Tag Archives: Book Review

Prince of Lost Places – Kathy Hepinstall

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Prince of Lost Places is my second book by this author; the first book I read by her was The House of Gentle Men over 15 years ago. Yikes. This book has been languishing on my bookshelf for ages. (Trust me, it’s not an outlier, buying more books than I could ever possibly read is a thing.)

Martha Warden has kidnapped her six-year-old son, Duncan. She has her reasons. Her husband, David, tells the detective he’s hired to find her that “She’s sick. […] Her mind has left her. She is in no condition to be wandering around somewhere.”

Martha takes Duncan to a cave someone told her about. It’s on the Rio Grande, isolated, and although Duncan misses his father, the two sort of settle into a life in the wild. Martha has planned well, packing as many of the necessities as she could manage and setting her car on fire in the desert before she and Duncan set off in a rubber raft down the river.

We know something has happened, but Martha is slow to reveal exactly what that something is. Early on she tells us about Duncan’s friend, Linda, and then she tells us that “Linda has been dead for nearly three weeks.” Is Duncan responsible for her death? David? Why have they run away?

Then Andrew arrives on the scene.

The man I saw was tall and lanky, wearing tattered, faded jeans, desert boots and a T-shirt with a plaid shirt thrown over it. A knapsack was strapped to his back. He had a narrow, friendly face and tousled light hair, and as he knelt down he paused to scratch at a full beard.

Who is this man? He claims that he, too, is trying to figure some things out and while Martha doesn’t trust him at first, he turns out to be a good listener. Soon, they become a trio.

Prince of Lost Places is a quiet and thoughtful book about motherhood, love, guilt and grief. I suppose some people will be unhappy with the end, but I thought it was terrific.

A Year to the Day – Robin Benway

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Robin Benway’s novel A Year to the Day is a love letter to sisters. The novel starts on the one year anniversary of the car accident that killed Nina, Eleonora aka Leo’s older sister. Leo and Nina’s boyfriend East were also in the car when they were struck by a drunk driver. Leo doesn’t remember what happened, not really.

Benway takes an unusual route to tell the story by working backwards from the one year anniversary to the day before the accident and it’s an effective structure to let us see how grief permeates the lives of the people in Nina’s life and also how time really does offer some modicum of relief. On the one year anniversary of Nina’s death, Leo thinks

about how sometimes things are gone, just like that, even as their absence still takes up space in your heart, their place carved out forever, reminding you of what has been and what will never be again.

Leo’s mother lives in a little cocoon of grief, where she watches HGTV and doesn’t always wash her hair. Leo feels like ‘that girl’, all eyes on her as she attends school. Her father and his new wife, Stephanie, are expecting their first baby. Although her parents aren’t really friendly, they are certainly united in their grief and Stephanie is kind and thoughtful. So, the adults in her life certainly prop Leo up. She also becomes closer to East, not in a romantic sense, but when the book opens we see that she is hanging with him and his friends and as the narrative unspools backwards we learn how much this relationship sustains them both.

We only ever see Nina through Leo’s eyes. She “always made sure that you knew her, that you knew what she was doing, where she was going, what she liked and hated. Nina wasn’t shy about any of that, about being herself.” She was someone Leo greatly admired and depended on. She was her favourite person, the “compass in our family, the rudder, the North star.”

I loved Benway’s novel Far From the Tree (I didn’t write a review of that book, but I talked about it here). I also found this book well written and thoughtful, but just a bit slow. The final few pages of the book were very effective though.

The Hollow Kind – Andy Davidson

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Body/cosmic/folk horror isn’t really my thing, I don’t think, but Andy Davidson’s The Hollow Kind is still an entertaining, albeit slow (until the last 50 or so pages) read.

Nellie and her young son, Max, have fled their lives and headed for Georgia, to the rural property left to her by her grandfather, August Redfern. Nellie’s husband, Wade, is abusive and Nellie was desperate to get away, so even though the property is dilapidated, Nellie is certain they can be quite happy there.

