"The postwoman Eva Kluge slowly climbs the steps of 55 Jablonski Strasse."

#FirstLineFridays
@@ShyBookOwl

I love China Mieville's work (Embassytown, The City in the City) and I was intrigued to see what his collaboration with Keanu would look like. It took a minute to get into it, but once I did I was hooked. Unute, aka B, is an ageless warrior who regenerates after each death. A partnership of convenience with a US special forces team allows him to direct his "rage fugues" but his true purpose is unknown, even to him. Absorbing and mysterious.

Dawn, aka Aurora, daughter of a Montana cowgirl/outlaw and a dyed in the wool Communist spends her childhood in St. Petersburg and her teen years riding horses out west. She ends up in DC for the Bonus Army march, in Chicago for the 1933 World's Fair, and ultimately in Magnitogorsk, Russia, where she catches the eye of Stalin's secret police. Fascinating and at times harrowing, this is a story that demands the reader's full attention.

Another excellent entry in the Renee Ballard series. When Ballard's car is broken into at the beach, she goes after the perpetrators, resulting in a situation more complicated than she could have imagined. Meanwhile, DNA evidence pops up that could break open a legendary cold case. Tension builds as Ballard navigates her management, the volunteers at the Open/Unsolved Unit and her off the books investigation. Harry Bosch would approve.

In this engrossing story of profound grief and supernatural visitations, Constance turns to a spiritualist to assuage her mother's overwhelming despair after her younger sister dies. When she subsequently learns of a mysterious bequest, Constance feels compelled to uncover the truth about a mystery at its heart. The author deftly portrays the novel's Victorian setting as well as the desperation and despair of a woman trapped by her circumstances.

Annabel, Chloe, Esther & Tanya are surprised to receive an invitation from Poppy, the girl they bullied in their school days, offering a paid vacation on a private island to celebrate her impending nuptials. It soon becomes clear that Poppy has not forgotten their past cruelties, & that each of the four has secrets of her own. A dark & twisty story of revenge that follows familiar tropes, but vividly describes Poppy's torment and its consequences.

This final book in the Indian Lake trilogy finds Jade Daniels back in Prufrock, Idaho, the scene of multiple massacres. Now a history teacher, Jade has barely a moment of peace before violence begins to bubble up around her. More witness than participant, Jade tries to sit this one out if only the world would let her, while still churning out horror movie references to make sense of the unfolding nightmare. A bloody resolution to a gripping series

When Mallory, a young heroin addict in recovery, is hired to babysit 5-year-old Teddy, she hopes it will be a new start. As Teddy's drawings become increasingly dark and elaborate, showing technical skill far beyond his years, Mallory becomes convinced something supernatural is at work, but will anyone believe her? A tense, highly readable and fast-paced thriller--with illustrations! The pictures really brought the story to life.

Miranda, an actor turned college theater professor, lives a life consumed by pain. A bad fall has left her with a body she can no longer count on for anything but torment, while those around her question whether it might just be all in her head. Things take a turn when Miranda meets three strangers at a local pub. They offer her a chance to direct the Shakespeare play of her dreams and let the doubters know how real her pain is, but at what cost?

In this horror novel, Miriam Black is cursed with the ability to see the death of whoever she touches. She roams the country scavenging from those about to die, resigned to witnessing their fates, coping with cigarettes, alcohol and poorly chosen men. One particularly unfortunate choice puts her in the sights of a ruthless psychopath. Definitely not for the squeamish--Miriam is creatively foul-mouthed & the violence when it comes is hyper-violent.

In this fascinating noirish novel, Domingo, a young man who scavenges trash in the vampire-free zone of Mexico City, gets caught up in a deadly war between rival vampire families when he meets Atl, a young vampire on the run. Atl is the descendent of high priestesses who defended Aztec temples, her enemies a gang of vicious newcomers. Unique and intriguing world-building, vivid characters and a distinctive setting made this an exceptional read.

1. Not yet! I finally started putting decorations up yesterday.
2. Mexican vampire noir

#Two4Tuesday
@TheSpineView

In this second book of the series, Calla has accomplished her goal at a terrible cost; now she must find a new destiny. While the first book established certain rules around the ability to jump into another body, this book explores the cheat codes: sigils that permit the user to do the impossible. While not perfect, the series is inventive and intriguing enough that I'll definitely read the next installment whenever it comes out.

