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3.31 AVERAGE
3.31 AVERAGE
challenging
dark
mysterious
reflective
Plot or Character Driven:
Character
Strong character development:
Yes
Loveable characters:
Complicated
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes
adventurous
dark
reflective
sad
tense
medium-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
A mix
Strong character development:
No
Loveable characters:
No
Diverse cast of characters:
Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes
challenging
dark
sad
tense
medium-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
A mix
Strong character development:
Yes
Loveable characters:
No
Diverse cast of characters:
Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes
Sing Her Down is a contemporary crime novel about two women released from prison during the peak the Covid crisis and the cat and mouse game they play against each other across Southern California.
Florence (Florida) Baum was a rich girl gone wrong when she started serving her sentence at a prison in Arizona. Diosmary (Dios) Sandoval is her wickedly smart former cell mate and tormentor. When both women are released early on parole Dios will stalk Florida across two states leaving police Detective Lobos to figure out who is the predator and who is the prey.
Sing Her Down is told in alternating POV’s between Florida, Dios, Detective Lobos and inmate Kace. The language is rich and atmospheric and it’s easy to picture every setting and interaction. The backstory of every woman is a character study in all the ways that someone can go wrong and find themselves on the wrong side of the law. Personally, I preferred Detective Lobos’s backstory and POV the most and found her description of the collapse of her marriage eerily realistic.
Sing Her Down is a dark twisted tale of two women colliding after years of being cooped up together in prison. It wasn’t the most enjoyable story to read (random bits of violence and all the human misery that comes with it) but it’s beautifully written and plotted. But I did have a “so what was the point of all that?” feeling at the end which is why I’m giving it three stars.
🎧 audiobook notes: the audio of Sing Her Down was narratted by Frankie Corzo, Kimberly M. Wetherell, Sophie Amoss, Victoria Villarreal. The voices all added an authenticity to the story and brought the characters to life.
🎧 audiobook notes: the audio of Sing Her Down was narratted by Frankie Corzo, Kimberly M. Wetherell, Sophie Amoss, Victoria Villarreal. The voices all added an authenticity to the story and brought the characters to life.
challenging
dark
tense
fast-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
A mix
Strong character development:
Complicated
Loveable characters:
Complicated
Diverse cast of characters:
Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes
NetGalley ARC
3.5 stars
Dios and Florida are both serving time in an Arizona prison when they are released early due to COVID. Florida wants to forget prison and return to her privileged life as Florence Baum. Dios wants to force Florida to acknowledge the darkness inside her. As Florida flees to Los Angeles Dios follows her, leaving a trail of blood in her wake.
This was such an interesting book. It is told in four perspectives: Dios, Florida, the detective chasing them and Florida's old cellmate. Florida and Dois's lives prior to prison are mere sketch, what's important is who they are now. Florida desperately runs around Los Angels in a desperate escape from Dios. The confrontation at the end is perfect.
What I really enjoyed about this book is the depiction of early Pandemic period. Los Angeles in April 2020 seen as a wasteland. Highways are empty, tent cities pop up from nowhere. It captures the strangeness of the time.
3.5 stars
Dios and Florida are both serving time in an Arizona prison when they are released early due to COVID. Florida wants to forget prison and return to her privileged life as Florence Baum. Dios wants to force Florida to acknowledge the darkness inside her. As Florida flees to Los Angeles Dios follows her, leaving a trail of blood in her wake.
This was such an interesting book. It is told in four perspectives: Dios, Florida, the detective chasing them and Florida's old cellmate. Florida and Dois's lives prior to prison are mere sketch, what's important is who they are now. Florida desperately runs around Los Angels in a desperate escape from Dios. The confrontation at the end is perfect.
What I really enjoyed about this book is the depiction of early Pandemic period. Los Angeles in April 2020 seen as a wasteland. Highways are empty, tent cities pop up from nowhere. It captures the strangeness of the time.
dark
tense
medium-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Character
Strong character development:
No
Loveable characters:
No
Diverse cast of characters:
Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes
dark
adventurous
challenging
dark
fast-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
A mix
Strong character development:
No
Loveable characters:
No
Diverse cast of characters:
Complicated
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes
dark
tense
Plot or Character Driven:
Character
In a Nutshell: A gritty cat-and-mouse chase thriller focussing on one woman’s obsession with another, the differentiator being that both women are just-released prisoners. A bit too grisly for my taste. But the author *can* write, no doubt!
Story Synopsis:
Florence Baum, known to her prison mates as “Florida”, portrays herself as an innocent prisoner caught as an unlucky bystander. However, her ex cellmate, Diosmary Sandoval aka Dios, is convinced that Florida is lying and not at all innocent.
