wordsofclover's Reviews (2.16k)

Darcy and her fiancé Alex are looking for a fresh start when they move to the seaside town of Rock, preparing to get ready for their first child together. Joining an antenatal class seems like a good way to make new local friends going through the same experience and while Darcy struggles to connect with the women, she can't help let past insecurities and paranoia get in the way.

This was a very fun, gripping and well-paced thriller that sucked me right in from the start! It definitely helped (in some ways) that I'm currently 36 weeks pregnant and very familiar with a lot of the things Darcy is going through in this book, and could empathise a lot with the way she second guessed her own mind at times and hormones as yes sometimes pregnancy can make you think some crazy things. Darcy is an insecure person and it really highlights the fractures in her relationships with people from Alex to Carmen and Lucy.It can be hard to read at times especially when Darcy's insecurities makes her internally judge the other women in different ways.

As the story progresses and the pregnancies get bigger (and babies begin to arrive) we see shifts in relationship dynamics and personalities and tensions really rise up. I would have loved even more in some of the ways we see Darcy spiraling about things from the wedding dress to the attempted break-in - would love for subtle things like this to have happened from the start of the book versus the last part.

As for the last part which included the birth and subsequent events, I was literally gripped - I told myself I was going to read only to a certain part and then I'd go to sleep but I could not put the book down until I'd finished it. The scenes were so visceral and written so well. I do think afterwards, maybe because this part was so tense, the pace slowed down a bit ahead of the story wrapping up but I still enjoyed the ending. And the epilogue left me like !!

 

In Five Little Indians, we follow a group of characters who in one way or another survived being sent to an Indian mission school when they were younger - ripped away from their families, their cultural heritages and made to feel ashamed for being Native American. The characters all have ways of coping from Maisie who finds herself in dangerous situations, Kenny who can't stay in one place for too long, Lucy who falls into motherhood, Howie who confronts his abuser and Clara who finds a way to fight back and help others.

I really appreciated learning about this horrific history of Canada, and one of the things that struck me with this book is what happened to the characters we are following wasn't that long ago - by the time they are turned out of the school (with no life skills, help or money), Lucy and Maisie are in a more modern world even though the activities of what happened tot hem all int he schools feel like it should be 1900s stuff or earlier. The schools reminded me in a way of the mother and baby homes in Ireland - people stuffed away from their families, made to feel shame, not helped and abused by people of the church whose calling should be kindness.

However, unfortunately I felt like everything we got from the characters was too vague or we just didn't spend enough time with each one. It felt for a while that the author/story was favouring Kenny and Lucy (and while the romance was sweet, it felt a bit too saccharine that they always used to glance at each other in the school, and this held onto them both into adulthood when they saw each other again etc) but then Clara got a pretty interesting story and section as well. However Maisie got very little and Howie, and I also felt it odd that Wilf was mentioned, was apparently Lucy's brother but we never see if they reconnect. The timeline confused me as well as it felt we were jumping around all over the place, and suddenly Lucy's daughter was 23 but then we jumped to Howie and I couldn't tell how much later it was for him. The narration of this book also felt a bit stiff and unnatural at times for me as well. 

An easy to read, slice of life kind of book following Dahae, a young woman in her late twenties, attempting to survive the corporate office world of Seoul - working overtime to consistently be given middling performance reviews and no chances of raises or promotions. Dahae and her two friends Eun-sang and Jisong all dream of better opportunities and end up involved with cryptocurrency investment which could mean losing everything or shooting to the moon.

I quite enjoyed this book - as someone who has worked in corporate offices and also gone through the rigmarole of demoralising performance reviews that have less to do with your actual performance and more to do with what the company is unwilling to give to staff, I really resonated with a lot of the frustrations Dahae and her friends felt with their current work situation and I think anyone working and trying to just survive today can also resonate with the feeling of wanting more money, more opportunity, just something more. I know very little about investments and crypto so this part did go a little bit over my head but I was so tense for the girls as their investments rose and fell and I was just really hoping it would all go well for them.

I had some mixed feelings about the epilogue and wondered if we needed it but I also think it was a great opportunity for a full circle moment with Dahae and where she was, how she was feeling and what changed or didn't change with her from a year previously. I actually thought it was all very clever really - and really hammered home the point of the book and the characters. It's not necessarily that people want to be get rich and then do nothing, but just have that bit more so they don't have to struggle or worry quite so much or in Dahae's case, just get a nice apartment to live in! 

It’s been 5 years since Feyi’s husband died in a tragic car accident, and finally she feels ready to dip her toes back into the dating field. Artist Feyi knows how beautiful she is, and soon is exploring her sexuality and sensuality in fun ways, encouraged by her friend Joy. When she meets Nasir, she’s ready to take things slow and as friends they travel to his home country for an art show. But while there, Feyi finds a connection she didn’t expect but it could break multiple hearts and cause a whole lot of trouble.

I think this author has such a beautiful way of writing, and there were some passages in this book about grief, owning your body, queer identity and island life that I really loved. However, despite appreciating the style of writing, I just really didn’t enjoy the actual content of the story. I don’t know if Feyi is written as unlikeable or I just found her a bit unlikeable but I just couldn’t warm to her at all - I’m all for a woman doing her thing but I just thought some of her moves were a bit reckless and ultimately didn’t help with the situation she ended up in. I also really feel like we didn't learn anything about her other than she is a widow, an artist and very beautiful. We didn't get much else to really understand why people liked her for her so much (other than when she trauma bonded over dead spouses).

This is my first book I’ve read as well that followed the trope of (view spoiler) even though Nasir wasn’t really her boyfriend, there was a romantic connection there and it wasn’t just friends at first until she got the ick and cooled it off while staying in his family’s mansion on a free holiday. I just found it all a bit icky, and it’s so obvious how hurt people are going to be for the relationship, and potentially a man’s relationship with his children fractured forever, but they didn’t care because they had a 'connection'.

I also didn’t really like how Nasir’s rage at the situation was used by Feyi then as a good reason why she never let things go further with him. While yes absolutely he said and did some things that were not on, I don’t think Feyi was innocent in the situation and Nasir was right to be blindsided about Feyi’s new relationship when she had never stated as a fact they would just be friends and nothing romantic would ever happen between them.

And I had very little patience when Feyi freaked out that she might love this man - considering he’s imploding his life for her, I mean of course those feelings would be very strong so her freak out kind of annoyed me like wasn’t this the idea all along, that you loved each other and so were ready to deal with all the terrible things you might face.

I did really think I would like this but unfortunately the romance in this just wasn’t for me though as I said, I did appreciate some of the beautiful moments of writing.