book.dreamblog’s Book Reviews!

Mexican Gothic by Silvia Moreno-Garcia: Book Review  *Warning: This review contains spoilers*  Introduction  This book is an ideal read for spooky season, and is a good modern take on the gothic genre. It’s also a good read if you’re looking for something spooky, but that also still feels like it has a deeper thematic concern.  Review Mexican Gothic starts out very strong. It has an interesting protagonist, really immaculate “haunted mansion” type vibes, and there’s a really strong anti-colonial theme to the plot. It fringes the borders of dark fantasy, horror, and science fiction all with a gothic undertone to give the novel crossover appeal to a lot of different readers’ tastes.  We follow Naomí as she travels to her cousin Catalina’s husband’s family home after learning that Catalina is (supposedly) gravely ill, however Catalina believes that her husband is trying to murder her.  Now, as the story goes on, the spooky vibes do start to grow a bit more… co...

It by Stephen King: Book Review  *Warning: this review contains spoilers* *Content warning: this review mentions abuse, racism, homophobia, sexual violence, antisemitism, suicide, sexism, and child abuse*  Introduction  Time for an unpopular opinion! I didn’t love this book.  I know it’s a cult classic, a pop culture phenomenon, and saying you didn’t like it is basically blasphemy because it’s Stephen King’s magnum opus. But there’s actually a lot of reasons that I think this book just doesn’t work for me.  Review  It’s not that there aren’t accomplishments on King’s part with this book. It is actually impressive that he manages to create an entire history for the town his book is set in, his own mini literary universe before literary universes were a thing, there are some genuinely spooky moments involving clown shenanigans. Some of the characters are compelling, particularly Beverly, even if I didn’t like the way all of her storyline was handled, and ther...

Songs in Ursa Major by Emma Brodie: Book Review  *Warning: This review contains spoilers* *Content Warning: This review mentions drug usage and addiction*  Introduction  Fans of Taylor Jenkins Reid’s Daisy Jones and the Six will either gladly eat this novel alive out of how similar it is to the former, or they will decry it as a rip-off. While the two are very similar in plots and themes, they’re written in drastically different styles. As far as their similarities, there’s only so much difference that can be made between two novels that are both loosely based on 70s musicians, with Daisy Jones and the Six being inspired by Fleetwood Max and Songs in Ursa Major being loosely based on Joni Mitchell’s career. It’s sex, drugs, & rock ‘n’ roll both ways, so obviously similarities are to be expected. So I don’t hold the similarities against Ursa Major too much, even if I personally preferred Daisy Jones.  Summary & Review  Songs in Ursa Major gets a lot right...

The Girls in the Stilt House  *Warning: This review contains spoilers*  Introduction  This is a solid historical fiction novel and a decent modern take on southern gothic. If you like historical fiction and a more literary style of writing, you’ll probably really enjoy this. If this isn’t your genre though, I don’t think the book really transcends any hard genre lines to compel you.  Review  Set in the 1920s in Mississippi, the novel focuses on two young women, Ada and Matilda. Ada is a white woman and Matilda is a Black woman, and being that the novel is set where and when it is set, obviously racism and the legacy of slavery and segregation plays a large thematic role in the story. The focus of The Girls in the Stilt House is largely the friendship and bond that forms between Ada and Matilda. However, one of the things that I really appreciated that Mustian did with this story is not ignoring the realities of the story’s setting, or pretending like Ada was som...

The Wife Upstairs by Rachel Hawkins: Book Review  *Warning: This review contains spoilers*  Introduction  When I first found out about this book, I really wanted to love it. I mean, a modern Jane Eyre retelling? It’s every literature nerd’s dream come true! My biggest problem with Jane Eyre, like most people, was that there wasn’t enough focus of that huge plot revelation that Rochester literally had his wife locked upstairs and faked her death.  I went into this book hoping that it would be more of a focus on that aspect of the story, which, to be fair, it was. But the execution just wasn’t what I wanted it to be. It was… a lot less feminist than I was hoping for.  Summary & Review  If you’re looking for a story that actually has a character worth rooting for, you won’t find it here! Unfortunately, The Wife Upstairs follows the recent tradition of mystery-thriller books not having any likable characters. I get that when writing a murder mystery, you’re...

The Rose Code by Kate Quinn Book Review *Warning: This review contains spoilers* *Content Warning: This review mentions war violence, sexual assault, and the death of a child.*  Introduction  It’s fairly rare when I find a new favorite book on audiobook. It’s no shade to audiobooks at all. Just generally I like to own physical copies of the books I’m most excited about, and I save digital titles (audio and ebooks) for titles I’m mildly intrigued by and not 100% sure I’ll love, which is why I don’t buy them. The Rose Code has definitely becomes an exception, as I really loved it.  Loosely inspired by true events and historical figures, though with some liberties on Kate Quinn’s parts to literature-ize the story, and set during WWII, focusing on female historical heroines, The Rose Code is in a similar vein to The Nightingale by Kristin Hannah. Actually, I dare say that I think this book might be better. Primarily because this book didn’t feature a cringy love story with a ...

