Tag Archives: favourite authors

In the Wild Light – Jeff Zentner

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Well, that’s three 5 star books for Jeff Zentner. There’s just something about the way he writes characters that breaks my heart and Cash Pruitt, the sixteen-year-old protagonist of In the Wild Light now joins the ranks of Dill (The Serpent King) and Carver (Goodbye Days) as one of my all-time favourites.

Cash lives with his Papaw and Mamaw in Sawyer, Tennessee. It’s a backwater town and Cash doesn’t imagine much of a future for himself even though it is a place he loves. His mother died of a drug overdose; he never knew his father, but his grandparents are just salt of the earth people.

Cash’s best friend is Delaney Doyle. They met at a support group for people with family members who are addicts. Delaney is a genius, and that’s not an overstatement. For Cash, tying to understand how her mind works “is like trying to form a coherent thought in a dream.”

When Delaney makes an important scientific discovery, it earns her a full ride at Middleford Academy, a fancy private school in Connecticut. Delaney has no reason to stay in Sawyer – and every reason to go – but she isn’t going without Cash. Cash isn’t sure he wants to leave his grandfather who has end stage emphysema.

Cash agrees to go with Delaney and it is a decision that changes his life. First of all, he makes friends with a Alex, a boy he meets on the rowing team. He develops a crush on Delaney’s roommate, Vi, and he takes a poetry class, and this experience (and the teacher, Dr. Adkins) blow his world wide open. She tells him:

“I have two intuitions about you. The first is that you’ve got in your hear that poetry has to be elaborate, and that’s what’s fueling your hesitancy.

[…]

Number two: that you’re someone who pays attention to the world around him.”

Dr. Adkins is not wrong. Cash notices everything: the way people smell, the way Delaney worries the skin on her thumbs, the way water looks. “Ever since I first became aware that the world contains mysteries and incomprehensible wonders, I’ve tried to live as a witness to them.”

In the Wild Light is a coming-of-age story about a kid who has had to grow up way too fast, who feels out of his depth, but who learns to trust himself. Like every Zentner book I’ve read, this one made me cry on more than one occasion.

Highly recommended.

Mercury – Amy Jo Burns

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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.

Great book.

The Devil Crept In – Ania Ahlborn

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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.

The Devil Crept In is a solid read.

Those Across the River -Christopher Buehlman

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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.

Goodbye Days – Jeff Zentner

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Oh, Jeff, what are you doing to me?

The Serpent King, Jeff Zentner’s YA debut, was one of my favourite books of 2024. I figured I couldn’t go wrong with reading his follow-up, Goodbye Days. Geesh. Who is this Jeff Zentner guy and why does he insist on breaking my heart?

Carver Briggs, aka Blade, would have been pretty excited about his final year at Nashville Arts Academy if he hadn’t just buried his three best friends: Blake Lloyd, Eli Bauer and Mars Edwards. Now, though, he has to navigate this last year of high school without the rest of the Sauce Crew and deal with the overwhelming guilt that he is, in fact, responsible for their deaths.

He doesn’t think he killed them on purpose. And he knows that no one thinks he “slipped under their car in the dead of night and severed the brake lines.” But he did text Mars, who was driving, and the authorities did find Mars’s phone at the crash scene with a “half-composed text” to Carver. That was right before his friends slammed into the semi.

Now Carver is having panic attacks and debilitating feelings of guilt which are compounded by the fact that he is growing closer to Jesmyn, Eli’s girlfriend. It’s all too much. And he knows that he is not the only one who is suffering.

When Blake’s grandmother suggests that the two of them share a “goodbye day” for Blake, Carver is initially reluctant. She proposes that they spend a day together, doing the things that Blake used to love to do, and sharing their stories about him. A ‘goodbye day’ of sorts.

“Funny how people move through this word leaving little pieces of their story with the people they meet, for them to carry. Makes you wonder what’d happen if all these people put their puzzle pieces together.”

Goodbye Days is my first five star read of 2025. In all the ways I loved The Serpent King, I loved this one just as much. Zentner is so gifted at writing teenagers who are thoughtful and funny and broken and hopeful. This book was profoundly moving and yep, I cried.

For the most part, you don’t hold the people you love in your heart because they rescued you from drowning or pulled you from a burning house. Mostly you hold them in your heart because they save you, in a million quiet and perfect ways, from being alone.

I will read anything this guy writes.

Little Eve – Catriona Ward

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Catriona Ward’s novel The Last House on Needless Street was fabulous, so I snapped up a couple more of her novels for my tbr shelf and Little Eve was the first to be read.

