Password-protected posts contain heavy spoilers and are there to prevent accidental spoiling. They can each individually be accessed with the password "SPOILME(#of the post)". That means if the post is numbered #0000, the password is SPOILME0000 - SPOILME all in caps, no space in between.
Enter at your own risk. And have fun!
The Statistical Probability of Love at First Sight by Jennifer E. Smith
Who would have guessed that four minutes could change everything?
Today should be one of the worst days of seventeen-year-old Hadley Sullivan’s life. Having missed her flight, she’s stuck at JFK airport and late to her father’s second wedding, which is taking place in London and involves a soon-to-be stepmother Hadley’s never even met. Then she meets the perfect boy in the airport’s cramped waiting area. His name is Oliver, he’s British, and he’s sitting in her row.
A long night on the plane passes in the blink of an eye, and Hadley and Oliver lose track of each other in the airport chaos upon arrival. Can fate intervene to bring them together once more?
Quirks of timing play out in this romantic and cinematic novel about family connections, second chances, and first loves. Set over a twenty-four-hour-period, Hadley and Oliver’s story will make you believe that true love finds you when you’re least expecting it.
For the Reading Challenge(s): N/A
The Reason
I recently finished another one of the author’s books, Field Notes on Love, and loved it and I’m craving love stories so I decided to read another one.
The Quotes
“It’s not the changes that will break your heart; it’s that tug of familiarity.”
“Did you know that people who meet at least three different times within twenty-four hour period are ninety-eight percent more likely to meet again?”
“It’s one thing to run away when someone’s chasing you. It’s entirely another to be running all alone.”
“I like how you’re neither here nor there. And how there’s nowhere else you’re meant to be while waiting. You’re just sort of suspended.”
The Narrator(s)
Casey Holloway. It was great, no notes!
My Thoughts
I have read this before and as per usual, have completely forgotten everything about it. I did rate it 5 stars on Goodreads though, so I knew I was going to love it again, and I did! It does hit differently now than when I read it more than ten years ago; I was younger back then and remember the nostalgia and the romance of young love more clearly. Now that I’m older and more practical about love, I feel so much concern in the back of my mind for the two MCs falling in love after only a couple of days and during significant moments in their lives! I’m also judging Hadley’s father hard!
However, putting my practical real life tendencies aside and only focusing on the MCs’ stories, it was easy to get immersed in their world and their lives, and feel the romance of their meet-cute. I particularly loved how witty Oliver was, with his banter, and the way he made Hadley feel comfortable with him. It’s such a sweet, wonderful love story, and I still love it reading it now.
My Rating
⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐/5 stars.
Have you read this book? Would you read this book? Did you like the book or do you think you would like it?
Stephen King’s ultimate, evil vehicle of terror, Christine: the frightening story of a nerdy teenager who falls in love with his vintage Plymouth Fury. It was love at first sight, but this car is no lady.
Evil is alive in Libertyville. It inhabits a custom-painted red and white 1958 Plymouth Fury named Christine and young Arnold Cunningham, who buys it.
Along with Arnold’s girlfriend, Leigh Cabot, Dennis Guilder attempts to find out the real truth behind Christine and finds more than he bargained from murder to suicide, there’s a peculiar feeling that surrounds Christine—she gets revenge on anyone standing in her path.
Can Dennis save Arnold from the wrath of Christine? This #1 national bestseller is “Vintage Stephen King…breathtaking…awesome. Carries such momentum the reader must force himself to slow down”
“Has it ever occurred to you,” he said abruptly, “that parents are nothing but overgrown kids until their children drag them into adulthood? Usually kicking and screaming?”
“If being a kid is about learning how to live, then being a grown-up is about learning how to die.”
“I once heard about some millionaire who had a stolen Rembrandt in his basement where no one but him could see it. I could understand that guy. I don’t mean that Arnie was a Rembrandt, or even a world-class wit, but I could understand the attraction of knowing about something good … something that was good but still a secret.”
“I don’t believe in curses, you know. Nor in ghosts or anything precisely supernatural. But I do believe that emotions and events have a certain…lingering resonance.”
The Narrator(s)
Holter Graham. I loved it!
