🩶🍎🐍🍎🩶 T. Kingfisher's Latest 🎉🥳

I was fortunate enough to read  Hemlock & Silver the week it was released. T. Kingfisher is a favorite of mine. Her heroines tend to be middle-aged, intelligent women who are brave enough to step into a difficult situation and savvy enough to know there might not be a happy ending. Her latest book is a retelling of Snow White. There are lots of mirrors, poison, apples, an evil queen, a young girl in danger, and much more. Kingfisher's plot tend to be edgy with elements of horror. I don't consider myself a horror fan, but it does perk up the suspense and keeps things spicy in Hemlock & Silver. I'm not the best at predictions, but I think this will be considered for Goodreads' fantasy book of the year. I'll vote for it!

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    What Time the Sexton's Spade doth Rust by Alan Bradley is the 11th in the Flavia de Luce Mystery series. I was surprised to see it because #10, published five years ago, was the series finale. I'm not sure why Alan Bradley picked the series back up, but I have thoughts.

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The plot is a hot mess. Agatha Christie wrote some Hercule Poirot mysteries about a secret society, known as the Big Four, perhaps? There were not her best work. And this book was not Alan Bradley's best either, for much the same reasons. If you like the series, and I do, it is agreeable to revisit a child who reminds me a lot of Wednesday Addams. She is now twelve and is starting to wonder what her life will become as an adult. I like Flavia, who is creepy, intelligent, and somewhat naive. I think the plot would be more effective if it focused on murders in her village; however, I did enjoy catching up with the residents of Buckshaw.

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🐌🐚🌪️😵‍💫🌀 I Read Horror Manga on the Advice of a 15-year-old. Big Mistake or Bad Idea?

    My 15-year-old grandson recommended the Manga Uzumaki by Junji Ito. It is a creepy story of how the image of a spiral slowly drives an entire town into horrible, horrible behavior. So sinister. That said, the images were arresting. Junji Ito is a talented storyteller and artist. He explores various types of spirals, including staircases, snail shells, whirlwinds, and more. If you like Manga and horror, have I got a book for you!

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    I have been reading Abby Jimenez this summer and enjoying it. Life's Too Short (The Friend Zone #3) became available this week. This book is both a standalone and also contains characters from other books. That made it a fun scavenger hunt of looking for past characters. Jimenez gives her character steep growth curves of troubles in the form of family, health, and toxic coping methods. The meet-cute is a famous YouTuber, Vanessa Price, and her baby niece is keeping her hot attorney neighbor up. Adrian Copeland comes to complain and ends up holding the baby so she can take a shower. Vanessa opens the eyes of this workaholic to the idea that there's more to life, and he challenges her live-in-the-moment philosophy. As always, there is a dog. 

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I fell down an Emily Wilde's rabbit hole and read both book 2, Emily Wilde's Map of the Otherlands, and book 3, Emily Wilde's Compendium of Lost Tales. I like the first book, but I really like the second book better. The third and final book of the series provided a satisfactory ending. I was surprised that both books were available on Libby, as I thought I would be on a waiting list. Heather Fawcett has created a delightfully academic (nerdy) heroine. There is a romance that compels the book, but what stands out is Emily. She is usually the one doing the rescuing due to her extensive studies, a strong moral compass, and her compassion for the underdog, as well as her bravery. The book doesn't describe her as wearing glasses, but in my mind, she does. This is a solid, likable fantasy series.

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    I have been reading Martha Grimes for over thirty years, so we are both mature. The Red Queen is the most recent in the Richard Jury Mystery series. Because I have known the two main characters, Richard Jury, a Scotland Yard Detective, and his good friend, Melrose Plant, the talented amateur who can get into places Jury can't. Grimes has a knack for quirky, memorable characters that recur. In many ways, she reminds me of Louis Penny. The Red Queen's plot wasn't as tight as that of previous books, but it featured interesting backstories for two essential side characters. I wonder if this will be the last mystery in the series.

https://barbpruittwrites.blogspot.com/search?q=Martha+Grimes

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🥹😭 👽🧚‍♂️Frederik Backman Wrecks ME! Sci-fy and Fairies to the Rescue

    I'm having a Frerik Backman week. My Friends is his latest novel. Backman's stories break hearts, offering a front-row seat to the sadness and abuse in the world. Then he brings together damaged opposites who help each other heal. He writes what it feels like to be an anxious person so well that it makes me anxious.

