Author 'Nathan Burgoine posted this simple, direct method of not getting paralyzed by the prospect of having to write reviews. The Three-Sentence Review is, as he notes, very helpful and also simple to achieve. I get completely unmanned at the idea of saying something trenchant about each book I read, when there often just isn't that much to say...now I can use this structure to say what I think is the most important idea I took away from the read and not try to dig for more.
Think about using it yourselves!
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Celest by Sandy Robson
Rating: 3* of five
The Publisher Says: Has Celest been kept safe from harm, or have we been kept safe from her? She's afraid of the sun and she's terrified of turning 18. This is the start of a love story that could bring the end of days. What is real? Who is lying and why does everyone she touch—die?
I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU.
My Review: This is the endlessly popular "exceptional teenager" story that I never much liked. It's written competently. It follows all the beats of the formula.
If you like this kind of thing, it's liable to please you. I don't; it didn't.
A Kindle edition (non-affiliate Amazon link) will set you back $4.99.
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Empire of the Damned - Sampler by Jay Kristoff
Rating: 3* of five
The Publisher Says: Gabriel de León has saved the Holy Grail from death, but his chance to end the endless night is lost.
After turning his back on his silversaint brothers once and for all, Gabriel and the Grail set out to learn the truth of how Daysdeath might finally be undone.
But the last silversaint faces peril, within and without. Pursued by children of the Forever King, drawn into wars and webs centuries in the weaving, and ravaged by his own rising bloodlust, Gabriel may not survive to see the truth of the Grail revealed.
A truth that may be too awful for any to imagine.
I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU.
My Review: Samplers don't really tell you that much about a read in its entirety, but they do tell you if you are going to want to stick it out for over 700 pages of the story.
I don't want to this time, to my surprise; I felt fatigued almost from the start, like I was just being lectured at. This was not at all what I expected.
Disappointing, but YMMV.
Preorder your Kindle edition for delivery in March 2024.
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Educated: A Memoir by Tara Westover
Rating: 3* of five
The Publisher Says: Tara Westover was 17 the first time she set foot in a classroom. Born to survivalists in the mountains of Idaho, she prepared for the end of the world by stockpiling home-canned peaches and sleeping with her "head-for-the-hills bag". In the summer she stewed herbs for her mother, a midwife and healer, and in the winter she salvaged in her father's junkyard.
Her father forbade hospitals, so Tara never saw a doctor or nurse. Gashes and concussions, even burns from explosions, were all treated at home with herbalism. The family was so isolated from mainstream society that there was no one to ensure the children received an education and no one to intervene when one of Tara's older brothers became violent.
Then, lacking any formal education, Tara began to educate herself. She taught herself enough mathematics and grammar to be admitted to Brigham Young University, where she studied history, learning for the first time about important world events like the Holocaust and the civil rights movement. Her quest for knowledge transformed her, taking her over oceans and across continents, to Harvard and to Cambridge. Only then would she wonder if she'd traveled too far, if there was still a way home.
Educated is an account of the struggle for self-invention. It is a tale of fierce family loyalty and of the grief that comes with severing the closest of ties. With the acute insight that distinguishes all great writers, Westover has crafted a universal coming-of-age story that gets to the heart of what an education is and what it offers: the perspective to see one's life through new eyes and the will to change it.
I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU.
My Review: Pleasant enough read, much like any memoir about an adolescent abused-by-misogyny-addled-man will be. Clearly her experiences were awful. I feel voyeuristic reading these kinds of books, since I have nothing to offer the author for their baring of painful past wounds except money in royalties. If you liked Boy Erased: A Memoir of Identity, Faith, and Family, this will please you.
Kindle editions are $9.99 (non-affiliate Amazon link).
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Blind Vigil (Rick Cahill #7) by Matt Coyle
Rating: 3.5* of five
The Publisher Says: Anthony and Lefty Award-winning Author
A friend arrested for murder. A vicious killer lurking in the shadows. A world of darkness.
