Book Reviews

Understated, quietly moving, but absolutely brilliant nonetheless, upon finishing Scott Alexander Howard’s debut novel The Other Valley, it immediately shot to the top of my favorite reads of the year. This had everything I love in ambitiously written novels, including my love for time jump/continuity based speculative fiction elements. But what set apart The Other Valley from other similar books for me was its reserved and meticulous character work with its poignant tone and reflections on the choices one makes in their lives and morals behind it. It’s also a coming of age story that’s equally successful at portraying Odile’s life as a teenager as well as an adult in her late 30’s (coming of adult age) that felt so relevant despite the science fiction premise. I have nothing bad to say about The Other Valley which was a home run for me but as per the norm, I will attempt to write a detailed review that’s far too long to describe why I found it amazing. First and foremost, there are two important things that need to be discussed upfront which are potential deal breakers in this book. The first is Howard’s deliberate choice to forgo the use of…

Freida McFadden’s Never Lie is a thriller / psychological crime thriller that has a great plot, some wild (and polarizing) twists, and a premise involving found evidence that never gets old (in this case, tape recordings from therapy sessions). On paper, this should be a standout but unfortunately the execution with the details and the prose left a lot to be desired for me. The biggest twist near the conclusion is a great idea that simply conflicts with the rest of the narrative and makes the entire book’s plot unbelievable. Starting off with the good, Never Lie’s setting at a remote manor that also served as a home office for a mysterious psychiatrist was a great setup. The premise involving found audio tapes recorded by Dr. Adrienne Hale and her clients is a narrative concept I love and the snowed-in setup was a great narrative choice to not only trap Tricia and Ethan in the manor, but to also serve as a plausible source for the odd noises due to snowfall. The core crime mystery involving Adrienne’s sudden disappearance a few years ago and reliving her last known days through the tapes and a split narrative was a page-turner; I…

Side note, it’s hilarious to me how the most liked reviews for this book on Goodreads are in all caps, filled with frenetic energy or absolute distaste for elements that are really quite minor in my opinion. And that’s frankly so amusing to me considering this is possibly one of the least offensive, sickening sweet, and comfy books I’ve read perhaps this year. Falling firmly into the romcom area of the romance/chick lit genres, I thought the Love Hypothesis was a quick read that has a pitch-perfect tone for the story it’s telling. Clearly not intending to change the world nor blow you away with deep and nuanced romance, it’s a fun and light-hearted book decorated with light STEM and academic science references. I previously read Ali Hazelwood’s YA novel Check & Mate based on a friend’s recommendation but had some personal preference issues with some of the teenage angst, so I was encouraged to try her adult novels instead. Interestingly although The Love Hypothesis has a collegiate post-grad setting and two chapters of spice, in many ways it still felt like a YA type of read in that the characters felt quite standard and the plot entirely predictable and…

Unsettling, disturbing, and brilliant in a twisted way, The Possession of Mr. Cave by Matt Haig is an intense read that fully commits to its narrative. Whether most readers are prepared for what that entails is an entirely different discussion (definitely check trigger warnings before hand). The “horror” moniker gets tossed around quite loosely these days, ranging from slashers to psychological insanity to anything that is vaguely related to the supernatural. This book however taps into the quiet, heavy, foreboding type of horror that occurs when someone is witnessing something horrific but can’t look away or stop it; it’s conceptualized like a modern Shakespearean tragedy. The character narration and story is made all the more uncomfortable by Haig’s very effective use of the 2nd person perspective that pulls you into the story and traps you in Bryony’s shoes. The way the novel constantly refers to Bryony as “you” hits home the perspective of the characters and the horrors of what a parent is capable of doing. Complemented by excellent writing and Haig’s now distinctive heavily introspective style, I found this novel to be unlike anything I’ve read in a long time, one that I didn’t necessarily enjoy reading but one…

Yoko Ogawa’s The Memory Police is a poignant and thought-provoking exploration of loss masquerading under a dystopian premise. With the concept of an unexplained totalitarian regime and the premise of police taking objects and people at random intervals, many would expect this novel to be a psychological thriller or mystery. That is not the case at all as Ogawa merely uses the plot elements as framework to discuss and reflect on how people process loss and memories over time in an abstract manner. While subjectively The Memory Police wasn’t quite for me, I still appreciated the beautiful prose and can easily see why this book is critically well respected and worthy of literary analysis. Despite having some similarities initially to other established dystopian works (a lot of people compare it to 1984), at its core I would not consider The Memory Police to technically be a dystopian novel. While there is a plot to the book, it’s quite abstract and not the focus. The female narrator is a writer who enlists the help of an elderly unnamed old man to hide away her editor referred to as “R” from the Memory Police who mandate things and memories associated with them…