The Witch's Heart by Genevieve Gornichec

 

I am way behind, so just a short and sweet one this week - for those who enjoyed Circe by Madeleine Miller, for those who love mythology and gods, for Marvel fans who love Loki, for those who enjoy a very strong, capable and determined woman, this book is for you.

I would go so far as to say this one is better than Circe.  I liked Circe, but found the language kinda short and choppy.  This one, you can fall in to.  So very well written, the author weaves Norse mythology into a love story, a family story, a story of abandonment and magic and burning and seeing and of three very unusual children.  It is the story of a woman who is used, turned away, isolated, loved, who becomes a fiercely protective mother, wife, friend, and lover, and who fights for her family.

Quite relatable, really.

But, this is fantasy at its best, so if mythology and fantasy are not your thing, this will not be for you.  It is the story of Angrboda, a witch and seer who is punished by Odin, stripped of her powers for not helping him, and who flees to a remote forest to live alone and lonely.  Until she is discovered by Loki, and they fall in love.  Trouble ensues.  

I found the world building to be very believable and my daughter assured me that the mythology was on point (yes, Loki did actually give birth himself, just not in human form.  Say what?).  A definite break from the NYTimes best sellers and thrillers and mysteries I have been reading lately, this was a good read.  Sad in places for sure, full of the power of Woman, but such a different story, and a full circle ending, I would encourage Readers to give it a whirl!  I totally bought it for the cover, too.  ;-)

The Violin Conspiracy by Brendan Slocumb

 

This will probably not be a very popular opinion, but it is mine, so...

This book was just kinda Meh for me.  Predictable ending even though the subject matter (a priceless Stradivarius violin goes missing under questionable ownership) was original.  The insight into the life of a professional violinist was definitely different, but overall the story and the ending just was a little boring.  It is set in the city where I live, so that part was fun.  And the author plays the violin, so he knows of what he writes.

Ray, an African American musician, owns the beat up old violin his grandmother gave him.  He gets it refurbished, and discovers he actually owns a Stradivarius.  He plays all over the world - he is GOOD and the violin makes him GREAT in his mind - and then he enters the world's top competition of violin players right before the violin is stolen from him in his hotel room.  The white family who originally owned the violin have stated that their ancestor would have never just given this violin to his favorite slave, Ray's great-grandfather, who played it for his master.  And so a fight for ownership rights is launched. And not only between the black and white families, but within Ray's own family too.  They want him to sell it and split the money with the extended family.  They don't care what Ray wants, or how that violin connects him to his beloved grandmother; they just want the money.

There is a lot here about the life of a musician (similar to the singular focus of the single sport athlete in last week's review!) and all the practice, practice, practice and pressure, pressure, pressure, especially for a black musician.  He experiences devastating racism after being hired to play at a wedding but turned away at the door because they only see a black man who is not welcomed.  Ray does have a manager that really understands and helps him, and a devoted girlfriend, but his family is less that supportive unless he is sending them money or will ever sell that silly violin that is worth MILLIONS.    I just found his family to be flat out awful.  Poor Ray.

Maybe it was just too much for me.  The story was depressing, nothing went right for Ray, he was bullied and looked down upon by white people and his own family too.  

This author has a second book that has just been released which is about a composer/music historian, and I do plan to read his second book.  I hear it is better than the first one, and I know lots of people who really liked The Violin Conspiracy just fine, it just was not really for me.  Meh.

BONUS:

So remember back in January when I said I had already read my Favorite Book of the Year, and it was only January but I knew it would be my favorite anyway?

That book, Demon Copperhead, won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction this week.

Barbara Kingsolver was nominated once before in 1998 for The Poisonwood Bible, but did not win.  This year she and her book Demon Copperhead share the honor with another book (Trust by Hernan Diaz).  You can find my review here:  Rawles' Reads : Search results for demon (rawlesreads.blogspot.com)

Now, go read the book.

Carrie Soto is Back by Taylor Jenkins Reid

 

Whatdyaknow?  It is Tuesday and I am sending you a review! Miracles never cease.

This week, just in time for warmer weather and thoughts of summer sports and that OTHER crowning event, Wimbledon, I give you Carrie Soto.

