Reeta wakes up from a coma, handcuffed to a hospital bed. She doesn’t know how she got there; she doesn’t know her last name; she doesn’t remember anything about where she came from. And she definitely doesn’t remember committing the horrific crimes for which she is accused.
Inside she felt hollow. No personality lingered, no feeling of happiness or stress or calm or anger filled the void. She felt only weakness. She tried to access the feeling of hate or fury that would surely drive someone to do these things, but she couldn’t. She couldn’t find a malevolent fascination with the macabre, or a perverted desire for blood and gore. She rooted deep into her absent character and could come up with nothing but empty space.
Reeta is accused of murdering two young women who look like her and there are two more missing girls. The FBI know for a fact that it’s her, even though these days the evidence against her might be considered circumstantial at best. But it’s 1966, not 2026. Desperate to figure out who she is, Reeta reaches out to Washington Post reporter Carol Joyce hoping the reporter will help. All Reeta has to go on is the photograph Agent Willow gave to her. Reeta knows the man in the photo is her father.
Carol knows the man in the photo is connected to Pine Ranch, a plantation house turn religious homestead aka cult, led by the charismatic Jeb. But information about Jeb and the cult is meted out at a snail’s pace (and too bad because that was the most interesting part of this story).
I was hoping After Everything You Did was going to be a quick page turner, but it wasn’t. No quick internet searches available to speed things along, sadly. No forensics to clear up any lingering confusion. At 350 pages, it just took a dog’s age to get anywhere and when the twist finally came (and judging from the reaction on Goodreads, it was a shocker to lots of readers), I found myself just sort of weary from all the times characters swallowed thickly.
I decided last month to take a look at my auto buy authors. You know the ones, your ride or die authors whose books you know will deliver. If you want to look at my criteria and read about my first auto buy author, Thomas H. Cook, you can visit that post here.
This month’s auto buy author is another Thomas: Thomas Christopher Greene.
Thomas Christopher Greene is an American writer and co-founder and past president of the Vermont College of Fine Arts. He’s the author of seven books, of which I have read four. There’s a great interview with him here.
My first experience with Greene was back in 2011 when I read his novel Envious Moon. About that book I said: “Love is the one emotion that drives people, especially young people, to reckless behaviour. Greene’s novel captures that love-fueled momentum and propels Anthony, Hannah and the reader on a journey that is both heart-felt and heart-breaking.”
Like I said in my review, I am a sucker for star-crossed lovers or any book that taps into angsty longing and Envious Moon had that in spades, so of course I was going to seek out more books by this author.
Here’s what I’ve read:
The Headmaster’s Wife: One of the delights of this books (if you can actually call a novel about grief ‘delightful’) is letting the pieces of this puzzle click together in their own time. This is a book that sort of reads like a mystery, but isn’t that what life is at the end of the day? An unfathomable mystery. I read it in one sitting.
The Perfect Liar: Max W. and Susannah meet at a fancy art party in New York City. They are drawn to each other almost immediately and soon after, they are married. Now they live in Vermont where Max has taken a job as a lecturer at a small liberal arts college. One morning, while Max is away giving a lecture at an art institute in Chicago, Susannah discovers a note pinned to their front door: I KNOW WHO YOU ARE. Couldn’t put it down.
If I Forget You: The novel opens in 2012. Henry, a poet and lecturer at NYU, sees Margot – for the first time in 20 years – on the street in Manhattan. When their eyes meet, “the face Henry sees travels to him from a lifetime ago.” Instead of speaking to him, though, she runs away. It is from this point that their story unspools – toggling between their college days and this point in the present. Lives lived and all that.
Greene seems to walk that line that I love so much between page turner and literature, often with a heaping helping of angst thrown in.
I still have some Greene books to look forward to: Mirror Lake, After the Rain, I’ll Never be Long Gone, and Notes from the Porch: Tiny True Stories to Make You Feel Better About the World. I can’t wait to track these books down.
Eric and his daughters, Dess and Stacy, are on the run. From who? From what? You have to be patient to find out the why in Johnny Compton’s novel The Spite House. They can’t ever seem to get ahead, though, because Eric has to take jobs that keep them off the grid. Then he finds an ad for a job that “promised “high six figures at minimum upon completion of the assignment, with a much larger upside for the qualifying candidate.”” I mean, if something seems too good to be true, it probably is, right?
