Category: Reviews

Title: Darling Rose Gold

Author: Stephanie Wrobel

Author website: https://stephaniewrobel.com/

Publisher: Berkley

Published: 2020

Pages: 311

Genre: Psychological Suspense

Summary: Patty Watts is being released from prison after five years, and to everyone’s surprise, her daughter, Rose Gold Watts, has offered to let her live with her and her new baby. This is surprising because Rose Gold is the reason Patty was in prison, having testified against her mother for aggravated child abuse. Patty had been poisoning her daughter’s food for most of her life, making her appear sick and benefiting from the attention that gave her.

As mother and daughter begin to settle into a new life, the reader will question how contrite Patty is, how complicit Rose Gold is, and who is really in control throughout the story.

My take: This is a dark story. You are going to be reading from the perspective of a sociopath throughout the story. Wrobel spends a good portion of the book focusing on Rose Gold’s life after her mother’s imprisonment and how it wasn’t the vast improvement everyone thought it would be. Rose Gold is gullible and desperate for attention and affection and she’s finding her way in the world mostly alone. I like that this story challenges the idea that once you get a child out of a bad situation, that everything will just magically be better. All of the sudden with Rose Gold, we have a young women who has never had to take care of herself before. She looks like an adult on the outside, but she is still very much a child from an emotional standpoint.

The twists in this story come rapidly at the end and you will constantly have the nagging feeling that something more is happening but you don’t fully grasp it. I really enjoyed that as each piece of the puzzle slotted into place, I felt that the reader had been given all of the set-up they needed (no one likes an ending that doesn’t have a solid lead-up).

It’s hard to describe reading a story this dark as an enjoyable experience, but I did have trouble putting it down once I got going. I liked the cat and mouse nature of the two main characters and trying to figure out who was playing who. I also felt that the length of the story was perfect: not too much description, not so much action that we didn’t see development. The cover design was also really haunting considering it’s a pink cover.

This book came out right after the Gypsy Rose Blanchard case was getting a lot of media attention (Gypsy Rose was sentenced in 2016) and it is obviously resurging again now that Gypsy Rose has been released from prison. I can’t help looking for this character when I see images of Gypsy Rose now. The themes are certainly similar and the case is mentioned in the author’s acknowledgements page.

If you missed this one when it first came out and you like dark psychological suspense, I would recommend circling back around to it.

My rating: 3 stars

It’s pretty good for what it is, but psychological suspense where I can’t root for any of the characters just isn’t my preference.

Title: Smash It!

Author: Francina Simone

Publisher: Inkyard Press

Published: 2020

Genre: YA Contemporary

Pages: 368

Format: Hardback

Summary: At a Halloween party where multiple people give her well-intentioned but un-asked-for advice, Olivia “Liv” James comes to the conclusion that her life isn’t living up to her expectations. She decides to create a list of to-dos to change herself and her future. She’s inspired by Shonda Rhimes’ book, The Year of Yes, and vows to be bold, learn to take a compliment, stand out instead of back, go on a date, and stop crushing and move on. As she goes about these tasks the tagline says it all, “Mistakes were made”.

Featuring: angsty teens, body positivity, and a love rectangle.

Liv has to find out the hard way who her real friends are and that love doesn’t come easy.

My thoughts: This book unexpectedly made me cry. I wasn’t ready for the depth of emotion we get out of Liv. Don’t get me wrong, I’m more than a decade out of my teenage years and I found myself frustrated by her lack of maturity and her inability to communicate as a crux of the book. That being said, I like the character growth that we see throughout the book from nearly every character, not just Liv. Don’t let the bright colors on the cover fool you though, this book packs a punch. The teen characters are going through very difficult times in their lives. There’s racism, sexism, bullying, fatphobia, you name it and it’s pretty much in here.

I will offer some of the same criticisms that other reviewers have though, in that there are some lines of dialogue in here that go too far for my personal taste. I understand that teens will unintentionally say things that are incredibly insensitive and often will not get called out for it by their peers, but there were comments in here that were downright painful to read. The teens in this book call each other out on a lot, so it’s hard to see comments that are insulting to many groups go by like they’re acceptable jokes. This book tried to tackle a lot of hard topics, and it didn’t hit them all with the same level of sensitivity.

My rating: 3 stars

This marks book 1/25 from my Netgalley Shelf of Shame. See post here.

Hello Readers! I’ve done a fair amount of reading in the past few months, and many of those books were new releases that I want to tell you about. These were titles that I got on NetGalley with the expectation of an honest review.

The Future is Yours by Dan Frey

Published: February 9, 2021

This was a fast-paced sci-fi book that posited the potential impacts of technological developments that could predict the near-future. In this case, one very smart dude named Adhi develops a technology that can be used to search for events one year in the future, and his friend Ben helps him build a company around this idea and begin marketing it. It addresses all of the typical predicted pitfalls of future forecasting, most notably, as our two main characters attempt to test whether the future can be changed once it has been predicted. The story was a wild ride and a quick read. It’s also told as a modern epistolary novel (in the form of texts, emails, and records from a Congressional hearing), which helps keep the pace up while also keeping the reader guessing. The Congressional hearing is taking place in the present day and the emails, texts, and other items are being introduced as flashbacks, but also as evidence for the hearing. There’s a mystery at the heart of everything and I really liked how the book dealt with the practical and emotional sides of this oft-written sci-fi concept. I rated this one 4 stars, and other than some mild language, I would widely recommend this title for sci-fi fans.