This was another audiobook for me.  Voiced by 12 different performers (including Patrick McEnroe, Mary Carillo, and a few brief appearances by Julia Whelan who is usually the narrator for this author), this is a comeback story about a professional tennis player for whom tennis is LIFE. 

Anne Bogel of the blog Modern Mrs Darcy said this is a book about female ambition. 

 Other readers have just said Carrie is a bitch. 

She is ruthless and determined and focused and talented.  She wins and wins and wins and sets records, and then she retires.  Until someone wins and wins and wins as much as Carrie did, and her winning record is threatened.  So, she decides to come out of retirement to defend her record.  With or without her dad as her coach.

There is a lot here about the father daughter relationship.  There is a lot here about fierce unapologetic women, especially in sports.  There is a LOT here about tennis - match after match and practice after practice.  I played a little tennis growing up, and my mom and my brother were both local tournament players, and I have been to the US Open (SO FUN).  But I am not an athlete.  I can definitely understand the dedication, but I didn't really need SO much tennis in this book.  It became a bit repetitive, but that is the life of a single sport athlete, isn't it?

What I did like was that we weren't really supposed to like Carrie.  She is ruthless and rude.  She is the best of the best and she does not have time for shenanigans.  Or losers.  Or friends. She is older and things have changed when she returns to the tour, and the media tear her apart.  She doesn't really care.  Not really. Maybe just a tiny bit. But not really.  Her love life is all over the place (note the connection to Malibu Rising!) when she can even be bothered.  She is seen to read one book - Daisy Jones and The Six.  HA!  I love that TJR has connecting threads throughout her novels!!  I love that in the audiobook, we hear from real commentators as characters.  And Mary Carillo's character gives a great defense of Carrie's attitude at one point that I really appreciated.  We do get a love story woven in, but are not sure if Carrie will see what is in front of her.  I was very satisfied with the ending - nicely done.  

I think you can still enjoy this story even if you are not a tennis fan, but will admit this is not my favorite of Reid's work.  Nice full circle when you finally get the title, too.  ;-)

Let me know in the comments how you felt about Carrie, if you listened or read, and what your favorite Taylor Jenkins Read read is!!

Next week I will be celebrating a huge family event, so I definitely will not be sending out a review.  Maybe I will double up for y'all in two weeks!  Stay tuned.....

Firekeeper's Daughter by Angleine Boulley

 

Frist of all, I knew promising a weekly review would be risky.

I just didn't think I'd fail in the third week.  Sigh.  So, I am going back to promising random reviews, especially in light of some super fun and super time consuming family projects going on at the moment which will unfortunately negatively impact my reading and writing time.  Please bear with me!!

On to the Book of the Week!

Remember way back when when I was so anti Audiobooks?

Welcome to the first time I have thought, man, I should be listening to this one instead of reading the book.

Wow.

I will come back to that in a minute.  First of all I want to say that I am firmly in the camp that this is NOT a YA book.  I cannot believe it was categorized that way.  There are some really hard themes here, lots of loss of family and support and stability, and drug abuse and reservation politics and a violent sexual assault on a young woman that was almost skimmed over it was written so fast, but still was very disturbing to me.  Did it have impact on the story?  Well, yes, but still, that doesn't mean I had to like it.  I have two teenage/young adult daughters so that sort of thing is a trigger for me personally. 

Ok, moving on.  I wish I had listened to this one because of all the beautiful names and hard pronunciation problems I had with reading it.  My book club will review this book soon so maybe I will take that opportunity to listen to a book I have already read! I took a lot of notes on this book, trying to keep the family and the scandal Daunis was born into straight.  There are a lot of characters in this book!   Her two grandmothers - one white, one Native American Anishinaabe - push and pull her between two worlds and we see that relationship and identity strain from the very start of the novel.  We learn about the difference between a descendant and an enrolled member of their community, about how dreams are so important, about sacrifice and secrets and doing the right thing.  There is a murder, a witness, and some undercover cops, and Daunis is asked to go undercover too, to help them break up a meth ring, which could end up backfiring on her already fractured family.  There are overbearing parents and there is racism and prejudice against a biracial girl who has trouble finding her place.  We do get a nice full circle ending, but this is a hard read.  Fascinating in its description of life on an Ojibwe reservation, the injustice of tribal laws and/or the US Federal law's inability to prosecute crimes on reservation land, too.  There is just so much going on.