I read this for genre book club (the theme: books about books). It was an entertaining if somewhat contrived read. Liv works as a cleaner for reclusive best-selling author Essie Starling. When Essie dies suddenly, Liv is tasked with finishing her final novel, under one condition--she must keep the assignment secret. Her writing empowers Liv but strains her marriage, already feeling pressure from financial difficulties and an impending empty nest.

Inventive and detailed world-building make this a fascinating read, although it gets overly complicated at times. Ahilya is the sole archeologist in her society, which is dominated by the architects, who have the power to manipulate plants and keep their floating city in the sky. Her husband Iravan is a senior architect, a secretive position that has created distance between them. A gripping tale of survival, power and a marriage in trouble.

It took me a long time to finish this one for some reason, although the concept was an intriguing one: looking back at the trends and events of the 1990s that foreshadowed or contributed to our political culture today. Having lived through that decade, it was interesting to see what I remembered, had forgotten, or never knew about David Duke, Pat Buchanan, Ross Perot, Ruby Ridge and many other key elements of the decade.

Jess and Storey, experienced and capable outdoorsmen, are on a hunting trip in the remote woods of Maine when they stumble on scenes of destruction that leave them reeling, unsure where to find safety or means of escape. As the danger becomes clear, Storey focuses on returning to his family while Jess faces his memories of love, regret and loss. Grounded in the beauty of the natural world, this searing novel will stay with me for a long time.

In this tightly plotted disaster thriller, a pilot suffers a fatal heart attack, causing a commercial airliner to crash into a nuclear power plant outside a small town. The staff at the plant and the town's emergency responders face impossible decisions as they struggle to avert a catastrophe. A riveting story of duty versus family, the value of an individual life versus the public good, and risk management versus a true worst case scenario.

Ostensibly about time travel, this novel's real focus is the effects of generational trauma and parental neglect. Ursa makes a new life for herself in California, her ability to travel into her own past a gift that draws followers to her remote home. Her son Ray escapes, yet when his daughter Opal displays the same talent, it threatens to destroy their family. Ursa is truly awful, and her form of time travel seems more like a trap than a gift.

This fast-paced near-future thriller follows Logan Ramsay, the son of a brilliant geneticist responsible for triggering a devastating global famine. To atone, Logan has joined an agency that targets illegal gene editing, but when a raid leads to mysterious changes in Logan's DNA, he faces a choice that could determine the fate of the world. An intriguing and cinematic read.

June Hayward, a struggling novelist, takes advantage of the sudden death of her very successful friend Athena Liu to steal an unpublished manuscript. As June narrates the story of her rise to fame, it is clear her self-absorption and hubris will lead to disaster. The true feat of this gripping novel is that the author manages to humanize June, despite her many, many flaws, while Athena remains a mystery, seen only through the eyes of others.

This tense thriller follows Edwin and Gabriela, two young undocumented employees at a chicken processing plant, as well as Luke and Mimi, the plant manager and his wife. When Edwin impulsively kidnaps Luke and Mimi's baby, Tuck, all four are drawn into a fraught struggle, Edwin's delusional dreams versus Luke's cold need for control. A good read, although the ending felt a little forced; the chicken plant descriptions could qualify as horror.

I read this for book club and although it's not something I would have picked up on my own, it was definitely interesting. Lorenz traces the history of social media platforms from the early days of MySpace to the current world of TikTok. While the book touches on topics like online harassment and misinformation, the true focus is the tension between founders' intentions, corporate profit seeking, and the creative twists innovated by users.

I had high expectations for this new book by the authors of The Expanse; this riveting book managed to exceed them. Dafyd is a research assistant, the lowest cog in an acclaimed research team, and the nephew of a powerful administrator. When unknown objects appear above his planet, his world must face the violent judgment of a powerful colonizing race of aliens. A compelling account of trauma, survival and impossible choices. Next book, please!

After losing her job, May agrees to have her face subtly altered to resist facial recognition in exchange for a significant payment. The cascading effects of this decision in a world populated by humanoid AI robots send May into a downward spiral. This near future dystopia hit very hard; not only did it seem entirely plausible, its depiction of societal dependence on phones and a pathological need for consumption ring all too true. Fascinating.