Blinded by a gunshot wound to the face while working as a private investigator nine months ago, Rick Cahill is now sure of only one thing: he has to start a new life and leave his old one behind.
He’s still trying to figure out what that life is when his onetime partner, Moira MacFarlane, asks for his help on a case she’s taken for Rick’s former best friend. The case is simple and Moira only needs Rick for one interview, but Rick is wary of waking sleeping demons.
Ultimately, he goes against his gut and takes the case which quickly turns deadly. Rick’s old compulsion of finding the truth no matter the cost—the same compulsion that cost him his eyesight and almost his life—battles against his desire to escape his past.
The stakes are raised when Rick’s friend is implicated in murder and needs his help. Can he help the friend he no longer trusts while questioning his own lessened capabilities? His life depends on the answer as a shadowy killer lurks in the darkness.
I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU.
My Review: I jumped into this series at book #7 because a) I'm a grizzled old veteran of the private-eye book wars, 2) the character undergoes the titular loss of sight, therefore is going to have to make big adjustments...thus effectively starting a new series, and lastly, I am always down for something escapist and plot-driven during the long nighttimes of the northern US's winters.
Billed as just right for John Sandford fans, this is one where I think the publisher undersells the read. The pacing and prose work together, a thing it never felt to me that Sandford does. There's no stop the action while I talk to you groundlings in these books, which I do feel in Sanford's work.
$11.49 on Kindle (non-affiliate Amazon link).
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Last Redemption (Rick Cahill #8) by Matt Coyle
Rating: 3.5* of five
The Publisher Says: San Diego Writer’s Festival Mystery Writer of the Year for 2021
Anthony, Shamus, and Lefty Award-winning Author
Will Rick Cahill survive an insidious disease long enough to see his first-born child—or will sadistic killers murder him first?
Rick Cahill is finally living a settled, happy life. His fiancée, Leah Landingham, is pregnant with their first child and he is doing PI work that pays well and keeps him out of danger. Then a doctor gives him the bad news about the headaches he’s been suffering—CTE, the pro football disease that leads to senility and early death—a secret he keeps from Leah and his best friend Moira MacFarlane.
When Moira asks him to monitor her son, Luke—who’s broken a restraining order to stay away from his girl-friend—a simple surveillance explodes into greed, deceit, and murder. Luke goes missing, and Rick’s dogged determination compels him to follow clues that lead to the exploration of high finance and DNA cancer research.
Ultimately, Rick is forced to battle sadistic killers as he tries to find Luke and stay alive long enough to see the birth of his child.
I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU.
My Review: Clearly this series was my binge-thriller one for 2023. This read is still fast-paced, but Cahill's CTE brain damage is very much a point of drama in his life, as we saw in Blind Vigil.
I usually steer clear of child-endangerment stories because they're so often about girls in sexual predators' hands, but this one was (thankfully) free of that taint. Very exciting, surprising stuff...all done by a guy with a neurodegenerative disease.
$11.49 on Kindle (non-affiliate Amazon link).
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Doomed Legacy (Rick Cahill #9) by Matt Coyle
Rating: 3.5* of five
The Publisher Says: A sinister private detective agency, a shady shell corporation, and a dead friend—Rick Cahill is on his most dangerous mission yet
Private investigator Rick Cahill has been running from his past and chasing the truth his whole life. But his past is relentless—and so is his CTE, a disease caused by repeated head traumas that has attacked his body and his mind. As his CTE progresses, he realizes that the disease not only threatens his life but also endangers his family's wellbeing.
As Rick struggles to keep his family together, he does a favor for Sara Ansari, a business contact. Then, Sara is murdered, and the police believe her to be yet another victim of a serial rapist who has been terrorizing greater San Diego. But Rick has reason to question their theory. Determined to find the truth at any cost, and against his wife's warnings, he investigates on his own.
