Donna Tartt’s 1992 novel The Secret History is the dark academia novel all others aspire to be. This is a sub-genre of fiction that I really love, so I am drawn to books that feature isolated campuses, academics, and shifting loyalties. Ellie Keel’s debut The Four definitely scratched the itch.
Rose Lawson is one of four scholarship students admitted to the prestigious High Realms school. Telling the story of her time at the school from some years in the future, Rose paints a picture of extreme privilege and cruelty. She is saved from total desolation due to her friendship with the other scholarship students, Lloyd and Sami and her roommate Marta.
The novel opens with Rose’s admission that
It would have made our lives a lot easier if Marta had simply pushed Genevieve out of our bedroom window on our third day at High Realms. Certainly, it would have been tragic. […] She would have died instantly.
Genevieve Locke is a member of the Senior Patrol (aka a prefect), a member of the hockey team (field hockey as the story takes place in England) and she treats Marta and Rose with “lofty derision”. The truth is most of the students the four friends encounter at school are cruel and horrible, but all of the scholarship students count themselves lucky to have been chosen to attend.
Then something horrible happens and three of the friends find themselves desperately working together to protect the fourth member of their group. The Four has all the things I love in a book like this: secrets, unreliable narrators, a labyrinthine school, and surprising twists and turns that will keep you guessing until the very end. Keel is an award-winning theatre producer, but she is also a gifted writer and I will definitely be watching to see what she writes next.
When you read as many thrillers as I do, it’s hard to be not to feel as though you’ve read it already. Tracy Sierra’s debut Nightwatching definitely offers a few surprises for discerning readers.
Our unnamed narrator wakes up in the middle of the night to the realization that “There was someone in the house.”
It’s a terrifying notion because she is alone with her two young children and a snowstorm is raging outside. When she steps out of her room to investigate, she sees him at the end of the hall.
He was tall. His arms hung loose and long. His presence had the distantly familiar rancidness of something wrong and rotten she’d tasted before but couldn’t quite place.
All this woman knows is that she needs to keep her children safe. And thus begins a very long night of cat and mouse. The woman knows something about the house that she is quite certain the intruder does not know, and that’s the existence of a secret room. But even that will not guarantee long-term safety, so there are hard decisions to be made.
As they hide, the woman mulls over the details of her marriage, past trauma, and her acrimonious relationship with her father-in-law. These sections were perhaps not as exciting as other parts of the book. This book also has some interesting things to say about trauma and whether or not women are believed. I don’t want to say too much about that, but I have to admit to feeling like I was being gaslit. Is the woman a reliable narrator? Could I trust what I was being told?
While some parts of the book were a tad slow, there were lots of moments when the pages turned themselves and, at the end of the day, I felt like the book really delivered on its promise. Sierra is definitely a writer to keep your eye on.
When 17-year-old Marley West moves to Mercury, Pennsylvania with her single mom, Ruth, she has no idea just how much her life is about to change. At a baseball game she meets Baylor Joseph, oldest of the three Joseph boys, sons of local roofer Mick and his wife, Elise. She is soon pulled into the Josephs’ orbit, into rivalries and old traumas she doesn’t understand. She comes to understand that “The Josephs were the close kind of family that fought in equal measure but didn’t know how to make up.”
Amy Jo Burns’ novel Mercury is a family drama that covers several years in the lives of the complicated Joseph family and how Marley comes to love them. Although she initially meets them because of Baylor, it is her relationship with the middle son, Waylon, that cements her place in the family.
It doesn’t take long before Marley figures out that Baylor is “the flinty kind of young man … whom everyone feared and nobody liked.” Their relationship is short lived. Her friendship with Waylon, though, is worth keeping. Waylon is “easier, kinder, gentler”. This is the relationship that sticks.
Although Mercury opens with the discovery of a dead body in a church attic, and although this mystery is important, it isn’t actually what drives the narrative. The book uses the body as a jumping off point before it circles back to the beginning of the story of Marley’s arrival in Mercury and how her relationship with this insular and complicated family shifts loyalties and both frays and strengthens bonds. It’s a very character-driven novel, and all of the characters are complicated and beautifully rendered. There are no bad guys, just people trying to do their best for reasons that don’t always make sense. I really loved Waylon and Marley in particular, but I also loved the secondary characters including Marley’s best friend, Jade, and the youngest Joseph, Baby Shay.
Mercury is my second book by Burns (Shiner) and she is definitely an autobuy author for me now.
