Oh my. There is a lot packed into this little book. I mean a lot. Two books, three books, worth of interactions and plots and conversations and reasons and fiction-thingies that make books books and not real life. We have a brother with anger issues. We have immigrant parents. We have random violence unrelated to the brother with anger issues. We have high school friends staying friends forever (which I guess happens. I still talk to, at best we’ll say 0.75 of a person of my high school friends, but I suppose there are other people who stay close to those they knew as teenagers. Me: I prefer to remove all reminders of adolescence, including, but not limited to, people, places, and things). We have weddings. We have break-ups. We have stalker-ish, suicidal sisters with power-of-attorney forms. We have a suitcase of a book with the zipper popping open and staying closed only with the help of a huge roll of duct tape.

Maybe all of everything in Be Ready for the Lightning happened somewhere to someone, because it has that feeling of truth being stranger/more fantastical than fiction. At a micro-level, each of the bits works, but Be Ready for the Lightning often feels like too much of a good thing. A black hole collapsing in on itself. I feel weighed down after reading.

Be Ready for the Lightning by Grace O’Connell went on sale June 6, 2017.

I received a copy free from Netgalley in exchange for an honest review.

A sweet, predictable, read about a grieving girl running a laundromat. There’s an evil fat (literally) cat property developer wanting to buy the laundromat and kick out the family. Will the girl with the help of her ghostly friends save everything in time?

Spoiler: I said it was predictable, so yes, obviously they will. Everything works out in the end. I wish the real world were as ultimately karmic as here. Really, that’s what makes me saddest about the story — just how in the real world, being sweet and kind may not mean you win at the end of the day.

In any case, my nine year old read Sheets about thirty times in a row. For about a month, it was always the last thing opened on my reading app because she would just read it from start to finish again and again and again. I hope she absorbed some of the message and turns out to be sweet and kind too.

Sheets by Brenna Thummler went on sale August 28, 2018.

I received a copy free from Netgalley in exchange for an honest review.

I read this on an airplane…

… which, I know, has seemingly nothing to do with the book in question, but it was a book I read, on an airplane, and being on an airplane (especially ones without any in-flight entertainment) are times where I feel sort of removed from reality, or in stasis. So I read Veil while in stasis and it feels that way when I think about it: I read about an experience removed from me (I am neither Muslim nor do I wear a head scarf) while I was removed from everything else.
It was like listening to a friend tell you about their experiences. It was soothing. It didn’t offer solutions or force opinions.

A friend. Talking to you on an airplane. Passing the time. How the veil may be liberating. How the veil may not be liberating. What it means to her.

Veil by Rafia Zakaria went on sale September 7, 2017.

I received a copy free from Netgalley in exchange for an honest review.

So it’s a collection of somewhat interwoven stories (MFA before MFA was even an MFA!) about the underside of Odessa, the petty crooks, the not-so-petty crooks, their hangers-on, their not-so-hangers-on. But reading it, I couldn’t help thinking I’d missed something, like I’d literally forgotten to read an introduction or something because while everything felt familiar, something was just a teensiest bit off. Maybe the translation didn’t work for me? Maybe I need more background in that specific time-and-place of Ukrainian/Russian history. It was good and I knew it was good, but I had to keep reminding myself as we went along.

I did appreciate the dark humour, even if I was missing something all the while.

Odessa Stories by Isaac Babel went on sale November 15, 2016.

I received a copy free from Netgalley in exchange for an honest review.

Geoff: Is that book any good?

Me: I’ll bet you a million dollars she has an MFA.

Geoff: How can you tell that?

Me (looks in the About the author section): Yep! MFA!

Geoff: That doesn’t answer my question.

Me: What question?

Geoff: Is it any good?

So is it? Parts sure — the chapter set in the city with the rebels was so tautly written and great to read. But that whole thing reads exactly like my idea of a stereotypical I have an MFA and this is my first novel novel (I have no idea if my opinion is justified, since, perhaps, I read tonnes of novels with those two qualifications and don’t even realize it). What do I mean?

1. Every chapter is about/from the perspective of a different character.
2. Chapters change the point of view constantly (i.e. some chapters are second person singular (you), some chapters are third person singular (she), etc.
3. While each chapter is interlinked, they all have a stand-alone feel to them.
4. Catharsis is somewhat muted.

And so, it ends up being more like a bunch of short stories about a fictionalized account of the filming of Cannibal Holocaust. I’m not saying that this is bad, but it isn’t the most wonderful book I’ve ever read either. I think it was marketed as horror. I’m jaded, so I wasn’t that horrified. But, maybe I was supposed to be horrified. I don’t know. I need a new POV chapter/character to tell me what I’m supposed to feel.

We At Our Own by Kea Wilson went on sale September 6, 2016.

I received a copy free from Netgalley in exchange for an honest review.

It’s a mystery novel with the word fish in the title that has Spoiler red herrings in it and you have no idea how happy that makes me as someone who likes puns. So I’m going to giggle off here in the corner for a few minutes before moving on with my review.

Okay. Giggling done.

So we have a pretty standard British murder mystery book, a re-release from the 1998. A doctor finds out he’s being tried for the murder of his wife, his children are missing, he claims he is innocent, and then the scrappy female police officer has to save the day! The book then veers off into a whole side investigation before a Spoiler twist ending. I’m not generally a fan of twist endings (too much building up an emotional rapport between readers and characters before the story is like Aha! I’m smarter than you!), but this one wasn’t so bad. Maybe it was because it wasn’t all about being cleverer than the reader, although I doubt one could have figured it out on one’s own. I’m rarely surprised by plots anymore, so maybe I’m softening towards twist endings. Who knows? The investigation was compelling too — not that it had much to do in style, tone, or content, but it reminded me of Donna Tartt’s The Little Friend, wherein you don’t really realize how far you’ve floated away from the story catalyst for quite some time (I guess until the twist). Bobbing along on a floaty in the ocean, only to look up and realize that the shore is no longer in sight (need some water analogies because of the fish title).

So decent potboiler mystery novel to read during a lazy summer.

Back to giggling about fish and red herrings (you don’t even want to know how much I laughed about the fish statue from the In Auction in The Ersatz Elevator).

Dead Fish by Ruth Carrington went on sale March 29, 2018.

I received a copy free from Netgalley in exchange for an honest review.