Along the way, he bumps up against a sinister private investigative agency and a shady shell corporation that may be hiding more than company secrets. As Rick digs for the truth about Sara's death, he risks his own life and the lives of countless innocents caught in his relentless crusade. Ultimately, Rick must decide if his quest is worth the risk of losing his family forever.
I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU.
My Review: The terrible costs of CTE have forced Cahill to focus on desk jobs to keep his understandably worried wife from nagging...he knows she's right, but when someone he's close to is murdered...well, old habits dying hard is part of the charm in a series like this.
Plus Midnight the dog is such a great character foil! Scratches the ma'at needs of a series-crime-fighting reader to perfection.
$11.49 on Kindle (non-affiliate Amazon link).
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Odyssey’s End (Rick Cahill #10) by Matt Coyle
Rating: 3.5* of five
The Publisher Says: Brain disease worsening, Rick Cahill risks everything— even his life— to provide for his fractured family's future
San Diego private investigator Rick Cahill's past comes back to haunt him when he's at his most vulnerable. His wife, Leah, has fled with their daughter, Krista, to her parents' home in Santa Barbara. She fears Rick's violent outbursts brought on by his potentially fatal brain disorder, CTE— and she doesn't trust that he'll ever be able to tame his manic desire to bring his own brand of justice to an unjust world.
Rick desperately wants to reunite his family and help provide for Krista' s future— one he fears he won't be alive to see. A jumpstart toward that future appears in the form of Peter Stone, Rick's longtime enemy. Stone offers Rick $50,000 to find a woman he claims can save his life with a bone marrow transplant. Rick can' t pass up the chance to buttress Krista's future.
When what seems like a simple missing person case spirals out of control into cryptocurrency machinations, dead bodies, and an outgunned faceoff, Rick is forced to battle evil from his past. Can he stay alive long enough to see his family one last time?
I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU.
My Review: The tenth in the series, fourth that I've read; Cahill's decline is getting more and more shatteringly obvious, and I know I was so angry and sad that this good-hearted guy has to pay such a steep price for his past. A man's bad decisions robbing him of his family in the present, and of any hope of a long-term future, is an evergreen plot arc in the series-crime-solving world.
Solid outing, believable stakes, the usual good genre writing.
$11.49 on Kindle (non-affiliate Amazon link).
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This space is dedicated to Nancy Pearl's Rule of 50, or "the Pearl Rule" as I've always called it. After realizing five times in December 2021 alone that I'd already Pearl-Ruled a book I picked up on a whim, I realized how close my Half-heimer's is getting to the full-on article. Hence my decision to track my Pearls!
As she says:
People frequently ask me how many pages they should give a book before they give up on it. In response to that question, I came up with my “rule of fifty,” which is based on the shortness of time and the immensity of the world of books. If you’re fifty years of age or younger, give a book fifty pages before you decide to commit to reading it or give it up. If you’re over fifty, which is when time gets even shorter, subtract your age from 100—the result is the number of pages you should read before making your decision to stay with it or quit.
So this space will be each month's listing of Pearl-Ruled books. Earlier Pearl-Rule posts will be linked below the current month's crop.
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PEARL RULED @ 27%
The Hank Show: How a House-Painting, Drug-Running DEA Informant Built the Machine That Rules Our Lives by McKenzie Funk
Rating: 3* of five
The Publisher Says: The bizarre and captivating story of the most important person you've never heard of.
The world we live in today, where everything is tracked by corporations and governments, originates with one manic, elusive, utterly unique man―as prone to bullying as he was to fits of surpassing generosity and surprising genius. His name was Hank Asher, and his life was a strange and spectacular show that changed the course of the future.
In The Hank Show, critically acclaimed author and journalist McKenzie Funk relates Asher's stranger-than-fiction story―he careened from drug-running pilot to alleged CIA asset, only to be reborn as the pioneering computer programmer known as the father of data fusion. He was the multimillionaire whose creations now power a new reality where your every move is tracked by police departments, intelligence agencies, political parties, and financial firms alike. But his success was not without setbacks. He truly lived nine lives, on top of the world one minute, only to be forced out of the companies he founded and blamed for data breaches resulting in major lawsuits and market chaos.
