About Christie

Book lover. Tea Drinker. Teacher. Writer. Mother. Canadian.

Rovers – Richard Lange

Posted on March 24, 2024 by Christie

Stephen King called Richard Lange’s novel Rovers, “The best vampire novel [he’d] read since Let the Right One In.” I don’t usually go in for author endorsements except I know that King is a voracious reader and when it comes to things that go bump in the night, you could do way worse than King when he’s at the top of his game (and let’s face it, he usually is.)

Lange’s novel tells the story of brothers Jesse and Edgar (think George and Lennie from Of Mice and Men if they were bloodsuckers). They’ve been vampires–or Rovers as they’re called in Lange’s universe– for seventy-five years, Jesse first and then, at his mother’s behest, Edgar. They travel together, stay away from other people (except for that time when Jesse fell in love with Claudine) and feed only when they have to, usually about once a month. As far as vampires go, they’re relatively benign.

The Fiends, on the other hand, are not. They’re a motorcycle gang, led by bookworm Antonia and her lover, Elijah. For the right price, they’ll do a job and the job at hand involves a lot of money and a baby. When two of the gang take the baby to a remote location to feed, Jesse, Edgar, and a human woman they’ve just met– and to whom Jesse has taken a shine because she reminds him of Claudine–just happen to be nearby. Right place wrong time or wrong place right time – take your pick, but either way, now the three are on the run because the Fiends will stop at nothing to find them.

Then there’s Charles, a man who has been bouncing from city to city, hunting for the person responsible for the death of his son, Benny. When he meets Czarnecki a grizzled old man on a similar mission – to rid the world of Rovers- Charles’ understanding of the world is forever altered.

Rovers is a straightforward, action packed novel where I found myself feeling tremendous sympathy for some of these characters, even though I clearly should not. Lange leans into some of the vampire tropes: sunlight kills, behead the vampire and they turn to dust. Other things are slightly different: no fangs, instead a nick to the jugular and it’s an all you can drink buffet and just about any injury will heal given time. These vampires eat a lot of people food, too.

This is a violent, often gory, fun novel – if vampires are your thing.

The Realm of Possibility – David Levithan

Posted on March 20, 2024 by Christie

It won’t really be possible to review the “story” found in David Levithan’s (Every Day) novel-in-verse The Realm of Possibility because this isn’t really a straightforward, linear narrative. Instead it captures the voices of twenty different students who attend the same high school. Some of the poems tell stories which overlap, some recount the same incident from different perspectives. These are stories of friendship, unrequited love, isolation and family, eating disorders and sex. You know – the sorts of things that occupy high school students and will likely be relatable.

Personally, I had a hard time trying to connect the dots until I figured out that it didn’t really matter if I knew who was who and how or even if they were connected to the other narratives. Some of the poems definitely worked a little bit better for me. I really enjoyed “Tinder Hearts” which is the story of one girl’s relationship with food and her boyfriend.

at the mall
elizabeth says
is that all
you’re eating?
and i tell her
i’m having dinner
later and she says,
mary, it’s nine,
and i tell her
i’m okay and
she says that
wasn’t my
question and
i say you know
it was and she
says that’s true.
i just wanted
to see if you
knew it,
too.

I was also pretty invested in Jed and Daniel’s relationship, which bookend all the other poems and where Jed admits that “You think you know your possibilities,/ Then other people come into your life/ and suddenly there are so many more.”

I do think that thoughtful young adults will recognize many of these characters and care a lot less about trying to put these poems into some sort of coherent order. I don’t think it matters all that much to understand who is who and how or even if they are connected. Adolescence is a messy, fraught and occasionally magnificent period on our lives and Levithan’s book captures that beautifully.

The Yonahlossee Riding Camp for Girls – Anton DiSclafani

Posted on March 16, 2024 by Christie

From a vantage point some time in the future, Thea Atwell looks back at the year she was fifteen in Anton DiSclafani’s debut novel The Yonahlossee Riding Camp for Girls. It is only with this hindsight that Thea is able to make sense of the events which led up to her parents banishing her to North Carolina. She has only ever known her home in rural Florida, where her father is the only doctor for miles and the family’s wealth is buoyed by citrus. There, she and her twin brother Sam spend their days doing exactly what they want: for Thea this means riding her horse, Sasi; for Sam it means examining the natural world. The outside world consists of her aunt and uncle and her two-years-older cousin, Georgie, but they live in Gainesville.

Thea hints at the reasons why she has been sent away. She says early on that her parents were sending her to Yonahlossee so they “wouldn’t have to see me.” When she thinks of home she “wanted to weep, but I would not let myself. I had wept enough for a lifetime. Two lifetimes. Three.”

