This is a history book written for a general audience and it is about the United States and its territories. It explores why we have expanded, when we have expanded, how we’ve viewed territories, and the consequences of the views for both the people in the territories and the people at home.
I learned a lot reading this. I was aware that the U.S. still holds territories and that it has held more and different territories in the past, but hearing about how different territories have been treated and its connection to things like race and immigration rules was eye-opening. Thinking about things like citizenship has consequences for things like voting in national elections, so even if we don’t currently hold the all the territories we’ve historical held, this part of our history is still important because it does still impact us today. (If you’ll recall from the previous Presidential election where some of our citizenry were surprised to find that Puerto Ricans are U.S. citizens, but they can only vote in the presidential election if they live on the mainland.)
So, this was good and I would recommend it. I also recommend getting it as an audiobook. Luis Moreno’s narration is engaging and it carried me through places where dates and details may have stopped me if I had been reading if off a page.
This was so good! While This Poison Heart, book 1 in the series, was a bit of a mystery, this one is more of an adventure. Leaving where the first book left off, they are on a race against time to restore all the pieces of the deadly Absyrtus Heart in order for Briseis to save her Mom. In order to do this, Briseis must rely on blood relatives she didn’t know she had.
These books weave myth in with the modern I absolutely loved them. Briseis is a smart and thoughtful hero and I cheered for her the entire way. I absolutely recommend these! They were so good!
I will admit that I didn’t realize that this was a companion series to Tahir’s An Ember in the Ashes series. I wasn’t made about it. I enjoyed that series. I also didn’t realize it was a duology. I guess I should be grateful it is only two books. Heir takes place twenty years after the end of the previous series. It is told from the perspective of three people. Quil, the Heir to the Martial throne and nephew to the Empress. Aiz, an orphan with some anger issues from a Keger and Sirsha, an outcast hired to track down a killer.
A Few Spoilers for both series ahead.
Laia, Elias and Helene from the An Ember in the Ashes series all appear but as minor roles. This story is about their children or nephews. Quil is the son of former Emperor Marcus and Livia Aquillius and he doesn’t want to be Emperor for fear he will become like his father. Laia and Elias’ son Sufiyan is one of Quil’s closest friends. In a neighboring country, Keger attacks the Martials and Quil must escape to find Tas, his friend and spy to fight back. On the way, he meets Sirsha, a tracker who has been hired to find a killer who is plaguing the Empire. Their objectives align. Aiz is an orphan from Keger, a small country in the south with little connection to the rest of the world but obviously will collide with the other two. I do appreciate an angsty hero and a witty protagonist. Quil and Sirsha are such a great couple. Good Chemistry. About halfway through the book, it is revealed that one of the POVs is not happening in the same timeline as the other two but in an earlier time frame. As soon as I realized that, I knew exactly where the story was going. I wasn’t completely right but I did figure out who the murderer was based on the reveal and clues about this character that I have already learned. I didn’t mind it because the writing made the journey to get to that destination fun. I wanted to know how they turned. My one critique would be that I thought It was a little too long. It kind of dragged on a bit for me but left enough of a cliffhanger that I am looking forward to the next one.
This one was a bit of a wild ride. So, our detective friends are called to a crime scene where a man, a longstanding pillar of the community and a Jewish Holocaust survivor, is found executed in his own home. Pia Kirchoff and Oliver von Bodenstein find out during the autopsy that the murder victim was not what he appeared. For one, he may not have been Jewish. They are left to ravel this mystery as more murders pile up.
What I liked about this one was that not only was the main narrative full of twists, but there were a number of interesting subplots that wove themselves around the main narrative. I was interested in the bigger picture question but also the interpersonal matters that arose in the narrative. However, the one thing that is stuck in my craw a bit is that these books don’t appear to be in their original order. This is listed as book 2 on audible and Snow White Must Die is listed as book 1. The narratives are mostly self-contained, but some of the character development and relationships are out of order. It was an annoyance, but overall it didn’t too badly impact my enjoyment of the story.
If you like detective stories and you are interested in tales about (fictional) international scandals, this was pretty good.
It is January and the holiday season is over which means most of what is fun about winter is over. Except for the curling up with a good book, that is! Here are some suggestions of stories that involve travel, in case you’re stuck inside thiinking it would be better to be anywhere but here, where ever here is.
Genuine Fraud follows the friendship of Jule and Imogen, in reverse chronicle order, leaving you as the reader to put together the pieces of how the characters ended up where they ended up. The characters go from London, San Francisco, Puerto Rico, Martha’s Vineyard to New York. Sounds like a wild ride to me!
The Caraval trilogy is the story of sisters who are obsessed with a magical game. The sisters accept an invitation and travel to the game to find themselves at the center of the game where one of them must search for the other. If she fails, her sister could disappear forever.