Welcome to Life.  

I gave this one five stars on Goodreads, so I don't mean for this expanded review to sound negative.  I would direct you to other reviews on Goodreads by Brandann Hill-Mann, luce and Jessica Woodbury and don't miss the comments under those reviews; there is a lot of good information and explanation from Hill-Mann, whose hometown is Sault Ste Marie, Michigan, where the book is set. 

UPDATE:

My book club met last night.  We all LOVED this book and two members said it was now one of their all time favorites.  We all heartily agreed that this was not really a Young Adult book, and had a great discussion about what a YA book really is. For us, it is not solely defined by having a teenage protagonist (see: Demon Copperhead.  I would not give that book to a 12 year old.  An 18 year old?  Maybe.  But I know 50 year old women who had a hard time with that brilliant, wonderful, heartbreaking book - and still my favorite of the year).  One definition I found for YA was: a book for ages 12-18.  Say, What???  In what (modern) world is a 13 year old considered an adult?? Just call it what it is - teen fiction - and keep the adult themes for adults at least 21.  I mean, yes, I understand that every kid has a different maturity level and that we should never ban books and parents should encourage all kinds of reading.  But can we at least keep them age appropriate?  Do we want 12 year old girls, or boys, reading about violent or even non violent rape, for a perpetrator who legally got away with it, and having them think that is ok?  Impressionable minds and all that.  Just my humble opinion.  What is yours??

The Word is Murder by Anthony Horowitz

 

Happy Wednesday!

Last week I promised myself I was finally going to get more organized and scheduled with my reviews and blogposts.  I was going to publish them once a week on Tuesdays!!

Yeah, well, again, happy Wednesday.  Sigh.

I will try to keep publishing on a more regular basis.  If you are receiving this review via email, thank you for subscribing, and please do visit my site to see other reviews from years past!  Click the Read More link at the bottom of the email to see all my reviews!

Now, on to this week's review:

I plucked this book out of the Goodwill pile my daughter made when she went off to college.  She graduates next month.  So yeah, it has been on my TBR for a few years now! 

The great/unique thing about this book is that the author is himself a character in the book.  He mentions real things that are happening or will happen in his actual life. This makes it a little bit difficult to figure out what is real and what is actual fiction; I may or may not have been googling his tv show work as I read!  

Otherwise, what we have here is a pretty traditional whodunnit. A woman with a famous actor for a son plans her own funeral on the same day she is murdered.  Coincidence?  They think not. Horowitz follows ex-Investigator Hawthorne around as the brilliant detective chases the clues in his nontraditional way and writes down everything Hawthorne does so that "they" can write a novel about the case.  Horowitz asks a few questions of his own, which earns him frowning disapproval from the crotchety Hawthorne.  Same result when Horowitz tries to learn a little bit about Hawthorne the man, who thinks that since that information is completely irrelevant to the murder, it is irrelevant to the book.  So we continue to plod along and follow Hawthorne, until Horowitz decides to branch out on his own with his own idea of whodunnit. 

Disaster.

There are definitely a lot of twists and turns and misdirections in the story.  It gets a bit convoluted but keeps you guessing, if you care.  I found that I didn't really care.  There was no energy to the story, no real connection to the victim(s), and it read a bit dry honestly.  I did like the originality of the author being part of the story; it was like a shock to the system to be reading along in first person and then BAM he mentions something out of real life.  So that was fun.  There are three more books in this series.  And maybe it isn't fair that I read this so close to another murder mystery series with original characters that I REALLY liked.  But for my reading life, I think I will stick with Richard Osman's The Thursday Murder Club series.  They are a lot more fun!!!

Remarkably Bright Creatures by Shelby Van Pelt

 

About this book, author Kevin Wilson said, "A beautiful examination of how loneliness can be transformed, cracked open, with the slightest touch from another living thing."

Shelby Van Pelt said, "This is a story about getting unstuck."

I had heard that the audio version of this book was amazing, mainly because one of the main characters has a British accent.

I was in.  (Have you met my husband???  ;-))

Performed by Marin Ireland and Michael Urie, this story is about an octopus living in (and out of) a tank at an aquarium, a lady who works at the aquarium, and how they form a friendship of sorts that ends up with each of them helping the other out with their loneliness.  Set in Washington State, we learn about Tova's life and heartbreaks and her friend group, the Knit Wits (haha! They are actually based on a group of friends the author's grandmother had!  I loved that!).  We also learn that Marcellus, the octopus, is VERY observant about the humans who observe him through the glass.  So, pay attention.