It doesn’t take her long to settle in to life at Yonahlossee, partly because one of the camp’s more popular girls, Sissy, befriends her and partly because Thea is an exceptional horsewoman. Life here is so different from life back home and the people back home seem to have forgotten her; her parents take turns writing and she hears nothing from Sam, once her closest companion.

The novel moves seamlessly between days at Yonahlossee and the days leading up to the “event” which caused her exile. In the meantime, she begins to understand her power when begins a relationship with an adult at the camp.

One of the students in my Young Adult Literature class read this book and called it “disgusting.” I wholeheartedly disagree. This is a coming-of-age story featuring a young woman trying to figure out what society and her parents expect from her and what she wants for herself. The fact that the novel is set in 1930 makes this all the more problematic. Thea has been sheltered by her parents’ money, but out in the world she comes to understand that everyone has not lived as she has. She is often selfish and petty, but she is also smart and free-spirited. Does she make some bad choices? Certainly. Are her choices “disgusting”? Certainly not.

At Yonahlossee I learned the lesson I had started to teach myself at home: my life was mine. And I had to lay claim to it.

This is a fabulous debut.

The World Cannot Give – Tara Isabella Burton

Posted on March 12, 2024 by Christie

Sixteen-year-old Laura Stearns has left her home in Las Vegas to attend St. Dunstan’s Academy, a ritzy private school in Maine. Laura feels things deeply and cries easily and she is drawn to St. Dunstan’s because of its connection to Sebastian Oliver Webster, author of a singular novel called All Before Them.

He understood about angels, about heroes, about lattices of voices. He understood about beauty and meaning, and about World-History, which he always capitalizes. He understood about green morning light, and also about slant rhymes […] She doesn’t know who she is, not loving him.

The main character in Webster’s novel–a character based on Webster himself– attended St. Dunstan’s and Laura is anxious to walk in his footsteps. She is sure she will meet like-minded students and she does: Virginia Strauss and the band of five boys who make up the school’s choir. Virginia is clearly ‘other’ and “Laura has never seen anyone more beautiful in her life.”

Virginia rules the choir with an iron will.

The choirboys–all handsome; all ebullient; all terrifying–are always with her. She holds court at the head of the table, or at the center of the picnic blanket. Her eyes are always sharp. She rarely smiles.

But you know what they say about power? Yeah, there’s that because as she draws Laura into the choir’s orbit we earn, as Laura does, that Virginia has a black core of narcissism. She demands moral perfection and complete loyalty and when she does not get it, things go sideways.

Luce [is reading] wrote a pretty scathing review of The World Cannot Give and it’s worth a read. That said, I enjoyed this book. I think the pretentiousness of these characters and their desire to achieve what Webster calls the “shipwreck of the soul” suits the isolated setting and lack of (living) adult role models. The one person who might have had a positive influence, Reverend Tipton, struggles to control Virginia and actually seems more interested in one-upping her than in restoring or maintaining balance.

The World Cannot Give is a book that falls into the dark academia category and it has the requisite characteristics. It’s a slow burn novel and I will agree that not much happens with the exception of a lot of banal conversations and posing, but I enjoyed the book nonetheless.

You’d Be Mine – Erin Hahn

Posted on March 7, 2024 by Christie

Eighteen-year-old Clay Coolidge is country music’s biggest star. He’s also country music’s biggest asshole. Annie Mathers’ parents were country music royalty and she’s pretty talented in her own right. When Clay gets himself into another mess, his record label insists that he convince Annie and her band (cousin Kacey and best friend Jason) to join Clay on his tour. The record label wants Annie bad and they figure Clay is their best chance to get her. Not 100% sure why.

Anyway, that’s the set up of Erin Hahn’s YA (or is it New Adult – nah, not spicy enough for that) novel You’d Be Mine. Annie knows who Clay is, of course. There’s not a teenage girl in America who doesn’t know who he is and Annie herself had seen him in concert when she was fifteen and his “honey accent and swooping hair” had left its mark not just on her but “on every teenage girl in the audience.”

In real life, though, Clay is a bit of a jerk. Not always, of course because we’re supposed to root for these two crazy kids to get together. The thing is, they both have tragic backstories: Clay lost his older brother and grandfather and he hasn’t really had the time or inclination to process the loss and Annie’s parents have left her with a legacy she hasn’t quite figured out how to live with. She asks Clay

“Did you know the Late Night duet with my mom was the most-viewed episode of all time? I was six. I thought Willie Nelson was my grandpa until I was ten. I knew the words to “Coal Miner’s Daughter” before I learned my alphabet. My freaking birth announcement was on the cover of People magazine’s country music issue.”

These two talented young adults are damaged, for sure. They also have crazy chemistry which their fans see and they can’t really ignore, try as they might. Clay does things to Annie’s “lady parts” that are hard for her to ignore even though she has zero real experience in this department. I know, eh? Likewise, Clay is smitten with Annie’s undeniable talent and kindness and beauty.

