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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The Peculiar Garden of Harriet Hunt by Chelsea Iversen
Rating: 3* of five
The Publisher Says: A lush, enchanting story of a woman who must use the magic of the fantastical plants that adorn her crumbling estate in Victorian London to thwart the dark plots of the men around her...
Harriet Hunt is completely alone. Her father disappeared months ago, leaving her to wander the halls of Sunnyside house, dwelling on a past she'd rather keep buried. She doesn't often venture beyond her front gate, instead relishing the feel of dirt under her fingernails and of soft moss beneath her feet. Consequently, she's been deemed a little too peculiar for popular Victorian society. This solitary life suits her fine, though – because, in her garden, magic awaits.
Harriet's garden is special. It's a wild place full of twisting ivy, vibrant plums, and a quiet power that buzzes like bees. Caring for this place, and keeping it from running rampant through the streets of her London suburb, is Harriet's purpose.
When suspicion for her father's disappearance falls on her, she marries a seemingly charming man, the first to see past her peculiarities, in order to protect herself. It's soon clear, however, that her new husband might be worse than her father and that she's integral to a dark plot created by the men around her. To free herself and discover the truth, she must learn to channel the power of her strange, magical garden.
At once enchantingly mesmerizing and fiercely feminist, perfect for fans of The Magician's Daughter and The Once and Future Witches, the vibrant world-building and sinister undertones of The Peculiar Garden of Harriet Hunt make for the perfect modern fairytale about women taking control of their lives—with a little help from the magic within them.
I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU.
My Review: The men around her startle me. They noticed this floating wraith of a girl (term used advisedly) at all. She wanders lonely as a cloud around her unhappy home until, at the bitter end of this slogging tale, she has blinding revelatory things occur to her.
Women not in charge of their own lives aren't a lot of fun to read about, however period-appropriate this reality might be. When events finally goad her into action, she *still* drifts! Pretty sentences do not make up for a vacuous passive heroine (Victorian sense heavily implied) to this old man reader. YMMV, and you might see this book's feminism, so three stars.
Sourcebooks Landmark (non-affiliate Amazon link) asks $7.99 for a Kindle edition.
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Heir to Thorn and Flame (Court of Broken Bonds #1) by Ben Alderson
Rating: 3.5* of five
The Publisher Says: Married to a ruthless prince…
For years, Max had to serve and obey the vicious magical nobles. Now he is one of them.
When the heir to the throne attacks him, Max accidentally responds with a lethal burst of magic. Max is certain he will be executed. But his power is too rare and precious for that…
Instead, the king forces him to become the boy he killed, taking on the identity and duties of the heir. That includes an arranged marriage—to the dangerously attractive Prince Camron.
Living a lie, Max knows he can trust no one. Not Camron. And definitely not Simion, a handsome, dragon-riding spy sent to test his loyalty.
As a deadly struggle for power begins and desire sparks, Max must protect his secret and his heart at all costs.
Heir to Thorn and Flame is a passionate and page-turning fantasy romance that will have you reading late into the night. Featuring slow-burn, dark secrets, arranged marriage and found family.
Previously published as The Lost Mage, this expanded version begins a series that builds in heart-pounding tension and steam.
I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU.
My Review: Magic, political intrigue, and a deeply, if lopsidedly, drawn love triangle. I enjoyed it a lot more than I would have ordinarily because it's all men, all the time. I'm always down for a story about love blossoming among men. This time it's more than just private love, it's part of this secondary world's social and political fabric..a balm for someone who's spent over sixty years needing to find himself and those like him in the margins and shadows of heteronormative stories.
There are violent themes...family members murdered, rapes, exploitation and emotional abuse...that made the story darker than it needed to be. The pace of the story is slow, which isn't always a bad thing; it isn't offset by much introspection, though, or that was my experience. Acknowledging the need to use violent threats as a means of self-protection doesn't stand in for an involving inward gaze.
Second Sky (non-affiliate Amazon link) only asks $2.99 for a Kindle edition. Well worth the money; even more than that it's worth your time.
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I Will Greet the Sun Again by Khashayar J. Khabushani
Rating: 3.75* of five
The Publisher Says: A searing, heartbreaking debut about the powerful bonds that make and break an Iranian-American family
Three young brothers leave Los Angeles in the dead of night for Iran, taken by their father from their mother to a country and an ancestral home they barely recognize. They return to the Valley months later, spit back into American life and changed in awful and inexorable ways. Under the annihilating light of the California sun, our protagonist, the youngest brother, tries to piece together a childhood shattered by his father's abuse, a queer adolescence marked by a shy, secret love affair with a boy he meets on the basketball court, and his suddenly-hostile status as a Muslim living under the shadow of 9/11.
