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Posts by Jane J
Clark introduces readers to a new fantasy world in this latest novella and I'm so here for it.
Eveen is a an undead assassin. When she died she was offered a chance at an undead life - though she has no memory of how that came to be or why she would have made such a choice. As part of her deal she owes her goddess years of service as an assassin. As the goddess's assassin she has to follow 3 rules:
In 1951 two British government officials, Donald Maclean and Guy Burgess, left on a boat sailing from Southampton to France and then disappeared. Though there were suspicions that they had defected to the Soviet Union, this wasn't confirmed until five years later when they appeard at a press conference in Moscow. In the years after this it became clear that they were not the only two British "gentlemen" to have been recruited by the KGB, there were at least 3 others and they all became known as the Cambridge Five.
Athena Greydon was engaged to Johnny Vine. As a wedding present for him, she bought the 10-foot-wide house attached to his. Four weeks before they're to be married, however, Johnny's older brother, Dr. Matthew Vine III, convinces him not to go through with the ceremony. Now, not only has Athena lost a fiance', but she's given up her job and home in preparation for her married life in Harlot's Bay. She's left with few options.
I've been hearing great things about The Will of the Many for a while - which made me more reluctant to read it. I have this kind of reverse metric when it comes to buzzy books. If too many people are raving about a book, how good can it really be? That and it's a chonker of a book (639 pages!) had me on pause. I finally gave in when one more person, who likes many of the same things I do, gave it a rave. And now I'm both glad I waited and kicking myself for waiting so long.
Every month there are new titles purchased for the Too Good to Miss collections at our libraries. If you're not familiar with TGTM (as we call it here in library-world), it's a special collection of popular books that are truly too good to miss. Some are new and popular titles, others are older titles that might not have had as much media attention as a bestseller or celebrity book club selection but are still great reads that deserve another look.
"The kid is born with two shadows"
In spare, poetic language Marisa Crane draws you in from the first sentence and then holds your heart in their hands until the last page. They explore what it means to parent under the figurative shadows of loss and grief and the literal shadows imposed on their characters by a totalitarian government in this dystopian debut.
AI is all the buzz right now across a lot of platforms and there is much debate about whether the technology is actually a good thing or not. Me? I'm in wait and see mode - seeing some good applications, some bad ones and some that are downright weird.
I dropped into The Nigerwife without expectations. It was a book picked by the Lakeview Mystery Book Group members, from a list of suggested titles (created by me), last fall. But the picking of this year's books happened months ago and I didn't have much memory of why I'd put it on a list of suggestions back then. So when I picked it up now to read for the group, I just dove in.
I'm going to tell you that I have a very low threshold for scary things. So if I say that a book freaked me out you can take it with a grain of salt. That said, The Last Astronaut, which was a bit of Alien, a bit of The Martian and some Major Tom vibes thrown in, made me read with one eye closed for the latter half of the book as the creeping dread of the unknown grew.
Davi is living her own version of Groundhog Day. But instead of going to sleep and waking to the same day over and over, Davi is trapped in a fantasy realm attempting to save the Kingdom. And each time she fails and dies (often tortuously), she is woken by a wizard and has to start all over again. She doesn't know why she's trapped in this world, she just knows how many lives she's lived in the past 1000 years and that nothing she's tried up until now has worked to free her. So Davi decides on a new tack.