Thursday, June 30, 2022

The Witch's Kind



Title: The Witch's Kind
Author: Louisa Morgan
Publisher: 3.19.22
Release DateRedhook

Publisher’s Summary 
From the author of A Secret History of Witches comes an absorbing tale of love, sacrifice, family ties, and magic, set in the Pacific Northwest in the aftermath of World War II.

Barrie Anne Blythe and her aunt Charlotte have always known that the other residents of their small coastal community find them peculiar -- two women living alone on the outskirts of town. It is the price of concealing their strange and dangerous family secret.

But two events threaten to upend their lives forever. The first is the arrival of a mysterious abandoned baby with a hint of power like their own. The second is the sudden reappearance of Barrie Anne's long-lost husband -- who is not quite the man she thought she married.

Together, Barrie Anne and Charlotte must decide how far they are willing to go to protect themselves -- and the child they think of as their own -- from suspicious neighbors, the government, and even their own family...


My Review
First of all, I was expecting a continuation of the family storyline presented in A Secret History of Witches. I assumed this was the second book of a series but it is not. Once I got over that disappointment, I did enjoy the story but I'm not sure I would have read this if I would have more thoroughly read the summary because I am just soooo over WWII historical fiction. Morgan's writing style is soothing--like a grown-up bedtime story and overall I liked the book but didn't love it. A first chapter excerpt of Morgan's next book was included at the end of this novel and I think I will like the storyline in that one better than this one. 

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Tuesday, June 28, 2022

Into the Mist


  I received a copy of this release from the publisher in exchange for an honest review.


Title: Into the Mist (Into the Mist #1)
Author: P.C. Cast 
Publisher: Crooked Lane Books
Release Date7.12.22

Publisher’s Summary 
As men fall to the mist, the age of womankind begins to rise.

The world as we know it ends when an attack on the U.S. unleashes bombs that deliver fire and biological destruction. Along with sonic detonations and devastating earthquakes, the bombs have also brought the green mist. If breathed in, it is deadly to all men—but alters the body chemistry of many women, imbuing them with superhuman abilities.

A group of high school teachers heading home from a conference experiences firsthand the strength of these new powers. Mercury Rhodes is the Warrior, possessing heightened physical powers. Stella Carver is the Seer, with a sixth sense about the future. Imani Andrews is the Watcher, with a rare connection to the earth. Karen Gay is the Priestess, demonstrating a special connection with Spirits. And Gemma Jenkins is the Healer, a sixteen-year-old student who joins the group after losing her parents.

As they cross the Pacific Northwest, trying to find a safe place to ride out the apocalypse, the women soon learn they can't trust anyone, and with fresh danger around every corner, it will take all their powers to save themselves—and possibly the world.

My Review
I love post-apocalyptic, feminist speculative fiction. When I read this summary about a mist that kills men,  I thought of Lauren Beukes' Afterland and Christina Sweeney-Baird's The End of Men. Then the comparisons to Station Eleven and Practical Magic cinched my decision to read this release. I agree with the Station Eleven comparison but I think a Practical Magic comparison misses the mark. I would label this "Mad Max: Fury Road meets Shirley Jackson’s 'The Lottery' meets Twilight Zone meets Cormac McCarthy's The Road." All great movies and books in their own right but when woven into a supernatural narrative, those elements lose some of their weight.

What I loved: The weeklong journey of this band of teachers given superpowers after they are touched by "the mist" is absolutely action-packed.  

What I didn't love: The writing style included a lot of forced slang and pop culture references and strained tangents to make political and social commentaries. 

Overall, I didn't love it or hate it, and I will give the next book in the series "Out of the Dawn" (releasing next spring) a try. 

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January Fifteenth

 





 I received a copy of this release from the publisher in exchange for an honest review.


Title: January Fifteenth
Author: Rachel Swirsky 
Publisher: Tordotcom
Release Date6.14.22

Publisher’s Summary 
January Fifteenth—the day all Americans receive their annual Universal Basic Income payment.