As in Pratt's delightful Doors of Sleep series, this book features a cheerful, kind protagonist who finds himself hopping across worlds. Glenn's getting his PhD at UC Santa Cruz when he learns his girlfriend (& domme) Vivy is actually a freedom fighter for the Interventionists, a group dedicated to stopping the spread of fascism between worlds. It is in no way explicit, but it's funny how the kink is a more surprising plot point than, say, aliens.

Elin, a police detective struggling to deal with trauma and the recent death of her mother, arrives at a luxury hotel in the Alps hoping to get answers from her estranged brother. Instead, a dead body is discovered just as an avalanche makes it impossible to leave. A taut and compelling thriller, although Elin's anxiety sometimes threatens to overwhelm the reader as much as it does her, and there was a bit of excessive monologuing toward the end.

I think I messed up. Litsy was glitching so I un-installed the app, but when I went to the Google app store, Litsy was nowhere to be found. I tried adding the website to my phone homescreen but now I can't add photos, and that also doesn't seem to work from my laptop. I'm honestly not sure I will keep using it without the app! Has anyone else experienced these issues?

In this broadly comic account of a tragic story, an enslaved 12-year-old boy is freed by John Brown, mistaken for a girl, and spends the next few years enmeshed in Brown's plans for an uprising to end slavery. Henry, aka Onion, is focused mainly on his own survival and definitely not on heroism. By the inevitable end, his attachment to Brown gives emotional resonance to a death that forced a nation to face its sins.

I picked this up at the National Book Festival after hearing the author speak. The son of dissidents who fled the USSR, he traveled to Russia to work as a TV producer, documenting feel good stories while observing the darker undercurrents of power, money and oppression in the years preceding Russia's 2014 annexation of Crimea. A fascinating and prescient glimpse of individual lives against the backdrop of Russia's return to authoritarianism.

I read this book before seeing the author speak at the National Book Festival in DC. The concept is intriguing--a game show that allows you to change key moments of your past via "quantum bubbling"--but the story itself was a bit messy. The changes become increasingly frantic and the mechanism or rules involved don't seem entirely clear.The "choose your own adventure" aspect was promising but didn't quite pay off. Still, an inventive read.

In this brief and impressionistic novel, Lizzie works in a university library in New York and has a side gig answering correspondence for her friend, an increasingly despairing climate scientist. Her brother Henry is in recovery, his anxiety spiraling as he attempts to settle down. The vivid voice and stellar writing made this a compulsive read for me, although it probably wasn't great for my own climate anxiety.

This third book in the Children of Time series explores the meaning of sentience, identity, even reality itself. A crew seeks surviving remnants of the human diaspora on planets in various stages of the terraforming process. They encounter a race of corvids who may or may not be intelligent, and become entangled in the history of a colony ship. Not a good pick for anyone seeking a linear narrative, but absolutely fascinating.

"Thousands of years ago the humans of Earth reached out to the stars."

#FirstLineFridays
@ShyBookOwl

I read this entertaining romance novel for cat book club at the humane society. Lucie is estranged from her aristocratic family because of her dedication to the women's suffrage movement; Tristan is Lord Ballentine, an infamous rogue with hidden depths. And of course there is Lucie's cat Boudicca, who plays a key role in the story. A fast, fun, and well-paced tale framed by the (seemingly neverending) effort to establish equal rights for women.

1. Android! The rest of my family are Apple fans, but I am not.

2. I'm currently reading the tagged book, A Rogue of One's Own, a romance novel selected by my cat book club because it prominently features a cat. I ran out of time to pick up a copy, so I'm reading it on my phone. Good fun!

#Two4Tuesday
@TheSpineView

I read this for book club and it just wasn't my cup of tea. Some terrible events in the early pages are handled with a jaunty tone that felt off, and that initial negative impression made it hard to accept a number of implausible plot points and unlikely coincidences later on. The story follows Elizabeth, a chemist thwarted by misogyny in the 1950s. It picked up a bit once she became the host of a cooking show, but still, not really for me.

I read this engaging novel set during the 1889 Paris Exposition for genre book club (this month's theme: historical fiction). Vincent, orphaned at a young age, has found success as a designer of secret compartments and passages for the wealthy. When his work draws the attention of a secret society, Vincent is desperate to protect his brother and the rest of his team from danger while searching for a long lost sanctuary of legend.

