Reading List by Jennie for Summer 2024
The Return of Ellie Black by Emiko Jean
Detective Chelsey Calhoun has a complicated personal history. A transracial adoptee (she’s Japanese) whose father was the police chief of a small, very white Washington town, Chelsey experienced racism growing up and felt isolated from her peers. She did, though, have a close relationship with her sister Lydia; close in age, they were almost like twins.
Then, tragedy: Lydia disappeared at age 15, believed to be the victim of a secret boyfriend (he was found dead, an apparent suicide, but Lydia’s body was never found). The crime fractured Chelsey’s family – her mother left and it was just Chelsey and her father, whose pre-existing anger issues were only exacerbated by Lydia’s murder.
In the present, Chelsey is married and working for the same police force that her father, now dead, was chief of. She gets a call that a local girl who has been missing for two years has been found alive, having emerged from the woods emaciated and injured.
Ellie Black is closed mouth on where she’s been and who abducted her. Chelsey is determined to uncover the truth and begins to tie Ellie’s disappearance to other missing girls in the area.
The story is told from multiple perspectives, chiefly Chelsey’s and Ellie’s. Chelsey is in some ways a tough heroine to warm up to – emotionally closed off and stubborn. But as the story unfolds she develops into a sympathetic protagonist.
The plot is rather byzantine, but both Chelsey and Ellie held my attention. There were several twists at the end, one that I didn’t see coming (partly because I’d missed a plot point earlier, to be honest) and one that I thought was maybe unnecessary in how it tied all the characters together. I gave The Return of Ellie Black a B.
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What Stays Unsaid by Sophie Flynn
The problem with picking a book that ticks all of your “ooh, I love these suspense plot elements” boxes, is that sometimes that’s all it does. While What Stays Unsaid didn’t entirely fail to rise above the familiar tropes, it didn’t do anything really interesting with them.
Tropes I’ve enjoyed: a group of friends, an isolated country house, a storm (actually, I kind of roll my eyes at the appearance of storms at this point; they are ubiquitous when the first two elements are present), a member of the friend group that died tragically years before, and SECRETS. Duh duh dun!
Millie and Alex are recently engaged (um, not to each other – each has a fiancé). Both are roped into a surprise hen-do (what Americans would call a bachelorette party) by their friends Georgia and Jenny. Unbeknownst to Georgia and Jenny, Millie and Alex are recently estranged, making the party awkward from the get-go. The specter of the original fourth member of the group hangs over the events as well (Jenny is a replacement; she met the group in college). Millie, Alex, Georgia and Becca met in school and were fast friends, until Becca was tragically murdered.
The first night is well underway with games and too much prosecco, when one of Georgia’s “surprises” shows up – Becca’s lookalike younger sister, Katie.
What Stays Unsaid never quite launched for me. Everything felt mid – the characters were okay, but not terribly interesting, the mystery was fine, but nothing new. The prose was decent, which helped. But the weight of the tropes seemed to bog the story down – I don’t know if I just expected more from it going in, maybe? In any case, my grade is a B-.
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In a Dark Mirror by Kat Davis
This one was a little different, and perhaps because of that didn’t really work for me. Basically, it’s a fictionalized version of a true crime – the “Slenderman stabbing” in 2014, in which two adolescent girls obsessed with an imagined supernatural entity lured a classmate into the woods, stabbed her and left her for dead. In a Dark Mirror is apparently pretty faithful to the details of the real case, which felt a bit distasteful to me.
Maddie has been best friends with Lana for years; together they have been dedicated to playing in an imaginary world. But Lana, who is unbeknownst to Maddie is slipping into early-onset childhood schizophrenia, begins speaking of an entity “Him”, who only she can see and whose commands she feels compelled to follow. Maddie, desperate to not be left behind by her only friend, feels torn. Lana dominates Maddie, and she finds it hard to know what is right and what is Lana’s will. When a new girl moves into the neighborhood, Maddie sees a potential new friend; Lana sees the perfect victim.
The story switches back and forth between the lead-up to the crime, and the present day, in which Maddie has been released from 10 years in an institution. She struggles to reintegrate into society and find a job. Maddie is stuck living with her mother and her odious stepfather. She soon finds an escape reading a message board dedicated to the crime she and Lana committed and to “Him.” Maddie imagines she can turn some of the more concerning posters there from following the dark path she did, but it’s hard to be sure she’ll make the right choice this time.
In a Dark Mirror was, well, dark, and I found it depressing. The whole build-up to the inevitable crime felt a bit like a runaway train – inexorable and unavoidable. Maddie is mildly sympathetic but not particularly likable. I felt sorry for her but she also creeped me out.
The ending had a ray of hope, which I appreciated. Still, my grade for this one is a C.