They’re a match made in heaven, but first they have to navigate the troubled waters of their pasts and figure out how to be happy in their own skins. Sounds like a great country song.

How to Sell a Haunted House – Grady Hendrix

Posted on March 2, 2024 by Christie

Louise and Mark are estranged siblings who are forced to find a way to work together in an effort to clean out their parents’ house. That’s the starting point for Grady Hendrix’s novel How to Sell a Haunted House.

Louise and Mark squabble over everything, including how they should deal with the contents of the house: Mark calls it “junk”; Louise is more sentimental. It isn’t until things start to get, well, weird, that the siblings discover they have more in common than they realized.

When Louise arrives in Charleston, she discovers that Mark has already arranged for Agutter Clutter to come and cart away all the stuff their parents, Nancy and Eric, have accumulated over the years–and it’s a lot of stuff. Well, it’s a lot of puppets and dolls. That’s because Nancy was a puppeteer with “a Christian puppet ministry”. Neither of the siblings is really a fan and one puppet in particular makes “Louise’s skin crawl.”

Pupkin was a red-and-yellow glove puppet with two stumpy fabric legs dangling down from his front and two little nubbin arms. His chalk-white plastic face had a big smiling mouth and a little pug nose, and he looked out of the corners of his wide eyes like he was up to some kind of mischief. His moth and eyes were outlined in thick black lines and he wore a bloodred bodysuit with a pointed hood and a yellow stomach […]he looked like he’d crawled straight out of a nightmare.

How to Sell a Haunted House is often funny, and also violent and creepy (and this will be especially true if dolls and puppets make you uneasy). And, then, like in the other Hendrix books I have read (My Best Friend’s Exorcism, The Southern Book Club’s Guide to Slaying Vampires), it also offers a deeper look at something more meaningful and real than just straight-up scares. (I didn’t find this book particularly scary, although it did, on occasion, make me squirm.)

This book tracks the emotions attached with grief (each section of the book is named after one of the five stages), the unresolved feelings you’re left with when you lose someone unexpectedly, and the notion that when your loved one is gone, all you have left –if you are lucky — are the people you have shared the journey with. If you are really lucky, that is a sibling.

Super enjoyable read.

Keep This To Yourself – Tom Ryan

Posted on February 27, 2024 by Christie

Mac Bell and his friends are marking the occasion of their high school graduation and the anniversary of the death of their best friend, Connor, by digging up the time capsule they’d buried as kids when Tom Ryan’s YA mystery Keep This To Yourself opens. Although they’ve tried to move on with their lives, it hasn’t been easy. Connor was the last victim in a series of killings that have remained unsolved and Mac, in particular, is having a hard time letting go.

Connor.

Seventeen. Tall and good-looking. Always smiling. Loved by everyone. The kind of guy that adults liked to say had “a bright future ahead of him.”

One of my very best friends since childhood. One of my only friends, if I’m being honest.

Mac wonders if he might not have been a little bit in love with Connor, too. Maybe that’s why, when he discovers a note tucked into a comic book (the two had been swapping comic books forever), he knows that Connor is reaching out to him from beyond the grave, asking for Mac’s help in bringing the killer to justice.

Ryan’s book is set in the tiny coastal town of Camera Cove, a place where everyone knows everyone– which means that everyone is a suspect. As Mac begins following the cold case, he meets Quinn, cousin of one of the other victims. There’s an immediate attraction between the two young men, and Quinn is as anxious as Mac to crack this cold case open once and for all, so they band together to try and find a connection between the victims or anything else the authorities might have missed.

Keep This To Yourself is a straightforward YA mystery with a smart and likeable narrator and some clever twists. This is not my first book by this author (I Hope You’re Listening), and it certainly won’t be my last.

Together We Rot – Skyla Arndt

Posted on February 22, 2024 by Christie

Wil Greene is on the hunt for her mother and she’s not getting too much help from Pine Point’s sheriff. She is convinced that her mother’s disappearance has something to do with Garden of Adam, a strange church deep in the woods. Her mom’s disappearance has thrown her life into turmoil: her father spends his days drinking and Wil has lost her best friend Elwood Clarke, who just happens to be the son of Garden of Adam’s pastor.

Told in alternating first person narratives, Skyla Arndt ‘s debut YA novel Together We Rot, has a lot going for it. Wil is fierce and, ultimately, fiercely loyal, and Elwood is trying to figure out how he fits into a world that was chosen for him. The demons in this book are both real and figurative.

When Elwood discovers what his father (and the church) have planned for his future, he runs away and ends up forming an alliance with Wil. In some ways, this is a fairly straightforward story about rebellion. Except, you know, for all the fantasy elements. I am not really a fantasy reader (and I keep saying that and yet I keep reading fantasy), but I did enjoy some aspects of this story – although I have to admit that I thought I was getting a cult story. And yes, there is a cult story here, but it’s all wrapped up in some very imaginative mythology that requires blood sacrifices.

