I enjoyed this, but not nearly as much as most of Haddix's other works. The premise was fascinating, I loved the idea of the world, I loved the commentary on what war means and how citizens can be complicit and misled. She had so many interesting ideas.

But this book was so short that there wasn't much time to explore those ideas. And despite the short length, nothing happens for the first 100+ pages. In all the time she spent on set up and getting the characters to the point where they could have growth, she could have been developing the world or their personalities. Instead we got very little about anything and it dragged.

I also had an issue with Tessa's role as main character. She's an incredible passive character, driven solely by external forces. Which can be done well, I love a good passive lead. But it's not done well here. She's whiny and bland and contributes no action or thought in the book until the very end. Had she been more developed, she could have been passive while still being a worthwhile lead, but she didn't work well as the vehicle for the story to me.

I did really enjoy the ending. I think Haddix almost always offers fascinating insight on the world, and it was true here as well. It was just rushed. This didn't need to be an epic novel by any means, but it did feel like it needed more development and more time. It had so much potential, but just fell flat.

I wound up being very disappointed by this. I enjoyed the first installment in this trilogy of short story collections, All Out, which was historical fiction. It had a lot of decent stories with a couple of fantastic ones. But this collection did nothing for me. Most of the stories annoyed me. There are only two I remember liking at all.

It also threw me for a loop how fantastical and science fiction these were. I knew going in there would be a few fantasy elements. There was a story with vampires and a couple slightly speculative, which was totally expected. But then a few went into the realm of straight fantasy, like one story that was about the Greek Gods. No twist, it was just literally about the Greek Gods. I feel like either I'm confused or the marketing is, because I went into this expecting it to be heavily contemporary.

Usually I rate collections three stars if there were at least a few enjoyable stories, but I just didn't connect with any of these. There were no authors from this collection I'd actively seek out.

Truthfully, I kind of enjoyed this for all that it was a two star. It's a dense police procedural where every character is a terrible person and you're just following along and it devolves into chaos, which I quite enjoy. The main issue was that the characters weren't necessarily all intended to be that terrible. The main character's love interest (this is romantic suspense) beats a guy unconscious, breaks into multiple people's homes, gives a guy a swirly, and holds a gun on the MC for no reason. Dude's a cop. I can never get behind that as a love interest. I really enjoy terrible characters in cop thrillers, but I'm not going to be on their side.

The other main issues were the fact that this was unnecessarily long, the actual mystery itself was pretty uninspired, and there was a fair bit of random racism for a minute that had no purpose and meant nothing.

I did like the writing style, and I like this type of book a lot. While I had an issue with a lot of specific elements, I feel like Tami Hoag is capable of writing a really good cop thriller. This just wasn't it.

I absolutely fell in love with this story. It was enthralling. I never wanted to put the book down or stop reading and it was so hard not having the time to just binge this all at once, because I definitely could have. I was absorbed from page one and just devoured it.

My one main issue was the writing. I really didn't love her writing style. It's very dialogue heavy and pretty minimal, and I felt like this book would have benefitted from something more. A little more time spent in the characters' heads, or the present time period, or just dealing with everything. The world could have been opened up more. I don't really know, but it did feel a little bit lacking to me and kept this book from being an absolute favorite.

I loved the ending. It's dark and it hurts and it's the perfect conclusion to this story. Obviously I don't want to talk about specifics and spoilers, but it left such a bitter taste in my mouth. Butler definitely doesn't pull her punches and I love her for it.

Highly recommend. I loved this and I'm really excited to read more from Octavia Butler in the future.

 

I cried at 3 of the 4 stories in this book, so it was a pretty good time. Like pretty much all I wanted from this was to cry and it fully succeeded there.

The characters are all wonderful. The stories themselves are lovely and sweet and touching. It banks so much on the emotion of the situations and does such a good job capturing the love of these people and the heartbreak that often accompanies that love.

I will admit I wanted to care a little more. Like I did really enjoy this a lot, but I wanted to absolutely fall in love with the story and I didn't. There was just a little bit of a disconnect which was unfortunate.

It's the ultimate bittersweet book. If you like quiet stories about people's lives and want to cry a bit, I'd highly recommend giving this a go.