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Confessions on the 7:45 by Lisa Unger
After reading and enjoying Unger’s The New Couple in 5B recently, I decided to dig into her backlist. I found this slightly less accessible than the book, due to multiple narrators and my confusion about how they fit together.
Selena Murphy seems to have it all – a loving husband, two adorable children, a good job. But as the story opens, she sits in her office one evening and uses a computer connected to her nanny cam to watch her husband Graham have sex with said nanny Geneva.
Going home on the titular train, Selena encounters a stranger, Martha, who plies her with mini-bottles of vodka and invites confidences (she confesses her own secret immediately: she’s sleeping with her married boss). Selena somehow finds herself admitting that she “thinks” her husband is sleeping with the nanny (she can’t quite bring herself to admit that she KNOWS).
The meeting is unsettling and Selena almost immediately regrets sharing confidences. She goes home and confronts Graham, and shortly after her perfect world explodes. Geneva goes missing.
The multiple narrators come into the story early. There’s Anne, a cool cucumber who is not what she appears. She’s having an affair with her boss (the connection between Anne and Martha isn’t hard to figure out).
There’s a teenaged narrator, Pearl, whose story is set in an earlier timeline. Pearl lives with her feckless mother and her mother’s boyfriend-du-jour, Charlie.
A private investigator, Hunter Ross, who for years has been obsessed with the cold case of a missing girl, shows up in the narrative about halfway through.
I found the alternating narrators confusing at first. Selena seemed straightforward, and Martha/Anne is clear early on (I don’t *think* I’m spoiling anything there), but how does Pearl fit in? How do these stories fit together?
Selena is less than truthful with the police when they begin investigating Geneva’s disappearance. It was frustrating to read because of course you know that it’ll come out – there is VIDEO of Geneva and Graham having sex! At the same time, I understood. She was desperately trying to hold onto the illusion of her old life. In her attempts to do so, she reconnects with Martha, realizing that she’s a loose end who knows about the Graham/Geneva affair.
In retrospect, the connection between these various threads was…well, not obvious, since I didn’t figure it out until slightly before the revelation. But it made sense and was well done, I thought.
The story has an ending that is similar to The New Couple in 7B – I wonder if it’s a signature of Unger’s. Let’s just say that certain characters who seemed suspicious were, but not of what they are initially suspected of. I have mixed feelings about this twist because it feels a little manipulative. But I suppose most thrillers are manipulative by their very nature. My grade here was a high B.
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Emiko Jean’s book Mika in Real Life was highly recommended to me by a friend. It’s not a thriller but the concept reminded me of an Emily Giffin book and I remember you used to like those. So it might appeal to you.
Would you say that romantic suspense is your favorite genre now? I’m curious because you read a lot of them but they seem to be less prominent than they used to be.
@Janine: That Jean book sounds really interesting – I may check it out.
I’m not sure about “favorite” – my reading continues to be fraught and just not nearly as prolific as it used to be. I would say that suspense (and I do prefer suspense with romantic elements) is now my idea of “easy” reading, a position that used to be held (briefly) by new adult and for a long time before that by historical romance.
Historical romance feels hard because I just feel my dislike of tropes and other irritations so keenly when I read it, so I almost have to brace myself to read a historical romance at this point. Which makes me sad. I also used to try to read a non-fiction and a classic book along with whatever “quicker” reading I was doing, but I haven’t read a classic since I abandoned a book early this year for having gross antisemitic stereotypes. (I’m thinking about starting one for my annual “Halloween sort-of-scary classic” read.
As for non-fiction, I have been reading Erik Larson’s latest for MONTHS but it’s a slog for me – it’s about the run up to the Civil War. Some parts are interesting and some parts are about the size of guns at Fort Sumter and there is no universe in which I could care less about that.
I want to rediscover my love of reading. I should probably spend less time on Reddit and Instagram – I am way too old to be one of those people with an ever-shrinking attention span caused by social media.
@Jennie: Interesting (and sad) rundown. Historical romance isn’t my most read genre either these days, and I write in it (although I write the kind of book I want to read and research the crap out of my manuscripts despite all the extra time it takes). I think that the predominance of books that portray the 19th century as so much better and more enlightened than it was has driven many of the readers who prefer a different kind of book.
I know I read more fantasy now, more contemporaries than I used to, and I’m even branching into literary fiction, a genre that drove me away with how unlikable the characters were and/ or how relentlessly pessimistic some of the books were. I’ve been an able to find ones that aren’t like that, and one or two land on my best of the year lists every year, which is about as many or more than the number of historical romance books that land there.
With regard to shrinking attention spans, I think it’s happening to me too. I got into video games and I swear it’s ruining my brain.
