book.dreamblog’s Book Reviews!

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 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...

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...

  The Secret History by Donna Tartt *This review contains spoilers* Content Warning:  This review mentions incest.  Introduction  Before I bought this novel, I was given two very specific instructions from one of my literature professors in college.  Read The Secret History. Only read it during a snow storm.  So I waited until the first major snowstorm of the winter, and then I dove into this amazing book.  At first I didn’t understand why I was supposed to read this book in winter, because a large majority of the beginning takes place during summer. Once I got to Richard’s near freeze-to-death experience and Bunny’s murder, I completely understood.  And I fell in love with this book. The references to Greek mythology, the dark academia vibes, the reverse murder mystery, the small town college aesthetic, the way that Donna Tartt made me empathize with characters who are literal murderers? It’s all so well done.  Summary and Review At first, t...