October 2024's Burgoine and Pearl-Rule reviews

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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Ladykiller by Katherine Wood

Rating: 3* of five

The Publisher Says: When an heiress goes missing, her best friend races to unravel the secrets behind her disappearance using clues left behind in an explosive manuscript…

Gia and Abby have been best friends since they were girls, forever bonded by the tragedy that unfolded in Greece when they were eighteen. In the aftermath, bookish Abby threw herself into her studies while heiress Gia chronicled the events of that fateful summer in a salacious memoir.

Twelve years later, Gia is back in Greece for the summer with her shiny new husband and a motley crew of glamorous guests, preparing to sell the family estate in the wake of her father’s death. When Abby receives an invitation from Gia to celebrate her birthday in September beneath the Northern Lights, she’s thrilled to be granted the time off from her high-pressure job. But the day of her flight, she receives a mysterious, threatening email in her inbox, and when she and Gia’s brother Benny arrive at the Swedish resort, Gia isn’t there. After days of cryptic messages and unanswered calls, Abby and Benny are worried enough to fly to Greece to check on her.

Only, when they arrive, they find Gia’s beachfront estate eerily deserted, the sole clue to her whereabouts a manuscript she wrote detailing the events leading up to her disappearance. The pages reveal the dark truth about Gia’s provocative new marriage and the dirty secrets of the guests they entertained with fizzy champagne under the hot Mediterranean sun. As tensions rise, Gia feels less and less safe in her own home. But the pages end abruptly, leaving Abby and Benny with more questions than answers.

Where is Gia now? And, more importantly, will they find her before it’s too late?

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU.

My Review: Well, what can one say? The publisher sets up a Sabrina retelling with added Gone Girl tropes. I'm no more than lukewarm to either story. I'm lukewarm about this one.

I think the author's gift is for pacing. Once launched, it's easier to keep going than quit...no matter that it's a well-trodden path.

Come for the concept, stay for the execution. If the author can make my cynical, seen-it-all self read the whole book, she can do even more for you.

Bantam Books wants $13.99 for a Kindle edition.

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The Hitchcock Hotel by Stephanie Wrobel

Rating: 3* of five

The Publisher Says: A Hitchcock fanatic with an agenda invites old friends for a weekend stay at his secluded themed hotel in this fiendishly clever, suspenseful new novel.

Alfred Smettle is not your average Hitchcock fan. He is the founder, owner, and manager of The Hitchcock Hotel, a sprawling Victorian house in the White Mountains dedicated to the Master of Suspense. There, Alfred offers his guests round-the-clock film screenings, movie props and memorabilia in every room, plus an aviary with fifty crows.

To celebrate the hotel’s first anniversary, he invites his former best friends from his college Film Club for a reunion. He hasn’t spoken to any of them in sixteen years, not after what happened.

But who better than them to appreciate Alfred’s creation? And to help him finish it.

After all, no Hitchcock set is complete without a body.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU.

My Review: Amusing idea for a horror story, one I was really looking forward to; I love Hitchcock's films even as I grow ever more disillusioned with his living persona. I was very entertained by the film references, especially to his lesser-known masterwork Rope.

So I was ready for some fun. I got less of that than expected...why were these people friends? how did Alfred get the money to set up this elaborate haunted house?...as I pondered the practical problems inherent in the set-up. Like any horror-tinged read, I can't stop myself from asking these questions unless I'm utterly ensorceled.

I wasn't.

Berkley Books asks $14.99 for the ebook editions.

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House of Glass by Sarah Pekkanen

Rating: 3.25* of five

The Publisher Says: On the outside they were the golden family with the perfect life. On the inside they built the perfect lie.

A young nanny who plunged to her death, or was she pushed? A nine-year-old girl who collects sharp objects and refuses to speak. A lawyer whose job it is to uncover who in the family is a victim and who is a murderer. But how can you find out the truth when everyone here is lying?

Rose Barclay is a nine-year-old girl who witnessed the possible murder of her nanny - in the midst of her parent's bitter divorce—and immediately stopped speaking. Stella Hudson is a best interest attorney, appointed to serve as counsel for children in custody cases. She never accepts clients under thirteen due to her own traumatic childhood, but Stella's mentor, a revered judge, believes Stella is the only one who can help.

From the moment Stella passes through the iron security gate and steps into the gilded, historic DC home of the Barclays, she realizes the case is even more twisted, and the Barclay family far more troubled, than she feared. And there's something eerie about the house itself: It's a plastic house, with not a single bit of glass to be found.

As Stella comes closer to uncovering the secrets the Barclays are desperate to hide, danger wraps around her like a shroud, and her past and present are set on a collision course in ways she never expected. Everyone is a suspect in the nanny's murder. The mother, the father, the grandmother, the nanny's boyfriend. Even Rose. Is the person Stella's supposed to protect the one she may need protection from?

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU.

My Review: What Maisie Knew, with added (and unnecessary) murder, from a lawyer's PoV. It's not much of an improvement TBH. A lot easier to read than James's prose; less intensely compelling, too.

Tendentiously moralizing tale of a child's nightmarish loss of innocence. Judge less, understand more.

St. Martin's Press thinks $29.00 is fair for a hardcover.