This is the story of Evelyn, Little Eve, who lives with her “family” on Altnaharra, an island off the coast of Scotland. This family consists of her “Uncle”, two adult women, Nora and Alice, and her “siblings” Dinah, Abel and Baby Elizabeth – who is actually eleven. This de facto family is hunkered down on Altnaharra waiting for the arrival of the Adder. Power is transferred from one person to another by way of Hercules, a snake, that will choose one of them to “see with his eyes”.

Yeah – it’s a cult.

When the novel opens, James MacRaith, town butcher, has been called to deliver a side of beef to Altnaharra – a rather unusual request, but everyone in Loyal knows that what happens on the island is unusual anyway. When he arrives, he finds the gate at the end of the causeway open and Jamie enters, eventually making his way up to the house where he follows the “trail of mud and blood” to a ghastly scene.

How these events come to happen and the aftermath that follows is the plot of Little Eve.

Did you think you had heard the last from me? No, I have more gifts for you; more days I do not need. It has been ten years but the memories are still bright.

This is a book that I wish I had read in one or two settings because at some points I sort of got lost in its labyrinth. I enjoyed the writing and subject matter (I am a big fan of books about cults) but I have to admit that I didn’t always catch how I got to where I ended up. That’s on me, not on the author. This book is atmospheric and compelling.

Distant Sons – Tim Johnston

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It was on page 32 of Tim Johnston’s latest novel Distant Sons when I realized that I recognized his main character, Sean Courtland. It wasn’t his name; it was a passing reference to “the high pines of the Rockies, the summer she was eighteen, a track star floating up the mountain on pink Nikes while he, age fifteen, fell increasingly behind on the bike.” Wait a minute! I know that scenario. I raced for my copy of Descent and sure enough there he was. Cool, I thought. I LOVED Descent and I loved Sean, so I was happy to spend more time with him. Then, a while later, when we are introduced to Dan Young, I had the same niggle in the back of my head. Again, it wasn’t the name, it was the fact that he had a twin brother named Marky. Wait a minute! I ran for my copy of The Current. Yep. Tim Johnston is cannibalizing his previous novels and, oh, what a feast it is.

First of all, you don’t need to know anything about Descent or The Current to understand the plot of Distant Sons. This is not the sort of novel where the reader loses out if they are not familiar with the backstories. That said, I highly recommend both of those novels. Descent, in particular, blew me away and made Johnston an auto buy author for me. Nevertheless, you will not suffer for not having read these books before reading this one because Distant Sons isn’t really a sequel.

It’s ten years past the events of Descent (not totally sure what that means for the timeline of The Current.) Sean Courtland, now 26, has landed in small town Wisconsin and isn’t able to go much farther because his car has broken down. He finds a job doing some carpentry work for Marion Deveraux, an elderly reclusive oddball. The townspeople have long been suspicious of Devereaux because of three boys who’d gone missing thirty-odd years ago.

Not long after he arrives in town, he finds himself in trouble with the local police for getting into a bar fight, where he was defending the honour of local waitress Denise Givens against jack off Blaine Mattis. Then, he crosses paths with Dan Young, who has also run into some of his own bad luck with a vehicle. Sean offers him some work because, as luck would have it, Dan has plumbing experience and the job at Devereaux’s needs plumbing work done.

These are the main characters in Johnston’s story. Their intertwining lives, the stuff of chance, has a profound impact on each of them. As much as I loved Sean when I first met him, I love him just as much – or more – in this book. I feel as though he has been punishing himself for a decade and I wanted him to be able to let the past go and find something good to hold on to. His new relationships with Dan, Denise and Denise’s father are thoughtful and it is refreshing to see male relationships in particular that are not merely posturing. Sean’s interactions with other people errs on the side of kindness always. Although Dan and Sean are reluctant to reveal too much about themselves, I felt as though I was watching an authentic relationship unfold.

There is a mystery at the core of this novel, and Johnston certainly has a few surprises in store for the reader, but this is a novel about people – some of whom who are just trying to do the right thing. Slow burn, for sure, but 100% worth the effort. I gasped. I teared up. I loved every second of this book.

If you haven’t ever read this author, I beg you to give him a try. He’s fantastic.

You Are Here – David Nicholls

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As I age, my desire to read straight-up frothy romances has waned. Sure, I used to love them: hot boy meets hot girl and sexy fun times ensue. But now? Boring. Give me the characters who have lived a life and are neurotic, flawed, cynical, searching, hopeful…human. Bonus if they’re past 30. (Extra points if they’re past 40.)

