nerdyprettythings's Reviews (515)

So …this book is being published in April and I already want to read the sequel. It has everything! Magic! Siblings! History! YA that didn’t make me mad! 
In all seriousness, I think this book is great. I meant what I said though, it sets up so much, we NEED a sequel. Also HELLO look at this gorgeous cover?! AND Joniece Abbott-Pratt and Bahni Turpin are two of the main cast members in the audiobook. Add this to your TBR immediately please!!

Premise: A woman decides to get revenge after learning two of her students killed her daughter. I highly recommend going into the book without knowing much more than that. The first two chapters are so good and so intense. Perhaps I am a bit desensitized to disturbing stuff, but the middle of the book was a slog (rough for such a short book) as the same period of time was covered by several characters. However - it all worked out for a big finale, and it’s absolutely a disturbing and thought-provoking read. If you got the good creeps from the way The Troop included some not-so-innocent Scouts, I think you’d enjoy this.

This book is understated but so powerful. If you absolutely demand answers from a book, this is not the read for you, but if you’re satisfied to be intrigued and go along with the ride the MC is on, you’ll enjoy this. I would recommend it to anyone who enjoyed Our Wives Under the Sea for example. This book has my favorite thing - an older woman telling her story. But in a lot of ways, she’s quite childlike. She doesn’t know our world, only this completely surreal one. There are so many hints about what happened, but they all add new questions rather than answers, and I really loved that. 

I enjoyed this one! It very much feels like a literary sibling to the other book of SGJ’s I’ve read so far, Night of the Mannequins.  Like NotM, I spent a lot of the time unsure how much of what this disturbed kid was experiencing was real, and it very much kept me engaged and along for the ride. SGJ clearly loves horror movies, and if you’re a fan of Scream in particular, I think you’d get a kick out of the references to it (and the red herrings the MC ignores despite mentioning the film so much!) I’m excited to check out the sequel coming out soon!

This was a surprisingly fun read for such a dark topic. I loved the audio with many different narrators. Written pre-Covid, this book is about a pandemic that only kills people with XY chromosomes. It’s formatted as lots of different people’s stories, and it gets into what would have to happen when so many women are grieving while also needing to be trained for garbage collection and electrician jobs, etc., while also developing a vaccine and worrying about the future of humanity. One thing The Power (similar premise, women take charge because they develop powers) that this book didn’t was get into the violence and religious implications you’d expect, and especially having been through our own pandemic that felt like an omission. In fact, the name of the book comes from one little blog entry from an incel, but then nothing else comes from his inclusion. I did love that the author included some real life stats (that I learned from the book Invisible Women) where women by the end were now actively considered in designing uniforms, cars, and medicines.

Miriam’s father is an abuser and a charlatan who takes his family on revival and faith healing tours every summer. Until now, she has idolized him, despite his “discipline sessions” at home and a violent outburst at a revival the summer before. But this summer is different, and she begins to see who the man at the center of her entire community really is. This book is so good and so well-written.  I also highly recommend the audio. And it’s a debut! I can’t wait to read more from Monica West. 

So... hmm. I liked some things about this book. The NB MC (Ray) is a really fun character, and the POV character
(Simone) grows on you a lot over the book. But for a lot of the time, the cis POV MC is mostly asking dumb questions for Ray and Simone's trans roommate to answer. Additionally, the MCs are a thinly veiled Claire and Brad from the BA test kitchen, and I get the ick - it feels like the (white) author saw the way the racism and lack of pay for video appearances went down at BA and said "let's make
that about me." Neither of the main characters sees the lack of POC at the magazine or in front of the camera as
their issue, despite Simone realizing this is the case once it's pointed out to her). In the end, the book does what BA did. All of the POC characters are very minor side characters that always appear as a group and never have their own projects, and the lack of POC in the company only ever comes up once or twice more when one of the POC mentions it as an add-on to Ray's reasons for leaving the magazine.

Can a book be dumb and still kind of perfect? This is an And Then There Were None remake, and none of the kills will be surprising to you if you’ve read the original (omg please read the original first, especially if you don’t know what happens in it). The final twists are a little batty, but the puzzle pieces are all there to pick up on what’s happening, and I kind of loved it, even as batshit as it is.