Category: General

About time I checked this one out, I think. I’ve been wanting to see what so many people were talking about, and I’ve been watching the vlogbrothers for years now. Not big on John Green’s books ((Just not my thing)) but this was a genre book so maybe it would be a better fit for me!

The book follows April May, who finds an interesting statue on the streets of New York and becomes an internet sensation and the face of what turns out to be an alien invasion of sorts. The aliens have come bearing a message and they have chosen April as the person to deliver it, even if she has no idea what they’re trying to say. Fortunately, there are dreams and a whole network of people trying to solve them in order to figure out the puzzle.

The story does a thing that I like a lot ((And also a thing I personally do a lot)) — use the fantastical elements as a backdrop to frame a more human story. The core of this focuses much more on what celebrity does to April, how she reacts and changes because of it, and the people who come into her life because of it.

With the focus so squarely on April, it makes the world feel both larger and smaller in that there are several things that happen that have nothing to do with her that she hears about secondhand or in passing. I love seeing that in fiction, especially since I feel like a lot of books these days feel the need to bring everything into the foreground and force the leads to participate in every piece of the narrative.

Overall, I liked it! It’s an interesting look into what that kind of sudden celebrity can do to a person, and the aliens provided an interesting frame to the story. I also really liked what was being done with the aliens, how they communicated, and that feeling that the story was bigger than what was on the page. It’s a great read!

Did you know there was an Ikea horror novel? Because I have known about it for a while now and I’ve finally gotten around to checking it out!

Horrorstor focuses on Amy, a woman working what feels like a dead-end job at an Ikea knockoff store called Orsk. There’s been some vandalism happening overnight when no one is in the store. She is asked to stay and Amy along with her coworkers discover that the store has been built on an asylum and it’s being haunted by the inmates and the old warden, who thinks he can heal them of their illnesses.

The book feels very much like it was written by someone who has spent a long time in retail and I appreciate that. Amy needs the job, but she does not buy into the corporate platitudes that insist that Orsk is a family and that it should be an integral part of her life like some of her coworkers have taken it, which feels familiar to even my office positions.

I also really like how the parallels between retail and imprisonment worked. They are obvious to anyone who’s been in retail for a while, but it’s entertaining to watch them come alive on the page as the people in the store are dragged deeper into the store and try to get out. ((Or not get out…)) Each of the characters is an archetype and it all plays very nicely together to make a fun ride.

Overall, I really enjoyed it! It reads a lot differently than some of the other books I’ve been reading lately, but I think it was just what I needed to get out of the reading funk I’ve been in. And it was a great time, so I’d recommend it to anyone looking for something… maybe not light, but a quick horror story that isn’t going to give you nightmares.

Someone recommended A Darker Shade of Magic to me so here I am having read it! I don’t remember who suggested it, but thank you, it was a great read!

The book follows Kell, an Antari from Red London and one of the few people who can travel between worlds. In his travels between worlds, you learn about Grey London, which has almost no magic, Red London where magic is a happy thing, and White Lonon where magic is power and things are bad. He is handed a relic from Black London, one that has been essentially lost because it was too dangerous, and he needs to cast it back into Black London before it can do any harm. However, the power it grants could tip the balance in power and give White London the chance to be even more dangerous.

And a whole lot more stuff. But that’s the main bit.

I really enjoyed the book! Kell was a lot of fun, especially since he was able to move from the darker to the lighter moods in a way that I haven’t seen a lot in other stories. The worlds are interesting and the culture between each of them makes them unique and very easy to make the shifts from one universe to the other really clear. I do love a world hopping story, and there’s a lot of world details that make things really entertaining.

Also Lila. I know she was a main part of the story and she was a lot of fun, but you can explain the main plot of the book without her. She’s fantastic, though, and I do enjoy how casually bloodthirsty she is at all times.

Overall, I really liked it and would highly recommend it. At least, it was something that struck the right balance of what I was looking for at the moment.

I got the sequel already! That was really fast. Solutions and Other Problems continues the trend of being a series of anecdotal essays looking into the life of one woman as she tries to understand life and several of the animals and people who have come in and out of her own.

It’s just as satisfying a read as the first. It has fewer moments of devastation, but the devastation of this one seems to hit harder when it comes. There’s also more of a feeling that there are stories that are specifically not being told as well, like restraint has been learned over the course of writing the last one and now there is more care in choosing what to tell. It’s not a bad thing by any means, it only means that I want to read more.

Overall, it’s again one that I know I’ll need to be in a specific mood in order to read again, but I still greatly enjoyed the experience. It focuses much less on the themes of mental health this time and more on anecdotes, but it is still a great read.

The City and the City is a murder mystery that focuses on the death of a woman who was found essentially in the wrong city, and trying to figure out what happened to her. More than that, though, the story is about two cities that share the same physical space, that crosshatch in places, and that people can move between even though doing so is illegal. To acknowledge the existence of the other city is illegal and you can be taken by the mysterious Breach if you dare to acknowledge that there is something else there.

The focus is really more about the two cities than the murder mystery. It seems very much that the murder is more used as a way to explore the way the fact that there are two of them, and how they try to insist that they are different and how little this whole setup actually works. The story gets lost at times in the exploration of how the two cities insist that they are not sharing a physical space.

The ending was unsatisfying for me, but not entirely unexpected. Throughout the book they talk about how the setup of the universe doesn’t work for anyone but never really address it in a meaningful way, opting instead to maintain the status quo as if it goes without saying that it is the correct thing to do. When in the end that was never addressed, never questioned, never anything, I felt a bit cheated.

Overall, it’s okay. The premise is interesting, but the story isn’t quite sure what it really cares about. It’s not one I’ll be going back to.

Starting off the new year with a book that I’ve been meaning to read for ages! I enjoyed the blog, but somehow I have managed to buy three copies of this book in my life and never read it. Finally, my time has come!

Hyperbole and a Half is a series of personal illustrated anecdotes following Allie Brosh’s life. There’s no real narrative arc, but there is a theme of self discovery that permeates through the whole book. It’s light at times, and the addition of the comics interspersed with the text keeps the tone from getting quite as dark or heavy as the subject matter gets at times. The themes of mental health struggles are heavy in this book, including two sections specifically on depression. It’s certainly an enlightening look at it and very relatable at times, where other times it feels more like I gained a better understanding of what other people are going through.

Overall, I really enjoyed it! I don’t know that it was fun and I know any rereading I do of the book will require me to be in a specific state of mind, but it is a worthwhile read and I think one I will eventually come back to again, if only for specific chapters.