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The Kamogawa Food Detectives by Hisashi Kashiwai (tr. Jesse Kirkwood)

Rating: 2* of five

The Publisher Says: The Kamogawa Food Detectives is the first book in the bestselling, mouth-watering Japanese series for fans of Before the Coffee Gets Cold.

What’s the one dish you’d do anything to taste just one more time?

Down a quiet backstreet in Kyoto exists a very special restaurant. Run by Koishi Kamogawa and her father Nagare, the Kamogawa Diner serves up deliciously extravagant meals. But that’s not the main reason customers stop by . . .

The father-daughter duo are ‘food detectives’. Through ingenious investigations, they are able to recreate dishes from a person’s treasured memories—dishes that may well hold the keys to their forgotten past and future happiness. The restaurant of lost recipes provides a link to vanished moments, creating a present full of possibility.

A bestseller in Japan, The Kamogawa Food Detectives is a celebration of good company and the power of a delicious meal.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU.

My Review: I ignored the warning signs...the c-a-t on the cover, the call-out to Before the Coffee Gets Cold which is a dreadful, condescending farrago...and paid the price: I just do not like "international bestsellers" because if they appeal to that many people they'll make me queasy with insulin poisoning.

I hated it. But I read it. I wanted the lingering possibility of evoking my 1964 birthday cake, a caramel doberge cake my mother bought to make up for forgetting to make one herself.

Fail. I was annoyed and irked by turns...but y'all'll eat it up (!), I bet, hence the two stars.

If I'd spent Putnam's $25 for a hardcover I'd be frothing bloodily at the mouth and nose.

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A Legend in the Baking (Fake It Till You Bake It #2) by Jamie Wesley

Rating: 3.5* of five

The Publisher Says: After accidentally going viral on social media, a cupcake-baking football player gets assistance from a social media maven—and his best friend's little sister—to help promote his new bakery.

August Hodges was supposed to be the silent partner in Sugar Blitz Cupcakes. Emphasis on silent. That is until his impromptu feminist rant about how women bakers are the backbone of the industry and baking cupcakes isn’t a threat to masculinity goes viral, making him the hottest bachelor in town. With a new location in the works, August and his partners decide to capitalize on this perfect opportunity to help cement their place in the community. But the hiring of his best friend’s younger sister, the woman who has haunted some of his best dreams for years, was as much of a shock as his new-found fame.

Social media manager Sloane Dell fell hard for her brother’s best friend the moment she met him more than a decade ago, but that teenage infatuation cost her dearly. Still, she accepts her brother’s request to revamp the bakery’s social media presence to take advantage of August’s newfound popularity, knowing it’s the big break her fledgling career needs. She’ll just ignore the fact that August is still August, i.e. sexier and sweeter than any man has a right to be. And that he drives her crazy with his resistance to all her ideas.

They vow to leave the past in the past. But when an explosive make-out session makes it clear their attraction burns hotter than ever, Sloane and August are forced to reconsider what it means to take a risk and chase your dreams.

As they’re both about to find out, all’s fair in love and cupcakes.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU.

My Review: It worked before...do it again. People love formulas because they're very soothing. Jamie Wesley's on a winner here because it hits the beats, makes the current landscape...the social-media and baking-as-entertainment landscape that is...her own, and does it in readable prose that gets out of the story's way.

Yay!

Coming November 19th from St. Martin's Griffin. Preorder now.

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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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Body Phobia: The Western Roots of Our Fear of Difference (33%) by Dex E. Anderson

Rating: 5*? can't fault the book for my rage

The Publisher Says: Your body is who you are.

We will only build a just society by rejecting fear of our bodies. American culture hates the fact that we have bodies—from evangelical culture, which insists "you are a soul and have a body," to wellness culture that turns your control over your body into a moral test, to transphobic activism that insists any step taken to change one's body is an immoral act, to the treatment of disabled bodies in a profoundly ableist culture.

Fear has led cisgender, white, and able-bodied Americans to deprioritize the physical experience and prioritize the mind alone, contributing to our alienation from one another, the marginalization of certain kinds of bodies, and harm to us all. Body Phobia is an examination of the American fear of the body, how it permeates all parts of culture, who gets to be perceived as more than their body, and who does not.

By becoming self-aware of how our bodies interact with the world and what it means to have a body, we can begin to overcome the harm done in divorcing the American body and the American mind for centuries. Through cutting analysis and candid storytelling, Dianna E. Anderson exposes our fear-based politics and shows us a way to approach bodies that is neither positive nor negative but neutral. Our bodies are. And that's enough.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU.

My Review: I can not keep reading.

This short book is deeply tendentious and absolutely infuriating. I am confronted with thoughtless homophobia/heterosexism, invisible to the perps; with explicit transphobia everywher I look in our culture; with idiots bloviating about disability in ways that boggle*my*mind* and are impervious to anything like education.

How much more awful for Author Dex Anderson to confont these things, and then courageously set out to analyze and explain them clearly and persuasively...to people who won't listen. I suppose that includes me, since I'm absolutely unable to endure the stress of feeling so infuriated at the way things are one more page without having another stroke.

Broadleaf Books says, "$24.99 please," for the hardcover, which seems inexpensive to me. You should, though, get the information in here.