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bexellency's reviews
888 reviews
My Sister, the Serial Killer by Oyinkan Braithwaite
2.5
Interesting. Quite short. I like the Muhtar storyline, after he woke up. Also the elegant implying but never actually saying about the father’s death. . Not as humorous as I’d expected from the marketing.
The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue by V.E. Schwab
3.0
Interesting premise. I really like the bit about how so many artists had made a deal with Luc.
The Woman in Apartment 49 by Ross Armstrong
1.75
This was an okay thriller up to the point where you learn Lily’s husband died in a bike accident some weeks ago and everything has been in her head. But everything after that is strangely unengaging as your trust has been broken so why would you believe or be invested in it any longer? . The watching your neighbors plot isn’t original, has been done many times in many ways.
Number One Chinese Restaurant by Lillian Li
Did not finish book.
Did not finish book.
Unfortunately I started this audiobook while sick and between it reminding me of that and having lost the plot while listening while ill I won’t be carrying on.
The Paperback Sleuth--Death in Fine Condition by Andrew Cartmel
1.5
Oof, not good. I quite like the Vinyl Detective so happily picked up this book in a different Cartmel series. Except it’s not different. With the Paperback Sleuth set in the same world it reads like fan fiction, bad fan fiction. What a bummer!
The Guest by Emma Cline
Did not finish book. Stopped at 0%.
Did not finish book. Stopped at 0%.
I thought this was a vintage setting book and as I found out it was modern set, I wasn’t interested.
The Many Lives of Mama Love: A Memoir of Lying, Stealing, Writing, and Healing by Lara Love Hardin
2.0
Not a winner for me. My favorite part was the real life descriptions of the impossible puzzle of navigating the system and accessing services. Beyond that, I know I’m supposed to like the story of redemption, but it didn’t excite me. Perhaps the fall from grace didn’t seem that dramatic, since the story picks up in the addiction era and since the references to earlier times before that are mostly to an unhappy childhood; it lacked the happy PTA mom set up the promotion blurbs foreshadowed. Or maybe, what I did see of those days seemed unhappy, too, a desperate keeping up with the Joneses era. Perhaps the improbable coincidences of the redemption made it harder to believe; the work she finds and the people she meets too tidy a fit for real life. Overall, the books read very plodding and repetitive to me in the first half so that by the second half, I was unengaged. Perhaps I’m just not the right audience for a story of restorative justice, which is easier to support in theory than in practice; the part of me that still feels the effect of my experience as the victim of a crime committed by an addict perhaps could only manage indifference as to where the story went.