For Hannah, a middle-aged mother, today is the anniversary of the day she took her two children and fled her abusive ex-wife.

For Janelle, a young, broke journalist, today is another mind-numbing day interviewing passersby about the very policy she once opposed.

For Olivia, a wealthy college freshman, today is “Waste Day”, when rich kids across the country compete to see who can most obscenely squander the government’s money.

For Sarah, a pregnant teen, today is the day she’ll journey alongside her sister-wives to pick up the payment­­s that undergird their community—and perhaps embark on a new journey altogether.

In this near-future science fiction novella by Nebula Award-winning author Rachel Swirsky, the fifteenth of January is another day of the status quo, and another chance at making lasting change.

My Review
In this near-future America, every citizen receives a Universal Basic Income (UBI) payment on January fifteenth. I find the concept of a universal basic income interesting, thought-provoking, and questionable, especially in the midst of The Great Resignation, the fight for a living wage, the need for a redistribution of wealth among companies/billionaires, and most recently, the law of forced birth. The chapters are divided to follow 4 women and the novella (236 pages) spans the entirety of a single UBI day. Swinrsky gives a peek at the different pressures and obstacles being faced by several characters--just enough insight to get a reader's brain working and mulling over how a universal application does not equate to the same outcome. This book does not deliver answers or conclusions but was smart and well-written enough to not need those. I recommend this to anyone who loves speculative feminist fiction with social and economic focuses or someone looking for a thought-provoking quick read. 

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Monday, June 27, 2022

The Sinking Middle Class




  I received a copy of this release from the publisher in exchange for an honest review.


Title: The Sinking Middle Class: A Political History of Debt, Misery, and the Drift to the Right
AuthorDavid Roediger
Publisher: Haymarket Books
Release Date6.21.22

Publisher’s Summary 
The Sinking Middle Class challenges the “save the middle class” rhetoric that dominates our political imagination. The slogan misleads us regarding class, nation, and race. Talk of middle class salvation reinforces myths holding that the US is a providentially middle class nation. Implicitly white, the middle class becomes viewed as unheard amidst supposed concerns for racial justice and for the poor. Roediger shows how little the US has been a middle class nation. The term seldom appeared in US writing before 1900. Many white Americans were self-employed, but this social experience separated them from the contemporary middle class of today, overwhelmingly employed and surveilled.

Today’s highly unequal US hardly qualifies as sustaining the middle class. The idea of the US as a middle class place required nurturing. Those doing that ideological work—from the business press, to pollsters, to intellectuals celebrating the results of free enterprise—gained little traction until the Depression and Cold War expanded the middle class brand.

Much later, the book’s sections on liberal strategist Stanley Greenberg detail, “saving the middle class” entered presidential politics. Both parties soon defined the middle class to include over 90% of the population, precluding intelligent attention to the poor and the very rich. Resurrecting radical historical critiques of the middle class, Roediger argues that middle class identities have so long been shaped by debt, anxiety about falling, and having to sell one’s personality at work that misery defines a middle class existence as much as fulfillment.

My Review
The title and summary of this book really drew me in but overall I really struggled with the book as a whole. At only 264 pages, the book is dense with history and details but not exactly a riveting pageturner. This would be a great piece of supplemental reading for a political, business, or labor studies college course where each page and topic could be dissected and discussed, but I wouldn't recommend it as a general knowledge book for the average reader. Even after taking several related courses in college, I found myself struggling to find some concrete takeaways in this text other than the fact there is no universally agreed upon answer to the question "who/what is the middle class in America?"

For a bit more insight into the content of the book, I've included the chapter titles below. 

1. Languages of Class and the Exhaustion of Political Imagination 
2. The Pretenses of Middle-Class United States
3. How the Left Has Lived with the Problem of the Middle Class
4. Falling, Misery, and the Impossibilities of Middle-Class Life
5. Middle-Class Votes 
6. Stanley Greenberg, Democratic Neoliberalism, and the Rightward Drift of US Politics
7. Doubly Stuck
8. The Middle Class, the White Working Class, and the Crisis of US Neoliberalism


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Thursday, June 23, 2022

Sirens & Muses

 



 I received a copy of this release from the publisher in exchange for an honest review.