I never actually wrote a review of these books after I posted them as ‘What I’m Reading’. They’re super interesting. In an alternate timeline, if you are murdered, you turn back up again as you were moments before your death. This is horribly inconvenient for anyone who wants to commit murder, but is obviously nice for potential murder victims. It is also nice for other reasons, like if you are about to die during surgery, your doctors can be given another chance. Dispatchers are people who are officially sanctioned to murder people in certain circumstances. But there is a whole grey area where Dispatchers can also be employed. Zachary Quinn reads the audiobooks and he does an excellent job. These were interesting and enjoyable mysteries. I don’t love that they are exclusively from audible, since I prefer to get things from the library, but this is the world we live in.
This book is quite popular and I’m going to start my review by saying it was fine. That’s it. Just fine. The narrative has a very good hook and it definitely kept me interested with the twists, but I ended the book feeling… annoyed. Like, it was good. And it is deserving of hype. But… I don’t know. Maybe it was oversold to me?
Anyway, this is the story of famous and reclusive actress Evelyn Hugo as she narrates her memoir to Monique, who will then be allowed to posthumously publish the tale. It has a story within a story structure. We have the framing story of Monique’s life and what is going on in the world, and then the story inside that Evelyn is telling us. And Evelyn is a good storyteller. We get a really good look at what it was like to be a woman in Hollywood and how that changed. We also got a good look at how the world views Gay rights has changed over the course of Evelyn’s lifetime, so from the mid-20th century until now. It was interesting to consider what fame allows you, but also what burdens it comes with. I will say that something that happens towards the end was very well signposted, so it wasn’t a surprise but it also was and it made me mad. It fit perfectly in with the characters and who they were, but it still made me mad.
This was fine, good even, and while I probably wouldn’t recommend it to you unprompted, I also wouldn’t tell you not to read it. And of course, if you do, come back and let me know! Especially if you liked it more than I did!
Beth and I recently saw Nosferatu, and it got me thinking about vampire media. I’ve noticed three distinct types of vampire offerings: campy vamps, sexy, vamps, and seriously disgusting vamps. Nosferatu, I think, straddles the line a bit between disgusting and sexy? He’s got that vampy charisma, but he also has somehow both dry and gushy corpse vibes. With that in mind, here are some recommendations of gross vampires you can check out if you’re looking for a new book to dive into this weeked.
The Strain follows the story of Ephraim Goodweather, Abraham Setrakian, and others as they battle a plague of vampires that begins with an airplane landing mysteriously at JFK with no damage but also almost no survivors. The vampires cannot be mistaken for your sexy True Blood or Twilight Vamps. It is the first in a trilogy that is intense, heart-pounding, and an interesting take on vampire mythology. It is also a TV series, if you’re not looking for a book, but would like some vampire content.
Sunshine is a favorite here at Stacks Exceed Life Expectancy. I think both of us have read it multiple times. Set in a world of magic, it follows the story of Rae “Sunshine” Seddon and her unlikely compatriot, the vampire Constantine as they join forces to fight other vampires. These vampires aren’t gross in the way that Del Toro and Hogan’s vampires are, but they are decidedly more dangerous and less fun than other modern takes on vampires. This one is so good, y’all.
They come at night.They are shrouded in mist. They leave you with a fever that portends death. This one is set in Texas before Texas was a U.S. state. It has cowboys. it has Anglos coming in and making trouble. It is historical fiction as well as a vampire novel and it was so good. Oh, and it has a love story. So, even if you still want that bit of romance with your gross vamps, you get it. I really enjoyed this one and the audiobook has a solid narration.
Do you have a favorite unsexy vampire novel? Sound off in the comments!
I picked this up because there is a K-drama called Black Out on Hulu that is based on it and I was wondering how much of the insane misogyny in the story was part of the original narrative and how much of was just natural consequences of the changes they made to the story plus the change of setting it in Korea. (This is not to say that Korean culture is insanely misogynistic. But it is a patriarchy and that does entail some misogyny.)
Anyway, our detectives Pia Kirchoff and Oliver von Bodenstein are called to the scene of an accident where a woman fell from a pedestrian bridge. In the course of investigating, they discover that not only was it not an accident, it is related to a controversial case from a decade prior where a teenage boy, Tobias Sartorius, was convicted of killing two girls. There are some things about the the old case that don’t add up, like where are their bodies? And when another girl goes missing, they find themselves in a race against time to solve both the closed case and the new one.
So, how much of the insane misogyny is in the original narrative? Oh, a bunch. But, because of the differences in narrative choices, you are confronted with it in the K-drama in ways that just absolutely made my blood boil that weren’t in the original text. In both, there are discussions and depictions of rape and a bunch of abelism directed towards an autistic character. So, if those things are triggering for you, be aware.
I obviously kept reading the series, so there were things here that I liked, but I’m not sure I’d necessarily recommend this. This story had a good ending, but overall it was very dark. The end of the year was very busy and difficult, so I wanted something that felt comfortable, and detective stories and mysteries are a go-to for me. So, if you’re into dark tales and whodunits, these aren’t a bad choice, but if you absolutely can’t deal with depictions of rape or ableism, then give it a pass.
This has been a wild year of reading for me! I have done so much of it for fun! During COVID, I lost a bit of my desire to pick up books. There is still a bit of that resistance there, but with a combination of some great series, letting my whims take me, excellent recommendations from people in my life, and audiobooks, Ive managed to get back to being a reader! Alright! Let’s do this!