When both women are released much before their sentence is over due to covid restrictions warranting clearance of space in prisons, Dios is determined to show Florida how similar they both are. This turns into an unhealthy obsession, leading to dangerous repercussions.
The story comes to us mostly in the third person perspective of Florida and Detective Lobos, who is investigating a crime connected with the two women.
Bookish Yays:
🔥 Excellent prose! I’m not that fond of literary flourishes in the thriller genre as they feel quite artificial, but still, I can’t deny that the author is brilliant at stringing words together. I would have highlighted quite a few lines had I been reading the physical or digital version.
🔥 The depiction of the pandemic and its impact on the homeless and the marginalised. Most covid-related fiction so far has focussed on those with means, so this was a welcome and exceptional portrayal. Seeing characters afraid of a cough brought back some guilty yet funny memories.
🔥 The characters, with the possible exception of Dios, are carved quite intricately. They come across as realistic despite their unusual circumstances. Though we see them only in third person, there is still enough to help us understand their nature.
🔥 Wonderful use of the locations to create an atmosphere of nail-biting tension. Beginning in Arizona and ending in Los Angeles, the writing captures the raw side of both the places.
🔥 The narration comes to us from multiple third-person points of view. Florida’s is the most impactful track, as her backstory and her current insecurities come out clearly.
🔥 Another good track is that of Kase, a fellow prisoner who acts as a sort of Greek chorus, providing us with information to fill in the blanks left by Florida’s track. Her voice is muddling and clarifying at the same time.
Bookish Nays:
💢 Though Dios is a key element of the plot, she barely gets any direct role in the narrative. The book would have worked better for me if I had got a direct glimpse of the machinations of her devious mind.
💢 While I did like Detective Lobos’s track as it offered plenty of elements to ponder upon, I didn’t understand why she needed to be given a voice in what was essentially a Florida-Dios story. It took away from the core plot.
💢 This is a woman-oriented plot all the way. And the strong women characters carry the story well enough. As such, there are limited male characters but even then, all of them are portrayed as stereotypical jerks. This becomes monotonous. Even feminist fiction can have a couple of good male characters.
💢 Dios’ obsession with Florida didn’t feel convincing to me. This lack of connect is heightened as we don’t get to hear from Dios. So the entire cat-and-mouse pursuit felt baseless.
💢 Put this one down to personal preferences, but the level of violent and gruesome scenes was way beyond my comfort level. I just hated some of the grisly descriptions.
The Audiobook Experience:
The audiobook, clocking at 8 hrs 33 min, is narrated by four narrators: Frankie Corzo, Kimberly M. Wetherell, Sophie Amoss, and Victoria Villarreal. All the narrators are excellent, and do their best to flesh out their characters with emotions. There was just one minor issues. Dios’s dialogues come to us from the third person perspectives of Florida and Kase, and there are a couple of chapters with the first person voice of Dios herself. However, the emotional tone and voice pitch of the narrator in the first person pov were absolutely different from the two narrators voicing Dios in the third person. The former sounded quite delicately feminine while the latter two made her sound rough and tough. This was a jarring difference. Nevertheless, the audiobook is still a good way of trying out this book.
Do note that there are plenty of cuss words in the plot. While these might be justified as acceptable lingo for prisoners, they still make the audiobook a test of your patience as the f-bombs keep exploding in your ear.
All in all, this story made me read from start to end despite my misgivings. However, though I wanted to know what happened to the characters, I wasn’t emotionally invested in any of them, and this disconnect created a hurdle I couldn’t surpass.
That said, I am impressed by the writing prowess of this author, and will keep an eye out for her future works.
Recommended to those who would enjoy chase stories with feisty characters and don’t mind brutal scenes. I don’t think this qualifies as a Western thriller as marketed, despite a street fight and gritty characters. It’s more of literary crime drama.
My thanks to Macmillan Audio and NetGalley for the ALC of “Sing Her Down”. This review is voluntary and contains my honest opinion about the audiobook.
Story Synopsis:
Florence Baum, known to her prison mates as “Florida”, portrays herself as an innocent prisoner caught as an unlucky bystander. However, her ex cellmate, Diosmary Sandoval aka Dios, is convinced that Florida is lying and not at all innocent.
When both women are released much before their sentence is over due to covid restrictions warranting clearance of space in prisons, Dios is determined to show Florida how similar they both are. This turns into an unhealthy obsession, leading to dangerous repercussions.