I love David Nicholls. His outstanding novel One Day introduces us to Emma and Dexter on the eve of their graduation from university, but then follows them for the next twenty years. (If you have not watched the incredible series on Netflix, I highly recommend it. It’s perfection.) Us follows Douglas and Connie, a couple whose marriage is disintegrating after twenty years, just as they are about to head off on a European vacation with their 17-year-old son. Sweet Sorrow is Charlie and Fran’s story. They meet at sixteen while participating in a production of Romeo and Juliet, but their story is told from a future vantage point complete with the requisite melancholy.

Nicholls’ most recent novel You Are Here is the story of 38-year-old copywriter, Marnie, and a high school geography teacher named Michael who is 42. Marnie is divorced and lives a relatively solitary life in London. She used to have an active social life, was “A nice addition to the group if not the core, well liked if never adored or idolised.” Now all her friends are married and having babies and Marnie feels like “perhaps this was natural, this falling away.” Nevertheless, Marnie does admit that she is lonely. Michael and his wife, Natasha, are separated and Michael resists all efforts to shake off the lethargy. Instead of staying in the house they shared, where she had “left enough of her possessions to keep it comfortable but he could never quite escape a feeling that something had gone missing”, Michael walks. A lot.

Although Michael and Marnie are unknown to each other at the beginning of the book, they do have one common friend, Cleo. When Michael turns down one too many invites because he will be walking, she insists that she’ll come, too and bring other people. Thus, Michael, Marnie, Cleo and company set off to hike from one side of England to the other (well, at least, that’s Michael’s intent; the rest are only going to walk for three days.)

Initially Cleo had thought to match Marnie up with Conrad, “perhaps the most handsome man” Marnie had ever seen. The woman she’d invited for Michael cancelled at the last minute and so you can see where this is going to go from miles away….and miles is just how long it’s going to take for Marnie and Michael to really see each other…to let their guards down and trust themselves and each other.

Trust me, it’s the journey not the destination that matters in this one. It’s filled with flirty banter, heartfelt revelations, and beautiful descriptions of the English countryside. This book will make you want to plan your own ramble and open yourself up to the possibility of love.

Another winner by one of my favourite authors.

All the Colors of the Dark – Chris Whitaker

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Chris Whitaker’s novel We Begin at the End is one of the best books I’ve read in the last few years and so when I heard that he had a new book coming out I purchased it as soon as it was available. (Sadly, it’s a flimsy paperback with a stupid unremovable “Read with Jenna” sticker on it. ) Not only did I race out to purchase All the Colors of the Dark, but I started reading it almost immediately. The weather cooperated, too; I got a rainy Saturday with nothing much to do and so I didn’t stop reading until just after 2 a.m. when I turned the final page (595 of them!)

Patch and Saint meet as kids. They’re both outsiders in their small town of Monta Clare, Missouri. Patch lives with his single mother, Ivy, who has barely been able to keep it together; Saint lives with her grandmother, Norma. Their friendship sustains them for many years and is the central relationship in the novel.

At the beginning of the story, Patch rescues another local girl, Misty, from a man who clearly intends to do her harm. He has admired Misty from afar and when he encounters them in the woods, he recognizes that something is not right.

Patch desperately looked around for anyone at all. Anyone who could handle this, who could ease the responsibility, the acute burden of seeing a girl in trouble.

He has no choice but to act, and he does, and it changes the trajectory of his life.

When Patch disappears, Saint lets nothing stand in her way until she finds him. But he is not the same person he was and as the details of what happened to him emerge, it also reveals a dogged determination to get to the truth.

I can’t say any more than that.

This is an epic story because it takes place over many years. It is also a story that moves swiftly. There’s a lot of dialogue in this story and so despite its length it almost begs to be read in one sitting. I think Whitaker’s super power is his characters. I loved Saint and Patch, who are revealed to us through their actions and their dialogue. But they are not the only characters to love. There’s Chief Nix, Norma and Sammy, too. I felt like I knew and cared for each and every one of them.

There’s not a lot of exposition here. (Honestly, this would make a terrific series and given the author’s connection to Jordy Moblo, I’ve got my fingers crossed.) But there is a compelling mystery and some heart-stopping moments. In fact, there’s a lot going on in this book and while the conclusion wasn’t as punch-you-in-the-gut as We Begin at the End, I finished feeling very satisfied. And as a person who generally falls asleep relatively early, the fact that I had to stay awake – in fact, couldn’t fall asleep even after I finished – to find out what happened to these people I had fallen in love with should tell you everything you need to know about All the Colors of the Dark.

How to Sell a Haunted House – Grady Hendrix

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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.