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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Atlas of unknowable things by McCormick Templeman
Rating: 3.5* of five
The Publisher Says: Perfect for fans of The 7½ Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle, with a modern gothic twist.
High in the Rocky Mountains on a secluded campus, sits Hildegard College, a celebrated institution known for its scientific innovation and its sprawling, botanical gardens. Historian Robin Quain has been awarded a residency to examine Hildegard’s impressive collection of ancient manuscripts, but she has a secret. She’s actually on the hunt for an artifact—one she must find before her former best friend turned professional rival gets his hands on it first.
But Hildegard has secrets of its own. Strange sounds echo across the alpine lake, lights flicker through the pines, and the faculty seem more like Jazz-age glitterati than academics. And then there’s the professor who holds the key to Robin’s research. She vanished suddenly last spring. What exactly did she do at the college, and why does no one want to talk about her?
As Robin searches for answers, an unknown source sends her a series of cryptic messages that makes her question whether she’s the one doing the hunting, or whether someone is hunting her. Drawing on historical, botanical, and occult research, and steeped in the gothic tradition, Atlas of Unknowable Things considers what it means to search for meaning in the scientific, only to come face to face with the sublime.
I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU.
My Review: First, read this:
I began to understand. I had stepped through a veil of sorts. Hildegard wasn’t like other places. There were rules here I didn’t understand. There were puzzles and clues and mysteries, and even though I felt an almost immediate and palpable sense of danger, some part of me was excited. I’d spent my entire life waiting for something to feel real, to feel important. I’d always wanted to feel at the center of something truly grand. And though I couldn’t say definitively that what was happening to me was necessarily grand, at least it was something.
This is why the book only gets three and a half stars. Everything Robin, our PoV character, says here is exactly what I was thinking.
From beginning to end. That, my olds, is not great in a gothic story that's trading on dark academia vibes. If I'm *still* not clear on why I, or anyone else, follows her or allows her the access to the things she just...waltzes in and takes stuff...she has no right to, it'll take a lot more than a parade of only vaguely connected references meant to ground me. I'm afraid I never got invested enough to care.
St. Martin's Press (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link) asks $14.99 for the ebook.Read a sample first.
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And There He Kept Her (Ben Packard #1) by Joshua Moehling
Rating: 3.5* of five
The Publisher Says: They thought he was a helpless old man. They were wrong.
When two teenagers break into a house on a remote lake in search of prescription drugs, what starts as a simple burglary turns into a nightmare for all involved. Emmett Burr has secrets he's been keeping in his basement for more than two decades, and he'll do anything to keep his past from being revealed. As he gets the upper hand on his tormentors, the lines blur between victim, abuser, and protector.
Personal tragedy has sent former police officer Ben Packard back to the small Minnesota town of Sandy Lake in search of a fresh start. Now a sheriff's deputy, Packard is leading the investigation into the missing teens, motivated by a family connection. As clues dry up and time runs out to save them, Packard is forced to reveal his own secrets and dig deep to uncover the dark past of the place he now calls home.
Unrelentingly suspenseful and written with a piercing gaze into the dark depths of the human soul, And There He Kept Her is a thrilling page-turner that introduces readers to a complicated new hero and forces us to consider the true nature of evil.
I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU.
My Review: Unsettling, prurient teen-girl grooming story investigated by a gay cop returning home to small-town Minnesota to work. Absolutely not one hint of salaciousness, nothing played for titillation, all my bugaboos avoided there.
Except the one about psychosexual harm to girls. I finished it, which tells you something important. YMMV depending on your squeamishness levels.
Poisoned Pen Press (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link) needs $17.99 to let you read it.
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Where the Dead Sleep (Ben Packard #2) by Joshua Moehling
Rating: 3.5* of five
The Publisher Says: A small town's dark secrets turn deadly...
When an early morning call brings Deputy Ben Packard to the scene of a home invasion, he finds Bill Sandersen shot in his bed. Bill was a well-liked local who chased easy money his whole life, leaving bad debts and broken hearts in his wake. Everyone Packard talks to has a story about Bill, but no one has a clear motive for wanting him dead. The business partner. The ex-wife. The current wife. The high-stakes poker buddies. Any of them—or none of them—could be guilty.
As the investigation begins, tragedy strikes the Sheriff's department, forcing Packard to make a difficult choice about his future: step down as acting Sheriff and pursue the quiet life he came to Sandy Lake in search of, or subject himself to the scrutiny of an election for the full-time role of Sheriff, a job he's not sure he wants.
There's a hidden history to Sandy Lake that Packard, ever the outsider, can't see. Bad blood and old secrets run deep. But an attempt on Packard's life means he's getting uncomfortably close to the dangerous legacy of the quiet Minnesota town. And someone will do anything to keep it hidden.
I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU.
My Review: Caddish bro-dawggery getting a gladhanding con-man murdered in his bed? A boy can dream...and solved by sweet, seriously misplaced queer cinnamon bun acting sheriff (mulling a run for the real job, since the sheriff's got {terminal?} cancer) of a small Minnesota town? If it gets better I ain't found it yet.
