eggcatsreads's Reviews (480)

If you were looking for a novel that artfully weaves modern rom-com style dynamics, a spy mystery to solve, and a heartbreaking WWII historical drama - then 𝘉𝘦𝘢𝘳𝘦𝘳 𝘰𝘧 𝘉𝘢𝘥 𝘕𝘦𝘸𝘴 is for you. 

Told from the perspective of our protagonist - Lucy Rey - after she finds the love of her life cheating on her, she decides to take a chance to upend her life on a strange ad she finds online.

However, taking the job results in more than just the prize money when her investigation leads her to discovering a family history that changes how she understands her own past - and solves a mystery that started during an escape from Nazi Germany. 

With a story interwoven with letters, news articles, and case files from the Department of Lost Things between the chapters, I found myself flipping back to re-read sections after the storyline helped to recontextualize them. With these additions to the narrative, I believe this book would be just as intriguing - if not more - on a reread to catch any details that might have been missed the first time. 

Perfect for fans of mystery investigations involving family drama, historical fiction, and a quirky main character to keep you on your toes throughout it all. Full of twists and reveals I didn’t see coming, this book was a rollercoaster from start to finish. 

Thank you to Gallery Books for a review copy!

 

A novel about learning to trust and rely on oneself, and embracing the strength from within. 

We follow Valla, chosen to be the bride of the Count Leonid in exchange for providing for her village. But when she is injured traveling through the woods towards her betrothed, she realizes that promises mean nothing and she must do whatever it takes to survive her new husband. 

A combination of fairytale and horror, it isn’t until we see the true colors of everyone around that Valla can embrace her anger to claw her way to victory - no matter the cost. This book was a whirlwind of events, and there were multiple twists I absolutely didn’t see coming. Without spoiling anything, I’ll say that I really enjoyed how the multiple villains within this novel were handled - even those we are unaware are villains until it is almost too late. (I will say that I was a bit disappointed that one character is so violently treated and then killed, but then another survives - if only because it makes the one who survived much more tragic, despite the almost-hopeful feeling at the end of this novel.)

Brutal and dark, this book doesn’t hesitate to explore the darker aspects hidden in any fairytale, and forces Valla to either embrace her destiny and thrive - or to wither and die. 

 

Oppressive and filled with the feeling of the room closing in around you, of losing your ability to escape, of realizing the hopelessness of your situation - The Graceview Patient is another phenomenal read from Caitlin Starling.

With an unreliable narrator as our main character - often from the drugs of the experimental treatment given to her - we are never certain what is real and what is a hallucination inflicted. How much of what is going on is actually happening? Even when we get to the end of the novel, with the reveal and the understanding of what, exactly, is going on - we (as the reader) have the understanding that everything we’ve just experienced could be not real. 

Told as if our main character is recollecting all the events that brought her to her current situation, we are given hints and clues about how everything ends for her - even while she is hopeful for the best in the current timeline. We are given little red flags about her isolation, her precarious situation, and the inability to trust those around her in the statements she makes about what is going on in her recollection. I loved these because it upped the eeriness of the novel, even when nothing is actually happening yet, because it primes us to look for the other shoe to drop before there’s even a shoe to drop. I also love how it sets us up to believe everything our main character experienced is actually happening as she’s describing it, and not the very likely possibility that much of this is a delusion created by the cocktail of experimental drugs she is being subjected to.

Filled with intense medical situations, I found this book personally hard to read at times. I do not like things like needles or surgeries or the like, and found those parts a bit difficult to read. However, while going into detail I never felt like this book went so far into the medical horror aspect that it was unbearable, unless your phobia is so intense that even discussing such things would be upsetting. 

I loved this book and found the medical setting lending to a kind of hopelessness throughout the novel, as once the events truly begin to unfold our main character has absolutely no one to vouch for her. Anyone who is a fan of medical horror where you can’t trust your own memories or experiences, along with a trapped room/location where it begins to feel like the walls are closing in, would love this novel.

A huge thank you to the author, NetGalley, and St. Martin’s Press for providing this e-ARC.

This was a fun and twisty thriller, where you think you know how it ends until you actually get to the end. Filled with twists I absolutely didn’t see coming, I had a blast reading this book - meatballs (but from where?) and all.

We follow a disgraced editor as she is given the opportunity of a lifetime - editing the personal memoir of famous celebrity chef Maria Capello. With a television show, cookbooks, and personal sauces, she’s a name everyone knows - just like Martha Sterwart. The only issue? Her husband mysteriously died one night before she became famous and everyone thinks she killed and ate him. Now, she’s planning on addressing the rumors once and for all - and she’ll only speak to Thea Woods. Alone. At her remote farm. Without any access to her cell phone or the internet. 

