I am very late to the Where the Crawdads Sing party, but better late than never, right? After reading this novel, I can see why it was such a hit when it first came out. I really enjoyed reading it and had a hard time putting it down; I finished reading it in two days. I very highly recommend you read this novel if you are like me and are also late to the Where the Crawdads Sing party.
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Hench is an entertaining novel set in an alternate reality where some people are born with “superabilities” and they grow up to become either superheroes or villains. But Hench questions whether there is really a difference between superheroes and villains. Are superheroes really any better than villains, or are they just as bad, or worse, for society as villains?
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My Dark Vanessa was published to much fanfare in March 2020. At the time, I was indecisive about whether I wanted to buy a book that I felt for sure, based on the subject matter, I was not going to like. In the end I decided not to read it. About a year later, My Dark Vanessa went on sale on Kindle books and once again I found myself dithering over whether I wanted to buy it. In the end curiosity won out and I decided to read it. It turns out that I was right, I did not enjoy reading My Dark Vanessa. I do not know how anyone can enjoy reading a novel about a 15-year-old girl being sexually groomed by her 42-year-old English teacher. However, that does not mean I think you should not read this novel.
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I am beginning to feel confident that Kate Quinn is a writer that I can rely on to churn out a great historical fiction novel. The Alice Network, The Huntress and now The Rose Code are all novels that I very much enjoyed reading. These three novels all have World War II as the backdrop, but each focuses on a different aspect of the war, and each one is well researched and intricately plotted. The Rose Code is about the people who worked at Bletchley Park during the war and helped win the war by cracking enemy military code and deciphering enemy communications.
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Novels with dual timelines where the protagonist in the present timeline is trying to solve a mystery from the past timeline are like catnip to me. When I read the synopsis for The Lost Apothecary, I thought, yes, this is going to be good. And the reviews that I read for it were all very positive. But unfortunately, I ended up being disappointed by this novel. It has the potential to be a good novel, but it seems like the author was in a rush to tell the story and sacrificed a richer plot and stronger character development. There are other authors who tell this type of story much better, such as Kate Morton, Eve Chase and Susanna Kearsley (although her novels have a supernatural slant).
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The Map of Salt and Stars is a moving story about the Syrian refugee crisis. Jennifer Zeynab Joukhadar is Syrian American and she has never been a refugee, but she wrote The Map of Salt and Stars to bring attention to the refugee crisis and to share her grief over the Syrian war and the loss of Syrian people, places and heritage. Her novel also teaches us that home is not a physical place, but rather home lives inside of us. It is in our memories and the stories we tell ourselves and it is in our relationships with our loved ones.
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Lately, I seem to be reading a lot of novels by women that are a revival of Greek mythology, novels based on classical Greek literature written mainly by men. There is Madeline Miller’s The Song of Achilles (the first review I published on my blog) and Circe, and now A Thousand Ships by Natalie Haynes. I really enjoyed reading A Thousand Ships. It’s a feminist retelling of the Trojan war which focuses on the women who are usually side-lined in epic tales about the male heroes of Greek and Troy, and it’s purpose is to show that women can be heroes too even if they don’t fight in wars (with the exception of the Amazons).
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The Vanishing Half is a fascinating read and I highly recommend it. It is a novel about how identity is constructed. The central focus of The Vanishing Half is racial identity. It is about the Vignes sisters, identical twins Desiree and Stella, one of whom lives as a black woman while the other lives as a white woman and follows their lives through the decades spanning the 1950s to the early 1990s.
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Yellow Wife is at times a difficult novel to read. Not because it’s boring or poorly written, but because of its honest depiction of its subject matter: slavery in antebellum US. Sadeqa does not shy away from vividly describing the horrifying treatment of African American slaves by their white masters. I’m not going to go into detail as it was difficult enough to stomach it while reading it. There were a few scenes in this novel where I had to stop reading for a moment and talk myself back into reading more. I’m not sharing this with you to turn you away from reading this novel. I think you should read it. I just can’t believe that people would treat other people the way white slave owners treated their slaves. But I don’t want to turn this review of Yellow Wife into a discourse on slavery. This novel speaks for itself on that subject.
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The Golem and the Jinni is a long read, but worth every moment I spent on it. I really enjoyed this novel! I was first interested in reading this novel when it was published in 2013, but unfortunately never got around to it at the time. Silly me! I could have had this novel in my life for so many years! If you enjoy historical fiction and are interested in supernatural creatures from other cultures, then I highly recommend you read this novel.
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