Halloween-y Reads!

Trick-or-Treat (almost)! It’s time for the treat of some new book reviews! 😉

–Marissa

The Spare Room by Andrea Bartz was an audiobook listen, and since I super enjoyed her previous novel We Were Never Here, I was ready for it! This time, our protagonist is Kelly, who escapes the pandemic lockdown (friendless, jobless, broke up with her fiance) to a tony neighborhood with old friend Sabrina and her husband Nathan. Things take a turn for the… sexy, and they form a throuple, but nothing remains simple or easy when its discovered that they last lover is missing… this was a sexy, atmospheric, fast and satisfying suspense novel!

Demon Copperhead by Barbara Kingsolver probably doesn’t even need an introduction except to say that it was this year’s Pulitzer Prize winner for fiction. An Appalachian retelling of David Copperfield, this was wrenching, hard, heart-breaking, funny at times and ultimately hopeful. At 560 pages, this is a doorstopper, and it took me AGES to read, but was a good one for our book discussion group!

Traitor’s Gate by Jeffrey Archer sounded like it could be a fun heist story (stealing the Crown Jewels! Scotland Yard!), but man, this dragged for me. Perhaps it’s that it’s part of a series (I had no idea) so I had no history with the characters, but I perpetually felt like I was playing catch up to what was happening, which wasn’t that compelling. Eh.

Only Love Can Hurt Like This by Paige Toon was a “listen at 2x speed” audiobook romance that I initially picked for its southern Indiana setting (and yeah, some places got the odd shoutout, but it felt weird), only to discover it was a sort of Colleen Hoover-esque DRAMA AND WEEPING AND WILL THEY BE TORN APART sort of sappy story. It was fine… at 2x speed.😉

The Christmas Guest by Peter Swanson was just the novella I needed to snap my “it’s taking me forever to read a book that normally would only take me a minute” streak. At just over 100 pages, this novella knits together an American student in England, a sweeping manor house, a murder, unreliable narrators and a killer who may strike again. I read it in one evening – it’s not great literature, but it was good fun.🙂

How to Stay Married by Harrison Scott Key was an audiobook, narrated by Key himself, which truly made this memoir amazing and heartbreaking and at times, damn funny. On a normal day, Key finds out that his wife and mother of his three daughters is having an affair with a neighbor. Listening to Key unpack this, his past, their marriage, their failures, and the will-they-or-won’t-they of it all was a roller coaster of the best kind. Key is wry and funny and raw and honest, and I was here for every word. I really loved this.

White House Wild Child: How Alice Roosevelt Broke All the Rules and Won the Heart of America by Shelley Fraser Mickle in a nonfiction book about the life of Alice Roosevelt, eldest child of Teddy Roosevelt. I liked learning more about Teddy, but found that for a work about Alice, she was missing in parts, almost a ghost, and her “wildness” doesn’t reach the pages until about 3/4 of the way through the book. Still, a glimpse into Teddy’s ascension and presidency, the Gilded Age, and of course, Alice.