I’ve read a couple books recently that employ a podcast/documentary element (None of This is True,Listen for the Lie, The Favorites) and it’s definitely something that can add a little something something to a novel. In Charlie Donlea’s novel Don’t Believe It, Sidney Ryan is a documentary filmmaker whose last three projects have ended up exonerating people and Grace Sebold is hoping that Sidney can help overturn her conviction.
A decade before Grace and a group of friends arrived at Sugar Beach, St. Lucia, to celebrate the wedding of Daniel and Charlotte. It should have been a sun soaked holiday, but then Julian is found dead and just days later Grace is arrested for the crime. Incarcerated in a St. Lucian prison for the past ten years, her letters to Sidney have finally yielded the desired result and Sidney has agreed to take a look at the evidence.
Sidney decides to investigate and reveal what she finds week by week. Grace assures Sidney that is she is innocent, that the facts will bear that out. Circumstantially at least, it appears that all the signs point to Grace being the culprit, but there are some questions and soon Sidney begins to believe in Grace’s story. Forensics seem to agree.
Sidney talks to police, friends and family. She pores over evidence and consults experts. There’s an eleventh hour twist and all the requisite red herrings just to keep you guessing.
All of this should have been page turning stuff, but it really wasn’t. The ending introduces the idea of a secondary character investigating something else that is introduced in the the book, so I am not sure if this is meant to be the beginning of a new series, but I won’t be carrying on.
In 1998, Canadian ice dancers Shae-Lynn Bourne and Victor Kraatz competed in the Nagano Olympics, finishing just off the podium in fourth place. I was wholly invested in them at the time; they were innovative and fun to watch.
Flash forward to 2018 and Tessa Virtue and Scott Moir at the PyeongChang Olympics, where they capped off a long career with another Olympic gold. Even people who didn’t know anything about the sport rooted for this Canadian pair, and if you want to see why – just watch the video. It’s also interesting to watch the two videos back to back to see how far the sport has come.
So, that brings me to Layne Fargo’s novel The Favorites, a novel which drops the reader into the competitive, cutthroat world of competitive ice dancing. I have seen this book all over the place and so I bought it and read it and it was a ride.
Katarina “Kat” Shaw has only ever wanted one thing in her life – to be like two-time Olympian Sheila Lin. Well, she wants one other thing, actually: Heath Rocha. Kat and Heath have known each other since they were kids, when Heath, a foster child, came to live with the Shaws.
When the novel opens, they are sixteen and just about to head off to the National Championships. Kat’s parents are dead and she’s been left in the care of her older brother, Lee. I use the word ‘care’ loosely because Lee only really cares about getting high.
Anyway, Kat is a talented skater and Heath is a good partner because he won’t get in the way of what she really wants – which is to skate in the Olympics. The problem is they live in Illinois, have no money and little access to professional coaching, meaning that they don’t have the support necessary to make it all the way to the top. But then, they meet Sheila Lin and that changes the trajectory of their whole lives.
The Favorites draws some of its inspiration from Wuthering Heights, a novel I read a million years ago but which I credit for kick starting my love of stories featuring characters who shouldn’t necessarily be together but desperately belong together. I mean, I am not sure Kat and Heath deserve to be in the same company as Catherine and Heathcliff, but this book wants you to believe they do.
Look, I’m going to be straight up. I devoured this book. I couldn’t wait to come home and pick it back up at the end of the day. It’s an unapologetic soap opera covering many, many years and many, many skating competitions. Part of the narrative takes the form of clips from people talking about Kat and Heath and some of the events that happened to them as they chase their Olympic dream a la Daisy Jones and the Six; the rest of the book is Kat’s first person narration.
Objectively, it’s not a great book, in the sense that it’s not great literature. I felt like I was being told things to get me from one moment to the next and I never really felt the great passion between the two main characters because their love story was PG13, even as adults. The characters got older, but they didn’t act any different really. The book reads very YA, although it’s not. There’s lots of backstabbing and crying and miscommunication and gossip. The whole thing wraps up pretty tidily. It’s not unsatisfying, it’s just neat.
We stared at each other in the shadows, so close we were sharing breath. Later, we’d become world famous for that: stretching out the moment before a kiss until it was almost unbearable, until every member of the audience felt the quickening of our pulses, the pure want reflected in our eyes.
But that was choreography. This was real.
I might not have believed it by the end, but I skated along with them quite happily until their final bow. If there’s a limited series coming, I’m all in.
Although everyone and their octopus was talking about this book for a while, I probably would never have read it. Then, it was chosen for my IRL book club so…
Sowell Bay is a small community in the Pacific Northwest and it is here that we meet a group of characters including Tova Sullivan, a 70-year-old widow who works as a cleaner at the local aquarium; Ethan, the town gossip and owner of the local grocery store; and Cameron, who is not a native, but who arrives in Sowell Bay to locate the father he has never known. They are not the most interesting characters though; that honour belongs to Marcellus.
