Reading List by Jennie for January through June 2023

JennieBook ReviewsReading lists14 Comments

My reading continues to be fairly dreary and light on romance; aside from the books I’ve reviewed, the suspense books below are all I have to show for the first half of 2023 (apologies for these being more blurb that review – sigh; this is reflective of my meh feelings about most of these books):

The Snowstorm by Triona Walsh

Blurb:

It’s an icy New Year’s Eve. Snow blankets a windswept Irish island as the wild Atlantic Ocean rages.

Six friends gather. It has been ten years since the tragedy that tore them apart. A lot can change in a decade…

Childhood bonds are now lifelong secrets.

Dear friendships have twisted into deep jealousies.

A happy reunion is shattered by a dead body.

The celebrations have barely begun when one of the guests goes missing. As the snow thickens, the body is found.

Then the storm wreaks havoc on the island. Everyone is trapped – there is no way out. No electricity. No phone signal.

Nobody knows who to trust. No one is who they seem. Because one of them is a killer, and one will be dead next…

I picked this up because it had some features I usually enjoy in thrillers: an evocative setting (a remote Irish island), friends reuniting, and a tragic past death that may not be as it seems.

Overall, though, this book was kind of disappointing – it didn’t quite deliver what it promised. For one, I expected a closed circle mystery, but the snowstorm actually didn’t keep the main character or anyone else from wandering all over the island. The villain was obvious though their motive wasn’t. I did like the murder victim which only made me a bit sad that they were dead for the whole story. The setting was evocative but the characterization was lacking. I gave this a B-.

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The Forgetting by Hannah Beckerman

Blurb:

When Anna Bradshaw wakes up in a hospital bed in London, she remembers nothing, not even her loving husband, Stephen. The doctors say her amnesia is to be expected, but Anna feels cut adrift from her entire life.

In Bristol, Livvy Nicholson is newly married to Dominic and eager to get back to work after six months’ maternity leave. But when Dominic’s estranged mother appears, making a series of unnerving claims, Livvy is sucked into a version of herself she doesn’t recognise.

A hundred miles apart, both women feel trapped and disorientated, and their stories are about to collide. Can they uncover the secret that connects them and reconstruct their fractured lives?

This started slow for me in depicting Anna’s amnesia (which didn’t feel true to life – both the fact that the amnesia was so total and that her doctors didn’t seem that concerned about it). The sections with Livvy were a lot more compelling for the first half of the book. Perhaps this was in part because she was a more dynamic character – Anna was such a blank slate (maybe understandably).

I don’t love books where I am at sea for a large part of the story – as a reader I know there’s a connection between Anna and Livvy, but I have no idea what it is. The writing was heavy-handed in trying to suggest a particular direction, which only served to make me sure that it wasn’t as it appeared. I did guess the twist probably in the last third of the book. It wasn’t a twist that could bear up under much scrutiny, I don’t think.

I will say that the last third of the book was compelling to read, and I thought it did a good job of showing how a normal, relatively emotionally healthy person could find themselves bending to the will of a controlling, manipulative partner. I gave The Forgetting a B-.

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Lovely Girls by Margot Hunt

I think this was an Amazon First Read. Blurb time:

After the sudden death of her husband, Kate Turner is looking for a fresh start for herself and her teenage daughter, Alex. They relocate to the beachside town of Shoreham, Florida, where all is not as sunny as it seems.

Although Kate makes fast friends with a trio of fellow moms, their daughters take an instant dislike to Alex, who attempts to document their bullying in her video diary. Kate brushes off Alex’s concerns—until she receives a series of chilling warnings about the clique of moms from other parents and neighbors. As it becomes harder for her to ignore the malicious undercurrent she senses among her new friends, Kate grows increasingly unsure of who to believe—and who to trust.

As small-town gossip weaves a harrowing web of jealousy, deceit, and betrayal, Kate and Alex discover that whether you’re in or out, the status quo can turn on you deadly fast.

This was a fast, breezy read with low stakes and mediocre character development. Even the death of a teenage girl doesn’t really land with a lot of impact somehow. This was yet another B-, probably verging on a C+.

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Out of the Ashes by Kara Thomas

When she was thirteen years old, Samantha Newsom’s family was murdered and their Catskills farmhouse set ablaze in an unsolved crime that left nothing behind but ashes.

