Book Review: The Spy Keeper of Marseille

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The Spy Keeper of Marseille
by Roseanna M. White

My rating: 3 / 5
Genre: Historical Christian romance

Zelie Bellarose is second-in-command of a resistance organization in France during the time of Nazi occupation. Marcel Laurent is a famous concert pianist who was recently freed from a POW camp and is tasked with using his contacts and talents to help with the resistance. As the spy network grows, is betrayed from within, and loses members to arrest and execution, Zelie and Marcel lean on each other for support more and more.

As much as I loved White’s The Imposters series, set in Edwardian England, so far her WWII-era books haven’t resonated with me nearly as much. I’m not sure why there would be such a difference, but the plot here dragged for me. I didn’t really care for Zelie as a main character. I liked Marcel more, but honestly, do professional musicians often think in musical terms as much as he does in this book? Also, though I don’t need a Christian book to be heavy on a Christian message by any means, there seems to be an intent to have a message here, but it’s pretty weak. Zelie doesn’t really trust God, but because Marcel does and is kind and says a few nice things about God, she suddenly realizes she needs to trust Him more.

The stakes in this book with a spy network trying to outsmart the Nazis are weirdly high but also not that high. Though people are captured, even executed, I never really felt much of that personally. The climax was fairly intense in this area, at least, which I did appreciate. There are ups and downs in the book that renewed my interest now and then, but overall, it just felt sort of okay. The romance wasn’t necessarily completely front and center, but it still seemed somehow more important in the book than the spying and danger.

I’ve planned to read some of White’s earlier works, set during WWI, and I think I’ll still give one or two of those a try, but if she releases more WWII-era books, I think I’ll pass. Not that this book was terrible, but not interesting enough to want more like it. However, others liked it more than I did, so if you’re interested, check out other reviews at the link below.

I received an advanced review copy for free, and I am leaving this review voluntarily.

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Book Review: The Ghost at Dawn’s House

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The Ghost at Dawn’s House
The Baby-Sitters Club #9
by Ann M. Martin

My rating: 4 / 5
Genre: Children’s classic

For complete transparency, I’ll say up front that I read a lot of this series when I was a kid/pre-teen. And at the time, my name was the same as the founder of the BSC (with the first name spelled slightly differently). Nostalgia will hugely affect my reviews for this series, and I have no plans to try to be objective.

In this book, Dawn reads some ghost stories, hears some strange noises in the wall, and convinces herself that a guy that disappeared in the area a long time ago is probably now a ghost in the secret passage she found in her house. I mean…why the ghost would be leaving food in the passageway, I don’t know. I still don’t feel any connection to Dawn, but letting her imagination run wild in this story isn’t exactly that surprising for a girl her age, especially in the time period this is from. The Pike family is baffling to me—they have a ton of kids and let them do whatever they want…except when they need to impose rules after all. I just do not get how this is a good way to raise kids.

I was surprised at the mystery in this book being left somewhat open. Kids who are fans of spooky stories might enjoy being able to come up with their own explanation to some of the happenings that aren’t explained (and apparently, it never is). Overall, this is a good addition to the series. Whether or not this book will translate well to kids and pre-teens now, I couldn’t say. I wish I had thought to start reading this series to/with my daughter when she was around 8-10, because I think she would have enjoyed it, and we could have discussed the good and the bad of the books.

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Book Review: Running Out of Time

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Running Out of Time
Out of Time #1
by Margaret Peterson Haddix
Read by Kimberly Schraf

My rating: 4 / 5
Genre: Middle grade fiction

Jessie lives a simple life with her parents and siblings in a small town in 1840…or so she thinks. When a diphtheria outbreak threatens the kids in the village, Jessie’s mom sends her on an important mission: leave Clifton and get help. But leaving Clifton means stepping into a completely different world.

I enjoyed this story, which is like a time travel story without any time travel. The little clues dropped early in the book, when Jessie is still living a normal life in pioneer times, provide intrigue that I can see being even more so for kids/teens in the book’s target audience. When Jessie’s mom sends her on her mission, she gives her just enough info to get Jessie close to what she needs to do, and then Jessie has to use her own wits to fill in the gaps. The pressure is real, as the diphtheria outbreak is threatening the lives of several of the kids, and Jessie is constantly worried that she’s being tracked by henchmen of the founder of Clifton. The main thing that detracted from this story for me is that the motive behind everything that’s happening seemed really weak and squeezed in at the end, maybe because the author wanted to emphasize the premise and plot more than the “why” behind it all. Overall, though, I enjoyed my time listening to the audiobook. I think preteens through mid-teens would enjoy the book.