What Nellie doesn’t really understand is the property’s dark history, which began in 1917 when August, not a native southerner, meets George Baxter and then his daughter, Euphemia, who becomes August’s wife. Euphemia’s dowery is 1000 acres of woodland. George tells August:

Roots go deeper here than you ight imagine, August. Appease them and you’ll recoup your money soon enough. I promise you that. In these woods, there’s no end to the riches a man can now.

Unfortunately, August doesn’t know the half of it.

Davidson’s novel moves back and forth between Nellie and Max in 1989 and August and his young family in 1917-23. We are also privy to a short period of time that Nellie spent with her grandfather at Redfern Hill when she was a teenager, which I guess helps us to understand why he would have left the property to her. Although it is clearly obvious that the property is not quite right and any sane person would not even consider staying there, Nellie is between a rock and a hard place. She has no place else to go.

There is menace at every turn for Nellie and Max. Wade is still out there. George Baxter’s grandson, Lonnie, is desperate to get the property back and he is a nasty piece of work, and then there’s the house and property. The first sight of the house fills Max with dread.

…the old house rearing up before them has teeth, claws, is a thing alive. A dragon in the midst of a long slumber. It sees us. A fresh sweat springs out beneath his clothes. Above the roof, bats loose themselves like stones from slings.

The history of Redfern Hill is complicated and gruesome. It takes a long time to get where it’s going, but if you don’t mind the meandering pace, there’s lots to like about this book.

Atmosphere – Taylor Jenkins Reid

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I hope that my first read of 2026 is not an indication of how the rest of my reading year is going to go because Taylor Jenkins Reid’s novel Atmosphere was just not for me. My first experience with Reid was Daisy Jones and the Six and I loved it. I was so sure that she was going to be a favourite author for me, and so I started with her backlist and read One True Loves and it was a no from me. Since it came before Daisy Jones though, I thought I would read something after, so I tried Malibu Rising. Also a no. I would not have picked up Atmosphere for that reason alone, but a book about lady astronauts was of zero interest to me anyway. Then it got selected for my book club.

Joan Goodwin has a “PhD focusing on the analysis of magnetic structures in the solar corona” but she is “spending her expertise teaching eighteen-year-olds the definition of a parsec.”

Vanessa Ford is an aeronautical engineer who is also a pilot. She is “tall and straight, her shoulders broad.” The first time Joan lays eyes on her, she thinks “That’s an astronaut.”

These two woman are astronaut candidates in 1979. Historically, Sally Ride was the first woman in space. She went to space in 1983. Fictionally, Joan and Vanessa count themselves among “The Six.”

“The Six” became part of NASA Astronaut Group 8, a selection of 35 candidates tapped to begin training at Johnson Space Center in Houston in 1978. And the women weren’t the only ones making history. The class of astronauts in training was also NASA’s first to include people of color — three African Americans and one Asian American.” – CNN

Joan and Vanessa become friends, and then more than friends, a relationship that they keep secret for a variety of reasons. I found the whole love story part of this book super cringey. You want me to believe that two women, smart enough to be tapped as astronauts, are sneaking around and having inane conversations about how the sky now makes sense because of the other person. I mean, you wanted to be an astronaut, right? You never wanted to know anything about the sky until you looked into the eyes of a beautiful astronomer? Yikes.

Beyond the cringe, I just found the writing pedestrian. Loads of people on the WWW were calling Atmosphere a six star read, a book that made them bawl their eyes out. It made me want to tear my hair out. I didn’t particularly care about any of these characters. Joan’s sister, Barbara, is selfish and miserable (until she finds a rich man). Barbara’s daughter, Frances, is precocious and meant to be a surrogate daughter for Joan because they are way closer than mother and daughter. Even that relationship felt inauthentic.

This one’s a dud.

Stoner – John Williams

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John Williams’ 1965 novel Stoner probably would not have been on my reading radar without booktube. It seemed as though many young readers (people in their 20s and 30s – and yes, those are young people to me now) were reading it and talking about it and so I added it to my physical tbr pile, figuring that I would get to it eventually.

