Firekeeper’s Daughter by Angeline Boulley

Each November, my book club reads indigenous fiction or history. This month, we chose to read this book. It was an excellent choice.

Daunis is an eighteen-year-old Chippewa living near the Ojibwe reservation in Sault Ste. Marie, Michigan. She feels like she doesn’t fit in either the while world or the native world despite belonging to both. She used to play on the high school hockey team and her half-brother is the captain of the local club team. When handsome newcomer Jamie joins the team and befriends her brother, he asks her to be his ambassador. As she gets closer to Jamie she finds out more than she expected and her world turns upside down.

This is a wonderful coming-of-age novel that explores all the feelings and issues without getting too sappy and deals with them realistically. I loved how immersed it is in Ojibwe culture and language. And it is so well-written. Hard to believe it is a debut novel!

My rating: 5/5

Midnight at the Bright Ideas Bookstore by Matthew Sullivan

This was another thriller that my partner and I listened to on a recent road trip. We didn’t quite finish it by the time we got home. I finished it on my way to work the next day.

Lydia Smith works at a bookstore. Late one night at closing, I regular is discovered having hanged himself in the store. Lydia was close to this patron and finds that his effects have been left to her. In her effort to understand why she begins to uncover things in her past that she thought she left behind.

This was both a thriller and an exploration of relationships and dealing with the past. Better than most but nothing spectacular. A solid choice for a road trip.

My rating: 3/5

When These Mountains Burn by David Joy

My library book club members all read different books for each meeting. For our last meeting, the prompt was to read a book by a North Carolina author. Having read and enjoyed a previous novel by David Joy, I selected this audiobook for a recent road trip.

Raymond Mathis gets a call from a drug dealer. He says that unless he pays his son’s debt, he will kill him. He reluctantly bails his son out, warning the dealer to never sell to his son again. After his son relapses, Ray goes after the operation that poisoned his son.

What I loved most about this novel is that it takes place where I live. Once seen included a location I drive through every day. The author also does an amazing job of capturing the people and nature of the mountains of western North Carolina. Despite the depressing subject matter of this book, I thoroughly enjoyed how the community worked to overcome its own issues.

My rating: 4/5

Jaws by Peter Benchley

This being the 50th anniversary of the release of the movie, I have been hearing a lot of coverage about its making. This led me to want to read the book to see what all the fuss was about in the first place.

The plot of the novel is fairly similar to that of the movie. There are naturally other plot lines in the book that didn’t make it to the movie. These include the mayor of the town getting into trouble with local organized crime and the sheriff’s wife having an affair. The ending it also a bit different.

While I enjoyed this novel, I don’t really see what all the fuss was about. Perhaps it was one of those books that was a product of its time. It still holds up as a good novel, but I don’t think it would be the hit it was then if it was released today. This is the rare case where the movie was better than the book.

My rating: 3/5

Zero Days by Ruth Ware

Last weekend, my partner and I went to a wedding out of state. Naturally, I went looking for an audiobook to listen to in the car. My partner prefers thrillers; she likes propulsive plots. I filtered my library’s audiobooks to those immediately available and the proper length for our trip. I borrowed two of them and my partner selected this one to listen to. It would turn out to be a poor choice for both of us.

The plot sounded like your typical thriller. A woman comes home to find her husband murdered and is immediately made a suspect. She is forced to go on the run and figure out who has set her up and why. But I would not characterize this novel as a thriller. If you are looking for a fast moving story with twists and turns, look elsewhere. However, if you are looking for a story that explores how this kind of trauma might affect someone and shows their determination to overcome it, then it might be for you.

In any case, I found the writing indulgent and repetitive. Rather than finding the main character resilient and strong, I found her whiny and weak. This book simply does not follow the thriller model. Now, I know that that model is completely unrealistic. But when I pick up a book labeled as a thriller, that’s what I expect. I don’t expect a psychological navel gazing novel of a person trying to overcome the trauma of her husband’s grisly murder. And that’s my main complaint about this book. It was a bait and switch. I didn’t get what I was looking for in the book. On top of that, the book was way longer than it needed to be. The reveal happens many times and takes too long to be resolved. It is just a terrible thriller. We didn’t even finish it. By the time we go home we had over two hours left to listen to. We bailed. I looked up on the internet how it ended. Trite and predictable. We made the right decision.

My rating: 1/5

Picks and Shovels by Cory Doctorow

This book has yet to be released. I received a copy through Net Galley in exchange for an honest review. I was on the lookout for this book as i had read the other two in this trilogy. This one is due to be published on February 18. You can purchase a copy from the author here.

The trilogy has been a reverse chronology. This final book in the series is Marty Hench’s origin story. In it, we learn how he came to flunk out of MIT, start a company with his roommate, and move to Silicon Valley to start his career as a forensic accountant. Once there, he is hired by a trio of religious leaders (a rabbi, a priest, and a Mormon bishop) who are taking advantage of their customers by selling them computers and accessories only from them. The bulk of the story is how he and a group of women who used to work for the Reverend Sirs fight to free their customers from this lock in.