Well...start work on your brother's thirty-year-old cold case or quit obsessing. Also not one soul has walked up and said, "we don't like your kind here f*ggot," so why keep worrying about them voting for a crime-solvin' hometown boy? Pull 'em up and grab the life you want!
Poisoned Pen Press (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link) requires $16.99 from you this time.
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Café Unfiltered by Jean-Philippe Blondel (tr. Alison Anderson)
Rating: 3.5* of five
The Publisher Says: An ode to the French café as a magical place, portrayed by a beloved author with humanity, insight, and tenderness.
At a classic café in the French provinces, anonymity, chance encounters, and traumatic pasts collide against the muted background of global instability. Jean-Philippe Blondel, author of the bestselling The 6:41 to Paris, presents a moving fresco of intertwined destinies. In the span of twenty-four hours, a medley of characters retrace the fading patterns of their lives after a long disruption from Covid.
A mother and son realize their vast differences, a man takes tea with a childhood friend he had once covertly fallen for, and a woman crosses paths with the ex who abandoned her in Australia. Amidst it all, the café swirls like a kaleidoscope, bringing together customers, waiters, and owners past and present. Within its walls and on its terrace, they examine the threads of their existence, laying bare their inner selves, their failed dreams, and their hopes for the uncertain future that awaits us all.
I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.
My Review: What I loved about this read was its episodic, character-sketch nature; its acceptance of the complexity of human love; and its just-post-COVID sense of reopening, opening up, becoming open to life.
What I was less excited by was the scattershot feeling of wanting more than I got about the people I was ready to love; the not-its-fault datedness of the planet-wide post-COVID intake of breath; and its more ornamental prose bits (not the whole book, I hasten to say).
New Vessel Press (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link) requests $17.95 for any edition you care to read. It's a lovely, peaceful, easy-to-love cafe I'd be a regular at.
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The 6:41 to Paris by Jean-Philippe Blondel (tr. Alison Anderson)
Rating: 3.5* of five
The Publisher Says: Cécile, a stylish forty-seven-year-old, has spent the weekend visiting her parents in a provincial town southeast of Paris. By early Monday morning, she's exhausted. These trips back home are always stressful and she settles into a train compartment with an empty seat beside her. But it's soon occupied by a man she instantly recognizes: Philippe Leduc, with whom she had a passionate affair that ended in her brutal humiliation thirty years ago.
In the fraught hour and a half that ensues, their express train hurtles towards the French capital. Cécile and Philippe undertake their own face to face journey—In silence? What could they possibly say to one another?—with the reader gaining entrée to the most private of thoughts. This is a psychological thriller about past romance, with all its pain and promise.
I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.
My Review: Great loves that end badly don't, in my own experience, end. "The one that got away" and "the slime who broke my heart" and other such angry, wistful, and vaporous utterances are mainstays of entire genres of literature, romantic or suspenseful or violent as they need to be. Love needs an ending, not merely an end.
These two former lovers get a shocking amount of thinking (but nothing else) done on their trip to Paris; home, or not. Voyages are excellent mulling-over time. "Was it worth it?" A question that never offers one answer or even one foundation for an answer.
New Vessel Press (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link) requests $9.99 transfer itself to them before you may legally access the nebulous, intellectual jeu d'esprit of a story.
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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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Cackle by Rachel Harrison (68%)
Rating: 2.5* of five
The Publisher Says: A darkly funny, frightening novel about a young woman learning how to take what she wants from a witch who may be too good to be true, from the author of The Return.
All her life, Annie has played it nice and safe. After being unceremoniously dumped by her longtime boyfriend, Annie seeks a fresh start. She accepts a teaching position that moves her from Manhattan to a small village upstate. She’s stunned by how perfect and picturesque the town is. The people are all friendly and warm. Her new apartment is dreamy too, minus the oddly persistent spider infestation.
Then Annie meets Sophie. Beautiful, charming, magnetic Sophie, who takes a special interest in Annie, who wants to be her friend. More importantly, she wants Annie to stop apologizing and start living for herself. That’s how Sophie lives. Annie can’t help but gravitate toward the self-possessed Sophie, wanting to spend more and more time with her, despite the fact that the rest of the townsfolk seem…a little afraid of her. And like, okay. There are some things. Sophie’s appearance is uncanny and ageless, her mansion in the middle of the woods feels a little unearthly, and she does seem to wield a certain power…but she couldn’t be…could she?
I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.
My Review: I craved a funny, fantastical story for #Deathtober. Maybe some suspense, maybe some spice, I was primed and ready for a scary, dark read.
Not remotely. Ralph is the scariest character (an absurd idea that will only make sense if you've read the story) in what I found to be a solidly YA tale about two misfit women becoming besties. I hit, "Some men are so foul you wouldn't even save their blood," {Sophie} says. "Sorry?" {this from Annie the PoV}...and realized I could barely distinguish them, didn't care to, and was imagining beige walls in this scary place they are.
Berkley (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link) thinks it's worth $9.99 for an ebook. I don't, but I'm a long way from fifteen.
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