Title: Sirens & Muses 
Author: Antonia Angress
Publisher: Ballantine
Release Date7.12.22

Publisher’s Summary 
Four artists are drawn into a web of rivalry and desire at an elite art school and on the streets of New York in this magnificent debut for fans of Writers & Lovers and The Goldfinch.

It’s 2011: America is in a deep recession and Occupy Wall Street is escalating. But at the elite Wrynn College of Art, students paint and sculpt in a rarified bubble. Louisa Arceneaux is a thoughtful, observant nineteen-year-old when she transfers to Wrynn as a scholarship student, but she soon finds herself adrift in an environment that prizes novelty over beauty. Complicating matters is Louisa’s unexpected attraction to her charismatic roommate, Karina Piontek, the preternaturally gifted but mercurial daughter of wealthy art collectors. Gradually, Louisa and Karina are drawn into an intense sensual and artistic relationship, one that forces them to confront their deepest desires and fears. But Karina also can’t shake her fascination with Preston Utley, a senior and anti-capitalist Internet provocateur, who is publicly feuding with visiting professor and political painter Robert Berger—a once-controversial figurehead seeking to regain relevance.

When Preston concocts an explosive hoax, the fates of all four artists are upended as each is unexpectedly thrust into the cutthroat New York art world. Now, all must struggle to find new identities in art, in society, and amongst each other. In the process, they must either find their most authentic terms of life—of success, failure, and joy—or risk losing themselves altogether.

With a canny, critical eye, Sirens & Muses upends notions of class, money, art, youth, and a generation’s fight to own their future.


My Review
One of my biggest problems with reviewing books is that I put off reviewing books I love because I never feel I can do them justice. Seriously! I can't bring myself to review The Historian or The Resurrection of Joan Ashby because I just love them both too much. Does anyone else do this?  

I read Sirens & Muses almost a month ago and have been basking in my memories ever since. This novel had everything: the minutia of class differences, the evolution of art world "darlings" and the complications accompanying the inspiration, production, and commodification of art. Author Antonia Angress weaves the aggressive and manipulative pursuit of artistic relevance and the quiet quest for authenticity into the larger framework of a societal consumption in such complex and detailed ways that I shake my head in disbelief that this is her novel. I made so many highlights throughout this text and absolutely agree with the comparisons to both Writers & Lovers and The Goldfinch. I will be widely recommending this novel to anyone who truly appreciates all types of art.


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Friday, June 17, 2022

How the Mind Changed

  



I received a copy of this release from the publisher in exchange for an honest review.


Title: How the Mind Changed: A Human History of Our Evolving Brain
Author: Joseph Jebelli
Publisher: Little, Brown Spark
Release Date7.12.22

Publisher’s Summary 
A deeply researched and beautifully written account of how the human brain evolved, from the earliest primates through the modern age.

The human brain is an astonishing thing. No other life form on the planet has a brain like ours. How did such a unique brain emerge? How did a bundle of cells weighing just 1.2 kg give rise to conscious, self‑aware beings capable of understanding time, language, mathematics, and music, of exploring outer space and sequencing their own DNA? From what curious blend of nature and nurture did such astonishing intelligence arise? The answer to these questions and more is a 7-million-year-long saga. It is the story of how the human brain evolved.

How the Mind Changed is the definitive book on the evolution of the human mind. A sweeping natural history, it describes the remarkable origin of our species' most mysterious organ and how it has developed into its miraculous modern form. How the Mind Changed also sets out to answer existential questions about what the future holds in store for our brains. Will brain‑computer interfaces change human life? Can humans free their minds from the confines of biology and achieve digital immortality? What are the implications of such advances ‑‑ will the self evolve also?

