reader

Book Review: Murder in Mesopotamia

/ Kristi / Leave a comment

Murder in Mesopotamia
Hercule Poirot #14
by Agatha Christie
read by Anna Massey

My rating: 3.5 / 5
Genre: Classic mystery

Not my favorite of the Poirot stories I’ve listened to so far. A lot of it is personal preference, though, like the jarring change in narrator, which probably wouldn’t have been an issue if I wasn’t listening to the audiobooks and used to male voices. The setting and background situation in the story, an archeological expedition in Iraq (or something like that), could have been interesting, but it was pretty meagerly used. The resolution to this story was a little bizarre and not very believable. And man, did it feel like it took a really long time for Poirot to actually appear in the story (though this isn’t the first one that I felt that way about). Overall, it wasn’t bad, but it didn’t live up to my favorites in the series so far.

Find out more about Murder in Mesopotamia

See what’s coming up.

If you’ve read this book, or read it in the future, feel free to let me know what you think!

Book Review: The Truth About Stacey

/ Kristi / Leave a comment

The Truth About Stacey
The Baby-Sitters Club #3
by Ann M. Martin

My rating: 3 / 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 different). Nostalgia will hugely affect my reviews for this series, and I have no plans to try to be objective.

I have to admit that the storyline of Stacey trying to break out from under her over-protective parents didn’t resonate much with me. That’s probably because I’ve never been in the same situation as either a child or a parent. I suppose some would say my mom was overprotective, but it was in a very different way and I didn’t feel particularly bothered by it at the time. The side plot about the competitive agency interested me a little more, especially since I knew that of course the BSC would come out on top. Their reactions may have been a bit immature, but hey, they’re 12-year-olds, after all! Sometimes they talk or act older than that, but it’s nice to have a reminder that they’re still…well, immature.

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.

Find out more about The Truth About Stacey

See what I’m reading next.

If you’ve read this book, or read it in the future, feel free to let me know what you think!

Book Review: The Boxcar Children

/ Kristi / 3 Comments

The Boxcar Children
Book #1
by Gertrude Chandler Warner
Read by Phyllis Newman

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

I know I read at least the first book in this series when I was younger, but I don’t remember much after that. Truth be told, apparently I didn’t remember the first one very well either, because…(spoiler alert, but hey, the book is about a century old) I really thought the kids would live in the boxcar for more than just one book. Clearly my memory is faulty, not that that’s a surprise to me. But I digress…the story is sweet, but boy was this a different time. Nowadays, if there was an older man who set up an event because he liked to watch teenage boys run…he’d probably be arrested. I don’t mean to say that the man in this book had any ill intent, but it’s certainly something no one would include in a book these days.

I liked all the different kinds of ingenuity the kids employed to set up their home and give it some semblance of normalcy, from their dishes to the “refrigerator.” And though at least one adult they meet is heinous, at least other adults are kind and compassionate, so it avoids that trope of “all adults are evil” some kids books have. I listened to the audiobook narrated by Phyllis Newman, and though I don’t know if I can accurately explain what I mean, I felt her voice worked really well for the time period this is set in. It reminded me of a record I listened to as a kid with a woman narrating some story. I could see this book being fun for younger kids nowadays to read or listen to (or have read to them), though they might have some questions about things that are very different from our world today.

Find out more about The Boxcar Children

See what I’m reading next.

If you’ve read this book, or read it in the future, feel free to let me know what you think!

Book Review: The Alcatraz Escape

/ Kristi / Leave a comment

The Alcatraz Escape
Book Scavenger #3
by Jennifer Chambliss Bertman

My rating: 4.5 / 5
Genre: Middle grade adventure

An escape room in Alcatraz? What’s not to love?! Of course, there’s more to the story as Emily, James, and Matthew test their wits against fellow book scavengers and other puzzle lovers. Someone clearly doesn’t want Emily involved, and the man who helped create the story for the escape room is more than a little mysterious. Then Matthew is blamed for several mean-spirited incidents, so Emily has to kick her puzzling into high gear.