My Thoughts
I watched the movie for the first time earlier this year and I thought I really should read the book too, because it’s the one Stephen King book that my husband read that I hadn’t yet, and he’d been singing its praises. I’m glad I finally did because I really liked the story and yes, it’s definitely much better than the movie! There was a lot of nuance with the characters and their relationships, and their backstories too, that I wasn’t expecting and didn’t get with the movie. The relationships between Arnie’s parents and himself was especially interesting, and I love how King really gets in there with the complexity of parent-child relationships.
I had put off reading this book because I wasn’t particularly interested in cars and there were so many other King books I wanted to read first, but now that I’ve read it I feel like a fool for putting it off so long. I think this may be one of my top Stephen King books now!
My Rating
⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐/5 stars.
Have you read this book? Would you read this book? Did you like the book or do you think you would like it?
When Jonathan Harker visits Transylvania to help Count Dracula with the purchase of a London house, he makes a series of horrific discoveries about his client. Soon afterwards, various bizarre incidents unfold in England: an apparently unmanned ship is wrecked off the coast of Whitby; a young woman discovers strange puncture marks on her neck; and the inmate of a lunatic asylum raves about the ‘Master’ and his imminent arrival.
In Dracula, Bram Stoker created one of the great masterpieces of the horror genre, brilliantly evoking a nightmare world of vampires and vampire hunters and also illuminating the dark corners of Victorian sexuality and desire.
It’s one of my online book club’s buddy reads for Halloween season.
The Quotes
“Remember my friend, that knowledge is stronger than memory, and we should not trust the weaker.”
“The last I saw of Count Dracula was his kissing his hand to me, with a red light of triumph in his eyes, and with a smile that Judas in hell might be proud of.”
“Doctor, you don’t know what it is to doubt everything, even yourself. No, you don’t; you couldn’t with eyebrows like yours.”
“Ah, it is the fault of our science that it wants to explain all; and if it explain not, then it says there is nothing to explain.”
The Narrator(s)
Tavia Gilbert and J.P. Guimont. I loved this narration, it was so immersive.
My Thoughts
Wow, this is one hell of a journey! I’m surprised by how much I enjoyed the book considering it’s been adapted to death in pop culture media. A lot of the story is familiar to me, of course, but reading it for the first time, I’m enjoying so much of the nuances of the individual characters and their actual interactions with each other.
Van Helsing’s reasonings and the way he speaks to and cares for the other characters really jumps off the page to me, and I can’t help but love him. Mina is also such a wonderful character, so vibrant and smart and compassionate, caring about everyone else even when she’s the one in danger. I love that the book is in epistolary form, and that it plays a part in how they document events and discover connections.
The book did go on longer than I expected, but I found it interesting how much that added to the tension; the waiting, anticipating resolutions – was Lucy going to get better? was Mina going to die? will they find where Dracula is? will they triumph over evil? I’m really surprised how much I loved reading the book! I’m pretty sure I’ll reread it again soon!
My Rating
⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐/5 stars.
Have you read this book? Would you read this book? Did you like the book or do you think you would like it?
When Jenny Lawson was little, all she ever wanted was to fit in. That dream was cut short by her fantastically unbalanced father and a morbidly eccentric childhood. It did, however, open up an opportunity for Lawson to find the humor in the strange shame-spiral that is her life, and we are all the better for it.
In the irreverent Let’s Pretend This Never Happened, Lawson’s long-suffering husband and sweet daughter help her uncover the surprising discovery that the most terribly human moments—the ones we want to pretend never happened—are the very same moments that make us the people we are today. For every intellectual misfit who thought they were the only ones to think the things that Lawson dares to say out loud, this is a poignant and hysterical look at the dark, disturbing, yet wonderful moments of our lives.
For the Reading Challenge(s): N/A
The Reason
It was my in-person bookclub’s Book of the Month, and I’d been wanting to read Jenny Lawson for a while.
The Quotes
“Because you are defined not by life’s imperfect moments, but by your reaction to them. And because there is joy in embracing – rather than running from – the utter absurdity of life.”
“But really, what else are you going to talk about in line at the liquor store? Childhood trauma seems like the natural choice, since it’s the reason why most of us are in line there to begin with.”
“When I was in junior high I read a lot of Danielle Steele. So I always assumed that the day I got engaged I’d be naked, covered in rose petals, and sleeping with the brother of the man who’d kidnapped me.”
