MAY I Recommend...?
Guys, I am terrible at these email titles. I'm so sorry
Happy Pride Month, all! I am going to celebrate by flying out to DC on Wednesday night for a good long weekend visiting friends. Does it have anything to do with pride? Not particularly. Am I going to enjoy myself immensely and be queer while having a nice time? Yes. So it’s celebrating Pride in my book.
Books I Read Last Month
To The Bridge: A True Story of Motherhood and Murder - Nancy Rommelmann
I’ve had this on my TBR for an age so I finally picked it up and read it the other day and ooof. A true (and local to me) story, a journalist follows the story of a young mother who dropped her two children off the Sellwood Bridge back in 2009, trying to figure out why. Slipping back and forth between the aftermath of the event and the turbulent marriage that led up to it, it’s just a sad story all around. No one comes out looking good and ultimately, you just feel so much for those poor kids. It was also much closer to home than I realized, not just happening in Portland (my hometown) but actually centered around the area of town I currently live in. Weird to hear where I work mentioned in the book! You very much have to be prepared to read a book like this but the story is told with empathy and compassion so if you feel like this would be of interest to you, it’s worth reading.
I’m not usually a big thriller fan but last fall, I was headed to Bristol for a long weekend and wanted to read a book set there. I grabbed this and then promptly forgot about it until now. Oops? Set on two adjoining streets in a neighborhood in Bristol, this centers around three families and how they will eventually intersect in a murder. You go in knowing someone has died but not who or how and then the countdown begins three months earlier as you slowly piece together how everything’s going to go down. This book reads incredibly fast, each chapter no more than three or four pages. It’s not going to blow anyone’s mind and I’ll probably forget it in a week or so but it was fun to read while I was reading it and honestly, that’s more than you can say about some books.
I was still in thriller mode after the last book so I picked this up off my TBR, a more literary crime thriller set in small town Ireland. Twenty years ago, a rookie guard reports to a domestic disturbance to find two kids, an older sister and younger brother in a moldering mansion, their mother dead upstairs. In the present, the once younger brother is now a young man found dead of a presumed suicide, the rookie guard is now an experienced detective transferred back to the smaller station for his partner’s job, and the long-lost sister has returned just in time for the funeral. Guys, this book is just sad. I enjoyed reading it, the writing is great, especially the opening and the bits from Aisling (the brother’s partner)’s point of view. It takes a strange twist midway through I don’t know if I particularly liked and overall, it’s just incredibly depressing. Big trigger warnings for child abuse in all forms and police corruption. I’ll read more from her but I need a happy break.
An Heiress’s Guide to Deception and Desire - Manda Collins
Ah, my favorite genre: historical woman falls in love while solving a mystery. This is the second in a series where I very much enjoyed the first book and then promptly forgot about them so now there are four. In this one, a lady (and newspaper columnist) is trying to solve the kidnapping of a friend of hers along with her ex-fiancé (but are the feelings really gone~??~). I remember really enjoying the first book so I was slightly let down by this one. The mystery and the romance didn’t really meld together very well and it felt like two different stories put together. But there’s a chance I was just not feeling Caro and Val so I’ll definitely be putting the next book on hold to check it out.
This Wretched Valley - Jenny Kiefer
I am always here to give a horror debut a chance and the pitch of phd students and climber investigate weird valley and go missing sounded right up my alley! It just didn’t click for me, though. I was halfway through it and paused to try and figure out why, despite me actively reading it, nothing was sticking and I think it’s because it was so action-based that it neglected character building. For a horror novel to work, you have to care about the characters that you’re putting in danger, worry for them because someone’s had a rough childhood or needs to get back to their dying mom or something else less cliche. But the four twenty somethings on this trip were barely even one dimensional: the climber, the phd student, the boyfriend, the extra one. I could not tell you one thing about any of them outside of actions they took. Which is disappointing because the idea behind this book and some of the images it conjures are great but it was just hard to want to read it. This is a debut so hopefully future books focus slightly more on characters to match atmosphere.
Murder in Masquerade - Mary Winters
First things first, please look at the proportions of that behatted man on the cover. I have been giggling about that for weeks.
Okay, this book! It’s the second in a series of which I very much enjoyed the first (which I talked about here) and when I realized the second had come out a month or so ago, I immediately sought it out. Unlike the earlier book this month, this was the perfect mix of romance and mystery, as Amelia helps Simon solve the murder of his sister’s ill-suited suitor. All the characters are well-rounded, lived in, and the mystery had a lot of fun twists and turns. Alas, I’m sure I’ll have to wait another year for book three but something to look forward to!
The Mysterious Case of the Alperton Angels - Janice Hallett
Between this book and the last, I read a book for review which I did not enjoy and am skipping but knew I needed something good to get back on board. I’d read Hallett’s The Appeal a few years ago and it blew my mind (talked about briefly in this newsletter) so when a friend reminded me she had a new book out, I knew that was what I needed to read next. AND IT WAS THE CORRECT CHOICE. The set up is that 18 years ago, there was a cult suicide with two teens and a baby at the center of it who then went missing into the care system. Now, the baby would be an adult and two true crime writers are trying to find them to interview them for a new book. Told through notes and emails and interview transcripts, the reader has to slowly piece together what actually happened that night and what’s going on in the lives of the two writers. I devoured this book in a day and a half. Hallett’s style of writing in breadcrumbs is such a treat and if you feel like you would like a book where you feel like you are solving the mystery, check out any of hers. They’re all great.
As I mentioned at the top of the newsletter, I’m off to DC in a few days and I’m very excited about it. I haven’t been in a few years and that had been just a quick 36 hour whirlwind to pick up Rosie from my friend who was fostering her. Before that, the last time I was there was in … 2009? It was my first time, I was visiting a friend who lived in Silver Springs, and we went to the Air and Space Museum, along with various monuments. I took a picture in front of a dinosaur skull that was my facebook profile picture for a good year and also learned how to crack an egg one-handed.
I have somehow managed to amass a good number of friends in the DC area and I’m very much looking forward to seeing all of them. I have made no plans beyond ‘see friends’ so if anyone has any suggestions of things I must see or do while I’m there, please pass them along! I’ve got time to fill and friends I can drag along.
I hope you all have a very pleasant June, stay chill, and read lots of good books! I’m already 100 pages into my next one and it is great so far. Looking forward to telling you all about it soon. See you on the other side of Pride!
