shereadytoread's Reviews (806)

This was a disturbing read in a good way. Reading about what these women went through and the extent that so many people went to in an effort to cover it up was disgusting. The audiobook includes some actual recording of Weinstein (which I'm sure is probably available online) that was terrible to listen to. This book is very well written and presents almost unbelievably. It's wonderful that this has all come to light, but terrible that it took so long to happen.

This book has such a full world. The characters are excellent spins on standard character archetypes without seeming cliché. The strong grandfather holding a secret; the mother who doesn't know how to love her children; the young boy who grew up to fast to father his younger sibling; the sick grandmother holding family lineage together and the racial identity issues of being part of a biracial family with an absent white parent. There is also richness of cultural and spiritual beliefs that run through the stories and tie together the generations through ghosts of the family and outside. I didn't realize that the author had other books when I checked this out, but I look forward to reading it!

I wanted to love this book so much more than I did. It's a dark comedy/horror inspired by Christmas which is exactly my cup of tea. However the comedy didn't really resonate with me and it was too slow a build. The horror aspects were pretty quick and there wasn't enough build to them to make them suspenseful. The final 3rd of the book was pretty good, but it also had a 1940s war trope that I'm so bored with.

Well they say the sequel is never as good as the original and this is very true. This book of course centers around a detective with severe OCD. However, he is magically able to fly because of a fictional drug that makes him not care about germs which results in him flying, swimming, sharing food with strangers. He turns into a "cool" guy with no drawbacks. He then immediately turns back into his normal self, solves a crime (obviously) and then takes more of the drug and turns cool to fly back home. The explanation of the crime was ... meh and the attempted plot twist fell flat. Ah well. On to number 3!

The first story was good enough, it went downhill from there. I didn't even finish the second one fully and the third was meh. Not worth the read in my opinion.

The premise is pretty normal for a Christmas novel a dedicated baker with dreams of her own restaurant runs into a man in the "hollywood" of baking and her life changes. However the men in this book are a weird type of controlling for the "nice guys" and straight up manipulators and predatory for the "bad guys". The books switches between the new couple and a romantic plot between two former friends. I wanted to like this more but it's not great.

This book is half search for the city and some historical and political context and half a theory of pandemics and disease affect on history.

Too much focus on historical pandemics that it then tries to connect with lost city with no actual evidence of that people the case. However the team then contracts Leishmaniasis which it then hypothesized was the reason the city was abandoned. It spends almost a 3rd of the book on this, only to then pose an expert who states it was so commonplace there is no way that is what happened.

It also uses a title for the book that he notes the indigenous people considered to be racist and disrespectful to their heritage. He later posits the thoughts of a single scientist (who doesn't even want his own name attached) that rape of indigenous people by Europeans is why those indigenous groups were able to survive.

Overall this book starts off incredibly slow but is well-written. The first 10% of the book almost stopped me from finishing but I'm very glad I ended up picking it up again. It gives a thorough look at race relations and how it affected everything from social mobility to consumerism to law to politics. The story of the Reverend and his alleged murders and connections to voodoo were both very interesting and I wish the book started off with that but I understand why the context is provided first.

The first half of the book focuses promarily on 3 things:

1. The history of life insurance and how it has been used and abused
2. The life of Rev. Maxwell who was thought to have abused life insurance fraud before his death
3. The trial and lawyer of Robert Burns. This trial is the one mentioned in the title.

The second half of the book then focuses on Harper Lee, her life and how she is connected to the aforementioned trial.

It could almost be read as two completely separate books. If you were interested in the murders and trial, you could read the first half. If you were more interested in Harper, she isn't mentioned until the second half. It's a well written biography but of a woman with somewhat a dull life (outside of sadly some substance abuse issues, depressive episodes and family deaths).  She's a writer who didn't really write much and an author of what is considered to be an important anti-racism novel who held some racist ideas. It also makes a habit of glossing over the "good" individuals racism but delving into that of the "bad" individuals.

A good anthology if you enjoy horror (and the christmas season of course). I'd say that I enjoyed about half the stories in total. About 3 of them were terrible in my opinion. The others were not bad, just not of interest to me. Since it's an anthology, it probably has something for all horror fans.