Together We Rot is filled with descriptive writing. Wil describes the run-down motel where she lives with her dad:

The place feels especially haunted tonight– there’s a quiet sputtering somewhere, a faucet dripping, pipes creaking. Walls grown tired of holding their weight, floors shifting and crying beneath my feet. Shadows find their way in from outside. Wind slams at the door in violent gusts. The parking lots lights tear through the darkness, but beyond them the world has grown pitch-black.

Sometimes the description gets in the way of the pacing because, ultimately, this is a story about friends banding together to fight evil. Anyone who loves fantasy would likely love this book, but I think I need to give fantasy a rest for a bit.

The Do-Over – Lynn Painter

Posted on February 17, 2024 by Christie

High school junior Emilie Hornby runs her life like a CEO. Her outfits are planned. Her days are planned. Her relationship with Josh is planned to the point that she decides exactly when and how she will first tell him that she loves him: Valentine’s Day. She concedes that VD is a commercialized, Hallmark holiday, but she also believes in true love.

But Emilie’s perfect Valentine’s Day scenario doesn’t go quite as planned. First of all, on the way to school she gets into a fender bender with her Chemistry lab partner Nick Stark, who doesn’t seem to know who she is. Then, when she gets to school, she and Josh don’t seem able to connect. When she does track him down, she discovers his sitting in the front seat of his car with the beautiful Macy. At home, she gets more bad news from her father. The whole day is a disaster. And even stranger, when she wakes up the next morning, it’s Valentine’s Day all over again. And the day after that it was another “been here, done that.”

Lynn Painter’s YA romance The Do-Over is a frothy confection of a novel and although I tend to like my romances more tart than sweet, I couldn’t help but fall in love with Emilie as she tries to find a way out of the time loop she seems stuck in.

Emilie has got her life buttoned down, and maybe that’s because some aspects of her life are complicated. But things go seriously off the rails when she and Nick (who is totally my kind of love-interest) start spending more time with each other and the results are swoon-worthy.

A YA romance worth your time.

Remembering Satan -Lawrence Wright

Posted on February 12, 2024 by Christie

Lawrence Wright is a staff writer for The New Yorker magazine. He is a prolific writer who has turned his journalist’s gaze on a variety of subjects including Scientology, terrorism and in his 1993 book Remembering Satan, the Satanic panic which swept America in the 1980s.

Paul and Sandy Ingram were raising their family of four (two sons and to daughters) in Olympia, Washington. Paul was the chief civil deputy for the sheriff’s office and an active member of both the Republican party and the Church of Living Water, a Protestant fundamentalist church. On November 28, 1988, Paul was called into his boss’s office and asked if he was aware that his daughters, Erika, 22, and Julie, 18 had filed against him. They allege that their father had sexually molested them over a period of several years. Paul’s strange response was “I can’t see myself doing this.”

This is the beginning of a long, complicated investigation that makes zero sense from the outside looking in…especially for anyone reading this book now in 2024 and who has watched hours of crime dramas on television. The girls’ stories get increasingly more convoluted. Pretty soon, it wasn’t just their father, but their older brother, their mother and the police officers who often played poker with their father in the family home. And why were all these people involved? Because they were part of some sort of satanic cult. There is not a single shred of physical evidence, though, despite the girls’ claims that they were tortured, covered in scars, and that there were the bodies of dozens of babies buried on the Ingram property.

Satanic panic originated in 1980 with the publication of the book Michelle Remembers. “Michelle Remembers, written by Canadians Michelle Smith and her husband, psychiatrist Lawrence Pazder, was published in 1980. Now discredited, the book was written in the form of an autobiography, presenting the first modern claim that child abuse was linked to Satanic rituals. According to the “memoir”, at the age of five Michelle was tortured by her mother for days in “elaborate satanic rituals”. As the torture reached a climax, a portal to hell opened and Satan himself appeared, only to be driven away by the Virgin Mary and the archangel Michael. Explanations for a lack of any evidence of abuse on Michelle’s body were that it had been miraculously removed by St. Mary. Not explained was testimony from Michelle’s father and two sisters, contradicting the memoir, as well as a 1955/56 St. Margaret’s School yearbook. The yearbook includes a photo taken in November 1955 showing Michelle attending school and appearing healthy, when according to Pazder’s book Michelle spent that month imprisoned in a basement. (Wiki)

Over the next decade, there were -according to Wikipedia – over 12,000 cases of unsubstantiated abuse in America. It is fascinating watching how this seemingly normal family (or at least, not Satanists) got caught up in this conspiracy and how the investigators, against their better judgement and expertise, came to believe the girls despite the numerous red flags and inconsistencies in their statements.

It’s a fascinating story.

The Ludic Reader

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