Back in November when my friend (and former student) Luke and his wife, Lauren, were making their plans to come home for a visit over the holidays, they suggested a book club of three. Whenever we see each other, we always spend a lot of time talking about books and so this seemed like a good idea. I perused my shelves and suggested five titles, Stoner among them, and so that is where we landed.

Stoner is the story of William Stoner, son of impoverished Missouri farmers, who goes off to college ostensibly to take an agriculture degree, but who ends up taking a different path altogether. When the professor, Sloan, reads a sonnet and says “Mr. Shakespeare speaks to you across three hundred years, Mr. Stoner; do you hear him?”, Stoner falls in love. I also fell in love… with this book.

The novel follows Stoner through his undergraduate degree, his post graduate work, his early marriage to Edith, academic politics, the birth of his daughter, his affair. Williams doesn’t spend an inordinate amount of time at any of these road stops in Stoner’s life and yet somehow we come to know him very well.

Anybody who loves literature would find touchstones in this book and, indeed, in Stoner’s own life.

Sometimes, immersed in his books, there would come to him an awareness of all that he did not know, of all that he had not read; and the serenity for which he labored was shattered as he realized the little time he had in life to read so much, to learn what he had to know.

Luke, Lauren, and I could all relate to the feeling of anxiety at how little we will actually be able to read over the course of our lives, and Williams managed to capture that exact feeling. I think Luke and Lauren read far more deeply that I ever did at their age. (Luke is enrolled in a PhD of Philosophy and is currently reading Proust; Lauren is a research scientist at Harvard, about to start her own PhD. You might wonder what they are doing giving up precious family time to hang out with me; I wonder the same thing myself. :-)) Even if I have read upwards of 2000 books over the course of my life, lots of them were crap.

I also had another point of intersection with Stoner, and that was his feelings about teaching.

Always, from the time he had fumbled through his first classes of freshman English, he had been aware of the gulf that lay between what he felt for his subject and what he delivered in the classroom.

Sometimes Stoner feels like he is doing a great job and sometimes he feels like everything he does is crap and that is a feeling I have experienced over the course of my career. Of course, he is teaching at university and I am a high school teacher, so there’s that.

We had quite a lively discussion about Edith’s role in Stoner’s life, too. Lauren was a lot more sympathetic about her; Luke and I hated her. She never seemed like the right person for Stoner, and she did a lot of damage to his relationship with his daughter. It was hard to see anything positive about her at all. Did she redeem herself at all in the end? Not in my opinion.

Stoner is a book that gets you thinking about so many things, ‘what makes a life?’ chief among them. In the end, all three of us agreed that it was a fantastic book and a made for a great first book club of three discussion.

Highly recommended.

If He Had Been With Me – Laura Nowlin

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Several of the female students in my Young Adult Lit class have read and raved about Laura Nowlin’s debut novel If He Had Been With Me. They all told me that they bawled their eyes out and I do love a good tear-jerker, so I decided to give it a go.

Autumn and Finny have been best friends forever. Partly it has to do with the fact that their mothers are best friends, practically sisters. (In fact, the kids call each other’s mother aunt.) Partly it has to do with proximity; they live next door to each other.

Then, at the end of middle school the two, for reasons that are not really clear – but probably make sense to 12 years olds – the two stop speaking. In high school, Finny morphs into the most popular and beautiful guy in school and Autumn, ousted by the cheerleaders, finds herself sitting on the steps to nowhere with a group of outliers, one of whom, Jamie, ” a dark-haired Adonis, a Gothic prince” becomes her boyfriend.

The novel follows this cast of characters for all four years of high school, which seems like a bit much since they don’t really do anything. Jamie tries to convince Autumn to do the deed, but she puts him off. Her parents’ marriage falls apart. She and her mom continue to spend time with Finny and his mom even though it is AWKWARD. Finny starts dating Sylvie, a super popular girl. It’s all pretty melodramatic – kind of just like high school is.