But Eric is desperate, so he lands an interview with Eunice Houghton, an old lady who owns a property in Degener, Texas. She needs a caretaker for the Masson House aka the spite house, which Eric explains to his daughters is “A place built just to make someone upset or show the world how pissed you are.”
The spite house is haunted. Eunice has had several rounds of paranormal investigators there. The last ones, Max and Jane Renner, well, let’s just say, it didn’t end well. Basically, all she is asking is that Eric stay there and keep track of any not-of-this-world activity. If it’s too much for Dess and Stacy, they are welcome to stay in Eunice’s mansion. What can possibly go wrong?
Well, of course, lots of things can and do, but for me it wasn’t scary. The ghosts haunting Masson House are vengeful. It seems, at least Eunice thinks, they are looking for payback for something Eunice’s great-great grandfather did back in the day. The land is cursed. Peter Masson, the man who built the house, is also cursed. But there are children in the house, too. How are they connected?
It takes a long time for things to be revealed in this book and it’s pretty much all exposition. Eunice telling Eric the family history; Millie, a local writer, filling in the blanks. There are lots of perspectives in this novel, perhaps too many. It ends up feeling pretty repetitive and it definitely wasn’t a page-turner. More time in the house and perhaps a tighter plot (there are a lot of side stories that just didn’t add to the story overall, and weren’t fully explored — the children in the Masson House, for example) might have helped move things along.
I guess this was Compton’s debut, and it shows promise, for sure. But it was just okay for me.
I have been a letter writer my whole life. Perhaps part of it had to do with how much we moved around (and, no, my father was not in the military), but I always wrote letters. For a while in my early teens I had a whole load of pen pals, people you’d meet via ads in teen magazines or through school. One of my oldest pen pals I have known for 52 years. We don’t write letters anymore, which I miss. (Now it’s just the odd message via the internet, which is a poor substitute.) I do not have every letter I have ever received –sadly too many moves– but I do have a handful of special letters. Recently I met an old boyfriend at his father’s funeral and he told me he had saved some of my letters to him…from almost 40 years ago and when I asked if I could have them, he obliged and sent them my way. Talk about an embarrassing blast from the past
So, you see, I was predisposed to love Virginia Evans’s debut The Correspondent and I did.
Sybil Van Antwerp “is a mother and grandmother, divorced from a distinguished career in law” but it is “the correspondence that is her manner of living.”
This is the only exposition we get in the novel, the rest is Sybil’s correspondence with a variety of people including authors (Joan Didion and Ann Patchett); her adult children (Fiona and Bruce); her best friend, Rosalie; her beloved brother, Felix, and Harry, the young son of a former colleague. There is also one letter, never sent, to someone called Colt.
Some of the letters in the novel are from Sybil to the recipient and some letters are to Sybil, but we are able to piece together a variety of different “plots” based on these letters. For example, we know that Sybil has a fraught relationship with her daughter and a close relationship with Felix. Both Sybil and Felix were adopted. At least one of her correspondents seems to hold a grudge:
I imagine you reading my notes standing at the mailbox, heat growing on your neck and the sick feeling in your stomach. […] I hope you have to look twice, and that little fear keeps you from enjoying the life you have left, in the same way that you impeded me.
It is through Sybil’s correspondence that we learn about a tragedy in her past, her disintegrating marriage (30 years prior, because Sybil is now in her 70s), her stubbornness, her kindness, and her desire to make things right when she can. She is a fully realized character without ever saying a word. As Sybil says in one letter: “my letters have been far more meaningful to me than anything I did with the law. The letters are the mainstay of my life”.
er correspondence (both sent and received) is funny, nostalgic, heartbreaking, and mundane, and it accurately captures the minutia of daily life. Just when Sybil thinks there can be no surprises left for her, she discovers that’s not quite true.
I loved every single thing about this book. An easy five stars, no notes, highly recommended.
Maya and Roe, the central characters of Maxine Swann’s 2003 novel Serious Girls meet at boarding school their junior year. Maya’s grandmother had insisted she attend the school, partly to get her away from her hippie mother, insisting that Maya would be “stunted[…]living out there in the boondocks.”
Maya feels like an outsider until she meets Roe, who comes from a nothing town in Georgia. The two girls find that they have a lot in common, a love for thrifting and literature and a desire to figure out who they are and who they might become. Roe asks “if the whole aim in life is to become as distinctly yourself as you can?”