I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU.
My Review: Figuring yourself out is the main project of adolescence. Religion screws this up royally for many gay boys; all Muslim gay boys I've ever known, most others. This story's chronicle of family dissolution, personal awakening, and societal rage directed at children all unearned, isn't breaking new narrative ground. The Southern California/Iran axis of immigration's pretty new to most not from SoCal, so adds a savory new ingredient to most readers' reading.
Lovely sentences, cultural clashes among and outside the family, and a piquant salting of Farsi to lend extra music to this oft-told coming-of-age story all make this good value for a gay man's eyeblinks. Maybe less heartily recommended to straights; still worthy of the time and treasure to get it read.
Hogarth (non-affiliate Amazon link) says "$12.99 please" for the Kindlebook.
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Beholder by Ryan La Sala
Rating: 3.5* of five
The Publisher Says: From Ryan La Sala, author of the tantalizingly twisted The Honeys and riotously imaginative Reverie, comes a chilling new contemporary fable about art, aesthetic obsession, and the gaze that peers back at us from behind our reflections.
Athanasios “Athan” Bakirtzis hasn’t had an easy life. Orphaned by a fire at a young age, he’s had to rely on his charm, his under-the-table job as an art handler, and the generosity of family friends to care for his ailing Yiayia, his grandmother.
But Athan also has a secret: a hereditary power that allows him to rewind the reflection in any mirror, peering into its recent past. Superstitious Yiayia calls the family ability a curse, and has long warned him never to use it. For Athan, who’s survived this long by keeping to the realm of the real, this is a perfectly agreeable arrangement.
Until the night of the party. After being invited to a penthouse soiree for New York’s art elite, Athan breaks his grandmother’s rule during a trip to the bathroom, turning back his reflection for just a moment. Then he hears a slam against the bathroom door, followed by a scream. Athan peers outside, only to be pushed back in by a boy his age. The boy gravely tells him not to open the door, then closes Athan in.
Before Athan can process what’s happening, more screams follow, and the party descends into chaos. When he finally emerges, he discovers a massacre where the victims appear to have arranged themselves into a disturbingly elegant sculpture—and Athan's mysterious savior is nowhere to be found.
Something evil is compelling people to destructive acts, a presence that’s been hiding behind Athan’s reflection his whole life, watching and biding its time. Soon, he’s swept up in a supernatural conspiracy that spans New York, of occult high societies and deadly eldritch designs. If beauty really is in the eye of the beholder, what can it do to us once it’s inside?
I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU.
My Review: Fast-paced, fascinating tale of how mundane things, usually noticed in passing at best, can become deeply threatening when their shape and pretty shine is manipulated against the eye of the beholder. I think the fundamental need of the PoV, Athan, is one we ought to pay better attention to: Seeing underneath the surfaces of shiny, pretty things is a curse indeed, as his grandmother says; it's not because it's inherently dangerous, though. Because it means the adept is now dangerous to those who hide behind distractions and reflections.
Well-written, deftly plotted, and unputdownable. Why not more stars, especially since it's also low gore? "Eldritch" supernatural stuff automatically feels silly to me. Also I do not think I'd give this to anyone under seventeen and then only if I knew them well enough to know their level-headedness would keep nightmares at bay.
PUSH (an imprint of Scholastic; non-affiliate Amazon link) wants $11.99 for a Kindle copy. Reasonable to my eyes.
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The Longest Summer by Alexandrine Ogundimu
Rating: 3.75* of five
The Publisher Says: Being queer in a small town? Bad. Your employer believing you stole ten thousand dollars? Worse.
Abboton, IN has kept hard-partying Victor Adewale in the closet for his entire life. So he makes a deal with his stern Nigerian father: Clean up his act, hold down a job, and the dad will pay for him to attend grad school in New York. Easy enough, until $10,000 goes missing from Victor’s Hot Topic-esque mall store under his watch, leaving him the prime suspect.
Meanwhile, Victor’s secret ex-boyfriend Kyle sets him up with fellow mallrat Amory. A bisexual love triangle forms when it becomes clear Victor and Kyle aren’t over each other. But as Victor grows increasingly certain that Kyle is responsible for the theft, their relationship gets way more complicated. Desperate, Victor turns to his dangerous friend Henshaw, who offers shady alternative methods of getting the money he needs. But Henshaw’s got secrets of his own that might destroy them all.
I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.
