Well, if January was the month that didn't know when to up and leave, February was the one that high tailed it right the heck out of there, didn't it?!
Another less than stellar reading month from a total quantity perspective but another solid month in terms of quality.
Check out which books blew me away this past month....
The Repeat Room by Jesse Ball
Jesse Ball is a must-read author for me. His writing is so sparce and strange and beautiful and unsettling and everything I've ever read from him just haunts me endlessly. He has a unique way of viewing humanity and creates worlds that I would be terrified to live in.
Take The Repeat Room for example. In this horrific future, a man is called in for jury duty. He is in a room packed elbow to elbow with hundreds of other potential jurors. They will spend the next two days going through rigorous testing and examinations. They will be whittled down to one person, and that one person will be given the opportunity to sit beside the repeat room and experience the accused's life in order to make a determination on whether they get to rejoin society or be put to death.
The first half of the book follows Abel as he moves through the selection process. The second half of the book is through the eyes of the accused. And neither part is going to give you the answers you are seeking so you can forget all about that but holy crap what a journey this book is.
If you haven't read Jesse before, this might be the perfect book for you start with. If you enjoy books that never quite let you in, leaving you feeling slightly lost and uncomfortable, you are going to love this.
Listen to Your Sister by Neena Viel
Yeah. No. This wasn't for me. I thought about DNFing a few times before the weirdness fully kicked in and then once it did, I figured I was too far in at that point so I just sucked it up and muscled through.
Was it me or did the writing seem... off? Things flowed really strangely and it felt kind of disjointed at times. It definitely had the rougher edges of a debut novel.
For those of you who haven't read it yet and are expecting a creepy cabin in the woods horror novel, this is not quite that. Part childhood trauma, part sibling survival story, and a huge heaping serving of oldest sister trying to hold everyone's shit together, including her own, this is more psychological horror than anything else. And it's weird. I mentioned it being weird, right?
Ring Shout by P Djeli Clark
I am really late to the game with this one but in my defense, the jacket copy does not do it justice and whenever I saw people reviewing it, I just assumed it was historical fiction, which really isn't my cuppa, so it totally flew under my radar. Until... I saw it sitting on the shelf in a used bookstore a few weeks back, in their sci-fi and fantasy section. Obviously that gave me pause, so I really looked it at this time and decided to bring it home with me.
I was feeling a bit under the weather today and this one called to me from the tbr and here we are, a handful of hours (and a man, I really don't feel good, nap in the middle) later...
I liked it! Three badass black women taking out their anger on a bunch of demonic monsters in human meat suits known as Ku Kluxes, not to be confused with the Klan, which are regular white assholes who haven't been infected or 'turned' yet.
The book is full of haints, an evil butcher, and a nasty boss monster that's determined to bring on the end of the world. And our leading lady Maryse discovers she's the one everyone's looking at to save the day.
It was soooo deliciously not what I expected! An incredibly unique spin on a very dark period of our history.
Beta Vulgaris by Margie Sarsfield
Just another weird sad girl novel, only this one takes place during a sugar beet harvest as we watch our main gal lose her shit when her eating disorder gets the better of her, and her bank card gets overdrafted and her boyfriend gives her the slip, and other harvesters start disappearing into the darkness....
The beets told her all along to return to the dirt. Elle oh Elle.
I actually didn't hate it. I mean, it was a slow burn for a long while there and we spent a lot of time in Elise's head and I'd be lying if I said my younger self didn't have some of the very same neurotic, paranoid thoughts she did about whether people actually liked her or were putting up with her, loved her or were planning on leaving her, tiptoeing around the hard conversations to avoid giving anyone any reason at all to leave her. So get ready for 200 plus pages of THAT while also learning all about harvesting sugar beets, haha, but then strap in because once she really starts giving in to the self talk and the breakdown hits its crescendo... I can't even. Unhinged City Here I Come.
And hello to that cover, amirite?!
The Garden by Nick Newman
Oh man! This book! I think by now you know that I'm a sucker for post apocalyptic, dystopian novels and the isolation angle is always a fun one!
Two elderly sisters rely on each other for their daily survival. Evelyn steadfastly follows Mama's almanac, a book which guides the girls through each season and how to tend to their garden to ensure they have enough food to live off of. Lily, the younger, is more whimsical, preferring to practice her dance routines or paint out in the gazebo, and cooks what Evelyn forages.
The house they live in is the very same one they grew up in, and was initially put to use as a group commune when things in the outside world first started going bad. Though, as things worsened, everyone packed up and headed out, leaving the sisters alone with Mama and Papa. Papa also eventually disappeared and that left the three. Mama, now crazed and in an effort to protect the girls, sealed the kitchen off from the rest of the house, claiming the rooms were all poisoned and filled with dangerous "man" things, and forbid them from exploring beyond the garden because there was nothing left outside their little haven but a barren wasteland.
After Mama's passing, the girls did the only thing they knew to do, which was maintain her strict rules to ensure their own safety. That is, until they discover a young boy who has broken through their garden wall claiming he is running from "others" and, you guessed it, this encounter shatters their entire world, flipping everything they were taught to believe right onto its head.
The Garden is wonderfully reminiscent of other post apocalyptic and isolation novels I've read (books like The Road, California, Whether Violent or Natural, The Water Cure, What Mother Won't Tell Me, These Silent Woods, all come to mind) where the characters appear to unravel almost as beautifully as their outside worlds do and where creative parenting plays a large role in just how fucked up the kids have become.
It's a deliciously slow burn with a couple of sick little twists thrown in towards the latter part of the book and it's an understatement to say that I thoroughly enjoyed it!
Red Rabbit by Alex Grecian
This is another #bookstagrammademedoit banger!
Red Rabbit is an epic western with ghosts, ghouls, demons, shapeshifters, witches and witch hunters, and found family, and was just a super fun read.
It follows an eclectic group of strangers that end up falling in with each other on a journey to Burden County, Kansas to see if they can put a stop to Sadie Grace, a witch who's allegedly tormenting the townfolk there. The characters were quirky and well developed, the storylines all flowed together smoothly, and the best part was how Grecian kept you guessing the whole way through.
Evenly paced, deliciously atmospheric, simultaneously tender and violent, this chunkster of a novel should not be missed!
It gets all the stars, goddamnit!