The two girls begin a year long-long journey to figure themselves and their world out and it’s a strange journey, indeed. What Roe wants is “to feel alive, the whole way through.”
As you might expect, part of this journey has to do with boys. For Maya, who is our first person narrator, it’s Arthur, a young man she sees at a diner on a trip into New York City. For Roe, it’s Jesse, who lives in the town where they go to school. There is also drinking and smoking, which feels like a costume the girls put on in order to feel older. (It’s hard to say when this story takes place. The 60s? 70s?) There are no adults to guide them; Maya’s grandmother who invites the girls to spend Christmas with her, feeds them martinis and doesn’t seem to mind when they flirt with much older men.
I kept turning the pages as Maya and Roe try to determine “What makes a person a person?” the prose was spare and the plot non-existent, but somehow I found it sort of intriguing, even though I wasn’t really sure there was a point. Well, maybe that’s the point. Your adolescence is just a series of missteps and ultimately, for better or worse, you step over the line from innocence to experience.
French writer Victor Jestin’s debut novella, Heatwave, was published to much acclaim when he was just twenty six. Translated by Sam Taylor, this is the story of an introverted and angsty 17-year-old called Leo who is on the last day of a camping holiday with his parents and younger siblings. The opening of the novel is definitely punchy.
Oscar is dead because I watched him die and did nothing. He was strangled by the ropes of a swing, like one of those children you read about in the newspapers. But Oscar was not a child. At seventeen, you don’t die like that by accident. You tie the rope around your neck because you want to feel something. Maybe he was trying to find a new form of pleasure. After all, that was what we were here for: the pleasure. Anyway, I did nothing. Everything stemmed from that.
Heatwave captures the last 36 hours or so of Leo’s holiday at “the Landes, in the southwest corner of France. Three stars. Surrounded by pine forest. Close to the ocean. Swimming pool with slide. Children’s playground. Karaoke, gym, special events every night.” For the other teenagers on site, it’s endless partying and hookups, but Leo is quiet and awkward. The only friend Leo has made in his two weeks at the campsite is Louis, who “didn’t have any other friends, so he put up with [Leo].”
After the novel’s inciting incident, and the decision Leo makes afterwards, the novel just follows Leo around “annoyed with everyone on the beach–for failing to hear [his] silent screams, for failing to guess.” He considers telling various people about what he knows, his parents, Oscar’s mother, Luce, the girl he wants to hook up with, but he is never quite able to say the words.
I think Jestin’s novel is trying to capture the claustrophobic, confusing business of being a teenager on the cusp pf adulthood. Pettiness, a failure to communicate, poor decision making, and a longing to shed our own skins, to be someone cooler and more in control, are feelings everyone can relate to (or remember). I think this book would likely be more meaningful to a younger reader, but it was easy to turn the pages and even though I didn’t really understand Leo’s brain and felt sort of disconnected from the story, it was an interesting and disconcerting read.
Never in a million years would I read a book by Mitch Albom and then Twice was chosen for our March book club. Where did my aversion come from, I wonder, because I know nothing about him. I mean, everyone and their dog has heard of Tuesdays with Morrie, reportedly one of the best-selling memoirs of all time. It’s a book that many teachers use in their classrooms at school, but I never have. I have never seen the movie, either. Never had any interest.
Twice is the story of Alfie Logan who discovers, age eight, that he has a unique ability to relive events over again. He uses it for the first time when his mother dies. Despite being told to sit with her while his father runs to the store, Alfie goes out to the soccer field. When he returns home, his mother is gone. The next morning, he wakes up to discover that she is still alive; essentially he has been given a do-over. During this second chance encounter, his mother tells him that “This is something [he’s] going to be able to do the rest of [his] life.” But she cautions him: “But it won’t fix everything, Alfie. The second time won’t always be better than the first.” But reliving this moment doesn’t save Alfie’s mom because, as he discovers, he
can’t change mortality. If someone’s time is up, it’s up. I can travel back to before the death takes place. I can alter how I experience it. But it’s still going to happen. Nothing I can do to stop it.
Can I say it was better, rewinding my mom’s departure? I don’t know. The first time, I left the house and returned motherless. The second time, I stood witness as she departed this world. You tell me.