Drawing on the latest breakthroughs in neuroscience, psychology, and evolutionary biology, How the Mind Changed is a fascinating, in‑depth look at where the organ that truly makes us human comes from ‑‑ and where it is going.
My Review
I've been trying to read more nonfiction books and in doing so have found that there tend to be 2 distinct writing styles within the genre: (1) dense, dreadful, and makes me feel like I'm in a terrible high school class or (2) accessible, interesting, thought-provoking, and maybe even a little fun/funny. Luckily, How the Mind Changed falls into the second category. Author and neuroscientist Joseph Jebelli received a PhD in neuroscience from University College London for his work on the cell biology of neurodegenerative diseases, then worked as a postdoctoral research fellow at the University of Washington. He pairs examples of scientific evidence with great storytelling skills. I found lots of parts very interesting, for example, this tidbit had me really thinking. 



"And a single mutation is all it takes: if a mutant organism produces just 1 per cent more offspring than its non-mutant rivals, it leaps from representing 0.1 per cent of the population to 99.9 per cent in just 4,000 generations, a mere 100,000 years."



To further give readers an idea of what to expect from How the Mind Changed, I've included the table of contents below

Table of Contents
1. Building the Human Brain
2. Inventing Emotions
3. Our Social Brains
4. The Genesis of Memory
5. The Truth about Intelligence
6. Creating Language
7. The Illusion of Consciousness
8. Different Minds
9. The iBrain
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Wednesday, June 15, 2022

✨SPOTLIGHT✨ Bitch: On the Female of the Species


  I received a copy of this release from the publisher in exchange for an honest review.


Bitch: On the Female of the Species by Lucy Cooke was released yesterday (thank you Basic Books for my review copy.) While I have only read a few pages so far, I'm already giving this a glowing recommendation. 



Title: Bitch: On the Female of the Species
Author: Lucy Cooke
Publisher: Basic Books
Release Date6.14.22

Publisher’s Summary 
A fierce, funny, and revolutionary look at the queens of the animal kingdom

Studying zoology made Lucy Cooke feel like a sad freak. Not because she loved spiders or would root around in animal feces: all her friends shared the same curious kinks. The problem was her sex. Being female meant she was, by nature, a loser.

Since Charles Darwin, evolutionary biologists have been convinced that the males of the animal kingdom are the interesting ones -dominating and promiscuous, while females are dull, passive, and devoted.

In Bitch, Cooke tells a new story. Whether investigating same-sex female albatross couples that raise chicks, murderous mother meerkats, or the titanic battle of the sexes waged by ducks, Cooke shows us a new evolutionary biology, one where females can be as dynamic as any male. This isn‘t your grandfather’s evolutionary biology. It’s more inclusive, truer to life, and, simply, more fun.

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Tuesday, June 14, 2022

✨3 Mini Reviews✨


How High We Go in the Dark by Sequoia NagamatsuI added this release to my TBR almost two years ago and it had multiple changes to its release date, but I finally got around to reading it about 3 weeks ago. The description of "Cloud Atlas meets Station Eleven" is apt and I would definitely label this book as "unique" but I was not expecting so much death. Lots and lots of death. For more detailed insight into this release, I recommend checking out Abigail and Torie @ataleoftwolitties and Aoife @littlecassreads recent reviews of this one.

The Secret History of Witches by Louisa Morgan
I wanted to get my hands on an ARC of this at the 2017 Book Expo and just could not score a copy. Then, when I finally got myself a copy, like so many other books, this one got relegated to the bookshelf to be read "soon". Ha! Well 2 weeks ago this one called to me and I finally got around to it...and then promptly ordered the next 3 books. I especially loved the feel of this book. The pliability of the paperback and the deckled edges were well suited to the atmosphere of the story. 

The Secret History by Donna Tartt
This is one of those books that is constantly referenced when a book falls in the realm of dark academia so I'm glad I now have that point of reference. Knowing how much Deb @lonestarwords loves it, I had high hopes but I didn't love it as much as I thought I would. I found the constant drinking, drugging, and changing of settings messy and drawn out. Also, the chapters are LONG. The entire 500+ page book has a total of 8 chapters. Those complaints aside, Tartt is a tremendously talented writer and I absolutely do not regret reading this. 