This novella, a dark and unsettling fable, drew me in immediately and was impossible to put down. Veris is the only person known to have entered the forbidden north forest and returned. When the Tyrant's children disappear into its depths and the soldiers he sends after them meet a terrible end, the Tyrant compels her to retrieve them, threatening terrible consequences if she fails. A fascinating, lyrical and deeply sad tale of wisdom and grief.

In this remarkable & sometimes disturbing book, Mr. Kong is a low level office worker who escapes the boredom of his job by reading the mysterious files stored in Cabinet 13. As he becomes embroiled in the tales of the symptomers, unfortunate souls who skip ahead in time or find a lizard has replaced their tongue, Mr. Kong becomes the target of a dangerous syndicate. An absurdist look at the existential woes of modern life, whimsically Kafkaesque.

In this tense and compelling thriller, a group of friends set out to enact retribution for past injustices after the murder of 17-year-old Darius by a group of White assailants. A thought-provoking concept makes it worth reading, although info-dump dialogue and two-dimensional secondary characters were a bit distracting at times. Thematically similar to The Trees by Percival Everett, but told in a more conventional style. A low pick for me.

This gripping book recounts the devastating 2016 fire that ravaged Fort McMurray, a remote town in the boreal forests of Alberta, Canada, that owes its existence to petroleum. As global temperatures rise and fire behaves in ways humanity has never previously encountered--devouring entire houses in mere minutes, forming tornadoes of fire--the true cost of fossil fuel consumption rises higher and higher. A timely and terrifying call to action.

Davico is heir to a wealthy, powerful banking family in Navola, a republic where allowing your true thoughts and feelings to show on your face is the ultimate sign of weakness. Although Davico has an affinity for the natural world, his birthright is an all too human tangle of plotting and manipulation, a fate forever altered by touching a potent relic, the eye of a dragon. An absorbing, immersive and increasingly brutal story of power and betrayal

In a near future London plagued by devastating heatwaves and floods, an unnamed narrator accepts a position as a "bridge," tasked with monitoring a person abducted from their own time by way of a mysterious time door. The narrator, increasingly obsessed with 19th century Arctic explorer Graham Gore, is willfully obtuse in a way that really bothered me. I have mixed feelings about this one mainly because I disliked her so much. Still, worth reading

This powerful novel opens in Shanghai in 2040 and moves backward in time, revealing moments in the lives of the Yang family: Leo, a wealthy structural engineer and Shanghai native; his wife Eko, born in Japan and raised in Paris; their three daughters, Yumi, Yuko and Kiko; and glimpses of the staff whose lives are temporarily interwoven with theirs. Fascinating, beautifully written, and deeply tragic.

Killashandra Ree is a crystal singer, enabled by the symbiont in her bloodstream to heal rapidly and live without aging for centuries. The cost for this longevity is a lifelong need to cut crystal, a process that requires perfect pitch and slowly eats away at her memories. As Killa's memory deteriorates, a chance encounter with a mysterious substance plays a pivotal role in her future. Highly original world-building made this an interesting read.

I read this cozy mystery for cat book club, so of course it prominently features a cat: Agatha C Christie, official bookstore cat at the Book Chalet run by the Christie sisters, Ellie and Meg. While they are not related to the real Agatha Christie, they are avid mystery readers who can't help but search for clues when a stranger interrupts their book club seance only to turn up murdered. A book lover's book with lots of references to baked goods.

Proctor is a ferryman, tasked with leading those who have reached the end of their life to set out on the journey from which they will return as fresh young iterations, with no memory of what came before. But increasingly, Proctor feels that something is wrong, that the world is off. This book is long and it sometimes feels that way, but the conclusion was worth it: a series of reveals, some more unexpected than others, that left me thinking.

This book was part of a fun display at the library where staff blurbed recent reads they'd hated. I can see why this dark, unsettling story wouldn't be everyone's cup of tea, but it was atmospheric and compelling. A man recounts his family's pilgrimage to a shrine in a remote and desolate seaside village, seeking a miracle to cure his older non-verbal brother, Hanny. The trip does not go as planned, and the outcome arrives at a terrible cost.

The 3rd book in this crazy, gross and strangely heart-warming series finds Carl & Princess Donut fighting to survive the 4th floor, a convoluted system of trains called the Iron Tangle. The layout was incomprehensible, but the team ups and betrayals kept things interesting. While the powers outside the dungeon continue to manipulate the game and its players, Carl now has a secret edge in his efforts to beat the system. Looking forward to book 4!