The Burning Girls by C.J. Tudor

Published: February 9, 2021

This book tells the story of a female vicar named Jack Brooks who moves to a town that is best known for burning eight people at the stake as Protestant martyrs 500 years before. Interwoven with the history of the town is the fact that 30 years before, two young girls went missing and have never been found. On top of all of that, the only reason that the new vicar has been summoned to this town is that the previous vicar appears to have killed himself two months ago. There are a lot of threads to this story, including a sinister subplot following the new vicar, Jack. As she and her teenage daughter get settled in to this very small new town their interactions with the locals are rarely positive, and both women appear to be having brushes with the supernatural. This is my third C.J. Tudor book and I’ve come to expect a few things from one of her novels: the plot will be much more complex than I think it is at first, there will be a plethora of likely suspects, the victims will be deeply flawed people, and I will not see the ending coming. I have also come to expect that there will be at least one deeply disturbing scene in each of the books that makes it difficult for me to recommend as widely as I would like, and this book was no exception. Nonetheless, I gave this one a 4 star rating and would recommend it for fans of Simone St. James and Riley Sager.

Good Girl, Bad Blood by Holly Jackson

Published: March 2, 2021

I was so worried going into this book about the dreaded second book syndrome, but I needn’t have worried. In my opinion, this book is even better than the first one was. In Good Girl, Bad Blood we pick up with Pip only a few months after the events in A Good Girl’s Guide to Murder have concluded. After the dangerous events tied to her first investigation, Pip has promised her family that she will not lose herself to an investigation like that ever again. That promise is tested when someone she knows goes missing and she is approached by the victim’s family to help after the police refuse to investigate. The reader really gets a great sense of the mental struggles Pip is going through as she delves into another investigation. So many people are telling her how she should feel and how she should act and are criticizing her for both. The emotional depth to this story far outweighs the first book, in my opinion, and I will definitely be continuing on with the series. I rated it 4 stars as well and would recommend it for fans of the Truly Devious series and fans of YA mysteries in general.

Every Last Fear by Alex Finlay

Published: March 2, 2021

I’ll admit that I wasn’t as enthusiastic about this one in the first few chapters. There are a lot of cliched characters in this book and it felt like it took a long time to get to the central premise of the mystery. The story begins as Matt Pine discovers that his family has been found dead on a vacation in Mexico, which the Mexican authorities initially rule an accident, but that is only where the story begins. The Pines have been in the news before, primarily because Matt’s brother, Danny, is in prison for the murder of his high school girlfriend. Danny has always claimed he was innocent of the crime and most of the Pine family has spent the last several years fighting to get him a new trial or have him released from prison. Ultimately, the plot line with Danny is what puts the rest of the events in motion, but he plays very little active role in the story itself. The story is told in varying perspectives from Matt in the present, and his father, his mother, and his sister’s points of view in the past. Each are experiencing the hardships of Danny’s incarceration in different ways. I predicted the killer at about the 60% mark and accurately assessed the killer’s motives at that time as well. Ultimately, whether it was the pacing or the character development, this story just didn’t feel that special to me. The FBI presence didn’t feel necessary and some of their actions are nonsensical (such as flying Matt out to the prison in a helicopter to make him inform his brother of the deaths). I gave it three stars and would recommend it to thriller readers, but it wouldn’t be my first recommendation for them.

Hello Readers! Through a twist of library hold fate, I got to read two of my most anticipated backlist titles this weekend. They’ve each been out for a while but have been really difficult to get from my libraries.

First up, I read The Silent Patient by Alex Michaelides. This is a thriller that came out in 2019 and made tons of “best books” lists in the meantime. I went into it with very little knowledge of the plot, and I would recommend that you do the same. The basics are that you are reading about a woman who is currently residing in a mental health facility because she killed her husband several years ago and she hasn’t spoken or communicated with anyone since then. It’s an interesting thriller that was unlike anything I had ever read before, but ultimately it underwhelmed me a little. I gave this title 3 stars on Goodreads because the twist was pretty good, but the rest of the story just didn’t grip me. I also felt like it was lacking in tension-building. Obviously, this was a very well-loved book that a ton of people really enjoyed, but it’s not one that I’ll be picking up to reread. That being said, the author’s writing was clear and the twist was good enough that I will be reading his upcoming release, The Maidens. I think one of my favorite aspects of The Silent Patient involved a side plot with references to Greek tragedy, and I’ve heard that the next book leans more heavily into that theme.

The next book that I read this weekend was The Midnight Library by Matt Haig, which came out in the Fall of 2020. I would offer a trigger warning related to this book for suicidal ideation and other elements related to suicide. It is not what you would call a happy book, but I found myself wanting to underline and highlight quotes throughout the book (but I didn’t…because it’s a library book and we all know that you shouldn’t do that to library books. Right?). I will probably be purchasing a copy for myself so that I can go through and read it again while adding my own notes. The writing is lyrical and the concepts can get pretty deep into philosophy, but there wasn’t any point while I was reading this book where I felt lost. All of the events that the main character, Nora, goes through sparked empathy in me. She is a troubled young woman who has to come to grips with a lot of tough events in her life. Her regrets are numerous and overwhelming to her at times and the entire book is about her reckoning with that fact. This was a 5-star read for me and I already want to pick it back up for a re-read. If you’re a fan of sci-fi that deals with alternate timelines, I think this would be an interesting pick for you. I will be picking up Matt Haig’s backlist soon.

I hope you’ve had a productive reading weekend. Take care!