Filled with tension, mystery - and a deadbeat husband at the heart of it all - we get into the mind of Maria Capello to discover what really happened that night her husband died. Did she kill him, or did he really commit suicide like his note implies? And just what, exactly, is in her locked freezer in her house and what is her ‘secret ingredient’ she uses for everything? I went into this book expecting to know the answer to a lot of these questions, but it wasn’t until the end that the mystery was well and truly solved. Maria Capello is a woman of many faces - one to her audience on her television show, one towards her business life, and one that is truly herself. But until the  end, we’ll never know just which one is speaking to us, or what will happen next. Truly an exciting ride and one I’d recommend taking. 

 

A story told in three separate timelines - 1906, 2006, 2106 - with a psychic connection to a jade teacup binding all of them together. 

I’ll be honest - this book did not work for me. Personally, I felt like the connection between the three timelines to be…tentative at best, and at no point did it feel like there was an actual reason for all three people to be connected through time. While reading this, I wound up wanting full books on both Maida and Li Nuan’s lives, as opposed to the small glances we were given. By breaking up this book into their three separate lives, instead of one entire story, I felt like I was given the sparknotes of three different ones. I was even explaining the plot of this book to my mom, and with only about 100 pages left could still not come up with a reason for the connection between these people - or how it was necessary to help a single one of them. 

Maida has the psychic ability to connect to objects and see their pasts, and by doing so sees a brief glimpse into the lives of both Nathan and Li Nuan. She also discovers a plot to capture and control everyone else like her in their futuristic world. Li Nuan is a trafficked 16 year old girl in the slums of Chinatown, desperate for escape and freedom. And Nathan…is a grown man who somehow just discovered that child exploitation, labor and slavery is a thing in the tech world, and has a crisis of conscience. 

Clearly, two of these stories had a stronger connection to me than the third. It was just a bit difficult to read about the real life abuses and dangers suffered by these two women, only to have a chapter where this man complains about the horrors of society. I’m sorry but I just didn’t care about Nathan and found his chapters to be tedious and boring, at best. 

Also, much of this book is written with a more YA feel, and - while there were trigger warnings for the sexual abuse Li Nuan would suffer - I felt it was a bit more graphic at times than was entirely necessary, or went into more detail than I felt was needed to understand her story. There is one scene in particular that I felt went into more detail than I needed to understand her sexual abuse, as well as another scene that I didn’t find necessary at all other to have her be abused another time. And with the whiplash of her chapters as opposed to the “party at Burning Man and then suddenly become aware of capitalism” Nathan and “anxious at her new job and then forced to become an agent to save her kind” Maida felt extremely out of place. I strongly believe her chapters could have been toned down to still tell her sexual abuses but to not make them so violent and triggering, while not losing any of the horror of them. 

This book has a huge theme on limiting harm and trying for the best, but in many ways it doesn’t work with the rest of the novel. With a societal collapse that happened before the events of this novel started in 2106, despite the theme of “time is circular, not linear” it doesn’t exactly work. The book itself even mentions how Li Nuan can’t really do anything to help prevent the apocalypse and so she just tries to do her best where she’s at, and Nathan can only do so much to try to mitigate his carbon footprint. We know how the story ends because we’re currently in the future!

Also, so much of this novel in the futuristic “utopia” world present in 2106 involved Maida saying disparaging things about those who do not help in some way to “clean up the mess” left by the Precursors (people present before the collapse).

One thing I kept thinking of while reading that was never mentioned or acknowledged, was how do disabled people fit into this model of “everyone needs to work to get basic necessities”? While the knowledge that in this utopia things like food, basic clothing, and housing are provided - but they are provided by “contributing” which…isn’t much better than how capitalism works currently. It was even mentioned that her living quarters are provided by the job she is doing, which - in my honest opinion - sounded a lot like company towns and like having these benefits are only provided to those who can do the work for them. How does this utopia provide for those who cannot do those jobs, who cannot “dedicate some time to clean up the mess” not because they are “a giant asshole” but because their body doesn’t allow them to do so? Not to mention that the way to gain luxuries was to do even more work than the bare minimum required, so do…disabled people then just not deserve things like nice clothes or alcohol? 