@Janine: I am sorry to interfere in your conversation :), but since I have had my shair of complaints about finding good historical romance these days, I want to mention this bit which both made me sad and amused me. I looked at m/m romance which was presumably set in Middle Ages relatively recently. Granted, the description and tone made me wary already, but some reviews confirmed it. One review said – historical romance for people who hate history :(. Head desk.
That would be share, not *shair. Ugh.
@Janine: Anachronistic portrayals are definitely one of my complaints about historical romance. Especially when they are used to show that the hero and/or heroine are better than other people. It’s such an unnuanced take, and it aggravates me.
There are fantasy novels I love but generally I don’t find it a “comforting” genre because there’s just more effort involved in reading all the world-building and the names (I find the unfamiliar names in fantasy *really* hard to keep straight). Literary fiction is also rarely comforting or easy, but I dip my toes in every now and then.
I think a lot of reading for me is sort of a risk/reward paradigm, in part because I’ve never grown out of my habit of wanting to finish books once I start them (the Larson is testing me, though). Romance and now suspense have been low risk/high reward genres for me, because even the worst books usually hold my attention. That’s not so true for historical romance any more, though it might still be truer there than in other genres.
@Jennie: There’s a ton of fantasy right now that is low on the kind of intensive worldbuilding you’re thinking of. Lots of books set in our world or in magical libraries for example. Or fantasy where people wake up in their past and encounter people they knew then from a more mature perspective. Lots and lots of Groundhog Day type fantasy or Sliding Doors type fantasy. Cozy fantasy is a huge trend too. Just yesterday I got an email with this book description:
This too is a trope right now.
My impression (though I could be wrong) is that these accessible worldbuilding fantasy novels are a lot more common these days than books with detailed and/or dense worldbuilding.
BTW, I sometimes think we mean different things in our use of the term worldbuilding. To me worldbuilding is something that every book has, regardless of genre. The history-focused historical romances do a lot of worldbuilding. The fluffy ones also do worldbuilding, but it’s often less detailed and for me, less believable. Frequently because the worlds aren’t self-consistent, in that the characters have the street cred of rebels while the worlds present them with no siginficant obstacles or constraints to rebel against.
@Sirius: LOL funny. I have no problem with people enjoying these books but what does bother me is how hard it’s become to find the other kind of historicals.
@Jennie:
Raises hand. I read AITAH way too much lately.
@Janine: Right exactly I do read romps, but I just want to read the other ones too and alas, so hard to impossible to find
@Janine: I’m sure you’re right that all books use worldbuilding, but my issue with fantasy worldbuilding is that so many of the elements are unfamiliar to me and thus require a higher level of attention and concentration. That said, I am open to more accessible worldbuilding fantasy! (I feel like the Fire and Ice series by George R.R. Martin is an example of fairly accessible fantasy – the names are different, but they are riffs on familiar names; the world is similar to a real medieval world, with some magical enhancements. Not saying those books don’t have issues that make them problematic for some readers, but from a worldbuilding POV I feel like they are very accessible.)
@Jayne: Oh, man – same.
@Jennie: I’ll try to come up with recs for you. It sounds like you are interested in epic fantasy that has easy to pronounce names and somewhat familiar settings… is that correct? Does the level of magic make a difference? Are you also interested in historical fantasy (for example I just finished a fantasy novel set in Inquistion Spain which is named as such) or contemporary fantasy (real world, our own time, but with magic, and a different feel than urban fantasy)? What about multiverses or time twists? YA fantasy (I know you like the Megan Whalen Turner series but I don’t know if you read any others)? There is really a ton along those lines these days and the other kind of fantasy you describe (hard to pronounce names, really different settings) is less common than it once was. Romantasy, which is New Adult fantasy romance influenced by blockbusting novels like The Hunger Games or a A Court of Thorns and Roses, is on the ascent right now.
@Jayne: AITAH is hard to resist.
@Janine: Probably historical over contemporary, generally speaking. Alternate history is good. I am fine with magic. I just don’t like things that feel complicated because when stories are complicated I get all Australian Shepherd and spend all my time obsessively going over what I know and have trouble just sinking into the story.
I would probalby like a Court of Thorn and Roses, though I’ve heard it disparaged by some readers. It feels like another one of those books that non-readers really get into (like 50 Shades of Grey, for instance). But maybe I’m being unfair.
@Jennie: I can’t recall if you’ve already tried it, but I wonder if Curse of Chalion by Bujold might appeal to you. The setting feels reminiscent of a long ago Spain. It’s a book I’ve reread at least half a dozen times.
@Kareni: Curse of Chalion is a good suggestion.
@Jennie: I’ll email you with recommendations.
@Jennie: Have you tried Guy Gavriel Kay at all? Based on very real history, very little magic – earlier books have some, but it decreases and I think his older books become mostly history with different names. I mean, stories are his, but take place in recognizable places.
@Kareni: @Sirius: Thanks so much for the suggestions – I will check them out!