As an escape room enthusiast, I often find that books that are billed to be about escape rooms are the worst at being true to the real-life experience. This book was the first that I’ve read with escape rooms mentioned in the synopsis that had a true escape-room feel, and I really enjoyed that aspect of it. The rest of the plot involving the mysterious game maker and Matthew being suspected as a villain was good as well. I think the inclusion of several of Emily’s classmates may have bloated the character list a little too much, and it was difficult to keep some of them straight. Overall, though, this was a good wrap-up to a series about books and puzzles that I have really enjoyed, and I think that as a kid, I would have loved it all the more. So it’s easy to recommend it to kids aged around 10-14 (my 14-year-old daughter loved it as well) but also for teens and even adults who enjoy books and puzzles.

Find out more about The Alcatraz Escape

See what I’m reading next.

If you’ve read this book, or read it in the future, feel free to let me know what you think!

Book Review: Dogged Pursuit

/ Kristi / Leave a comment

Dogged Pursuit
Andy Carpenter #31
by David Rosenfelt
read by Grover Gardner

My rating: 4 / 5
Genre: Mystery

In this prequel to the 30-book series, Andy Carpenter is a new defense attorney, making the change from prosecution, against the advice of so many. With his marriage a little uncertain and wanting to make further changes in his life, Andy goes to the shelter to adopt a dog and falls in love with a golden retriever named Tara. He doesn’t want to split her up from the dog she’s been sharing a space with, so he tries to adopt both Tara and Sunny. However, Sunny is mixed up in a criminal case with her owner, who is currently being charged with murder. Soon enough, Andy is mixed up in that criminal case too, as he ends up taking Sunny’s owner on as a client.

I’m never sure what to expect with a prequel, and I’ll admit that I was a little nervous going into this one. At the beginning of the book, there’s a note where Rosenfelt acknowledges that there is a continuity issue with Tara, mostly that he knows a golden retriever wouldn’t actually live as long as she does throughout this series. I wouldn’t have questioned that, but I did question the use of some side characters who, from what I can remember of when they were introduced in some of the earlier books in the main series, didn’t seem to have the history with Andy that this book showed.

Leaving aside continuity questions (which was not difficult for me to do, especially considering that I was sad about the potential loss of Andy’s team, yet several of them are still here), this book was a fun, new take on the series while still having the same cleverness and humor that I love about the series. The formula is mostly intact, even with this being a prequel. I could see this being a good place for someone new to the series to start reading, though it’s definitely more similar in style to the later books than the earlier ones. Either way, I recommend this book (especially the audio) for fans of mystery, crime fiction, and courtroom dramas, whether you’ve read any of this series before  or not.

Thank you to Netgalley and St. Martin’s Press for providing me a copy of this book to review.

Find out more about Dogged Pursuit

See what I’m reading next.

If you’ve read this book, or read it in the future, feel free to let me know what you think!

June in Review

/ Kristi / Leave a comment

I read 7 books last month, which is about half of my average. It’s not at all a surprise, though, considering that June contained 2 large events—Vacation Bible School, for which I’m a director, early in the month and my husband and my 25th wedding anniversary, which involved a vow renewal and party at the end of the month. I was busy a lot of the month between the planning for both of these and the week of VBS itself being very tiring in its own right. My husband and I were gone for a week at the beginning of July as well, which is why this post is so much later than normal and contributes to the reason that I have written only 1 review for the books I read in June. I’ve got some catching up to do (and not just on book reviews).

Here are the books I read in June:

Shell Shocked
Carpenter 31
Alcatraz Escape
Boxcar 1
BSC3
Poirot 14
Stellar
white placeholder
white placeholder

Shell Shocked by Kathleen Welton (1 / 5)
Dogged Pursuit by David Rosenfelt
The Alcatraz Escape by Jennifer Chambliss Bertman
The Boxcar Children by Gertrude Chandler Warner
The Truth About Stacey by Ann M. Martin
Murder in Mesopotamia by Agatha Christie
Stellar English by Frank L. Cioffi

This list includes 3 ARCs and 2 re-reads. My favorite book from June was The Alcatraz Escape. I started 1 series, continued 3 series, and finished 1 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: Shell Shocked

/ Kristi / Leave a comment

Shell Shocked
by Kathleen Welton

My rating: 1 / 5
Genre: YA mystery

The synopsis I read for this book talked about turtles with strange markings on their shells, mysterious bioluminescence, and an investigation led by friends Alex and Avery. So I was expecting puzzles and detecting, but it was really just a long PSA about tourists and poachers endangering the environment. The bioluminescence is only mentioned maybe once, and the strange markings on the turtle shells are just…gashes made by boat motors? I think? It was really confusing. 

