End of January Book Reviews

I haven’t been reading as much this January, but here are the pages I’ve turned lately….

–Marissa

If I Disappear by Eliza Jane Brazier sounded like a spooky suspense novel…Sera is obssessed with a new true crime podcast, so when the host disappears, she follows the clues to the host’s hometown to see if she can solve the mystery… and then things get hella weird. I hung in there on this one, but found it just a bit to weird and wacky and oddly written for my taste. Cool cover, though!

Waiting for the Night Song by Julie Carrick Dalton has been advertised as the next Where the Crawdads Sing, and while the beautiful cover and an emphasis on nature are similar, I didn’t have NEARLY the same reading experience with this one (too much comparison and hype, methinks). Cadie receives an urgent message from her childhood best friend and returns home to the wilds of New Hampshire to help her. This weaves in themes of murder, immigration, lost love, off-the-page potential abuse, friendship and more. While I enjoyed it, I didn’t have the same emotional connection I did to Crawdads.

Greenlights by Matthew McConaughey is his memoir, and I bet the audiobook would be amazing! This combines stories from his life with things he learned long the way, diary entries, musings and more on his life (man, he’s fifty now!). What a great storyteller!

Siri, Who Am I? by Sam Tschida was a fun, frothy romp and I needed it! Millennial Mia wakes up in the hospital with amnesia, and using social media, figures out where she lives, the billionaire she’s shacked up with, and tries to piece together what her life was like before “the incident”. The twin mysteries of what happened to Mia and her unpacking her life from clues along the way was entertaining, though the ending got a bit absurd for me. Still fun though!

Beginners by Tom Vanderbilt is a memoir/non-fiction work chronicling Vanderbilt’s attempt to learn new things at a, ahem, slightly more advanced age. He takes on chess, singing and surfing and details his successes and failures along the way, along with nuggets about how and why we learn – and struggle to pick up new skills as we get older. A bit dry in parts, but interesting!