The Narrator(s)
Jenny Lawson, the author herself. I absolutely loved it, she was hilarious!
My Thoughts
I listened to this on audio with the author narrating, and I think that adds tremendously to my enjoyment of the book. She’s hilarious and I love how she finds humor in everything, but she also talks about some serious issues in such a nonchalant way, making light of them, sometimes to the point where I’m wondering, “Are you okay, Jenny?” I actually had her other book “Furiously Happy” on my TBR for a while, but I ended up reading this one first because it was my in-person bookclub’s BOTM. I’m glad I did because apparently this book was her first published one. Taking a look at the other books she’s released, it looks like humor about horrible things is her niche, and yes, I absolutely want to read them all! I’m also going to try to read them all on audio because I think it’s better with her narration. The copy I listened to had a bonus chapter and some really funny outtakes of her recording process which are probably not in the printed copies!
My Rating
⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐/5 stars.
Have you read this book? Would you read this book? Did you like the book or do you think you would like it?
NO MORE THAN A DARK PENCIL LINE ON A BLANK PAGE. A HORIZON LINE, MAYBE, BUT ALSO A SLOT FOR BLACKNESS TO POUR THROUGH . . .
A terrible construction site accident takes Edgar Freemantle’s right arm and scrambles his memory and his mind, leaving him with little but rage as he begins the ordeal of rehabilitation. A marriage that produced two lovely daughters suddenly ends, and Edgar begins to wish he hadn’t survived the injuries that could have killed him. He wants out. His psychologist, Dr. Kamen, suggests a “geographic cure,” a new life distant from the Twin Cities and the building business Edgar grew from scratch. And Kamen suggests something else.
“Edgar does anything make you happy?”
“I used to sketch.”
“Take it up again. You need hedges . . .
hedges against the night.”
Edgar leaves Minnesota for a rented house on Duma Key, a stunningly beautiful, eerily undeveloped splinter of the Florida coast. The sun setting into the Gulf of Mexico and the tidal rattling of shells on the beach call out to him, and Edgar draws. A visit from Ilse, the daughter he dotes on, starts his movement out of solitude. He meets a kindred spirit in Wireman, a man reluctant to reveal his own wounds, and then Elizabeth Eastlake, a sick old woman whose roots are tangled deep in Duma Key. Now Edgar paints, sometimes feverishly, his exploding talent both a wonder and a weapon. Many of his paintings have a power that cannot be controlled. When Elizabeth’s past unfolds and the ghosts of her childhood begin to appear, the damage of which they are capable is truly devastating.
The tenacity of love, the perils of creativity, the mysteries of memory and the nature of the supernatural–Stephen King gives us a novel as fascinating as it is gripping and terrifying.
“If I kept saying it; if I kept reaching out. My accident really taught me just one thing: the only way to go on is to go on. To say ‘I can do this’ even when you know you can’t.”
“A person’s memory is everything, really. Memory is identity. It’s you.”
“The only religions I don’t like are the ones that insist their God is bigger than your God.”
“Stay hungry. It worked for Michelangelo, it worked for Picasso, and it works for a hundred thousand artists who do it not for love (although that might play a part) but in order to put food on the table. If you want to translate the world, you need to use your appetites. Does this surprise you? It shouldn’t. There’s no creation without talent, I give you that, but talent is cheap. Talent goes begging. Hunger is the piston of art.”
The Narrator(s)
John Slattery. I was completely immersed and I enjoyed it very much!
My Thoughts
This is also a reread. I don’t remember anything about it except that I loved it, because although I rated it 5 stars when I first read it, I didn’t leave a review. Having read it again this time, I can totally see why I loved it the first time, and why I’m quite sure I’ll still love it when I read it again in the future.
It is such an all encompassing book for me; it evokes so many emotions, makes me feel so much, all the ups and downs. It grabbed my attention from the beginning, even though it started slow and almost felt like an easy vacation read, and then it got really intense and I couldn’t put it down. I fell in love with all the characters, but that’s no surprise because King’s characters are always so well-written.