The author didn’t seem to pay much attention to her own book as she wrote. The turtle with strange markings on its shell is similar to one Alex saw in the rescue center she works at, which I thought would end up being part of the mystery, but by the next day, the turtle at the center is never mentioned again. Other elements are discovered and don’t go anywhere as well. And though I don’t mean to diminish the real-world plight of wildlife being poached and killed by careless people, the tone of the book was just so much more dire than I felt that the story required. In the end, this felt like a passion project for someone who has lived on or visited an island like that in the book and is concerned about the wildlife there, which is fine if you’re the right audience for it. I am not.

I received a copy of this book for free from the author in exchange for an honest review.

Find out more about Shell Shocked

See what I’m reading next.

If you’ve read this book, or read it in the future, feel free to let me know what you think!

May in Review

/ Kristi / Leave a comment

I read 9 books last month, which was definitely a low month for me. There were a few longer books in there, but since my overall page count was lower than average too, I just read less in general.

Here are the books I read in May:

Inheritance Games
wing 4
Face of Death
Navigator
Swimming
Harry August
Carpenter 15
Misplaced

The Inheritance Games by Jennifer Lynn Barnes (3.5 / 5)
The Warden and the Wolf King by Andrew Peterson (5 / 5)
Face of Death by Blake Pierce (3 / 5)
The Navigator by Pittacus Lore (4 / 5)
The ABC Murders by Agatha Christie (4.5 / 5)
Night Swimming by Aaron Starmer (3.5 / 5)
The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August by Claire North (4 / 5)
The Twelve Dogs of Christmas by David Rosenfelt (4 / 5)
Misplaced Threats by Alan Zimm (4 / 5)

This list includes 2 ARCs and 2 re-reads. My favorite book from May was The ABC Murders. I started 1 series, continued 2 series, and finished 1 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: Misplaced Threats

/ Kristi / Leave a comment

Misplaced Threats
by Alan Zimm

My rating: 4 / 5
Genre: Sci-fi

From the official synopsis: Decades after The Shift, 17 Systems were locked into an entrenched authoritarian government ruled by gene-selected elites. ‘The 35 ‘royal’ Families and 50 Great Corporations control the Federated government, as a self-centered tyranny, the very definition of fascism.

Mike just wants to open a restaurant to earn some money. Ghost just wants to be left alone to live his life and breathe oxygen without being fined. But they, along with many others, learn that the system is not set up to work for them, to help them in any way, or to care about anyone but the elite.

I struggled to write the synopsis for this book, because I struggle to explain the main plot. A lot of characters are introduced early on, though eventually Mike and Ghost rise to the top as the two biggest characters (Mike being the main, in my mind). Almost everything else in the book was some kind of support to their stories, minus one side plot that I think could have easily been cut and the book wouldn’t have lost anything. Even though I wasn’t sure what the main plot was though, I enjoyed the book overall. I’m not a space opera expert by any means, but I really appreciated the world building in this book. Major and minor details worked together really well, and I felt immersed in the overall setting. More specifically, Mike’s restaurant is amazing! There’s a lot of creativity there, and it’s one of the reasons I was always happy to go back to Mike’s POV.

The author is great with characters and dialog. Conversations, especially between patrons of Mike’s restaurant, feel completely realistic. Part of that is also involved in the world building I mentioned earlier—being futuristic and set far from Earth, there would have to be a lot of different terminology, and there is, yet I never felt bogged down by it. In fact, there are even quite a few pop-culture references in the book, and even some more obscure references (one of which particularly amazed me), and they actually fit in really well.