My Review: What a hoot! Kyle and Victor are such a fun snarktastic pair of boys who are seriously believeably In Love and scared to do anything like, you know, make a commitment or something. Their gal-pal Amory thinks she can wedge in the middle, and realizes how powerful the bonds she's between are. Kyle is manipulative and unkind; Victor's wishywashy and unmoored; everyone's in that middle ground where feelings are, in fact, everything. It makes the explosions that come all the more believable.
Victor's rigid, unyielding, controlling father and his mad, bad, dangerous to know chaotic craptastic "friend" Henshaw are the poles of the magnet that has him, Kyle, and Amory in its field. It was a completely believable story, true to the young people's life I think we all must go through, and drawn with great sensitivity.
Clash (an imprint of Scholastic; non-affiliate Amazon link) wants $5.99 for a Kindle copy—run, don't walk, to get one!
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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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Undead Souths: The Gothic and Beyond in Southern Literature and Culture edited by Eric Gary Anderson, Taylor Hagood, Daniel Cross Turner (27%)
Rating: 3* of five
The Publisher Says: Depictions of the undead in the American South are not limited to our modern versions, such as the vampires in True Blood and the zombies in The Walking Dead. As Undead Souths reveals, physical emanations of southern undeadness are legion, but undeadness also appears in symbolic, psychological, and cultural forms, including the social death endured by enslaved people, the Cult of the Lost Cause that resurrected the fallen heroes of the Confederacy as secular saints, and mourning rites revived by Native Americans forcibly removed from the American Southeast.
To capture the manifold forms of southern haunting and horror, Undead Souths explores a variety of media and historical periods, establishes cultural crossings between the South and other regions within and outside of the U.S., and employs diverse theoretical and critical approaches. The result is an engaging and inclusive collection that chronicles the enduring connection between southern culture and the refusal of the dead to stay dead.
I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.
My Review: I'll say this for the editors: They cast a wide net. They did not give me a bum steer in their description. It's accurate.
That's my issue, it's accurate. It is great for a lit-crit text designed to enliven a course of lectures. It gave me a sense of seasickness from the discontinuity inherent in the format. So this isn't a complaining review, just a "don't mistake this book for a continuous narrative or you'll be disappointed" one.
LSU Press (non-affiliate Amazon link) charges $19.95 for a Kindle copy.
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WALLACE STEGNER'S UNSETTLED COUNTRY: Ruin, Realism, and Possibility in the American West
Mark Fiege, Leisl Carr Childers, Michael J. Lansing, Editors @ (31%)
Rating: 2.5* of five
The Publisher Says: Wallace Stegner is an iconic western writer. His works of nonfiction, including the Pulitzer Prize–winning Angle of Repose and Big Rock Candy Mountain, as well as his nonfiction books and essays introduced the beauty and character of the American West to thousands of readers. Wallace Stegner’s Unsettled Country assesses his life, work, and legacy in light of contemporary issues and crises. Along with Stegner’s achievements, the contributors show how his failures offer equally crucial ways to assess the past, present, and future of the region.
Drawing from history, literature, philosophy, law, geography, and park management, the contributors consider Stegner’s racial liberalism and regional vision, his gendered view of the world, his understandings of conservation and the environment, his personal experience of economic collapse and poverty, his yearning for community, and his abiding attachment to the West. Wallace Stegner’s Unsettled Country is an even-handed reclamation of Stegner’s enduring relevance to anyone concerned about the American West’s uncertain future.
I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU.
My Review: Why revisit the life and work of yet another old, dead white guy in all his sexist, regressive glory Because he has a lot to tell us, and teach us, about our world and its roots, I'm told in these essays.
Stegner is nowhere near as troublesome to modern sensibilities as many of his contemporaries. He was blissfully unaware of the importance of nonwhite people in the discourses about our country, yet perfectly willing to discourse about them and their issues. His unawareness of the privilege of old-white-maleness was tempered by his genuine concern for the abuses and issues of people not like him; but he was a man of his time, and both misogynistic and paternalistic in his attitudes. Liberalism is not enough, and that idea never so much as crossed his mental radar. He is shown here in all his flawed grandeur, a talented writer and a man more open to learning and to changing his mind as facts and evidence demanded. His position as a monadnock of Western-US writing, and thinking about Western-US issues, is not diminished by assesssing his failings, flaws, and mistakes. That does not, however, mean the essays about him don't take A Tone that swings from laudatory to embarrassed. It wore my patience too thin.
Bison Books asks $14.99 for a Kindlebook. You'd need to be a much bigger fan than I am to shall that out.
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