I loved Edgar’s and Wireman’s bromance, the way they trusted each other and related to each other even from the beginning. I love the way we see Edgar’s progress from the start of the story; his struggles, his recovery, his thought processes… I love how I fell for Ilse and other people in Edgar’s life, simply through the way Edgar thinks about them. How can I not love King’s books when he gives me everything? The story is always exciting, the characters are always interesting, and all the different types of emotions are always spilling out of me! Ugh, so good!
My Rating
⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐/5 stars.
Have you read this book? Would you read this book? Did you like the book or do you think you would like it?
Carrie may be picked on by her classmates but she has a gift. She can move things with her mind. Doors lock. Candles fall. This is her power and her problem.
To be invited to Prom Night by Tommy Ross is a dream come true for Carrie — the first step towards social acceptance by her high school colleagues. Until an unexpected cruelty turns her gift into a weapon of terror and destruction that no one will ever forget.
“People don’t get better, they just get smarter. When you get smarter you don’t stop pulling the wings off flies, you just think of better reasons for doing it.”
“High school isn’t a very important place. When you’re going you think it’s a big deal, but when it’s over nobody really thinks it was great unless they’re beered up.”
“Nobody was really surprised when it happened, not really, not on the subconscious level where savage things grow.”
“This is the girl they keep calling a monster. I want you to keep that firmly in mind. The girl who could be satisfied with a hamburger and a dime root beer after her only school dance so her momma wouldn’t be worried . . .”
The Narrator(s)
Sissy Spacek, and Margaret Atwood. I can’t think of better narrators for this book. Love them!
My Thoughts
This is a reread, and although it isn’t one of my favorite Stephen King books, I find that I like it more this time around and appreciate it for the story it is. Carrie is such a fascinating character; she’s not really the bad guy here and yet, she caused hundreds of deaths and a whole town’s destruction. Stephen King has always been the master of writing about regular people who are monsters, and it’s interesting when you realize he’s been doing this since the beginning.
Carrie isn’t the monster here, she’s just a scared little girl pushed to the brink of what she could handle emotionally. Her mother, her school bullies, they are the true monsters. I also read this right after reading Frankenstein and I thought it was interesting with the whole “who’s the real monster” theme. There are some real parallels here that I’m not sure I would’ve realized if I hadn’t read them back to back, especially with some of what I said in my Frankenstein review about bad parenting. I also mentioned about how it was great that Frankenstein was focused more on the father as the parent, while here, we see the mother being the focus of bad parenting.
Maybe I liked this book more this time around precisely because I read Frankenstein right before, but honestly, I find myself noticing a lot more this time too about the rest of the characters in the story, the way they behave, their thoughts processes, and I’m amazed once again by Stephen King’s character study. This is why I love his books.
My Rating
⭐⭐⭐⭐/5 stars.
Have you read this book? Would you read this book? Did you like the book or do you think you would like it?
A man. His ex-girlfriend’s cat. A sadistic game show unlike anything in the universe: a dungeon crawl where survival depends on killing your prey in the most entertaining way possible.
In a flash, every human-erected construction on Earth—from Buckingham Palace to the tiniest of sheds—collapses in a heap, sinking into the ground.
The buildings and all the people inside have all been atomized and transformed into the dungeon: an 18-level labyrinth filled with traps, monsters, and loot. A dungeon so enormous, it circles the entire globe.
Only a few dare venture inside. But once you’re in, you can’t get out. And what’s worse, each level has a time limit. You have but days to find a staircase to the next level down, or it’s game over. In this game, it’s not about your strength or your dexterity. It’s about your followers, your views. Your clout. It’s about building an audience and killing those goblins with style.
You can’t just survive here. You gotta survive big.
You gotta fight with vigor, with excitement. You gotta make them stand up and cheer. And if you do have that “it” factor, you may just find yourself with a following. That’s the only way to truly survive in this game—with the help of the loot boxes dropped upon you by the generous benefactors watching from across the galaxy.
They call it Dungeon Crawler World. But for Carl, it’s anything but a game.
The Reason
There was so much hype I couldn’t ignore it!
The Quotes
“Cats are assholes. I get it. But do you know why people like cats, despite their asshole-ness? It’s because they don’t fucking talk.”
“If we get to the point where we don’t help each other anymore, that’s when we stop being human.”
“New achievement! You’ve killed an armed mob with your bare fucking hands! Holy crap, dude. That’s kinda fucked up. Reward: You’ve received a Bronze Weapon Box!”