I didn’t read a lot of non-fiction for fun and, funnily, they were all memoirs. Readme.txt by Chelsea Manning and Consent by Jill Ciment were excellent, and they have both brought up important topics that need to be considered and discussed, but Nanette gets the nod here for a combination of also touching on important topics that need to be considered and discussed, emotional resonance and Gadsby’s audio narration. This one had me in tears, both from happiness and sadness. It was a great read.
I don’t know I can really say this was on a whim. I put it in my library want list on a whim ages ago and when my library finally got it, I was first in line. This is a story of sisterhood and family. It is also the story of growing up Asian-American and navigating multiple sets of cultural expectations while also trying to figure out who you are. Some of the story felt so relatable and some of it felt like a brand new experience for me. I love how stories can be both mirrors and windows. Anyway, this was at times thoughtful, funny, and sad and I loved the growth journey the characters went on.
Y’all this book was so good, seamlessly interweaving multiple tales of motherhood and family highlighting different kinds of conflicts that arise from differences in income, ethnicity, and race. I couldn’t put it down and I needed to know what happened next! The characters were well-written, the plot contained surprises. I really loved this one.
The Starless Sea is stories within stories within stories. I loved Zachary, the main character. He was thoughtful and interesting and I was happy to have him as a companion on this journey of so many twists and turns. Putting it over the top in this category is the multiple excellent narrations, including a performance from one of my favorite audiobook readers, Bahni Turpin.
This romance novel was a delight! I tore through it and finished it in time to pick up its sequel at the same independent bookshop I bought it at, The Ripped Bodice! 10/10. bookshop and 10/10 novel I took too long getting to. I liked the characters, I liked the intrigue, I liked the spice, I liked the ending. This was wonderful!
Best Series (Plural) I started this Year: Gideon the Ninth by Tamsyn Muir, His Majesty’s Dragon by Naomi Novik, and This Poison Heart by Kalynn Bayron
Part sci/fi and Part fantasy, these books have mystery, sword play, and fiery heroines that are delightful.
An Alternative history with dragons! Temeraire was described to me as the best baby boy of characters before I read it and I couldn’t agree more. I want nothing but the best for this sweet dragon and his handler Laurence, who find themselves in the middle of a war between England and Napoleon’s France. The only reason I haven’t gotten to the rest of the series is that the other books in my library hold queue keep getting in my way.
I was so taken in by Briseis and her moms and the mystery at the heart of these books that having to wait for the second one to come available at the library was torture. Briseis is a wonderful heroine and these books interweave myth with the modern in a really fun way.
I read a lot of books this year that featured houses. A House with Good Bones, The House Across the Lake , and Nothing But Blackened Teeth just to pick a few. But Cañas’s gothic novel set after Mexico’s war for independence scratched all the itches for the gothic horror genre. Beatriz is an interesting narrator, although not as naive as you’d expect and that was a nice twist. I enjoyed this immensely and would definitely recommend it.
This has been a great year for reading and I already have things queued up for the new year (including reviews of things I started this year, but haven’t posted yet!) Beth and I hope you have a Happy New Year and we hope to see you in 2025 for more from our endless stacks!
It has been hard for me to get into the holiday season this year. I have a feeling that I am not the only one. I had a coupon that was about to expire, and that is how I stumbled on this gem. You can say I didn’t know I needed it until I found it. Maggie is a mystery writer who is having the worst year and Christmas is coming and that never makes her feel any better. Her husband left her for her best friend and took half of her money. Things might be turning around. She’s been invited to spend Christmas with her “biggest fan”. Too bad Ethan Wyatt is also invited. She can’t stand Ethan. He always calls her the wrong name and is just too perfect. When they arrive, they find out that their host is Eleanor Ashley, maybe the most famous mystery writer of all time, and the reason that Maggie wanted to be a writer in the first place. The first night they are there, Eleanor disappears and it’s up to Maggie and Ethan to solve the mystery.
Right off the bat, I loved both Maggie and Ethan. I am a sucker for enemies to lovers trope. Though it is pretty obvious that the loathing is really one-sided let’s not get ahead of ourselves. Maggie is the ultimate Eleanor Ashley fan so she first thinks this is just a test for her to solve but as twists and turns start to happen she starts to doubt herself. Like so many successful women I know she has been warned down by so many people belittling her and making her doubt herself. Ethan starts out as your typical alpha male type that everyone is drawn to. His first book is a best seller and is being turned into a movie. Things just come naturally to him. However, there is more to him than that. His charisma is more a defense than anything else but one thing is for sure. He’s down for whatever Maggie wants to do never questions her and is the steadying force for her. As they go through the usual suspects and work the case, they grow together. I found the reason why he always called her by the wrong name to be touching and sweet. This was the perfect quick, fun read that I needed this season. Sure, the plot is pretty typical of Agatha Christie’s set up but it works and it doesn’t matter that it’s not that original. It doesn’t have to be. It just needs to be fun and entertaining and it was. Happy Holidays everyone!
2 Women, So Many Books 