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Book Review: The Worst

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The Worst
by Mark Binder

My rating: 2.5 / 5
Genre: Middle grade fiction

This series of vignettes about life in middle school in the 90s follows a group of 7 friends who refer to themselves as “Team Bomb Shelter,” because they hang out in a basement bomb shelter at the house of one of the friends. Starting in the summer before eighth grade and going all the way to the end of school, the book actually ends with a novella about a school shooting. If that sounds like a strange combination to you, it felt that way to me, as well. Before the vignettes start, the protagonist/first-person narrator (whose name I don’t recall ever being told) tells us that the school year ended with a school shooting. But first, he takes us back almost a year and tells us mostly fun, whimsical, completely unrelated stories about normal life for him and his friends. The stories range from outlandish to realistic, fun to serious. One story involves the protagonist developing a super-fast but also super-minor attraction to a new kid, whose gender he doesn’t know, so that makes him question what he’s always assumed about himself. The author seems to remember the 90s differently than I do, because he indicates that “crises of identity” were common back then, and I sure don’t remember that whole thing being even a fraction of what it is today.

Regarding the school shooting novella in particular, I think authors need to be really careful about how they handle something that is still a subject of such terror today. It’s strange to me that this story was put after a series of mostly light, jovial vignettes. I wouldn’t go as far as saying that Binder treated the subject lightly, but I do have a difficult time believing that any eighth-graders would have acted the way the kids in this book do. This makes it seem more like a story written specifically so the kids can be the heroes, and it just seems strange for a school shooting story to be written that way. I’m not sure if I can adequately explain what I mean, so I’ll leave it at that. I also didn’t particularly enjoy the way the author slips from a first-person narrative, even one where it’s clear the narrator is looking back on his childhood at a much later time and giving minute-by-minute details of the event, only to interrupt himself with a chapter from the shooter’s POV or an explanation of what they learned from the police report after the incident. It was jarring.

The first half of the book, the vignettes, could be enjoyable for the right reader—either adults who enjoy nostalgic views of the time they grew up or possibly middle schoolers now who like to read about what life was like before cell phones (which we’re reminded of many times during this book). The novella in the second half is a very serious subject matter, but some may enjoy that as well. This wasn’t a stand-out read for me, but if you’re interested, please check out other reviews at the link below.

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Book Review: Thunderhead

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Thunderhead
Arc of a Scythe #2
by Neal Shusterman

My rating: 5 / 5
Genre: YA dystopian

Spoiler notice: The following review may contain some spoilers for the previous book in the series, Scythe.

After the events in the previous book, Citra is an official scythe and Rowan is a self-appointed scythe-type…person. They both have the same goal, which is to expose and fix the corruption in the scythedom, though they’re both approaching it in vastly different ways.

This trilogy continues to blow me away. Several things happened in this book that I did not see coming, but I can’t really expand on any of it without spoiling the story. Citra and Rowan really come into their own in this 2nd book, growing in ways that made me both proud of them and sad for them. Scythes Faraday and Curie continue to be great grounding influences. And the villainy from the first book continues here in ways that I could not possibly have expected. One thing in particular that I enjoyed about the story is that the author drops just enough hints to make me dread the climax while not being able to remotely predict what will actually happen. I was left with a book hangover (which I don’t experience often) and a desire to read the final book in the trilogy ASAP. Fans of dystopian YA fiction should definitely check out this series (starting with the first one).

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Book Review: Corpse Creek

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Corpse Creek
Bleak Haven #3
by Vincent Ralph

My rating: 2 / 5
Genre: YA paranormal horror

The town of Bleak Haven has had more than its share of serial killers, almost as if it’s under a curse. But Ethan’s older brother’s death was ruled an accident, though Ethan has never been able to accept that. Four years after Brody’s death, Ethan still hasn’t found the closure he needs to move on and hopes visiting the creek where Brody died will help. Instead, he seems to have roused the spirit of his dead brother, who now tells Ethan that he can bring Brody back if he’s willing to sacrifice someone else to do so—a life for a life.

After enjoying the first book in this series, which is a straight-up slasher thriller, the next two books have been more of a letdown. They both still involve horror and suspense, but in a different sub-genre from the first book and even different sub-genres from each other. The second book was more of a zombie story, and this book…well, this one is more difficult to define. It has supernatural elements, though it’s difficult to say how much of it is meant to be real and how much imagined. In the end, there’s not a whole lot of plot, and though yes, it does have some creepy moments, it’s much more of a drama showing how grief can eat away at one’s life and relationships than a thriller. The only character I really cared about at all in this book is Ethan’s dad, as I did appreciate his progression through the book. But in the end, the drama side of the book is repetitive and tedious, while the thriller side is confusing and unfulfilling.

