Taste the Books: Review Morsels #74 Jonathan Maberry et al., Mollyhall Seeley, Lora Beth Johnson

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.

The Big Bad Book of Kaiju by Jonathan Maberry et al. (ARC Review)

★★

24 authors from different backgrounds pay homage to (and often reinvent) the giant-monster genre.

***

Rated 2.5 really.

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

When I saw Seanan McGuire's name in this anthology's line-up, I couldn't help putting in a request, hoping that I would enjoy a good portion of the other stories as much as I usually do hers. Unfortunately, the ones that stood out for me were few, and some I even ended up skimming or skipping altogether because the style wasn't to my taste (or in one instance, because I didn't fancy reading about a crew performing a colonoscopy on a giant bird - by entering its bowels themselves, of course 😶). Anyway, I have to give credit to most of these authors for putting a series of spins on the subject material. My favourite stories involved environmental themes/social commentary/ethical issues (Hum, Complete Garbage, followed by Kaiju, Theoretically and Size Does Matter) or Kaiju/human bonding (Strange Beasts, Don't Tell Me How to Love Kaiju - though the latter left me with questions, but what with it being a sort of fable, I guess that's not the point). Kudos for originality to Shedding Season (people building a whole life on a ginormous, scute-covered beast, with all it entails) and Mama Bear (Kaiju meet ghosts). Alas, as I said, there weren't enough entries I enjoyed in this anthology to balance out the ones that weren't for me, but if you're a fan of kaiju and are looking for some different approaches to the source material, you might like this one more than I did.

Note: definitive review (I don't have enough to say to justify writing a full-length one later, and of course I don't plan to reread this book; also, due to time commitments, I've decided not to write full-length reviews anymore for short stories, novellas and anthologies, except in special cases or unless they're part of a series).

We Hexed the Moon by Mollyhall Seeley

★★★★

After performing a drunken (in more ways than one) and impulsive ritual, four girls whose paths are about to diverge find out they've summoned the moon - and she has an impossible task for them.

***

Four girls who just graduated high school are spending a final summer together before they go on their separate ways. They're all as different as they can be and they're like an unicellular organism. They love each other and hurt each other (and more often than not, themselves) in equal measure. And one day they try to hex the moon, because why the hell not. The hex doesn't work, but the moon takes enough interest in them to leave the sky, adopt a womanly shape of sorts, crash their sleepover and demand they find a substitute for her so she can take that person's place among the living. Which means, you know, killing said person first. Underneath this exhilarating (and crazy) premise, We Hexed the Moon has a lot to say about girlhood, the complexity and messiness of teen female friendship (and lesbian awakenings), being afraid of change yet wanting out of your own skin, leaving your teen self (and your tribe) behind at the end of high school, and processing that loss while turning over a new leaf. There are also a lot of observations about things like climate change, loneliness, sexuality, rage, patriarchy, the male gaze, but most of them feel organic to the story. The ending is absurdist, harsh and emotional at the same time, with a late twist you won't see coming, but one that ties in with the story beautifully (in the middle of all the mayhem and heartache, that is). WHTM may be a short novel (or a long-ish novella), and I for one would have liked for it to be a tad longer, but it surely leaves a mark.

TW: death/violence/blood and gore, self harm, drug abuse, alcohol abuse, eating disorder, toxic friendship, misogyny/sexism, bigotry, suicidal thoughts, some sexual content (semi-explicit).

A note about the writing: be aware that the author made the stylistic choice not to use quotation marks in dialogue, which may be confusing at times, but gives the narrative a more stream-of-consciousness-like quality (conversely, I'm not sure what's the point of substituting "&" for "and" occasionally).

For quotes about this book click here.

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.

Hell to Pay by Lora Beth Johnson

★★★★

A teen con artist who lost her brother during a job reunites with her old crew to perform an impossible assignment, hoping it will give her the means to bring her sibling back from the dead. Except nothing is quite as it seems, and she might even end up taking her brother's place in the afterlife... 

***

This one has a fresh premise (take Ocean's Eleven, but make it YA, magic-fueled and underworld-related) and an interesting worldbuilding, in which classic Greek deities are still alive and kicking in the modern world, though they have adapted and basically gone undercover, all while still ruling it via a series of corporations. Our protagonist Ellie comes from a family of con artists and afterlife-hoppers of which she's the only surviving member, after her parents' death and the recent "incident" that took her brother's life. A year after his demise, Ellie might have found a way to resurrect him, but she needs the funds and a particular object to perform the task - plus her old crew. This starts a cascade of heists/cons/adventures at the end of which Ellie will get both less and more than she'd bargained for. The story is fast-paced, imaginative and full of twists - though one of them didn't exactly take me by surprise...but the last one did for sure, and I found it morbidly funny. I wish we'd seen more of the afterlife (because that's my jam, you know), and I didn't get particularly attached to the characters (though they were all solid), plus the heists were somehow convoluted and required some suspension of disbelief (especially since they were performed by a band of teens, maybe new adults? it's unclear). But Hell to Pay turned out to be original and entertaining, and I'd definitely recommend it to anyone vibing with outrageous heists, snarky protagonists, afterlife settings, mythology, humour and dysfunctional found families. Bonus points for the NB rep... and the (priceless) undead crow.

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?