This is partially what I mean when I say I’d have liked entire stories about these broken-up pieces of novels. Li Nuan’s story is barely fleshed out, with a strange focus on her sexual abuses while Maida’s doesn’t go into the worldbuilding and instead very quickly exposes the political corruption trying to imprison them. Reading about the issues they’ve been facing felt much more like a SparkNotes version of their story, as opposed to everything that was provided. (And don’t get me started on Nathan’s story focusing way too much on whatever party they were doing in the desert and the fact that I simply. Did not care one iota. About it. Or him.)

Also, this is a spoiler without actually spoiling anything, but the whale thing was too weird and should’ve been taken out. 

 

While this book didn’t work the best for me, I strongly believe that is more due to the fact that I was expecting a more straightforward thriller as opposed to one with more of a supernatural feel to it. 

This novel starts off strong, with our main character encountering a notorious serial killer - and his last victim - during a bathroom break on a road trip. Despite knowing something is wrong, our main character - being a child - decided to hide and to abandon the other boy he sees to his fate. Haunted by this choice, he became obsessed with the case and even pursued a career in criminal profiling and psychology. 

However, the story started to fall apart for me once his father goes missing and he tries to investigate his last days before his sudden disappearance - and assumed death. Attempting to put himself into the head of his father is written like his father is a kind of ghost in his mind, communicating and giving him information about his reasonings. Granted - nothing this “ghost” says isn’t something the main character already didn’t know, but when this is then stretched to try to understand the serial killer he begins hunting it made it difficult for my suspension of disbelief to hold. At times, it felt like this device was used to keep the story moving along without needing to do anything further. (And there was a scene where he recreated his encounter with the boy in the bathroom that simply…took me entirely out of the story.)

In the same way, much of how this mysterious “man made of smoke” serial killer worked - both as our main character as a child and as an adult - felt, at times, too unbelievable. I’m unsure if it was too much focus on how no one wanted to look this man in the eyes when he went into public - despite him looking dirty, saying strange things, and dragging a child behind him that looked both dirty and terrified - or the absurdity of how the crimes are occurring as an adult. 

Finally, this story is told through the points of view of both Daniel and his father, John, but - unlike the chapters labeled with the name “James,” there is no distinction for which POV we are operating in. The first time this switch happened I was both extremely confused and assumed I remembered the main character’s name wrong, in all honesty. I also felt like having these multiple POVs gave us, as the reader, too much information that wasn’t present in our “main” character. At multiple points we are given information our other character doesn’t have, and so it makes watching him investigate something we already know a bit tedious to watch - and at times, unbelievable to see him come to some wild conclusions without access to the same information. 

And this isn’t anything too bad, but I felt like the reveal was a bit anticlimactic and did not explain anything that happened in the first half of the novel.

However, I can clearly see that I am not in the majority of my dislike for this novel and I would encourage anyone to check this out to see if you feel differently. It’s entirely possible I simply disliked this because reading this felt much less grounded in reality than I was expecting, and found the mysteriously almost-supernatural aspects a bit too ridiculous so they took me out of the story. 

 

A perfect little story to connect the events of Grave Importance to move towards Strange New World, this novella gave me everything I love in this series in a small bite-sized portion. I, unfortunately, wound up reading Strange New World before this novella, and while there were some references to this in the book, it was all explained through the text where you wouldn’t lose any understanding. 

However! Why would you want to miss this? We are given a glimpse into how Greta has been living at Dark Heart along with a closer look at Dracula, as well as those creatures living on the land. Lucy is a delightful child and we feel for her circumstances, and it was fun to see the foreboding and untouchable Count Dracul and his wife be suddenly inundated with questions from an inquisitive 10 year old - as well as how the wider vampiric society works. We get a closer look into Ruthven and Grisaille’s lives, as well as a glimpse into Ruthven’s inner thoughts and how he became the vampire he is today. 

All in all, I think anyone who enjoys these novels will have a blast revisiting these characters in this novella, and be excited to see where the story continues from this point in the next novel. 

 

Trigger warnings for: incest, rape, sexual asssault/drugged sexual assault, sexual and physical abuse, domestic abuse/domestic violence, child abuse, child marriages, religious indoctrination 

This novel isn’t wholly explicit about the sexual abuses mentioned, but the physical abuse is described in detail, as well as the main core of this novel is about the physical and sexual abuse and this book cannot be read without encountering it. I think I might be missing some trigger warnings, but if it seems like it’d fit in with a sexually and physically abusive preacher convinced of his own holiness and the need to control every woman in his life, I’d apply it here as well. 