“You’re not going to break me,” I said. “You might hurt me, or kill me, but you’re not going to break me.”
The Narrator(s)
Jeff Hays. For all the books in the series. I have insufficient words to describe how incredible his narration is. I am spoiled by his narration!
My Thoughts
I decided to do one post for the whole series because I’m so far behind with my reviews and I’m too lazy to do one for each book, so I’ll just put them altogether here in this post.
Book 1 – Dungeon Crawler Carl This is a reread; I first read this (and the second book in the series) in November last year and loved it, but I wasn’t able to finish the series at the time so now I have to reread to refresh my memory. I had a lot of other books on my TBR and wasn’t initially planning to pick this series back up now, but life has been kicking my ass and I felt like I needed a story that was fun and easy to read but also thrilling and exciting at the same time to keep my interest throughout everything else happening in my life.
This book is such perfect balance of being light-hearted while still dealing with some heavy issues. I love Carl and Donut as a team; they have the cutest relationship and the best chemistry as a duo. It makes me wonder about the kind of relationship I would have with my cats if they turned sentient! Now that I’m back in the DCC world, I intend to complete the series this time and I’m so ready to start the next books!
Book 2 – Carl’s Doomsday Scenario Continuing the saga of Carl and Donut but now we also have Mongo! I love that they picked their Classes in this book that allow them to get all the perks and upgrades. The side quests are interesting as hell, I am also waiting to see where this goes when they reach the lower levels! I loved the ending of the book and I loved the epilogue even more! It was hilarious! It was incredible! It was amazing! It was (insert all your favorite adjectives here)! I’m sure I’ll be back with another glowing review after I finish the next book!
Book 3 – The Dungeon Anarchist’s Cookbook This is the third book in the series and I think it might be my favorite one so far! One of the reasons the first book pulled me in is because of the humor and how easy it is to read, but it should be acknowledged that there are some very disturbing themes in the book and a lot of emotional trauma as well. This book delves deeper into some difficult topics that are handled so beautifully and serves to show us the growth and development of the characters. I love them more now than ever. I love that although there is more focus on character development, there is no detraction from the excitement of the Dungeon Crawl and the missions, quests, and scrapes that Carl, Donut, and their friends get into.
Book 4 – The Gate of the Feral Gods Fourth book in and I am still caught off-guard by how this story manages to surprise me! I love that we are getting to know more of the other characters better now. As we get deeper into the levels and more Crawlers die, we naturally get fewer characters left, of course, and we see some of them over the course of the books as well. It’s weird how Carl creates community and found family without getting too sappy about it, but in a way that makes my heart swell even more. They show love and care through actions rather than cheesy words (although there’s nothing wrong with that!).
There are several characters whose motives I’m still unsure about though, and I guess we’ll find out as we go. I also love how much more openly defiant Carl has gotten, and how he uses his ratings and popularity as leverage. I can’t help it, guys. I wanted to take a break to read other books, but I already started the next book!
Book 5 – The Butcher’s Masquerade Fifth book in and still going strong! Book 5 gets better and also more traumatic at the same time. I laughed out loud so many times while reading, and probably teared up an equal amount of times. The relationships are the best thing about this book, but there’s also the plot and the humor, and oh, everything! The fact of the premise really allows Dinniman to go crazy with the cast and plot but it also highlights just how f’d up the events in the books are if they happened in real life. There are things set up in previous books that come to fruition in this book, but there are also a lot more that have not come to pass, and I’m sort of scared of what’s going to happen because the story does not go easy!
Book 6 – The Eye of the Bedlam Bride Book 6 and it’s still so good and hilarious, and completely outlandish in a good way! Where do I begin? The fact that we are now on Book 6 and there’s still so much I can say about it because it never gets boring, there’s always something new, and I only fall more and more in love with the characters.
The fact that this freaking book can make me laugh out loud in one paragraph only to make me cry like a baby in the next, to the point that my husband sitting beside me stared at me worriedly and wondered if I was having a neurological event. The fact that the traumatic events that happen in this book is handled so sensitively and seriously, and at the same time so irreverently and humorously, and still makes me relate to the human condition and everything it means to be human for these characters.
