Taste the Books: Review Morsels #73 Courtney Gould, Seanan McGuire, Melissa Albert

Intro

Hello beauties!

Welcome again to my own brand of mini reviews! I never thought I'd do minis, until I recapped a few of my long reviews in some digest post in 2014, and then guest-posted some shorties for a blogging event in 2015. And Karen from For What It's Worth started praising my short recs/recaps 😊. Just to be clear,  I'm STILL writing long reviews too - but for anthologies, shorter books or books that I didn't enjoy/don't have enough to say about, I decided to stick to minis, and I took to writing them also for novels that I can do justice to in a less wordy fashion, in order to ease my reviewing burden. In addition to that, I sometimes write minis for books I don't want/don't have the time to review in full at the moment, but plan on rereading and writing "proper" reviews for later. Lastly, just be warned - this feature is VERY random!

Note: all the mini blurbs (in italics) are of my own creation.

Until the Last Light Goes Out by Courtney Gould (ARC Review)

★★★★★

Hoping to find answers and to battle their own demons, the kids of five massacre survivors go back to the abandoned resort their parent managed to escape - but they're not prepared for a sentient, reality-bending building determined to consume whomever crosses its threshold.

***

First off...DISCLAIMER: I requested this title on NetGalley. Thanks to Pan Macmillan for providing a temporary ecopy. This didn't influence my review in any way.

If you enjoy liminal-space/impossible-maze narratives, only with a heart, it doesn't get any better than this. Told in a double-timeline narrative (Paige's POV in the present, her mother Casey's in the past), UTLLGO blends atmospheric/body horror (but also the horror of being a teen and inherently straddling a different kind of liminal space - the one between victim and abuser, popular and outcast), generational trauma, coming of age, fierce friendship/lesbian awakening, on the backdrop of a labyrinthine, impossible building that is not a haunted house, but a haunt in itself. Rooms shift, time breaks, violence erupts, the resort feeds, and a bunch of friends (in both timelines) try to find a way out: what's not to love? But the human angle is equally compelling, with themes of guilt, atonement and sacrifice, but also hope and strength - including that of rising above the sins of your parents. The ending is...interesting, and while it doesn't wrap things up in a convenient ribbon, it at least offers some (provisional) closure and a tendril of hope. Once more, Courtney Gould proves to be capable to write the type of supernatural horror populated by genuine teens that even more mature readers can enjoy.

TW (list provided by the author): body horror, self harm, death/harm of a child, gore/violence, suicide, homophobia; (more): death of a parent (off-page), near-drowning, animal killing (bird), vomiting.

Note: as a rule, I review every book that I rate 4 stars and above in full, unless it's a novella or an anthology. But I didn't want to go in too deep about this one to avoid spoilers, and it felt easy to summarise its contents (and my opinions) in a few sentences, so I took the mini-review route.

Butterfly Effects by Seanan McGuire

(InCryptid #15)

★★★★★

Telepatic predator and amateur mathematician (a.k.a. Johrlac) Sarah Zellaby gets abducted and carried to her home world by her own people, to be tried for the supposed crimes she committed eight years ago. Of course her human family doesn't take it well, especially when her cousin Arthur is swept along for the ride and both of them might be annihilated in different ways. But when a small, yet battle-hardened extraction team follows Sarah and Arthur on Johrlar, they find more than they bargained for, in several respects...