I don't really want to say much more about what happens here.  What I really want you to know is that this is an AMAZING debut novel.  Yep, this is Van Pelt's first novel!  Do WHAT?  I was amazed.  This is such good writing, and weaving of a story, and she keeps the direction she is going tightly bound.  She writes about living with grief and about life as an older person and what it is like to have your life go in a direction you were not planning on.  I can hardly wait to discuss this with my book club.  There is a LOT to talk about here with the structure and the storyline and just the fact that we get inside the head of a giant Pacific octopus.  And yes, I did google the videos of how octopuses can squeeze themselves through the smallest of spaces. Then I went to an author event with Shelby Van Pelt and learned even MORE about octopuses!  She is a very bright creature too, so bubbly and excited about her first novel, and very cagey about what she might write next. Marcellus started as a character for a creative writing class she took ten years ago.  I asked her if there would be another animal featured in her next book, and while she didn't think she would write a sequel to RBC, she did not deny the possibility of having another non-human character featured in the future.

Remarkably Bright Creatures with its fantabulous cover is ultimately a book that will leave you smiling and wishing you could read it again for the first time - and wanting to go to the aquarium.  

Fairy Tale by Stephen King

 

I am not a fan of horror.  How do I know? I read Pet Sematary back in high school and I am still scarred. (Shiver)

I am, however, a big fan of fantasy.  And great dogs. :-)

Stephen King is inarguably one of America's best and greatest writers.  I was so excited that he wrote a non-horror story during the pandemic.  Santa brought me this tome (598 pages) for Christmas and I saved it for my Spring Break Vacation.  I love having a special book for a special occasion!

This was a good read.  It was not a GREAT read, so I was a tiny bit disappointed.  Maybe my hopes and expectations were too high because of the author.  I absolutely loved his novel 11 22 63 (again, not horror, more time travel and butterfly effect, but with those details and word choices and sentences that are pure King).  So I just knew I would totally love this one too.  I felt like the premise for Fairy Tale was not really very original, even if the characters, their backstory and current predicaments definitely were.  Charlie is a teenager who lost his mom which drove his dad to drink, and yet Charlie plays the hero for his dad's health as well as that of the scary and mysterious neighbor Bowditch, whose own health crisis, alerted to Charlie by his trusty dog, Radar, is the catalyst for an adventure down a rabbit hole to another world.  A world in trouble and just waiting for a Savior.  The characters he meets and befriends (and...loves??) in this other world are quirky and tragic and hilarious and weird.  I expect that from King.  Gross Giants and rude leprechauns and an evil force and a sad princess?  Oh yeah, baby, now we are talking.  It felt a little like an expanded YA fantasy novel, which I don't mind, but have read before.  

Here's what I liked:  I liked Bowditch.  What a great name for the crazy man who lives in the creepy house with his Cujo dog (yes, King references Cujo.  HAHAHAHA!)   I bow to King for this; he can write and flesh out a character with words like no other.  Bowditch might have been my favorite character.  Such a curmudgeon, I could just SEE his facial expressions!

I liked all the literary references.  I won't list them here (ok, just one - LOVECRAFT.  #iykyk), they are fun to discover as you read.  But King definitely has a sense of humor, warped though it may be, and I loved it.

I loved that in this fantasy story of other worlds and impossible tortures, King also weaves in the devastation of loss, of alcoholism, and the difficulties during and support necessary for coming out of addiction.  I loved that the relationship between man and dog was so vital to this story.  It made these characters real.  Even if they are moving in and out of a magical land.

I loved that even at almost 600 pages, this story never felt too long.  I was invested.  It kept me interested even though you know it will have some sort of happy ending for our hero.  The ending was good and necessary, but wasn't necessarily done with a big red bow, if you know what I mean.  Satisfying.  Charlie is believable, he has faults, but such a big heart.  King asked himself "what could I write that would make me happy?"  And his answer was a devastated Kingdom with smashed statues and a palace with tall glass towers....and so it began. 

Please, Mr. King, please do give us another non-horror based book, if not next, then soon!