Who am I, you ask? My name is Marcellus, but most humans do not call me that. Typically, they call me that guy. For example, Look at that guy–there he is–you can just see his tentacles behind the rock.
I am a giant Pacific octopus. I know this from the plaque on the wall beside my enclosure.
I know what you are thinking. Yes, I can read. I can do many things you would not expect.
Yep, one of the characters in Shelby Van Pelt’s novel Remarkably Bright Creatures is a sentient octopus, and he is actually the most interesting character in the whole book. I wish we had way more of him and way less of some of the other stuff in this book.
This is a novel about people in transition. Cameron is a 30-year-old man, but he acts like he’s a kid. He plays in a rock band with one of his best friends, he keeps getting fired from jobs, his girlfriend has finally had enough of him, his Aunt Jeanne is supportive, but frustrated by his lack of resilience. Sure, his mother abandoned him when he was nine and sure he doesn’t know who his father is but, c’mon. When Jeanne gives him a box of stuff his mom left behind, Cameron uses a clue in the box and sets out for Sowell Bay.
Tova is a taciturn Swede who lives in the house her father built. She has been grieving the loss of her son, Erik, for 38 years. She has never understood what happened to him; he was just about to go off to college; he was happy. Then, one night, he just didn’t come home.
Marcellus, watching from his tank, sees what other people don’t see. His perspective was my favourite and I wish there had been more of it. Known to be highly intelligent in the real world, Marcellus, the character in the book, sees what others do not. He calls humans “remarkably bright creatures”, but I think he is being generous.
I suspect that many readers would love this book. It gave me Bear Town vibes and I didn’t like that book at all. Remarkably Bright Creatures is a little too sweet and the characters’ manufactured quirkiness just wasn’t my cup of tea.
It takes a lot to really surprise me when it comes to thrillers. Amy Tintera’s novel Listen for the Lie did not surprise me, but it was an okay diversion from the shitstorm of the world in which we are currently living.
Lucy Chase returns to Plumpton, Texas for her grandmother’s– the feisty Beverly– 80th birthday. Lucy hasn’t been home in five years. Lucy’s life is pretty much off the rails: she’s just been fired and her boyfriend, Nathan, is on the precipice of kicking her to the curb. (Literally, since they live together.) Lucy really, really doesn’t want to go home.
When she left Texas for L.A., it was to escape the side-eye she was getting from everyone after the death of her best friend Savvy. Why all the suspicion? Well, no one knows quite how Savvy died, but what everyone does know is that she and Lucy were seen fighting and then Lucy was found covered in blood with no memory of what happened. No charges were ever brought against her, but that doesn’t really matter. Everyone thinks she killed Savvy. Geesh, even Lucy herself isn’t convinced that she’s not guilty.
Enter Ben Owens, host of the popular true crime podcast Listen for the Lie.
Is it true that no one believes Lucy Chase? Is she hiding something, or have the people of Plumpton accused an innocent woman of murder for five years?
Let’s find out.
Ben sets about interviewing all the people who know Lucy: her mother, her high school besties Maya and Emmett, Savvy’s ‘boyfriend’ du jour Colin, Savvy’s family and Lucy’s ex-husband, Matt. Eventually, Lucy agrees to talk on the record. I am sure that if you’d listened to this novel on audio you would have had an interesting reading experience, but I am not an audio reader.
It’s hard to say why this book wasn’t a winner for me. Maybe it was because I didn’t really like any of these characters, including Lucy herself (who spends a lot of time fantasizing about how to kill the various people she encounters.) The podcast scripts in novels has certainly been done before (Sadie, None of This is True) and here it is used to offer up potential explanations, and perhaps to incriminate other people.
When Lucy does finally start to remember what happened, it’s just a bit over-the-top. For me, I would slot Listen for the Lie in the okay category. The writing, the mystery, the reading experience were all okay.
I suspect others will like like it a lot more than I did.
High school junior Joel Higgins has a hard time speaking his truth, so instead he writes texts to people: his principal, his best friend, Andy, and Eli, the girl on whom he has a major crush. He doesn’t actually send the texts, though.
Joel lives with his parents and five-year-old brother, Jace. He hasn’t really found his niche yet. He says “Basically the things that I am good at, they don’t teach in high school.” Other than Eli, Joel is pretty solitary. “I’m always surrounded by people, but I have no real friends. […] The things most kids care about don’t matter to me.”
