The Four Winds is the second novel that I have read that is written by Kristin Hannah. It is a good novel, but I did not feel the same emotional connection to it as I did with The Nightingale (ie. I did not bawl my eyes out at the end).
Sisters in the Wind is Angeline Boulley’s third novel and has the same setting and some of the same characters as her first two novels, Firekeeper’s Daughterand Warrior Girl Unearthed. Although not as good as the other two novels, I initially found Sisters in the Wind to be an interesting story. But now that I have had some time to reflect on it, I have realized that I do not like this novel very much.
On the face of it, Holly Brickley’s Deep Cuts seems like it would be a very similar story to Marissa Stapley’s The Lightning Bottles as they are both novels about a pair of music lovers where the man finds greater success than his female counterpart, but these novels are actually quite different from each other. And while I think I they are both good novels, Deep Cuts is the one that I would most likely read again.
Emma Donoghue’s latest novel is about the Montparnasse train crash that occurred on October 22, 1895 in Paris. If you know nothing about this train crash, I recommend waiting until after you have read The Paris Express before Googling it, otherwise you will spoil some of the suspense of this novel.
The Book of Lost Hours is the imaginative debut novel of Hayley Gelfuso. I am quite impressed by this debut and will definitely be keeping an eye out for what Gelfuso writes next.
The Bewitching should have been my most anticipated book of the year, because I really enjoyed reading this novel, especially after feeling somewhat disappointed with Katabasis. The Bewitching is definitely my favourite of Silvia Moreno-Garcia’s novels that I have read so far.
Katabasis was my most anticipated book of the year; I have been really excited about reading this one. While I think it is a good novel, unfortunately, I do not like it as much as Babel. And I wanted so much to love Katabasis, but I really do not care much for the novel’s protagonist, which seems to be a thing I experience with dark academia novels.
A Most Puzzling Murder is a murder mystery novel with puzzles that the reader solves alongside the protagonist for clues to figure out whodunnit. Now, I love mystery novels and puzzles, so I was expecting to love this novel as well, but this novel is not it.
Nnedi Okorafor is a writer of sci-fi and fantasy novels for both adults and children. Death of the Author is the first novel of hers that I have read, and I would say it is more literary fiction than sci-fi even though it has much to say about technology and Artificial Intelligence. I wasn’t sure I was going to like Death of the Author because of the sci-fi elements to the story (sci-fi isn’t really my jam), but I ended up really enjoying this novel.
What drew me to Isola is its basis in historical record of a sixteenth-century French noblewoman who survived being marooned on an uninhabited island in the Gulf of Saint Lawrence for two years before she was rescued and returned to France. Like the author, I wondered how the heck this woman survived two Canadian winters mostly on her own in the sixteenth-century. Unfortunately, we will never know the true account of Marguerite de la Rocque de Roberval’s survival, but I found Goodman’s fictional account of Marguerite’s story compelling.