This book, at its core, is one about family connections (not necessarily by birth) and the need to protect each other from dangerous men in powerful positions. Told through many different points of view, our main story follows Genevieve as she returns to her first home in Arkansas, before she was forced to run away and survive on her own. Through her journey she finds family and community, and must take on danger to save others from suffering her same fate. 

The biggest plot thread of this novel was the correlation of men who are abusers, and men who are in power. Both of the biggest abusers in this novel are preachers of their church, and I do not find this to be a coincidence. Our main antagonist, the one we spend the great bulk of this novel wishing he was dead - is a well-respected preacher of his parish, and one who has a great deal of sway in the community. Careful to only hurt the women in his life in areas that are easily concealed, from the start we know how dangerous he is - and how difficult it will be to stop his abuse. 

While I found the very start of this novel a bit confusing at first, once our title character has grown up and we meet the other main character - a traumatized Vietnam veteran named Mercer - the story really comes into its own and I was hooked on every line. Filled with Southern imagery, we can almost feel the humidity and the religious indoctrination in every line as we go through this journey. As Genevieve connects with this family and grows closer to them, she is able to help fill the cracks in their frayed relationship due to the abuse inflicted by the father of the family. Her presence, support, and strength is the reason the women she encounters in her life are able to find their own ways to break the chains of abuse holding them down. 

This book isn’t a romance and I really enjoyed that aspect of it. The connections in this book are forged through family, through friendship, and through bonds that are stronger than both. While both Genevieve and Mercer are haunted by (literal) ghosts, the supernatural aspect of this story is almost in the background to the actual plot of this story. In many ways, even though both of our title characters can see these ghosts, the ability to physically see them is almost a metaphor for their being haunted by the things they’ve experienced. 

While heavy and tragic at times, this book was a beautiful read and I was captivated until the end. Anyone who is a fan of historical fiction, literary fiction, and stories that focus on human experiences and connections would be amiss to not pick up this novel. This was a phenomenal read and one that I will be thinking about for a long while after I’ve finished it. 

A historical fiction tale that brings to life a reality that many of us might not have been aware about and one that doesn’t shy away from the grim realities of the time.

From the first page, I was captured into the narrative of this novel. With the slave revolt on the Garnett Plantation forcing Daniel to make a terrible choice - to save his sister or his love - we follow the rest of his journey as he lives with the choices he’s made to keep his sister safe above all else. Choosing to serve the British army in the American War for Independence with the promise of freedom after the war, a terrible set of circumstances instead leave him and his sister destitute on the streets of St. Giles. 

Daniel is an honorable main character, and as we are taken on his journey with him we cannot help but want to root for him to find success against all odds. Everything he does is with his sister in the forefront of his mind, and he wants nothing else but to protect her from the horrors of the reality they’ve found themselves in. I found Pearl to be, at times, almost naively unaware of the reasons for Daniel’s wanting to shelter her, but with her growing into a young woman and wanting some independence of her own, I could never fault her for her choices. Together they form a bond that keeps them together through hardship and loss, and despite their circumstances they both work to try to better themselves. 

While the streets of St. Giles could be harsh and violent - lead by a violent man named Elias who calls himself the King of the Rookery - they still find community and safety among the same streets. I liked the intricacies of the many areas and people they meet within the streets - those who would betray them at any moment, and those who risk their lives to ensure their safety - and no person or station within this novel was simply one-dimensional. 

Filled with drama, trauma, and even a bit of romance - this novel will captivate you until the last page. Any fan of historical fiction would love this novel, and you can tell a great deal of research was put into its creation. There were quite a lot of characters, but I found their introductions and inclusions to be easy enough to follow. While not the fastest paced novel, I was invested from the start and loved entering this world I had never even known existed before. With Daniel trying to turn their fortunes, a romance hovering in the background, and a surprise from the past arriving with a mystery to solve, this book was a great read from beginning to end. 

 

A heart pounding thriller that will keep you on the edge of your seat desperate to know what happens next, with twists and reveals that will keep you guessing until the end.

This book starts off with a bang and doesn’t let up until the end. Told with dual perspectives - Ruby, an aspiring travel vlogger whose aspirations lead her to getting lost in the Paris catacombs, and Sean, her almost-boyfriend doing everything he can from the surface to find where Ruby has gone missing. With the timeline ticking down on being able to find Ruby and the others, we don’t know who - if any - will survive to the surface. 

This is a perfect read for anyone who is a fan of YA thrillers - filled with drama, romance, betrayals and a shocking twist I didn’t see coming - I was on the edge of my seat until I finished reading.