Joel (and Eli) volunteer at the local soup kitchen as part of their graduation requirements. Many of the people who come in for food are veterans who have been abandoned by the system. Joel forms a sort of attachment to one of these men, and this relationship – although this man does not speak – starts to crack through Joel’s protective shell.
Words We Don’t Say cares very much about words, actually. When Joel’s English teacher suggests his students read all the banned books they can get their hands on (after ranting about how books like Winnie the Pooh have been banned because the bears are anthropomorphized and don’t wear pants), Joel realizes that
free speech [was] something we should protect even if that means sometimes we had to hear stuff that made us uncomfortable and how lucky we were to read whatever we wanted to read even if that only meant sitting on the curb and reading a book out loud to a man who has a Purple Heart that came with delusions and a heartbreak of an illness that nobody could fix.
This book is quite often very funny, but also filled with heart and empathy for a wide variety of characters. Joel eventually starts to understand that he is not the only person who has to carry a broken heart around with him, and it is only when he really starts to reach out to people that he starts down the path to healing.
If Ania Ahlborn’s novel The Devil Crept In had been the first book I’d read by her, I am not 100% positive that I would be adding her backlist to my TBR, but it was not. My first encounter with this author was her novel Brother and that book was both creepy and emotionally devastating and made my top books of the year list, pretty close to the top. This novels suffers only by comparison because The Devil Crept In is an objectively creepy book.
Ten-year-old Stevie lives with his deadbeat teenager bother, Duncan, his mother and his bully of a stepfather. Stevie has some weird ticks; his words jumble up in his head and come out sounding like nursery rhymes. And sometimes he’s prone to an overactive imagination, like that time he hallucinated and stuck his hand in the garbage disposal, losing a couple fingertips in the process.
Stevie’s best friend (and cousin) Jude, 12, lives next door. They are each other’s only friends and even though Jude is a bit of a hell raiser, was “tough [and] unforgiving”, Stevie worships him. Then one day, Jude vanishes.
Jude Brighton was gone, like he’d never existed; vanished as though he and Stevie hadn’t spent their entire lives stomping the pavement of Main Street and living the summer in those woods. To them, the ferns were landmarks. Each bend in Cedar Creek, a compass. If someone had chased Jude through those trees, he would have outrun them. If they had dragged him deep into the wilderness, he would have broken free.
But then, one day, Jude reappears. He doesn’t remember where he’s been and although the adults are certainly glad to see him, Stevie’s concern soon turns to dread because Jude is “Like a corpse brought back from the dead.”
There is another narrative thread in this novel and that belongs to Rosie Aleksander. I wasn’t quite as invested in this part of the novel because it felt like exposition — although it is necessary to the whole plot.
The action really ramps up in the last third of the book and I read until the wee hours (on a school night, no less) so that I could see how it would all wrap up. One thing I have admired about Ahlborn is her willingness to draw the reader down a dark path without the promise of a happy ending.
Those Across the River is my second novel by Christopher Buehlman (The Lesser Dead) and he now joins the ranks of my auto buy authors.
Frank Nichols and his soon-to-be-wife Eudora have just landed in Whitbrow, a backwater town in Georgia. Their life is a little bit in flux. Frank was essentially chased out of Chicago, where he’d worked at a college, because Eudora had been married to a colleague. The two meet at a faculty luncheon.
She was twenty, wearing a sweater the color of an Anjou pear. I was still built like the St. Ignatius basketball center I had been fifteen years before.
We were in love before the salads came.
It is 1935 and Frank is a WW1 veteran, prone to night terrors; Dora is a school teacher. They land in Whitbrow because Frank has inherited a property. The letter that tells him about this inheritance also cautions him to sell the property, that there is “bad blood” there, but with limited options, they decide to move. Frank is going to write the history of Savoyard Plantation, a derelict property owned by his ancestors.
As Frank and Dora settle into their new lives, they find it to be both secretive and charming. For one thing, the townspeople gather once a year to release pigs into the woods as a sort of sacrifice. But to what? Then there’s the plantation, which is located somewhere across the river, but Frank finds that no one is interested in taking him there. One of the locals tells him “Them woods is deep and mean.”
Just how mean? Well, it takes a while for Frank (and the reader) to figure out just what the heck is going on. Some readers might get frustrated with the slow pace at which the story unfolds, but I liked it. I really enjoy the way the Buehlman writes; he’s also a poet and it shows in his prose. One reviewer suggested that the main characters are wooden and the plot not that compelling, but I disagree. I was wholly invested in this story.
I won’t spoil the reveal. I did figure it out before the end, and while it isn’t a scary horror novel, it is atmospheric and a compelling read.
The Ludic Reader 