Mini Reviews: I Know What You Read Last Fall

My life was pretty chaotic in September, October, and December, which means I read a lot of books, but I didn’t have time to review them. Instead of ignoring those poor books, I thought I’d do rapid-fire reviews. I’m not going to include summaries because then you’d be scrolling forever. Click the titles to open Goodreads.

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Mini Reviews: I Know What You Read Last Summer

Last summer was intense for me. I had so much stuff going on that I pretty much gave up on blogging. I didn’t give up on reading, though! I actually read some awesome stuff. Instead of ignoring all the books I finished in summer 2019, I thought I’d do rapid-fire reviews. I’m not going to include summaries of the books because that would make this post colossal, so click the titles to open Goodreads.

Mini Reviews: Bodily Harm || Three Things About Elsie

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Mini Reviews: The Blue Girl || The Power

Mini Reviews: Copenhagen || The Mothers

Mini Reviews: The Great Alone || An Absolutely Remarkable Thing

Mini Reviews: The Possessions || Stranded

Mini Reviews: The Wonder || Pull Me Under

Mini Reviews: A Man Called Ove || Britt-Marie Was Here

Mini Reviews: A Head Full Of Ghosts || Grief Is The Thing With Feathers

Mini Reviews: Tin Man || Some Possible Solutions: Stories

Review: Good Morning, Midnight by Lily Brooks-Dalton || Why Characters Need Agency

Good Morning, Midnight by Lily Brooks-Dalton

Pages: 259

Genre: Post-apocalyptic literary fiction

Publication Date: August 2016

Augustine, a brilliant, aging astronomer, is consumed by the stars. For years he has lived in remote outposts, studying the sky for evidence of how the universe began. At his latest posting, in a research center in the Arctic, news of a catastrophic event arrives. The scientists are forced to evacuate, but Augustine stubbornly refuses to abandon his work. Shortly after the others have gone, Augustine discovers a mysterious child, Iris, and realizes the airwaves have gone silent. They are alone.

At the same time, Mission Specialist Sullivan is aboard the Aether on its return flight from Jupiter. The astronauts are the first human beings to delve this deep into space, and Sully has made peace with the sacrifices required of her: a daughter left behind, a marriage ended. So far the journey has been a success, but when Mission Control falls inexplicably silent, Sully and her crew mates are forced to wonder if they will ever get home.

I have to admit that this book was a total cover-buy. I was scrolling through Book Outlet, and Good Morning, Midnight appeared on my screen. I was like, “Get in my cart right now. I need you.” Also, I’d really like to be in that tent on the cover. It looks cold, but it’s probably infinitely more interesting than whatever I’m doing with my life at this moment.

Review: The Butcher’s Hook – Janet Ellis

The Butcher’s Hook – Janet Ellis

London, summer 1763. At nineteen, Anne Jaccob is awakened to the possibility of joy when she meets Fub, the butcher's apprentice, and begins to imagine a life of passion with him. 

The only daughter of well-to-do parents, Anne lives a sheltered life. Her home is a miserable place. Though her family want for nothing, her father is uncaring, her mother is ailing, and the baby brother who taught her to love is dead. Unfortunately her parents have already chosen a more suitable husband for her than Fub. But Anne is a determined young woman, with an idiosyncratic moral compass. In the matter of pursuing her own happiness, she shows no fear or hesitation. Even if it means getting a little blood on her hands.

Review: Brace yourselves.

I read a romance book.

And I liked it.

Of course, it’s a twisted, disturbing romance with a main character who murders her romantic rivals, but that’s a small detail. I’m still counting this as a romance.

Anne Jaccob is a nineteen-year-old woman living in London in the mid-1700s. She’s an upper-class lady who’s used to getting whatever she wants. Her parents have money, and Anne has servants to take care of her every whim. She’s very sheltered. Her parents rarely let her leave the house. She’s uneducated and has had very little contact with people outside her home. When the butcher’s boy, Fub, shows up at Anne’s door to deliver the family’s meat order, Anne immediately becomes infatuated with Fub’s strong body and the blood on his hands. Anne wants to marry Fub. And she’ll murder anyone who tries to stop her.

This book has mixed reviews on Goodreads, and I understand why. It’s gory and often crude. There’s sexual abuse and violent human and animal deaths. If you can’t handle reading about bodily fluids, you should avoid this book. All the fluids are present and accounted for. Anne is not a likeable character. She’s sex-obsessed and has no empathy for other humans. For Anne, people are just obstacles to overcome. She either kills them or manipulates them until they give her what she wants.