The Paris Apartment by Lucy Foley: Book Review *Warning: This review contains spoilers* *Content Warning* This review contains mentions of sex trafficking.  Introduction Okay, so… I don’t actually like giving negative reviews of books. I don’t seek out to dislike books. I genuinely always go into a book with the hopes I’ll enjoy it. I would love to live in a world where the lowest rating I ever gave a book was a 3.5, where most books could be 4s and 5s and faves. Unfortunately, that’s not the case for The Paris Apartment by Lucy Foley. I was so intrigued to read this book because I studied French for five years and wanted to read a thriller with French undertones.  What I got instead was mostly just a disappointment.  Summary and Review First of all, I would like to say that the protagonist of this story, Jess, adds absolutely nothing to the story at all. She isn’t dynamic as a character at all, barely has her own arc, and adds relatively little to the actual plot. In fa...

Malibu Rising by Taylor Jenkins Reid: Book Review  *Warning: This review contains spoilers*  Introduction  This is the third book in TJR’s infamous “Mick Riva Universe,” and it’s the third TJR book I read after Daisy Jones and Evelyn Hugo in the incorrect order because I didn’t know they were part of a continued universe, it’s the installment set in the 80s (with Daisy being the 70s, Rvelyn set primarily in the 60s, and the fourth installment following this one covering the 90s), and it’s the only book in the four books set in this universe that doesn’t contain the first and last name of the female protagonist (I’m so sorry Nina Riva, you deserved the spotlight).  Look, are these books serious literature? No. But I enjoy them nonetheless, they’re fun and entertaining and sometimes emotional, and I like the way that Taylor Jenkins Reid managed to create a literary universe that is more satisfying when you realize the books all go together, but at the same time don’t r...

Local Woman Missing by Mary Kubica: Book Review  *Warning: This review contains spoilers. It also contains mentions of abuse and the abduction of a child.*  Summary & Review  This is mostly another mixed bag thriller for me, just like my last review of Lisa Jewell’s Then She Was Gone. In this novel, Local Woman Missing by Mary Kubica, there’s a good mix of things I liked, things I didn’t like, and things I had mixed feelings about.  Starting off with the positives, the thing I actually loved most about this book had nothing to do with the mystery! It’s the fact that the main character/main couple featured in the present day of the timeline is a lesbian couple. I have been saying for so long that I want more LGBTQ representation in books in general (like outside of books that are specifically branded as queer romances). Not because I dislike queer romance novels—obviously I love them—but because queerness exists outside of romance and relationships, and LGBTQ folk...

Then She Was Gone by Lisa Jewell (Book Review)  *Warning: This review contains spoilers* I was a bit skeptical going into this book because thrillers are pretty hit or miss for me. I generally prefer my stories to be character driven, and often I find thrillers to be more plot driven (understandably so, usually). In the case of Then She Was Gone, that’s wasn’t really an issue at all! My absolute favorite thing about this novel had nothing to do with the plot or figuring out who the killer was—it was Laurel as the protagonist. There are so many things to applaud about her as a main character. First of all, not many books feature older women as protagonists, so there aren’t a lot of well known stories out there about life for women past the age of twenty-five or thirty. Laurel is a middle-aged woman who has been married and divorced, has had children, and we spend a lot of the novel getting to watch her continue to live life—fall in love again, re-establish her sex life, redefine her...

This is How You Lose The Time War by Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone Summary and Review This is a difficult book for me to review because I absolutely chose a book that was not my usual taste when I selected this to listen to on audio. If you’ve noticed the general trend of books I listen to on audio getting general lower ratings than books I read as physical, it’s because of the correlation to how excited I am about the book. If I’m really excited about reading a book because I think I’m going to love it, then generally I want to buy a physical. And if I’m going to own a physical copy, then I’m going to read that copy, because there’s no point in owning a physical edition of a book if I’m not going to do anything with it. So, I usually pick titles that I’m only mildly intrigued by to listen to on audio—then that way if I don’t love it, I didn’t spend money to own a physical copy of a book I won’t read again.  That’s my philosophy anyway. Also, I listen to audiobooks when I’m work...

When Women Were Dragons by Kelly Barnhill  *Warning: This review contains spoilers*  Summary & Review  Ok, so I want to start by giving Kelly Barnhill major props for actually coming up with such a unique concept. I have literally never read anything like it before, so I was pretty blown away by that.  The prose is remarkably well written, and the narration of the audiobook I listened to was fantastic as well. As was the actual structure of the novel. I liked the brief “historical” interludes the separated sections of the story being told to give the reader historical and scientific commentary on “dragoning,” as if this truly were a biography (autobiography? Memoir? Case study?) written about the character of Alex to explain the story’s events. This is a kind of structuring that can’t necessarily always be pulled off well, especially in a fantasy novel. If done wrong, it can throw off the pacing of the entire book, but Barnhill handles it with finesse. I actually...