In the vein of the blockbuster movie Catch Me if You Can, this spellbinding work of narrative nonfiction propels you forward on a forty year journey of intrigue and innovation, from Colombia to the White House and from Silicon Valley to the 2016 Trump campaign, focusing a lens on the dark side of American business and its impact on the everyday fabric of our modern lives.
I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU.
My Review: I should love this book. I agree with the unstated but amply footnoted contention that Big Data is Bad, and was built to be that way from the start. But when reliving the utter and complete clusterfuck that was the 2000 election, an realizing what I'd hitherto not known...that this jackanapes was in the debacle up to his eyebrows...I lost any further interest in pursuing the read.
Just tell me where he's buried so I can go shit on his grave.
If you're more forgiving, or a lot younger and thus without the bad memories, than I am, a Kindle copy will set you back $14.99. (non-affiliate Amazon link)
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PEARL RULED @ 20%
Buying Reality: Political Ads, Money, and Local Television News by Danilo Yanich
Rating: 4* of five
The Publisher Says:From a certain perspective, the biggest political story of 2016 was how the candidate who bought three-quarters of the political ads lost to the one whose every provocative Tweet set the agenda for the day’s news coverage. With the arrival of bot farms, microtargeted Facebook ads, and Cambridge Analytica, isn’t the age of political ads on local TV coming to a close?
You might think. But you’d be wrong to the tune of $4.4 billion just in 2016. In U.S. elections, there’s a lot more at stake than the presidency. TV spending has gone up dramatically since 2006, for both presidential and down-ballot races for congressional seats, governorships, and state legislatures—and the 2020 campaign shows no signs of bucking this trend. When candidates don’t enjoy the name recognition and celebrity of the presidential contenders, it’s very much business as usual. They rely on the local TV newscasts, watched by 30 million people every day—not Tweets—to convey their messages to an audience more fragmented than ever.
At the same time, the nationalization of news and consolidation of local stations under juggernauts like Nexstar Media and Sinclair Broadcasting mean a decreasing share of time devoted to down-ballot politics—almost 90 percent of 2016’s local political stories focused on the presidential race. Without coverage of local issues and races, ad buys are the only chance most candidates have to get their messages in front of a broadcast audience.
On local TV news, political ads create the reality of local races—a reality that is not meant to inform voters but to persuade them. Voters are left to their own devices to fill in the space between what the ads say—the bought reality—and what political stories used to cover.
I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.
My Review: Well-written, if academic in tone; impeccably researched and footnoted; a really good book and an important read. I just Can Not Deal. Sickened, outraged, horrified, furious...these are not the emotional states I want to evoke as I enter 2024. Reality is doing it for me, I do not wish to add to my negativity burdens.
A Kindle edition will set you back a cool $31.64, but I will tell you it is worth the money and more...just be in the right frame of mind to get your mind around the scary realities of the present.
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PEARL RULED @ 38%
Surviving Gen X by Jo Szewczyk
Rating: 2.5* of five
The Publisher Says: Enter the neon-soaked world of Las Vegas in the 1990s with Surviving Gen X—a gripping and timely political work that follows the story of an unnamed man and an abused housewife as they navigate the city's dangerous underbelly.
Through their journey, they find solace in each other as the broken city attempts to destroy them. Unfolding like an electrifying dream, Surviving Gen X is an intensely intimate and profoundly moving tale packed with humor, heartache, and the quest for survival.
I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU.
My Review: My goodness, was this book trying too hard. I don't know what the heck was so transgressive as to give the author the idea a warning of the D/s lifestyle was necessary, but the warning I needed was about how awful all the women were. Terrible, thoughtless, rude. I just don't want to read any more about any of them.
YMMV, of course, so a Kindle edition is $5.99.
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