"People say that anxiety is fear for no reason, but Ted's brain is very helpful when it comes to providing suggestions. Once he read a book that said that people with neuropsychiatric disorders need to "make friends with their brain," but Ted and Ted's brain are not friends, they're classmates, forced to do a group assignment called "life" together. And it's not going great."
― Fredrik Backman, My Friends

He has a gift for descriptive metaphors that provoke giggles. 

"The birds are like tourists. They screech and make a mess, but you're not allowed to shoot them…"

Backman's stories pierce and penetrate, giving incentive to care more about those you love and those who are unloved.

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    The Answer is No, by Fredrik Backman, translated by Elizabeth Denoma, is short and sweet. Backman takes the absurd and makes it plausible, such as a woman pretending to be in a coma and hiding from her family at her doctor's apartment. Or a trash pile being declared a hill to keep it from becoming the city's problem. Or a Facebook group that believes in angels showing up to worship a neighbor. For only 60 pages, Backman creates beautiful chaos.

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    Infinite Archive is the third book in The Midsolar Murders series by Mur Lafferty. They are a great mash-up of mystery and science fiction. I would like to tour Lafferty's brain because her plots are clever and inventive, bordering on wacky, and the characters she invents, like aliens made of rock and space ships that are the internet, are captivating. Her large cast of characters behaves questionably — a key element to a mystery series, with numerous potential victims and suspects. Infinet Archive has space babies and cats! Win!

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        After reading the emotional rollercoaster that is Frederick Backman, I was ready for something enjoyable and escapist. Emily Wilde's Encyclopaedia of Faeries was perfect. Emily Wilde is a professor at Cambridge in the field of faeries — she is a dyriadologist. She travels to a faraway island in Norway to study the elusive frost faeries, where she is followed by her Cambridge rival,  handsome Wendell Brambleby, who leads a charmed life as the head of the department. His students are always eager to do whatever he asks, making research and field work more of a vacation than a chore. Emily is a grumpy, thorough scholar who struggles with the niceties of social interaction. She inadvertently offends the insular inhabitants of Hrafnsvik, Ljosland, forcing her to accept help from Bramblely. There is much to discover and learn, but she can be her biggest impediment. 

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🐯🪄🦹‍♀️ Much Magical Realism

 

    Recommended by my daughter Noelle (linktr.ee/NMcManusArt), I started reading another book by Yangsze Choo, The Night Tiger. Last week, I read The Fox Wife, and it was a fantastic book:  several-excellent-books.html. The Night Tiger is equally excellent. It contains so much and could be categorized as historical fiction — it takes place in the 1930s, incorporates magical realism, and features a suspenseful romance. At the heart of the book are Jin-Li, the dance hall girl, and Ren, the Chinese house boy. Together, they must set the world right, placating the mysterious night tiger.

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    Last week, I read The Unmaking of June Farrow by Adrienne Young. This week, I read her previous book, Spells for Forgetting, as it is considered her breakthrough book. There is an island off the Northwest Coast called Saoirse. Its insular natives know it is more than it seems. As a teenager, Emery was eager to leave with her true love, August. Then her best friend died under mysterious circumstances, and August leaves without her. Years later, August returns to bury his mother, and the past, the island, and its inhabitants want revenge.

 https://barbpruittwrites.blogspot.com/search?q=Adrienne+Young

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    Hench by Natalie Zina Walschots was a surprising book. In the blurb, it stated that the main character was angry, which made me less inclined to read it. I understand there is no story without conflict, but I have a big conflict-avoidant streak, and it made me resistant to reading the book. I did, and I'm glad I did. Anna is the lowest level of henchperson. She works for a temp agency and is hired to be an extra in a villain's ransom plot, where she becomes collateral damage. This lights a fire in her belly to expose the "good" guys. Walschots has thought-provoking things to say about what nudges some towards evil-doing and others to the hero business, while at the same time sustaining a turbo-paced plot with a large cast of weird, wonderful characters with odd superpowers. It wrestles with the morally grey areas of who's a good guy and who's a bad guy.  

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