I was really interested in this town after reading the first book and hoped for more insight into why it has such a history of serial killers and violence, but none of the later books so far have delved further into that, at least not in any remotely satisfying way. Like the previous books in the series, this one has no sexual content, but I do seem to recall more language this time. It’s really not necessary to have read any of the other books before reading this one—past events in the town are referred to quite a bit here, but none of them were the subject of any previous books. On the other hand, there are a lot of references to the event that the 4th book is named after, which made me wonder if this installment might have any spoilers for the final book. As for recommendations, I’m sure there is an audience for this kind of exploration of extreme grief with horror elements, so if that interests you, you may want to read some of the positive reviews at the link below.

I received an advanced review copy for free, and I am leaving this review voluntarily.

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September in Review

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I read 15 books last month, which is just shy of my average for this year so far but with just above my average total page count in a month. It was nice to have an average rating for the month up over 4 stars again, after a few months with a lot of low ratings.

Here are the books I read in September:

Never Fade by Alexandra Bracken (4.5 / 5)
Empire and Frontier by Samuel Marquis (3 / 5)
The Terminal List by Jack Carr (2 / 5)
Mandie and the Abandoned Mine by Lois Gladys Leppard (4 / 5)
First Degree by David Rosenfelt (5 / 5)
Boreal Wilderland by Robert Mullen (4 / 5)
Criminal Destiny by Gordon Korman (5 / 5)
Life Is Hard. God Is Good. Let’s Dance. by Brant Hansen (5 / 5)
The Reappearance of Rachel Price by Holly Jackson (4 / 5)
Sketch by Ros Hill (3.5 / 5)
Hunt for Jade Dragon by Richard Paul Evans (3 / 5)
An Echo in the Darkness by Francine Rivers (4.5 / 5)
Bark Humbug by David Rosenfelt (5 / 5)
Payback by Gordon Korman (5 / 5)
Blightfall by Brandon Sanderson & Janci Patterson (4 / 5)

This list includes 3 ARCs and 4 re-reads. My favorite book from September was Bark Humbug. I started 1 series, continued 5 series, and finished (or caught up on) 2 series. My ever-changing short list of to-be-reads, as well as a flag for the book I’m currently reading and an ongoing list of those I’ve read and posted about can be found here.

I’m also keeping my Goodreads page updated with a more extensive list of to-be-reads. Despite my almost too-long TBR list, I’m always looking for more to add. Feel free to offer suggestions of your favorites or just recent reads you enjoyed.

Book Review: Blightfall

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Blightfall
Riftwake #1
by Brandon Sanderson & Janci Patterson

My rating: 4 / 5
Genre: YA sci-fi

Soon after winning a decades-long war against alien oppressors, a team from the planet Detritus is sent to another planet, Blightfall, to make contact with a settlement of humans that had been isolated there during the war. But they can’t possibly guess what awaits them even before they land on Blightfall.

I have not read the series that this is an offshoot of. It wasn’t even until I was around 2/3 into the story that I realized this was a continuation of the Skyward series by Brandon Sanderson (though I suppose I should have suspected) and, more directly, a series of side novellas in the same world, written by Janci Patterson. But that means that my perspective will be as a complete newcomer, not a veteran, and as such, I did not have too many issues following the worldbuilding. Yes, I was initially lost with terms like cytonics, aliens that are given only cursory explanations, and people that clearly have backstories that I don’t know. I didn’t feel like it was any more difficult to muddle through the early chapters than any other sci-fi book with worldbuilding that hits the ground running though. By the end, I felt like I had a pretty good understanding of everything I needed an understanding of.

I was caught up in the story and the story world, especially when it became clear that there was something strange going on on Blightfall. I absolutely adored the taynix (slug-like creatures), their way of communicating, and their love of scritches and snuggles. There were a few interludes from the perspective of some of the taynix that made me really curious to know more about the world outside of what we’re shown for this story. I have no idea if any of that is part of the previous books in this world or not. Things got a little strange, though, with a couple of romances that felt awkward and unnecessary. And I really wish fiction writers could understand that having characters with they/them pronouns just makes things confusing in fiction, especially when any kind of action is going on. It was so hard to follow.

Despite the fact that I never had a desire to break into any of Sanderson’s epic fantasy/sci-fi works before, I have to admit that this has made me consider starting at the beginning of the series. As I understand it, this book was basically written by Patterson but with some input from Sanderson, which makes me all the more curious to see what his writing is like. (The only other Sanderson book I have read in the past is Alcatraz vs. the Evil Librarians.) I recommend the book for fans of futuristic, space-themed sci-fi, even if you haven’t read any of the books that precede it.

Thank you to Netgalley and Random House Children’s Books for providing me a copy of this book to review.

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