Post by Liz n Dick on Sept 18, 2023 9:44:04 GMT -5
Baseball is winding down, so we're winding back up with our reading. Recently:
Lisa Scottoline, Loyalty. Woof. This was another title from our "psychological thrillers" mystery-of-the-month club, and Boomer was excited because she said she's enjoyed other books by the author. The hardcopy was gorgeous, too; under the dust jacket it was bright lemon yellow, and I really liked the look and feel of the pages. Alas, the book itself read like a middle-schooler's history report. I guess Scottoline's oeuvre is modern legal thrillers/mysteries? Something like that? This is set in early 19th-century Sicily, though, I guess telling a story of the birth of the Mafia? I wouldn't know, because we didn't get that far. The exposition was clunky and felt like we were reading the author's justification for writing off an Italian vacation as a business expense; there was lots of "I learned history!" list-making, shit like "Gaetano walked down the road in the heart of the city, the street lined with shops of fishmongers, cobblers, lacemakers, cheese merchants, woodworkers, and letter-writers who would write and read letters to customers, as 90 percent of the population of the island was illiterate." And the dialog was even clunkier. Everyone spoke in exclamations, and exposited as poorly as the narrative. Shit like, "Marco, we are brothers! But mother taught me to read, and not you! We live in a feudal state! But the land here is rich! We grow lemons, primarily, but also ( ::list of crops, oh my god, seriously, this isn't an actual quote but it could be:: )!" We got way deeper into this dumb book than it deserved, where there were about six different totally uninteresting stories going on, and they seemed to have nothing to do with each other, and finally we quit and Hugs looked up the plot synopsis and it sounds like it never came together and never made any more sense. UGH.
Laura Sims, How Can I Help You. Another from the book-of-the-month club, and this one we dove right into because Hugs is a librarian, and this was about librarians. Unlike Hugs, this was about very creepy librarians, though. This book was SUCH a delight to read aloud. The story is about Margo, a beloved small-town librarian, who appeared in her job one day a few years earlier with a mysterious past... as a killer nurse. No one on staff knows anything about this, until Patricia, a young new librarian, joins the staff. Margo finds herself inexplicably drawn to Patricia, inexplicably willing to open up a little bit about her past... and then Patricia finds herself compelled to dig deeper and deeper into the mysteries Margo is on the run from. The narrative swung between Margo's and Patricia's POVs, and it was great, giddy fun inhabiting the skin-crawling creepiness of the characters. It's a slim book, and the pace was a blast to enjoy aloud, the tension ratcheting up and up and up, as the stakes got higher and higher and higher... I completely loved this, and it was a great kick-off for Spooky Story Season!
Lisa Scottoline, Loyalty. Woof. This was another title from our "psychological thrillers" mystery-of-the-month club, and Boomer was excited because she said she's enjoyed other books by the author. The hardcopy was gorgeous, too; under the dust jacket it was bright lemon yellow, and I really liked the look and feel of the pages. Alas, the book itself read like a middle-schooler's history report. I guess Scottoline's oeuvre is modern legal thrillers/mysteries? Something like that? This is set in early 19th-century Sicily, though, I guess telling a story of the birth of the Mafia? I wouldn't know, because we didn't get that far. The exposition was clunky and felt like we were reading the author's justification for writing off an Italian vacation as a business expense; there was lots of "I learned history!" list-making, shit like "Gaetano walked down the road in the heart of the city, the street lined with shops of fishmongers, cobblers, lacemakers, cheese merchants, woodworkers, and letter-writers who would write and read letters to customers, as 90 percent of the population of the island was illiterate." And the dialog was even clunkier. Everyone spoke in exclamations, and exposited as poorly as the narrative. Shit like, "Marco, we are brothers! But mother taught me to read, and not you! We live in a feudal state! But the land here is rich! We grow lemons, primarily, but also ( ::list of crops, oh my god, seriously, this isn't an actual quote but it could be:: )!" We got way deeper into this dumb book than it deserved, where there were about six different totally uninteresting stories going on, and they seemed to have nothing to do with each other, and finally we quit and Hugs looked up the plot synopsis and it sounds like it never came together and never made any more sense. UGH.
Laura Sims, How Can I Help You. Another from the book-of-the-month club, and this one we dove right into because Hugs is a librarian, and this was about librarians. Unlike Hugs, this was about very creepy librarians, though. This book was SUCH a delight to read aloud. The story is about Margo, a beloved small-town librarian, who appeared in her job one day a few years earlier with a mysterious past... as a killer nurse. No one on staff knows anything about this, until Patricia, a young new librarian, joins the staff. Margo finds herself inexplicably drawn to Patricia, inexplicably willing to open up a little bit about her past... and then Patricia finds herself compelled to dig deeper and deeper into the mysteries Margo is on the run from. The narrative swung between Margo's and Patricia's POVs, and it was great, giddy fun inhabiting the skin-crawling creepiness of the characters. It's a slim book, and the pace was a blast to enjoy aloud, the tension ratcheting up and up and up, as the stakes got higher and higher and higher... I completely loved this, and it was a great kick-off for Spooky Story Season!