Twenty-two years later, Sam is pulled back to her hometown of Carney, New York, under the shadows of the grim tragedy she’s never forgotten or forgiven. Authorities mishandled the evidence, false rumors were seeded about her family, suspects yielded nothing, and the case went cold. Not anymore. Investigator Travis Meacham has been assigned to the case, and he has news for Sam: a prison inmate has come forward with a shocking admission. Sam’s baby sister, presumed dead in the fire, made it out of the house that night.

It’s not the only reveal that upends everything Sam thinks she knows about the crime and her family. But Carney protects its secrets. And this time, Sam might not be able to escape the town alive.

This was the best of the bunch; it was rather well written and entertaining. It reminded me a bit of Gillian Flynn’s Dark Places, a book that I didn’t love because of how dark and grimy it was, but a book that’s stayed with me in the years since I read it. Out of the Ashes is not quite as evocative and compelling, but maybe that’s a good thing, considering how disturbing I found Dark Places.

I will admit that I finished this several months ago and don’t actually remember it entirely, but the setting and characterization were above average. Sam is fairly compelling as a protagonist and the ending is satisfying, if bittersweet. I gave Out of the Ashes a B+.

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The Lying Game by Ruth Ware

When I decided to dig into Ware’s backlist, of course I started with a book partly set at a boarding school and partly set 15 years later after a Terrible Thing Happened. Books partly set at boarding schools or posh colleges where a Terrible Thing Happened and then later when the characters have to confront the Terrible Thing are my suspense jam.

Since I’m letting blurbs do the heavy lifting in this rundown:

On a cool June morning, a woman is walking her dog in the idyllic coastal village of Salten along a tidal estuary known as the Reach. Before she can stop him, the dog charges into the water to retrieve what first appears to be a wayward stick, but to her horror, turns out to be something much more sinister…

The next morning, three women in and around London—Fatima, Thea, and Isabel—receive the text they had always hoped would NEVER come, from the fourth in their formerly inseparable clique, Kate, that says only, “I need you.”

The four girls were best friends at Salten, a second rate boarding school set near the cliffs of the English Channel. Each different in their own way, the four became inseparable and were notorious for playing the Lying Game, telling lies at every turn to both fellow boarders and faculty, with varying states of serious and flippant nature that were disturbing enough to ensure that everyone steered clear of them. The myriad and complicated rules of the game are strict: no lying to each other—ever. Bail on the lie when it becomes clear it is about to be found out. But their little game had consequences, and the girls were all expelled in their final year of school under mysterious circumstances surrounding the death of the school’s eccentric art teacher, Ambrose (who also happens to be Kate’s father).

This one was a bit uneven, though. There’s something about the distribution of the story between the past and the present that feels unbalanced – details like the Lying Game, or the supposedly deep bonds the four girls forge in a relatively short period of time during a single year, weren’t as teased out as I expected them to be. It all felt sketchy, and when the big secret is revealed, it didn’t seem worthy of all the portentousness.

To be clear, the girls were involved in something serious as teenagers, and made a bad choice, but it feels like in real life they would have realized sometime before the story begins that coming clean about it would be by far the smartest choice.

Instead they wait until they are in the midst of a full-blown mystery, replete with bloody warning messages (a slaughtered sheep) and a Heathcliff-ish character skulking around menacingly (Kate’s erstwhile stepbrother, Luc). There’s some business about semi-racy sketches done of the girls back when they were in school, and of course the Bad Thing they did a decade and a half before turns out to be more complicated in the end.

I really like Ware’s writing – the prose is excellent and the setting is appropriately evocative. I feel like in the three books I’ve read so far there’s been a bit of a lack for me in characterization. I will continue to read her backlist though, and I’m giving this a straight B.

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Jennie

has been an avid if often frustrated romance reader for the past 15 years. In that time she's read a lot of good romances, a few great ones, and, unfortunately, a whole lot of dreck. Many of her favorite authors (Ivory, Kinsale, Gaffney, Williamson, Ibbotson) have moved onto other genres or produce new books only rarely, so she's had to expand her horizons a bit. Newer authors she enjoys include Julie Ann Long, Megan Hart and J.R. Ward, and she eagerly anticipates each new Sookie Stackhouse novel. Strong prose and characterization go a long way with her, though if they are combined with an unusual plot or setting, all the better. When she's not reading romance she can usually be found reading historical non-fiction.

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