It doesn’t sound that interesting when I write it out. I mean, Marty is a forensic accountant for crying out loud. Can you get more boring than accounting? But somehow the author makes forensic accounting exciting, cool, and intriguing all at the same time. The book really does have the feel of the early computer revolution and the optimism that went with it. A thoroughly enjoyable ride and fitting conclusion to the saga of Marty Hench. I will miss him.

My rating: 4/5

The Extinction Trials by A. G. Riddle

My partner and I had a recent road trip to meet family in Virginia. As we do, we borrowed an audiobook from the library to enjoy on the road. We chose this one as my partner had read some of the author’s other books and liked them. We didn’t finish it on our trip, but when I had some work to do around the house I finally finished listening to it on my own.

It opens with a prologue describing an idea for how to save humanity from itself. As the novel itself starts, things are going very wrong. Eventually, the two main characters end up in some kind of bunker with a bunch of others. They learn that they are a part of the “extinction trials” and begin to try to figure out what to do.

Much of this book feels like an escape room game that you might play on your smartphone. That feels like a criticism to me, but somehow I actually liked it. There is a lot of action and mystery in this one, making it a thriller (that’s part of why my partner chose it). One giant reveal waits at the end after a series of smaller ones unfold. It was pure entertainment with only a little bit of message. Overall I very much enjoyed it.

My rating: 4/5

All the Colors of the Dark by Chris Whitaker

The genre for the month of August in my book club was mystery/thriller. This is the book that we ended up reading. It is not one that I was familiar with or had heard of before. I found the story deeply interesting and engrossing while the writing left a bit to be desired.

The story begins in 1975 and revolves around a one-eyed preteen young man everyone calls Patch. Young girls about his age are disappearing. When he happens upon this happening in the woods and stops it, he is taken instead. This turns his world upside down. His best friend Saint never stops looking for him even after all of the rest of the town has given up on her friend.

This is a story about many things: love across the years, overcoming tragedy, and deep friendship. The plot has many twists and turns. The writing was a little off for me. For one thing, the author is British telling a story in the US, so some of the writing just feels out of place. Like when he mentions that something “came by post”. And the language at times tries to be so flowery and poetic that the meaning and storytelling become obscured. But overall, this is a beautiful, nuanced story of tragedy and how it can affect a young person for the rest of their life. Though it tries too hard in some places and fails to communicate, when it does communicate, it gets under you skin and hits you in the feels.

My rating: 4/5

Long Time Gone by Charlie Donlea

This was one of those books that I listened to in the car on a long road trip. We like to listen to thrillers that keep our attention and entertain us as the road goes by. This was a good choice.

A young woman is studying to become a medical examiner. As a forensic scientist, she must do a thesis on the topic of her advisor’s choosing. Her advisor chooses genetics as her area of focus. Diving in to get started, she submits her DNA to an online ancestry tool and learns that she is the baby that disappeared almost thirty years ago to national attention. As she tries to delay the inevitable national attention that will again be coming her way, she works to unravel what happened to her and her birth parents all those years ago.

This is a rip roaring adventure tale with many plot turns and twists. There is a bit of explicitly described gore, but largely the story is suspense driven. I thoroughly enjoyed it. The writing was nothing special for me, but it was excellent in the sense that I didn’t notice it, I was so absorbed in the story.

My rating: 4/5

Run by Blake Crouch

I recently watched on Apple TV+ the new series Dark Matter based on the book of the same name by Blake Crouch. I enjoyed it so much that I went looking to see if he had anything new coming out. I was excited to find on NetGalley, that he has a book coming out in the fall called simply Run. Turns out that this was originally self-published by the author in 2011. It is being published for the first time by Ballantine Books. It’s tentative release date is October 22. I read an advanced reader copy of the ebook provided by NetGalley.

Run is an apocalyptic thriller that takes place in essentially present times. An unexpected and (at first) unexplained pandemic has led many in Jack’s community of Albuquerque, NM to become randomly murderous. TV and radio are down except for the announcement of who those affected will be coming to kill next. When Jack hears his own name on the radio, he swiftly packs his family and camping gear into their SUV and run. The plot follows them as they head north toward Canada, doing their best to avoid those affected in order to stay together and alive.

This is a very dark novel. It is not as well-written as his more recent work, but there are glimpses of what is to come. The challenges and emotions of the family are the strength of this novel. The pace is unrelenting. There are no named chapters and no table of contents. This feels like a purposeful choice to keep you turning the pages. It works. Even the clipped writing, with regular incomplete sentences, feeds the urgency. As I read this book, I was reminded of other apocalyptic novels like The Stand by Stephen King and The Road by Cormac McCarthy. Unfortunately, this one does not rise to that level. It is much darker and more grim while not being as well-written. It was an interesting glimpse into Crouch’s early work, but if you are looking for an apocalyptic thriller, I recommend the others I mentioned. If you want to read Blake Crouch, you are better off starting with Dark Matter or Recursion.

My rating: 3/5