Reviews and Comments

I don’t know why so many of us are fascinated by true crime. I know I’ve speculated in the past but I’ve come to think that there are just too many reasons that draw people to stories about murder and violence and the hope of justice. Rebecca Makkai’s masterful new novel, I Have Some Questions for You, doesn’t answer this question either. Instead, it wrestles with our cultural obsession by reminding us that all of these stories that we consume through podcasts and articles and books and documentaries are about real people. This book also reminds us how the reality behind these stories is a lot more complicated to investigate and prosecute than we realize from the hour or less encapsulations we usually receive. What makes this book so amazing is that Makkai can do all of this at the same time that she gives us well-rounded, human characters and an amazing plot...

Read the rest of my review at A Bookish Type.

As I read The Imposters, the brilliant new novel by Tom Rachman, I couldn’t help but think of Kurt Vonnegut’s Mother Night. In Mother Night, the protagonist did terrible things while posing as a Nazi, arguing ever afterward that he was only pretending in order to do good things. The novel has its flaws but it sticks in my memory as a story about how what we pretend to be can effectively become who we are. The Imposters is also a novel about what we pretend to be. Unlike Mother Night, however, Rachman takes us underneath the veneer of those pretensions to reveal quivering fear and insecurity. It is one of the most unsettling works of literary psychology I’ve ever read...

Read the rest of my review at A Bookish Type. I received a free copy of this book from the publisher via NetGalley, for review consideration.

Two epiphanies bookend American Ending, by Mary Kay Zuravleff. Near the beginning of the novel, protagonist Yelena realizes that her mother sometimes changes the endings of the Russian tales she relates to her children. The original Russian endings bother Yelena, because they’re so depressing and unjust. She much prefers the happier American endings. This realization echoes the stark differences she sees between her Russian-born family and community members and the American-born ones. At the end of the book, Yelena is somewhat surprised to realize how much control she has over the story of her life. She can either see her life as having a Russian ending or an American one; it all depends on whether she can hold on to hope or give up when circumstances threaten defeat...

Read the rest of my review at A Bookish Type. I received a free copy of this book from the publisher via Edelweiss, for review consideration.

On May 19, 1930, Carl and Sadie Morlok were very surprised to find themselves the parents of four daughters. Marginally employed Carl was not prepared to support the new quadruplets and his wife, nor was his wife prepared to care for four infants. Who would be? But the community of Lansing, Michigan rallied around the stunned parents. Donations came in to fill their needs. A job offer came in for Carl. In exchange, the quadruplets became objects of curiosity. Visitors would barge into the Morlok apartment to look at the babies. When the girls got older, Sadie taught them to dance and sing. But, as Audrey Clare Farley reveals early in Girls and Their Monsters: The Genain Quadruplets and the Making of Madness in America, the family’s outward respectability covered abuse and mental illness. The Morlok sisters, we learn, would later become the subject of a study on schizophrenia, genetics, and upbringing by a group at the National Institute of Mental Health and the subsequent book, The Genain Quadruplets: A Case Study and Theoretical Analysis of Heredity and Environment in Schizophrenia...

Read the rest of my review at A Bookish Type. I received a free copy of this book from the publisher via NetGalley, for review consideration.

Seeing the dead is not unusual for Sister Maeve of the Order of the Good Death. She and her sisters are used to being called out to deal with hauntings all over Lenorum. But the (un)dead woman Maeve meets after a long afternoon of grave tending is, well, a lot more solid than most of the dead folks she normally deals with. This one is also a lot more coherent and persuasive than the others, so much so that she convinces Maeve to help her solve her own murder. That meeting develops into one of the most unusual love stories I’ve read in a long time. Readers who love impossible romances, twisty mysteries, and original settings will adore Grayson Daly’s The Untimely Undeath of Imogen Madrigal...

Read the rest of my review at A Bookish Type. I received a free copy of this book from the publisher via NetGalley, for review consideration.

Set more than 100 years before the founding of the Metropolitan Police and Scotland Yard, Robert J. Lloyd’s astonishingly gripping mystery, The Bloodless Boy, features two natural philosophers (scientists before we had the term scientist) investigating a fiendish series of murders in London. On a very cold January morning in 1678, Robert Hooke and his former assistant, Harry Hunt, are charged by Justice of the Peace Sir Edmund Berry Godfrey to find out who is responsible for the death of a boy. Why two natural philosophers? Well, the boy was found entirely drained of blood. Who better to find out what really happened than two people dedicated to Reason, in a city on the edge of anti-Catholic fervor and superstition? Both men have followed their intellectual curiosity wherever it might take them: meteorology, cryptography, medicine, chemistry, mathematics, physics, microscopy, geology, and more. To them, it’s all Natural Philosophy instead of the narrow fields of later scientists. Which, I suppose, does make them good potential investigators, even if they’ve never actually dabbled in forensics...

Read the rest of my review at A Bookish Type.