I am excitedly anticipating reading Book 7, but also dreading it because once I finish it, I’ll have to wait a while for the next books and I know I’ll miss Carl and Donut. I’m going to read some other books before starting Book 7, but I’m pretty sure I can’t put it off too long!
Book 7 – This Inevitable Ruin This is Book 7 in the DCC series, and the last one to date until the next one, which is expected to be released in May 2026. I don’t know how I can wait that long without going crazy. I don’t often do well with long-running series because I forget details, or get bored with the same story and characters, especially if the author tends to be formulaic. But every single book in this series has only gotten better and better, and just when you think it can’t get better, it gets better!
This book plays with my emotions; making me cry, making me laugh, making me feel awed at the plots, missions, side quests, power plays… making me disgusted because some really disgusting things happen, making me scared and on edge with suspense, making me feel so much! I thought I was already so deeply in love with these characters, but I find myself falling more and more in love with them with every book.
I cannot praise this series enough, but I also feel like I should maybe tone it down because it might raise expectations sky high and I don’t want anyone to be disappointed. It is that good though, for me at least, and now that I’ve finished the latest book and have to wait for the next one, I have no idea what to do with myself!
My Rating
⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐/5 stars. I love the whole series and each book only gets better and better!
Have you read this series? Would you read this series? Did you like it or do you think you would like it?
Brother Diaz has been summoned to the Sacred City, where he is certain a commendation and grand holy assignment awaits him. But his new flock is made up of unrepentant murderers, practitioners of ghastly magic, and outright monsters, and the mission he is tasked with will require bloody measures from them all in order to achieve its righteous ends.
Elves lurk at our borders and hunger for our flesh, while greedy princes care for nothing but their own ambitions and comfort. With a hellish journey before him, it’s a good thing Brother Diaz has the devils on his side.
For the Reading Challenge(s): N/A
The Reason
A bookclub friend recommended it and I had enjoyed the author’s The First Law trilogy.
The Quotes
“Happy endings are just stories that aren’t finished yet.”
“You need to stop clinging to the notion that there is only one right path. You’ll waste half your time panicking you’re not on it, and the rest backtracking to find it.”
“Show me a man who regrets nothing and I’ll show you a man who’s achieved nothing.”
The Narrator(s)
Steven Pacey. I loved him when listening to The First Law books and I love him for this one too!
My Thoughts
Abercrombie’s books usually start out really well for me. I read The First Law trilogy and really enjoyed his writing style and humor. This book is no different. I especially love how interesting and imperfect his characters are. They are all broken in their own ways, but I always feel like there’s hope for them and I want to see it play out in the story. Unfortunately, I feel like this book didn’t hit the mark for me. All the feels I initially felt, with a band of people forced together for some sort of mission, the way they worked together, getting to know each other, their chemistry…
I wanted some sort of resolution for them as a group, but after everything they went through together, the ending was so disappointing. To be fair, this is supposed to be the first book in a series so there’s the possibility that things might get better for them in subsequent books. However, I remembered how disappointed I was with the The First Law trilogy after having such high hopes for the story, and I feel like it’s not worth it to go through this whole journey if this is going to be more of the same.
As a reader, the journey is often more important than the destination for me, but somehow in this case, a lot of the journey felt meaningless when we got to the end of the book. Perhaps it’s unfair to compare the two different stories, but this first book by itself reminded me of how I felt reading the whole The First Law trilogy, and I just feel like the journey isn’t worth the destination.
My Rating
⭐⭐⭐/5 stars.
Have you read this book? Would you read this book? Did you like the book or do you think you would like it?
The year is 1348. Thomas, a disgraced knight, has found a young girl alone in a dead Norman village. An orphan of the Black Death, and an almost unnerving picture of innocence, she tells Thomas that plague is only part of a larger cataclysm—that the fallen angels under Lucifer are rising in a second war on heaven, and that the world of men has fallen behind the lines of conflict.
Is it delirium or is it faith? She believes she has seen the angels of God. She believes the righteous dead speak to her in dreams. And now she has convinced the faithless Thomas to shepherd her across a depraved landscape to Avignon. There, she tells Thomas, she will fulfill her mission to confront the evil that has devastated the earth, and to restore to this betrayed, murderous knight the nobility and hope of salvation he long abandoned.