We know from the very beginning that there is some sort of catastrophic accident and so we are hurtling (well, not really hurtling because this book is L-O-N-G) towards this event. I guess I can see how teenagers would find this story and this relationship between Finny and Autumn romantic and heart-breaking.

Sadly, it didn’t work for me. The book needed a really good editor, someone to tell Nowlin to strip away all the repetition. The main characters are tropey to the max: the manic pixie dream girl and the hot soccer star who shouldn’t love each other, but do love each other, but despite the fact that they have known each other their whole lives, can’t find the words to have a meaningful conversation. I didn’t particularly like Autumn, if I am being honest. Finny was a non-entity. Other characters were interchangeable and one-dimensional.

Apparently there’s a sequel where we see this whole story play out from other points of view. Why?

No tears were shed.

Razorblade Tears – S.A. Cosby

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Razorblade Tears is my second book by S.A. Cosby (All the Sinners Bleed). It’s a straightforward revenge thriller that grabs you by the throat immediately and shakes the living daylights out of you until the end.

Ike Randolph and Buddy Lee Jenkins have very little in common with each other except for the fact that Ike’s son, Isiah, fell in love with Buddy Lee’s son, Derek. Neither man had a solid relationship with their son for reasons that are more complicated than their sexual orientation. Ike spent several years in prison when Isiah was younger. Buddy Lee also spent time in prison. Ike has been out for a few years now, and has built a successful lawncare business; Buddy Lee lives in a rundown trailer and drinks too much. Ike is Black and married to his high school sweetheart; Buddy Lee is white and divorced.

Then their sons are murdered. And when it doesn’t look like the police intend to solve the crime, Ike and Buddy Lee join forces to find out what happened to them and make it right. And by make it right, I mean cause bodily harm to anyone involved.

It is often the case, and certainly true for Ike and Buddy Lee, that we only realize how much we love someone when they are gone. I mean, sure, these fathers loved their sons, but they also couldn’t abide the fact of their homosexuality. Their deaths stir up all sorts of unresolved feelings and also calls into question the validity of those feelings. Buddy Lee gets there a little quicker than Ike:

Derek was different. Whatever rot that lived in the roots of the Jenkins family tree had bypassed Derek. His son was so full of positive potential it had made him glow like a shooting star from the day he was born. He had accomplished more in his twenty-seven years than most of the entire Jenkins bloodline had in a generation.

Once the men start to ask questions about their sons, they find themselves in the crosshairs of a gang of bikers, and someone powerful further up the food chain. Ike and Buddy Lee are not without skills and they find themselves in some truly terrifying situations. Their partnership grows from wary colleagues to something like friendship as they take a wrecking ball to the mystery surrounding their sons’ deaths.

Razorblade Tears is violent, funny, heartfelt and a total page turner. It asks a lot of questions, not the least of which is what happens to a person who is not allowed to be their authentic selves. You will be rooting for these middle-aged men from start to finish.

The Safest Lies – Megan Miranda

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Seventeen-year-old Kelsey and her mother live in a fortress of a house; it even has a safe room in the basement. Kelsey has always felt safe there and, in fact, “The black iron gates used to be [her] favorite thing about the house.” She acknowledges that her life isn’t like the lives of her classmates. For starters, her mother hasn’t left the house in 17 years. For another, she has to meet with Jan.

Seeing Jan was part of my mother’s deal to keep me. Jan was assigned by the state. I’ve come to rely on her, but I also don’t totally trust her, because she reports to someone else, who decides my fate. My mother relies on her even more, and trusts her even less.

Although previously homeschooled, Kelsey now attends high school and on her way home one day she has a car accident. Ryan, classmate and local volunteer firefighter, is first on the scene and “saves” her from certain death. His heroism lands the pair in the paper and that’s when Kelsey’s life starts to unravel.

She does something she shouldn’t and sneaks out of the house one night to see Ryan receive a medal for saving her life. When she returns home, she discovers the gate at the front unlocked, and when she makes her way inside, her mother is missing. It’s a big deal because, remember, mom hasn’t been outside in 17 years.