Thus begins Alfie’s long life of second chances. As expected, in the beginning he uses this gift to save face, to meet girls, to excel at school. He is reunited with Princess, the girl he met when they were both children in Africa (Alfie’s mother was a missionary), and he redoes a few days in order to win her affection.
The story is told across the table from Bahamian casino detective LaPorta, who has nabbed Alfie for winning two million bucks at the roulette table. Surely he’s cheated. Alfie insists that LaPlant will understand everything once he reads this journal, which is addressed to ‘Boss’ (I was thinking God because there is a Christian undercurrent running through this book).
It was storming on the morning I picked up this book. I knew I had to read it before our meeting which was only a handful of days away. I flew through it in about three hours. It was easy to read because a wordsmith Albom is not. The book purports to be about the choices we make and how those choices shape us and our lives, but the structure of the novel and its saccharine dénouement made it mostly unpalatable for me.
Loads of people liked Katy Hays’ sundrenched (it takes place in Capri, which is pretty much the only thing I liked about it) thriller Saltwater. Told from multiple perspectives, it’s the story of a bunch of rich assholes behaving badly and maybe I’ve just had enough of that in RL to care very much about it happening on the page.
Helen Lingate is vacationing on Capri with her father, Richard, her Uncle Marcus and Aunt Naomi, her boyfriend, Teddy, and Marcus’ assistant (and Helen’s friend) Lorna. The Lingates return to the same villa every year to honour Helen’s mother Sarah’s accidental (but was it, though?) death 30 years prior.
Helen is trapped by her family’s wealth. She just wants to live her life, but she can’t. She is haunted by the family tragedy, has a relatively distant relationship with her father, and has never really made any friends until Lorna came into her life. Now the two women seem to be plotting some sort of “get-out-of-Dodge” scheme that will free them from the tangle of family obligations (Helen) and sleeping with rich old guys (Lorna). Just about the only good thing about Capri (other than, you know, the sun and endless drinking) is Ciro, the handsome son of the villa’s housekeeper, whom Helen has known and loved since she was a child.
Everyone has a secret in this book; I suppose that is what is meant to keep you turning the pages, but the problem is that I didn’t care about any of these people. Helen is 33, for God’s sake, and she is behaving as though she doesn’t have any agency at all. Seriously, I just wanted to give her a good shake. If this is all so unpalatable, just take Ciro and go. Hard to give up all that cash though. But even the cash isn’t what Helen thinks it is.
What motivates any of these people, beyond money, is hard to pinpoint. As Helen says “Money is my phantom limb. It was part of my body once. I know this because I feel its loss like an ambient current that runs up my spine, an occasional, sudden shock. Money is metabolic, a universal part of our constitution.” Um? What?
I didn’t enjoy this book, but I read it to the end because, y’know, there’s a part of me that wanted to know how it would all play out. There were a bunch of requisite twists near the end and while some readers were likely shocked and surprised, my reaction was more of the eye-roll variety. I found the writing choppy and repetitive and, like I said, it took me way longer to read this than I thought it would.
So, not for me, but I suspect lots of people would find it enjoyable.
At last count, I have 500 unread books on my bookshelves. I wish I could say that I am mortified by that number, but I am not. I am a mood reader and I like to be prepared for all contingencies. I also love buying books because books as objects just make me happy. Who knows what I am going to feel like reading on any given day, and it gives me a lot of pleasure to shop my shelves.
But then there are those tried and true authors whose books somehow make it to the tip top of that pesky TBR pile. Somehow, these authors always seem to move to the front of the line and even though I have many (many) books that have been languishing on my shelves waiting to be read, when these authors have a new book out–or in the case of today’s featured author, I stumble across a new-to-me book by them–I somehow forget my shelf and read the book straight away. (Alternatively, as is also true in the case of today’s featured author, I squirrel the book away for a rainy day when nothing else is floating my boat, and I need a guaranteed winner.)
What makes someone an auto buy author? That’s what I would like to write about today because I have several writers who meet my own very subjective criteria, my drop-everything-and-read-their-latest-book-asap crew.
Writing. I love it when a book is well written. Sometimes the writing doesn’t have to be stellar for me to enjoy a book’s plot or characters, but when the writing is excellent, that is definitely a bonus. Auto buy authors always have, at the very least, prose that isn’t clunky.