***

Sarah is my favourite InCryptid character (along with Mary), so I was looking forward to her narrating again - along with her adoptive niece/cousin Antimony (it's complicated). I was also eager to see the thread(s) left dangling at the end of Imaginary Numbers being picked up - and as a bonus, the synopsis promised a trip to Sarah's home dimension. I'll be honest though...it took me a bit to warm up to Butterfly Effects, mostly because 1) I don't care much for jail/escape narratives, and 2) the Johrlar setting ended up leaning more on the "fantasy" than on the "urban" side (I should have expected that from the little we'd seen of it in Calculated Risk, but oh well). Anyway, bit by bit, the story sneaked up on me, and so did the setting. Sarah is one of the most inventive, complex, fascinating characters you will ever encounter, and transporting her to her (equally imaginative) home world allowed McGuire to tackle themes of roots, identity, individual-vs.-collective, oppression, guilt/blame, loyalty and family of choice, peppered with a whole lot of coming-into-your-powers stuff (not only when it came to Sarah). Again, I'll be honest - the final confrontation went down a little too easily (though I'll partly chalk it up to a certain ally that shifted the power balance in our heroes' favour) and there were a couple of deus-ex-machina-adjacent moments that didn't make complete sense, but...these characters deserved some happiness and peace, and McGuire managed to have my jaw drop a couple of times, so I'm not complaining. Plus, the mix of tension, action, humour and heart was top-notch. As the Aeslin mice would say, HAIL! HAIL THE INCRYPTID SERIES!

(...I'd say TW: fire and giant bugs, but if you've made it so far into the series, I guess they aren't a problem for you).

 

As usual with the latest books in the series, there's an attached novella (narrated by Elsie, Artie's sister), in this case one taking place immediately after the events of the main story and for all purposes working as an epilogue. It features a couple of beloved characters' cameos, and most of all,  finally brings some grieving members of the family to a healthy place (I mean, they're still broken, but at least some repairs are getting made...).

Note: as a rule, I review every book that I rate 3.5 stars and above in full, unless it's a novella or an anthology. But this series has been around for years now, and I only started reading it in August 2022, so I decided to only write mini (well...probably more like midi) reviews for its installments, or it would have been too hard for me to catch up. Now that I have, I'm writing mini reviews for the new ones as well, out of consistency.

Our Crooked Hearts by Melissa Albert

★★★★

In the present, a series of disturbing and inexplicable events sets 17 y.o. Ivy on a quest for answers, with shocking results; in the past, her then 16 y.o. mother Dana (whom Ivy has a fraught relationship with) and two other girls start messing with dark forces that will upend their lives, and ultimately affect Dana's future - and her family's. 

***

Rated 4.5 really.

After reading The Children and The Bad Ones (which I immediately clicked with), every time I start a new-to-me Albert book there's a point where I'm like "bummer, I guess I'm enjoying this one less", until around halfway through things start coming together and I finally get the picture...all while a different realm takes center stage and I fall in love with the story because it's finally my scene. This happened to me with The Hazel Wood - and now with this one. I realised there's a series of recurring themes in (most) Albert's books - a mystery surrounding a headstrong/enraged/standoffish young woman (with good reasons to be that way, the story will reveal), a tense and/or secret-filled mother-daughter relationship (and/or a fierce friendship), a supernatural element that ends up not taking the shape we expected - and yet each book is its own thing, and despite the clues (because THERE ARE clues), we can never predict where it's going. This time the author blends dark magic (complete with animal sacrifices), "other places", impossible choices, consequences, betrayal, revenge, messed-up family dynamics, strong female friendship, female rage, female empowerment (literally), girls with sharp edges and a vulnerable center, and a pinch of romance (typical, yet unusual...I can't say more because SPOILERS). The main characters are raw and flawed, and I liked that Albert didn't magically (!!!) smooth things out between them (and the other family members) in the end, though she closed the story on a hopeful note. I will forever wonder how the author never fails to remember us that every girl is a target, yet her female characters (even the non-magical ones) can go around at all hours without becoming prey - but let's not be picky 😉. Also, the writing (occasionally purple, most of the time simply beautiful). More Albert, please.

Typo alert: I spotted one in Ch.6..."rootless" instead of "ruthless".

Note: as a rule, I review every book that I rate 4 stars and above in full, unless it's a novella or an anthology. But I didn't want to go in too deep about this one to avoid spoilers, and it felt easy to summarise its contents (and my opinions) in a few sentences, so I took the mini-review route.

So, have you read/are you planning to read any of the above? And if you have, what do you think of them? Do you post mini reviews? Do you like to read them?