Megan Miranda’s YA thriller The Safest Lies is pretty much what you’d expect from a book of this type. A plucky heroine, a solid love interest, a couple red herrings, a mystery and enough action to propel the plot forward. I was pretty invested when there seemed to be stakes (who are the shadowy figures lurking around and I guess that safe room will come in handy after all, eh?) It doesn’t necessarily wrap up as satisfactorily or as believably as I might have hoped, but as a seasoned thriller reader, that’s to be expected.

Teens probably won’t be able to turn the pages fast enough.

Wish You Were Here – John Allore & Patricia Pearson

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I don’t read too much true crime these days, but Wish You Were Here, the story of a young woman who goes missing from her university residence in Sherbrooke, Quebec and is later discovered in a farmer’s field, sounded interesting and, the girl’s parents live (lived) in Saint John, NB, which is my home town.

In 1979 (the year I graduated from high school), a body is discovered. It’s later determined that this is Theresa Allore, a student at Champlain College, who had disappeared without a trace in November 1978.

Co-author Patricia Pearson, who was a friend of the family (and for a short time dated Theresa’s brother, John) recalls Theresa as being “intelligent, independent, witty” .

The police at the time seemed to do very little investigative work to determine exactly what happened to Theresa when she first went missing. In fact, they told the Allore family that

their daughter, a fearless girl who rock-climbed and skydived and was excelling at school, had overdosed on drugs (unspecified) and had been taken (surely) from her dorm to the creek a mile or so away by panicked friends. They’d heard speculative talk of her choking on vomit, or perhaps having an allergic reaction. The friends must have dumped her, the police explained, after stripping off her clothes and stealing her purse and tossing her wallet in a ditch. As friends do.

Many years later, John and Patricia try to do what the police never manage: find out what happened to Theresa. Thus begins their exhaustive search for the truth, which is hindered by missing evidence, a closed-ranks system (both at the college and within the police force) and the passage of time.

At the time this happened, I wouldn’t have been much younger than Theresa, but I can’t say I remember anything about her murder. Shows you how oblivious we sometimes are as teenagers. Wish You Were Here is a thoughtfully written (and how could it not be) examination of the devastating impact of a violent death, the problems inherent in the criminal justice system, and the dangers facing young women.

Visit John Allore’s blog Who Killed Theresa? Allore worked tirelessly for families of missing and murdered young women until his accidental death in 2023.

Shattering Glass – Gail Giles

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Although Gail Giles is now a well-known name in the world of YA, she had to start somewhere and that somewhere was with her 2002 debut Shattering Glass.

Young Steward, so named due to a complicated family tree, narrates the story of what happens when his best friend, Rob, decides to elevate class doofus, Simon Glass, from zero to hero.

Simon was textbook geek. Skin like the underside of a toad and mushy fat. His pants were too short and his zipper gaped about an inch from the top. And his Fruit of the Looms rode up over his pants in back because he tucked his shirt into his tightey-whiteys. He had a plastic pocket protector, no joke, crammed with about a dozen pens and a calculator.

Rob is the most popular guy in their Texas high school. “He wore confidence like the rest of us wore favorite sweatshirts.” When he decides to make a bit of a project out of Simon, none of the members of their group including the handsome Bobster and star football player Coop raise an objection. Coop, in particular, seems to form an authentic relationship with Simon, but Young has a different view because “Simon Glass was easy to hate.” Young can’t say no to Rob though, although he does wonder why Rob is so eager to change Simon’s social standing.

The novel follows Simon’s gradual metamorphosis from nobody to somebody and how this act also changes the dynamic between the friends. It is clear from the beginning that something awful has happened. Each chapter begins with a short comment from some other secondary character, which allows readers to anticipate an event that the main narrative builds towards. Let’s just say that the book’s title is not merely figurative.

The book examines bro culture to a degree. Why do people follow others even when their conscience tells them they shouldn’t? Young is sympathetic, but also frustrating as he makes one bad choice after another. Even his decision at the novel’s expected but startling climax does nothing to redeem him.

Shattering Glass is a solid book. It’s well written and there’s lots to talk about.