As hell unleashes its wrath, and as the true nature of the girl is revealed, Thomas will find himself on a macabre battleground of angels and demons, saints, and the risen dead, and in the midst of a desperate struggle for nothing less than the soul of man.
For the Reading Challenge(s): N/A
The Reason
It was the BOTM for my in-person bookclub.
The Quotes
“Well, I do what I say. Which is why I don’t say much.”
“Love is always harder. Love means weathering blows for another’s sake and not counting them.”
“Hell, like prison, is worse when you don’t feel you earned it.”
“The injuries of spring are forgotten in the summer, but remembered in the winter.”
The Narrator(s)
Steve West. He was mostly fine, but I really didn’t like his voice for the girl!
My Thoughts
I’m writing this review a long time after reading the book, and for some reason I can’t find my notes so I’m going off a very spotty memory. I remember this being a dark story about a showdown between good and evil, and I remember enjoying most of it. The only issue is that I was rushing to finish it for my bookclub, and there were several parts of the story that included dreams and hallucinations and it was sometimes confusing for me when I didn’t realize what was happening.
In general, I liked the characters, especially the priest. I found the girl annoying (I’m sorry I forgot the names and I don’t have my notes!) but I’m not sure if that’s because I really dislike her character or because I dislike the narrator’s voice for her. I honestly feel that I would’ve probably enjoyed this book a lot more if I was reading it on print and not rushing it like I did. Perhaps one day I’ll revisit the story again.
My Rating
⭐⭐⭐/5 stars.
Have you read this book? Would you read this book? Did you like the book or do you think you would like it?
A dark retelling of the Brothers Grimm’s Goose Girl, rife with secrets, murder, and forbidden magic
Cordelia knows her mother is unusual. Their house doesn’t have any doors between rooms, and her mother doesn’t allow Cordelia to have a single friend—unless you count Falada, her mother’s beautiful white horse. The only time Cordelia feels truly free is on her daily rides with him. But more than simple eccentricity sets her mother apart. Other mothers don’t force their daughters to be silent and motionless for hours, sometimes days, on end. Other mothers aren’t sorcerers.
After a suspicious death in their small town, Cordelia’s mother insists they leave in the middle of the night, riding away on Falada’s sturdy back, leaving behind all Cordelia has ever known. They arrive at the remote country manor of a wealthy older man, the Squire, and his unwed sister, Hester. Cordelia’s mother intends to lure the Squire into marriage, and Cordelia knows this can only be bad news for the bumbling gentleman and his kind, intelligent sister.
Hester sees the way Cordelia shrinks away from her mother, how the young girl sits eerily still at dinner every night. Hester knows that to save her brother from bewitchment and to rescue the terrified Cordelia, she will have to face down a wicked witch of the worst kind.
I love fairy tale retellings and I’ve loved many of the author’s books!
The Quotes
“The problem with being rich is that you simply have no idea how expensive it is to be poor.”
“Hester was no hero, but there was nothing in her that would allow her to turn away from a person who had been dropped on her doorstep. Even if that person had brought Doom along with her.”
“I had a terrible feeling when I saw her. You know how people talk about love at first sight? This was like… fear at first sight.”
The Narrator(s)
Eliza Foss and Jennifer Pickens. They were great, I enjoyed the narration immensely!
My Thoughts
I’ve loved several of Kingfisher’s books and I love fairytale retellings in general. I wasn’t familiar with the original story this retelling was based on (Goose Girl) but the description of the book caught my interest. I believe the book first came to my attention back in May during Mother’s Day season, and there were a few books that featured mothers. The mother in question in this book is not a good person; she is an evil sorceress and the MC, her daughter Cordelia, is helpless against her.
I read this in between Dungeon Crawler Carl books, and since I was coming out of my DCC stupor, I expected to take some time to get into this book, but the moment I started reading it, I was completely sucked in and I couldn’t put it down. I was surprised by how hard this book hits and how intense everything was. I loved the characters, and I love how each of them stood out to me in their own ways; Hester, Penelope, Alice, Imogen. A book that vilifies the MC’s mother, but showcases the strength, resilience, and nurturing qualities of the many other female characters. There is so much I love about this book and it reinforces why Kingfisher is one of my favorite authors!
My Rating
⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐/5 stars.
Have you read this book? Would you read this book? Did you like the book or do you think you would like it?