My biggest issue with this book, aside from the one side plot I mentioned earlier than didn’t seem like it added much and was pretty anti-climactic and unsatisfying, is the heavy sci-fi elements. This type of sci-fi is not something I normally read, so it may be completely normal, but I did a lot of skimming throughout the book when piloting of ships, specifics about the mechanics of the food delivery in the restaurant, things like that, got too detailed. I knew I wasn’t going to follow it anyway. But overall, I enjoyed the book and hope that the author is going to continue the series (the first one was originally published in 2023) so I can read more about these characters and (fingers crossed) maybe a little more about the side plot that I felt went nowhere. And one more thing—this book is self-published, and though I’d imagine a publisher may have made some changes to the style and flow, it avoids many of the annoyances that I often find in self-published books. If you’re interested in reading this book, I’d recommend it.

I received a copy of this book for free from the author in exchange for an honest review.

Find out more about Misplaced Threats

See what I’m reading next.

If you’ve read this book, or read it in the future, feel free to let me know what you think!

Book Review: The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August

/ Kristi / 2 Comments

The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August
by Claire North
read by Peter Kenny

My rating: 4 / 5
Genre: Speculative fiction

When a little girl visits Harry August on his deathbed and tells him that the world is ending, he takes the message with him to the grave…and then into his next life. Harry is one of a small number of people who live their lives over and over again—dying only to be born again in the same place and time as their previous lives. Harry never sees the future, but the dire message has been passed back from the future, and now it’s up to Harry to do something about it.

This book is going to be difficult to review. I’ll say up front that I enjoyed it, even while being a little uncertain about what was going on for much of it. Now I’ll go into more detail about my journey with this book: My husband got the audiobook for me a while back, thinking it was something that would interest me, but it took me a while to get to it, mostly because the synopsis is fairly vague and didn’t grab my attention more than the general question of how the whole “multiple lives” thing works. When I started listening to it recently, I appreciated that the author starts with a decent hook, that being the little girl telling Harry on his deathbed that the world is ending, the end is coming faster, and that it’s up to him to do something. But then it hits the brakes from there to give us Harry’s backstory, and the pace is quite slow for a while. The thing is though…I don’t really remember ever being bored. And I think that’s because the author intersperses information about some of Harry’s later lives, even while talking about his first life, which is the one before he found out that he was going to go on to live multiple lives, and thus the “boring” one.

I labeled this novel as speculative fiction, and I think that actually fits more than one way. It’s certainly some kind of fantasy or sci-fi that sets up the world in which some people live their lives over and over again. But the plot itself is basically full of speculation about how a person might spend their time if they did live their life over and over again. For the longest time, I wasn’t really sure what the main plot or conflict was going to turn out to be, but even as I waited for it to develop, I didn’t mind the meandering. Then when it showed up, I was completely hooked for the rest of the book. Though even then, it slowed down a bit after that. Even then, the author would still pause the narrative for a moment to jump to a different time in Harry’s timeline—sometimes that would feel a little jarring, but most of the time, I appreciated the connection the author was making. The ending was completely satisfying, except I was left with just one question, which would be a spoiler to include. (If you’re curious enough to know what my question is, check out my review on Goodreads, where I could put it behind a spoiler tag.)

I worry that my review might be a little confusing, but it’s probably fitting, considering the nature of this book. Overall, I will just say that I enjoyed it a lot more than I thought I should as I listened. My main complaint is the major slow-downs along the way here and there, plus there was some unnecessary political commentary. The narrator, Peter Kenny, is pretty amazing and a great choice for this book, considering that Harry’s lives take him all over the world, so there are quite a few different accents incorporated. This is the kind of book that I fully intend to listen to again some time, because knowing more about Harry’s situation and the worldbuilding, I’ll probably catch more in the details early on. Since it’s difficult to explain what the book is about and what kind of genre(s) it fits into, it’s difficult to know who to recommend it to. I will say, though, that it reminded me a bit of The 7 1/2 Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle, at least in the mechanics of the worldbuilding, so there would probably be a crossover in fans there. Outside of that, if you have any interest in the book after reading my review (or before reading it), I do recommend it.

Find out more about The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August

See what I’m reading next.

If you’ve read this book, or read it in the future, feel free to let me know what you think!