The Weight of Blood by Laura McHugh

 

This is a very good novel--mostly a rural crime novel, but also a passable bildungsroman (maybe something of a a double-barreled one, given the twinned timelines) with perhaps part of the growing up in this case being a realization that unearned loyalty is a mistake and/or worthless; maybe something about staying where you are needing to be an active choice and not just the result of a lack of options. There's pain and grief here, but what they fuel is less in the way of vengeance than it is a burning need to know. The parallels between past and present play neat thematic chords, as well. I do kinda wish Ms. McHugh had been able to tell the whole novel in just the two first-person POVs, but I get why she needed to start introducing other POVs (and I get why those other POVs are all tight third).

Horror Movie by Paul Tremblay

 

A neat little Horror novel (big shock on the genre, there, I'm sure) that plays some interesting games with PTSD and identity, with maybe an interesting echo of Barker's "Dread," where someone brings about their own destruction by turning someone else into a monster. There are large stretches told in something like screenplay format (and might in fact be formatted correctly) but it's not a transcript, all the observations about what the people in the script are thinking or feeling are at least plausible as a written--as opposed to a transcribed--thing. Also, what's going on outside the movie is ... plenty realistic/plausible, there's nothing really supernatural happening in this novel, I think, just some damaged people making some dubious decisions.

The Cartographers by Peng Shepherd

 

This is a really ... stolid novel, really. There are hints of Rashomon in it, with all the various first-person characters flashing in for their own chapters, interrupting the main narration, but all of that first person stuff is remarkably reliable, really, and other than some notion of honesty or fair play I see no real reason for it. And I figured out the big dramatic reveal--who the bad guy was--something like two hundred pages beforehand. Ms. Shepherd has written a novel about some putative conflict between technology and magic, while skittering into "the map is not the territory" territory (heh). The former is a pretty common theme in modern (non secondary world) Fantasy, and the latter at least seems to be, as well--The Book of Doors and The Starless Sea both were playing with very similar ideas with books instead of maps. Given that my reaction to all those books, and this one, was very "meh," it's possible there's something in that that just doesn't work for me.

Skinny Dip by Carl Hiaasen

 

I am obviously in a place right now where Hiaasen's novels hit buttons I like having hit, and this one does just that. There's a nefarious scheme that involves continuing to destroy the Everglades unhindered, and it gets at least partially foiled, and the schemers come to bad ends; kinda oddly, approximately no one else does (mainly because none of the other characters in the novel are involved in that scheme--even the people knowingly committing adultery are not behaving that sort of badly). There's typical Hiaasen wit and mild raunch along side the crime and corruption and environmental destruction. Very laugh-out-loud in parts.

The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway

 

A bunch of rich drunks have drunken adventures in France and Spain between the Wars. There is fishing, and there are bullfights. Decadence and dissolution more or less without reprieve. Lots of conversations, occasionally not super-clear who's talking; I guess it's plausible the characters are talking about things they don't ever (much) mention, but the book really wasn't interesting enough for me to try to read that deeply, or for me to reread it.

The Last One at the Wedding by Jason Rekulak

 

This came out like right after I read Hidden Pictures, which I liked a lot, so I put a hold on it at the library. Uh ... This is not a very good novel--nowhere near as good as Hidden Pictures, for sure. There aren't any really likeable characters, or really even believable ones, and the big twist--who the sociopath the narrator needs to deal with--is pretty obvious from about halfway in (maybe more). I'm sure Rekulak is trying to say important things, mostly about stuff like wealth and power disparities, and I'm sure that to an extent the slightly dulled and thickened narrative voice is intentional; but the overwhelming experience here is authorial clumsiness.

Book of Night by Holly Black

 

This is a novel that sets itself some easy goals, and then reaches them. It's very much in the same vein as Laurell Hamilton or Kim Harrison, complete with "it's the real world but there's been magic for a while," but it's in third person (better to show you things the main can't possibly know) and the main clearly knows herself better than at least those two authors' mains ever did, that I saw. Also, she's only just on the path to becoming a monster--I presume there will be other novels, and I presume she will become more a monster in them, though I suppose it's possible she'll do so about as intentionally and knowingly as Dresden did; I won't be reading those novels, this book was not good enough to interest me in them.