 

Honestly, I enjoyed this a lot more than I expected. I like sad and dark books, so something that actively describes itself as low stakes gives me pause. But it was so well written. Baldree does such a good job capturing these characters and absorbing the reader in the flow of the story. It was really enjoyable.

My main issue was mostly that the coffee shop was the primary focus of the story. I just didn't care about it. I really liked the characters and wish we got more of them, more backstories or fleshed out motivations and desires. I know so little about any of them even after finishing the book. We get almost nothing about the world even though it's set in what seems to be a cool fantasy city. I wanted to like the romance, but it happened so quickly and needed a lot more character development.

This could have easily been bumped up a star if the coffee shop had taken more of a backseat and been a vehicle for the characters' stories, but it was just okay. He's a great writer, though. His writing made this so enjoyable.

This was so fascinating. Like that's my whole pitch for this book. It was absolutely fascinating and I devoured every bit of information in this. If you're at all interested in learning about the Troubles, specifically focused on the IRA, can't recommend this enough. Every time I listened to this on my commute to work, I was so excited to get back to it and learn more.

And the fact that by the end he actually solved the murder of Jean McConville. Like not provable in a court of law and it's barely more than a guess based on all the evidence, but he did everything but put the gun in the shooter's hand.

The book isn't really about that, for all that the murder is important. It's about everything. The politics and the history and the trauma on all sides. Everyone's motives and pain and triumphs. All the terrible things the English did and all the terrible things the IRA did. Just utterly fascinating. Every moment.

My main issue was with the amount of information. I was constantly researching and looking for more. I listened to this on my commute to work and nearly every day I'd have a handful of things I wanted to google because I wanted so much more. To a degree I enjoy that in a nonfiction. Like this made me so invested in the time period and what was happening. But at the same time, I feel like half the time I was left with more questions than answers. Like either this needed to be pared down a little more and tell a more narrow story, or I wanted it to include more information. It just wasn't quite enough for me.

I did feel a little misled by some of the earlier information. Like the whole first part of the book when he was talking about Gerry Adams being in the IRA and calling the shots and all. I don't dispute any of that, but I would have liked to have known earlier that Adams claims it's not true. It's kind of about perspective and I wish I'd had a different one while reading it. (Just to reiterate, I don't actually believe Adams.)

But this was great. I adored learning about this whole time period, and it gives you a really good overview of the IRA at the time and the political atmosphere. It left me hungry for more, and I might have to track down a physical copy so I can read through the notes section.

Judging from some of the reviews, this seems like maybe one of the worst books in the Kay Scarpetta series? Which makes it extra unfortunate that this was my second chance for the series. I didn't like the first book, Post Mortem, but this one was so much worse. It's basically nothing. Nothing happens, except for like a six page climax that ends while the main character is unconscious so we don't even get to see half of it.

The majority of the book takes place in one night. Kay Scarpetta is walking to meet her husband at dinner. Someone fakes a 911 call about her being a nuisance, which is irritating to her and maybe vaguely threatening, but not that serious. She gets called away from dinner because a dead body has been found. She examines the dead body. Would you believe that summary is for more than 300 pages of this book? It felt never ending.

So much of the time is wasted by Scarpetta thinking about random things and explaining their whole backstory. I get that in a long running series like this you need a little catch up on main events, but this was so excessive. There would be a single line of dialogue and then like two pages of Scarpetta explaining why the character said that and how they got to that point over the last 24 books, and what they truly meant by the words, and the underlying meaning of their inflection. Like occasionally that kind of thing is fine, but it would take forty pages to get through a single brief conversation because that was every line of dialogue.

And nothing made sense. Despite the fact that nothing was happening and their entire backstories were endlessly explained, it was so hard to follow. She had a stalker that I never really understood. Some people were treating it like she was about to be murdered and some were treating it like a mild nuisance. I could never get a read on that situation. It was hard to follow the concrete actions of the book, like who was present and what they were doing and why. The whole thing was such a jumbled mess.

This was insufferable. I didn't like the first book in this series either, but my complaints about it were pretty mild and generic. All of the books in the series can't possibly be this bad, but I do not have it in me to try another.