Plot. There are certain types of plots that I really enjoy. I love books that keep me guessing. I love angst. I love dark academia. I love it when the writer alludes to things that have yet to be revealed to the reader. I love to be surprised.
Characters. I love it when I love the characters, when they feel as though they could be a friend of mine. When I root for their success (or sometimes their demise). I love characters that feel like real people.
The feels. I love a book that punches me in the gut, makes my eyes burn with unshed tears, or a book that makes me sob. I love a book that grabs me by the throat and shakes me until my teeth rattle, a book that makes me read way past my bedtime, until my eyes are burning.
The unexpected. I love a twist, especially when it’s not contrived. I love it when a book breaks my heart.
Somehow, auto buy authors always have the perfect combination of these things and there’s something about that first encounter that makes me want to dive into another book. When that book also turns out to be great, then they make my auto buy list. I thought it might be fun to take a look at some of the authors whose work I have enjoyed and whose books I will always buy.
I thought it might be fun to share these authors with you and, of course, I would love to hear which writers would make your list!
First up: Thomas H. Cook
Thomas H. Cook is an American writer of mysteries with over 30 titles to his name. It doesn’t look like he’s had anything published since 2018. He has won many awards over the years, including an Edgar Award from the Mystery Writers of America.
I discovered Cook in 2007 when I happened upon his 1995 novel Breakheart Hill in a second hand bookstore. I knew nothing about Cook, but I was totally intrigued by the novel’s opening lines: “This is the darkest story that I have ever heard, and all my life I have labored not to tell it.”
Thus began my love affair with Cook.
Turns out, though, his books are not that easy to find. I can’t just head to Indigo and grab one of his books off the shelf. Tracking Cook books (haha) down is a bit like going on a treasure hunt. I was delighted when I went to a huge second hand book sale in Moncton (about 90 minutes from me) last summer and happened upon a title I didn’t own. If I am in a second hand book store, he’s the first author I look for. Over the years, I have managed to get my hands on 16 of his novels (two of which I am saving for that rainy book day).
Here’s why I love him.
First of all, he’s a brilliant writer. His writing is astute, and often lyrical (but not overly fussy.) He (mostly) writes what I would classify as literary mysteries. They are never just straight-up whodunnits. His characters are complicated and many of his novels deal with father/son dynamics. In virtually every book I have ever read by Cook, there has been some sort of mind-blowing/wait, what? twist that has made me want to go back and start again to see what I missed. While I have not loved every single book I have read, every single book I have read has been well worth the time and effort and has been heads and tails better than much of the dreck out there.
So, here’s what I have read:
Breakheart Hill – a leisurely southern gothic novel, filled with a real sense of place and time. The characters are interesting and flawed and I was 100% surprised by the ending, which wasn’t a cheat even though it felt like it should have been.
The Chatham School Affair – a richly realized mystery which unfolds as the book’s narrator, an elderly lawyer named Henry Griswald, recalls the events which transpired the year he was 15.
Places in the Dark – The story concerns brothers William and Cal who grow up in an idyllic seaside town in Maine in the 1930s. They are as different as night and day: William an energetic dreamer who rushes through life filled with hope and enthusiasm and Cal, the older more pragmatic brother. Still, despite their differences, they are close. Then Dora March comes to town.
Red Leaves – the story of the Moore family: Eric (owner of a camera shop), Meredith (teacher at a small community college) and Keith (their teenage son). They live in a small New England town and live, what Eric believes, is a perfect life. That is until eight-year-old Amy Giordano goes missing and the last person to have seen her is Keith, who’d been babysitting her that evening.
Instruments of the Night – the story of writer Paul Graves, a man who has spent his career writing about the horrible dance between serial killer and sadist Kessler (and his accomplice, Sykes) and the man who has spent his career chasing him, Detective Slovak. This might be my favourite novel by Cook.
The Cloud of Unknowing – David and Diana Sears were raised by their brilliant but schizophrenic father. Now they are adults and they carry all the baggage from that often difficult childhood. I have lukewarm feelings about this one.
Evidence of Blood – Jackson Kinley is a true-crime writer. His career has brought him close to unimaginable horrors: rapists and murderers and people who torture others for pleasure. Kinley (as he is most often called) seems somehow immune to these horrors. His armor is breached, however, when he gets the call that his childhood friend, Ray Tindall, has been found dead.