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Monday, June 13, 2022

Suburban Hell

  I received a copy of this release from the publisher in exchange for an honest review.


Title: Suburban Hell
Author: Maureen Kilmer
Publisher: G.P. Putnam's Sons
Release Date: 8.30.22

Publisher’s Summary 
Bad Moms meets My Best Friend’s Exorcism in this lite-horror-comedy about a group of women in the Chicago 'burbs, whose cul-de-sac gets a new neighbor: a demon.


Amy Foster considers herself lucky. After she left the city and went full minivan, she found her place quickly with neighbors Liz, Jess, and Melissa, together snarking the “Mom Mafia” from the outskirts of the PTA mom crowd. So, one night during their monthly wine get-together, the newfound crew concoct a plan for a clubhouse She Shed in Liz’s backyard – the perfect space for just them, no spouses or kids allowed.

But the night after they christen the space with a ceremonial drink, things start to feel…off. What they didn’t expect was for Liz’s little home improvement project to release a demonic force that turns their quiet suburban enclave into something out of a nightmare. And that’s before the Homeowners’ Association gets wind of it.

Just as Liz is turned into a creepy doll face overnight, cases of haunting activity around the neighborhood intensify, and even the calmest moms can’t justify the strange burn marks, self-moving dolls, and horrible smells surrounding their possessed friend, Liz. Together, Amy, Jess, and Melissa must fight back the evil spirit to save Liz and the neighborhood…before the suburbs go completely to hell. But at least they don’t have to deal with the PTA, right?

My Review
4 friends accidentally unleash a demon during their monthly wine night and when the demon inhabits one of the friends, the other women must band together to save her. This was a fun read! I needed something not too serious but interesting this week and this book hit the mark. If you are a Netgalley reader, it's currently available as a "Read Now" option. 
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Friday, June 10, 2022

✨Spotlight ✨The Fight to Save the Town



  I received a copy of this release from the publisher 


Title: The Fight to Save the Town: Reimagining Discarded America
Author: Michelle Wilde Anderson
Publisher: Avid Reader Press
Release Date6.21.22

Publisher’s Summary 
A sweeping and authoritative study of wealth inequality and the dismantling of local government in four working-class cities across the US that passionately argues for reinvestment in people-centered leadership.

Decades of cuts to local government amidst rising concentrations of poverty have wreaked havoc on communities left behind by the modern economy. Some of these discarded places are rural. Others are big cities, small cities, or historic suburbs. Some vote blue, others red. Some are the most diverse communities in America, while others are nearly all white, all Latino, or all Black. All are routinely trashed by outsiders for their poverty and their politics. Mostly, their governments are just broke. Forty years after the anti-tax revolution began protecting wealthy taxpayers and their cities, our high-poverty cities and counties have run out of services to cut, properties to sell, bills to defer, and risky loans to take.

In The Fight to Save the Town, urban law expert and author Michelle Wilde Anderson offers unsparing, humanistic portraits of the hardships left behind in four such places. But this book is not a eulogy or a lament. Instead, Anderson travels to four blue-collar communities that are poor, broke, and progressing. Networks of leaders and residents in these places are facing down some of the hardest challenges in American poverty today. In Stockton, California, locals are finding ways, beyond the police department, to reduce gun violence and treat the trauma it leaves behind. In Josephine County, Oregon, community leaders have enacted new taxes to support basic services in a rural area with fiercely anti-government politics. In Lawrence, Massachusetts, leaders are figuring out how to improve job security and wages in an era of backbreaking poverty for the working class. And a social movement in Detroit, Michigan is pioneering ways to stabilize low-income housing after a wave of foreclosures and housing loss.

Our smallest governments shape people’s safety, comfort, and life chances. For decades, these governments have no longer just reflected inequality—they have helped drive it. But it doesn’t have to be that way. Anderson argues that a new generation of local leaders are figuring out how to turn poverty traps back into gateway cities.



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