Here's the thing, I so badly wanted to love this book. It's about an elderly widower who meets an equally elderly woman and they embark on a romance, only for him to discover that her husband is alive and suffering from Alzheimer's. That sounds so wonderful and complex. It also deals a lot with antisemitism, as the woman is Jewish and Harvey is antisemitic, although he spends the whole book convinced he's not. He's just surrounded himself with antisemites. In fact, as proof that he's not antisemitic, he actually told his former wife to keep her antisemitic rants in private. But the antisemitism is the point, so that's not really a point against the book. 

But the thing is, it doesn't actually deal with the antisemitism well. Sarah is concerned because she doesn't trust non Jews not to be antisemitic. Harvey says they're both old and nothing matters anymore- he doesn't mind she's Jewish. So noble of him. He occasionally says offensive things and Sarah gets upset, but he's always so sorry to have offended her and decides he must walk on eggshells. He never actually confronts his own antisemitism.

Only. He gets mad at Sarah at one point. He goes through a very emotional situation and wants her with him for emotional support. So he calls her repeatedly for about 12 hours and she doesn't pick up. He gets mad about this. And I don't want to write out exactly what he said, but it was really awful. Very antisemitic and sexist, included a number of slurs and "you people are all alike." There's no coming back from that. Like at that point, I do not care about this dude and I do not want them to be together because Sarah deserved so much better. That's just abusive. Full stop.

Harvey obviously feels bad about it and calls to apologize. He says he doesn't know where it came from (ignoring the entire book's worth of his antisemitism, I suppose). And then after a while, he decides that the price he's paying (her leaving him) far outweighs his crime (antisemitic and sexist slurs). I hated the ending. It felt like it excused away a lot of his antisemitism and sexism- I don't know where it came from, how was I supposed to know you were in the hospital that night and had forgotten your phone, I'm not antisemitic, how could I be when I love you. And all of those statements were taken at face value.

Apart from that, I didn't enjoy anything in this. I didn't connect with the writing style. It felt so dry and like it spent too much time explaining everything. I was rarely in the moment with the characters. It needed to be edited a lot more as well. There were a few occasions I noticed back to back lines that looked like a slight rephrasing, like he'd written in two to see which he liked best and then forgot to delete one. And there were a few times that actions in a scene didn't make sense- like when a character is standing during a conversation and then two sentences later it'll say she stood up. And Sarah giggled constantly. Like I swear I counted about 11 times across three pages once. She didn't stop giggling. It was so annoying.

It was also super instalove-y. Nothing about their romance is built. They run into each other a couple of times at a dog park and then are immediately in love. Unless I'm mistaken, it only took three meetings for them to declare their love. It felt so shallow and emotionless. I didn't care about the relationship, apart from desperately wanting Sarah to find someone better.

Nothing about the Alzheimer's husband was really discussed. I didn't feel Harvey's pain in that situation at all. He treated it more like an inconvenience getting in the way of his relationship. He didn't really seem like he cared that Sarah was suffering. Just that he really wanted Sarah to spend more time with him, and this dying husband was taking that away from him.

This was gross. Probably would have given it two stars if Harvey had died sad and alone.

Do I tag this as horror? It's kind of horror, which makes it one of the only horror books I've ever enjoyed. This also cements Sayaka Murata as one of my favorite authors. I adored every second of this very short book.

It is so horrifically sad in a real world sense. This poor young girl is being abused in so many ways and she uses a number of very unhealthy coping mechanisms to do so. It's heartbreaking. She quite literally deludes herself while offering scathing commentary on the state of the world and the people in it. She survives by separating herself from the "earthlings," as she refers to them. 

But then it takes a turn into the horror genre with a lot of gore, and it becomes horrific in a very different way that hits just as hard. I've never read a book that took such a turn like this and worked so well. It genuinely felt like two different books, but they flowed into each so well that I genuinely couldn't separate them if I wanted to. Like there was no other place for this story to go, yet I could not have seen it coming in a million years. It was beautifully written.

I don't think this one will have nearly the wide appeal of Convenience Store Woman, and to be honest I don't think I love this one quite as much, but this was a stunning book. It felt like a gut punch. It broke my heart and made me want to throw up and completely changed my perception while it was doing so. This is a masterpiece and I adore Murata's writing. My favorite book of the year so far by a wide margin.