Master of the Delta – a book about fathers and sons, about the part luck plays in how our lives turn out, about kindness and cruelty.
The Fate of Katherine Carr – George Gates is a former travel writer who now writes features for the local paper and spends his evenings drinking scotch at his neighbourhood bar. He’s a broken man, but no wonder: his eight year old son, Teddy, had been taken off the street on his way home from school, murdered and the murderer had never been caught.
The Interrogation – the story of two cops, Norman Cohen and Jack Pierce. Each man has a heart full of demons (Cohen is haunted by his experiences in war; Pierce’s young daughter was a murder victim), but they are tenacious and accomplished interrogators. Since the story is set in 1952 they have to rely on the evidence they gather the old-fashioned way: visiting crime scenes, talking to people, chasing leads.
Mortal Memory – a story that begins when narrator Stevie Farris discovers, at age 9, that his father has shot and killed his mother, Marie, older brother, Jamie and sister, Laura. The knowledge of this horrific act tortures Stevie, mostly because he doesn’t understand why his father committed such a horrible crime. Wasn’t his family happy?
Peril – like a noir film, peopled with shadowy gangsters in crumpled hats, a beautiful, fragile heroine who earns the good will of the men she meets, and a bunch of guys who ultimately, turn out to be loyal and decent.
Blood Innocents – the story of NYC police detective John Reardon who, returning to work after the death of his wife, is given a strange case involving the slaughter of two deer in the Children’s Zoo in Central Park.
Into the Web – Roy Slater’s acrimonious relationship with his father isn’t the only difficult thing about returning to his childhood home. Just a few weeks before he was about to leave for college, Roy’s brother Archie was arrested for the murders of Lavenia and Horace Kellogg. Now he’s back in a town filled with ghosts – and then another dead body turns up.
And the two books I am saving for a rainy day: Flesh and Blood & Night Secrets.
I am on a mission to find all the remaining Thomas H. Cook titles that exist.
Although Things Don’t Break on Their Own is touted as a “miraculous literary thriller”, I think that’s doing Sarah Easter Collins’ debut a disservice. While the book is definitely literary and it’s definitely a page turner, I don’t think I would call it a “thriller”. But maybe that’s nitpicking and it really doesn’t matter.
Robyn and her wife, Cat, have invited some friends and family round for dinner. There’s Robyn’s older brother, Michael, and his girlfriend, Liv. There’s Nate, Cat’s brother, and his new girlfriend, Claudette, and then there’s Willa and her boyfriend, Jamie. Robyn and Willa have history; when they were 17 and in boarding school together they were roommates and then lovers, but it ended badly. That was years ago, now, though and the two women are friends. It wasn’t a particularly happy time for Willa. Her younger sister, Laika, disappeared when she was just 13 and nearly 22 years later, the family still doesn’t know what happened to her.
The story changes perspectives and doesn’t follow a straight line. As Robyn anticipates Willa’s arrival, she remembers the summer she took her back to Tea Mountain, the remote place she calls home. It is a transformative experience for Willa, whose own family is a dysfunctional mess. Robyn’s father is a potter, and as he repairs a broken bowl using the Japanese method of kintsugi, he assures Willa (without even knowing her all that well) that “You can fix anything, given the right tools.”
There is no fixing Willa’s fractured family though. Her father, Bryce, has a successful business, so money is not an issue, but he is a horrible and abusive bully, especially to Willa’s mother and Laika. In fact, Bryce never touched Willa, and perhaps some of her guilt stems from that. About Laika, Robyn says
I tried to keep her safe. I really did. I told her, keep your head down, don’t bring unnecessary attention to yourself, just do what you’re told, all the things that just came naturally to me. But I was so busy keeping her safe from herself that I forgot to warn her about the outside world. I should have told her that there were people out there, men, women even, who could harm her.
So much was my fault.
Robyn and Cat’s dinner party proves to be revelatory, but by the time you get to the “twist” (maybe that’s why they call this book a thriller), you’ll be so invested in these characters that –well, I don’t want to say it hardly matters, but it was honestly the least interesting part of the book.
I really enjoyed Things Don’t Break on Their Own. The writing was great, the characters were compelling, and the mystery surrounding Laika’s disappearance was intriguing. It’s a solid debut and I highly recommend it.
The Ludic Reader 