The story comes to us mostly in the third person perspective of Florida and Detective Lobos, who is investigating a crime connected with the two women.
Bookish Yays:
🔥 Excellent prose! I’m not that fond of literary flourishes in the thriller genre as they feel quite artificial, but still, I can’t deny that the author is brilliant at stringing words together. I would have highlighted quite a few lines had I been reading the physical or digital version.
🔥 The depiction of the pandemic and its impact on the homeless and the marginalised. Most covid-related fiction so far has focussed on those with means, so this was a welcome and exceptional portrayal. Seeing characters afraid of a cough brought back some guilty yet funny memories.
🔥 The characters, with the possible exception of Dios, are carved quite intricately. They come across as realistic despite their unusual circumstances. Though we see them only in third person, there is still enough to help us understand their nature.
🔥 Wonderful use of the locations to create an atmosphere of nail-biting tension. Beginning in Arizona and ending in Los Angeles, the writing captures the raw side of both the places.
🔥 The narration comes to us from multiple third-person points of view. Florida’s is the most impactful track, as her backstory and her current insecurities come out clearly.
🔥 Another good track is that of Kase, a fellow prisoner who acts as a sort of Greek chorus, providing us with information to fill in the blanks left by Florida’s track. Her voice is muddling and clarifying at the same time.
Bookish Nays:
💢 Though Dios is a key element of the plot, she barely gets any direct role in the narrative. The book would have worked better for me if I had got a direct glimpse of the machinations of her devious mind.
💢 While I did like Detective Lobos’s track as it offered plenty of elements to ponder upon, I didn’t understand why she needed to be given a voice in what was essentially a Florida-Dios story. It took away from the core plot.
💢 This is a woman-oriented plot all the way. And the strong women characters carry the story well enough. As such, there are limited male characters but even then, all of them are portrayed as stereotypical jerks. This becomes monotonous. Even feminist fiction can have a couple of good male characters.
💢 Dios’ obsession with Florida didn’t feel convincing to me. This lack of connect is heightened as we don’t get to hear from Dios. So the entire cat-and-mouse pursuit felt baseless.
💢 Put this one down to personal preferences, but the level of violent and gruesome scenes was way beyond my comfort level. I just hated some of the grisly descriptions.
The Audiobook Experience:
The audiobook, clocking at 8 hrs 33 min, is narrated by four narrators: Frankie Corzo, Kimberly M. Wetherell, Sophie Amoss, and Victoria Villarreal. All the narrators are excellent, and do their best to flesh out their characters with emotions. There was just one minor issues. Dios’s dialogues come to us from the third person perspectives of Florida and Kase, and there are a couple of chapters with the first person voice of Dios herself. However, the emotional tone and voice pitch of the narrator in the first person pov were absolutely different from the two narrators voicing Dios in the third person. The former sounded quite delicately feminine while the latter two made her sound rough and tough. This was a jarring difference. Nevertheless, the audiobook is still a good way of trying out this book.
Do note that there are plenty of cuss words in the plot. While these might be justified as acceptable lingo for prisoners, they still make the audiobook a test of your patience as the f-bombs keep exploding in your ear.
All in all, this story made me read from start to end despite my misgivings. However, though I wanted to know what happened to the characters, I wasn’t emotionally invested in any of them, and this disconnect created a hurdle I couldn’t surpass.
That said, I am impressed by the writing prowess of this author, and will keep an eye out for her future works.
Recommended to those who would enjoy chase stories with feisty characters and don’t mind brutal scenes. I don’t think this qualifies as a Western thriller as marketed, despite a street fight and gritty characters. It’s more of literary crime drama.
My thanks to Macmillan Audio and NetGalley for the ALC of “Sing Her Down”. This review is voluntary and contains my honest opinion about the audiobook.
challenging
dark
mysterious
sad
tense
medium-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Character
Strong character development:
Yes
Loveable characters:
Complicated
Diverse cast of characters:
Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes
Sing Her Down by Ivy Pochoda
⭐️⭐️⭐️
Synopsis: Florida is doing time in an Arizona women’s prison for a crime she claims to have much less involvement in than her cell mate Dios seems to know. When both of them are released early, Dios has every intention to make sure Florida sees herself for who she really is.
My Thoughts: I enjoyed the story overall. The book was well written and told their story very well. The different POVs kept things interesting.
Content Warnings
Graphic: Adult/minor relationship, Bullying, Confinement, Death, Domestic abuse, Drug abuse, Emotional abuse, Gun violence, Rape, Suicidal thoughts, Violence, Forced institutionalization, Blood, Murder, Injury/Injury detail