I like this book because it’s unusual. I’ve read and watched a lot of stuff about male serial killers, but you don’t often hear about women committing a string of brutal murders. To me, Anne’s behavior makes a twisted kind of sense. She’s spent most of her life in isolation, and she’s used to being handed whatever she asks for. She doesn’t know how to behave appropriately in public. When she meets Fub, she doesn’t understand why she can’t marry him. She’s never been told “no” before.

Anne’s murder spree is also a reaction to the oppression that women faced in 1700s England. Since Anne is a girl and can’t take over her father’s business, her father doesn’t see a reason to educate her. Her parents mostly ignore her. They give all their attention to her younger brother. Anne’s only purpose in life is to marry a wealthy, upper-class gentleman. Her parents have a man picked out for her, but Anne isn’t attracted to him. She wants Fub.

“Every girl hopes to find love and situation neatly bundled. It is hardly ever so.” – The Butcher’s Hook

Even as a child, Anne’s father uses her to impress his business clients. Anne’s only friend is the daughter of a rich businessman. Anne’s father encourages her to play nicely with the girl, but Anne doesn’t know how to be nice. She tries to impress her friend by showing her a rotting mouse corpse and then making her a necklace out of spit and hair.

Yeah. Anne is a strange character. She’s brilliantly messed-up. I think I’ll remember her for a long time.

“To my mind, we carry all that we need to survive, indeed to live well, in our heads and our hearts from birth. We must decide our own paths accordingly and individually. There is precious little other instruction available.” – The Butcher’s Hook

I have two complaints about this novel. First, the typos. Why are there such obvious typos in a finished book? Whenever I came across a glaring error, it pulled me out of the story.

Next, the book has a saggy middle. Anne spends the middle of the novel meeting Fub in secret, having sex with him, and plotting murder. I got slightly impatient with it. I understand that Anne loves sex and only cares about Fub because he has a nice body, but I wanted to get to the murders.

Is literary historical horror fiction a genre? The Butcher’s Hook has pretty much everything I like in a story. A vivid setting, good writing, deeply flawed characters, and a few murders. I need to find more books like this.

TL;DR: Do you like historical fiction? Do you like horror? Do you have a strong stomach? If you answered “yes” to all those questions, read this book. It’s delightfully screwed-up.

Review: The Last One – Alexandra Oliva

The Last One – Alexandra Oliva

She wanted an adventure. She never imagined it would go this far. 

It begins with a reality TV show. Twelve contestants are sent into the woods to face challenges that will test the limits of their endurance. While they are out there, something terrible happens—but how widespread is the destruction, and has it occurred naturally or is it human-made? Cut off from society, the contestants know nothing of it. When one of them—a young woman the show’s producers call Zoo—stumbles across the devastation, she can imagine only that it is part of the game. 

Alone and disoriented, Zoo is heavy with doubt regarding the life—and husband—she left behind, but she refuses to quit. Staggering countless miles across unfamiliar territory, Zoo must summon all her survival skills—and learn new ones as she goes. 

But as her emotional and physical reserves dwindle, she grasps that the real world might have been altered in terrifying ways—and her ability to parse the charade will be either her triumph or her undoing.

Review: Oh, mixed feelings. I really like half this book and really don’t like the other half.

The narrator—a woman identified as Zoo—wants to have a final adventure before settling down and starting a family. She decides to become a contestant on a high-budget reality show. For an unspecified length of time, Zoo must survive alone in the wilderness and face whatever challenges the show producers throw at her.

“The first one on the production team to die will be the editor.” – The Last One

What Zoo doesn’t know is that while she’s in the wilderness, a plague sweeps through the eastern US and kills most of the population. When the show’s producers and cameramen suddenly stop coming to work, Zoo isn’t sure what to think. She’s completely alone in the woods. Is this part of the show, or did something bad happen? She doesn’t know how to react. If she does the wrong thing, she could lose her chance at winning the prize money.

This story is told on two timelines. The past timeline shows Zoo’s first few days in the woods—right before everything goes wrong. The present timeline shows Zoo wandering through a post-apocalyptic landscape, searching for reassurance that all the devastation is actually part of a TV program.

The Last One definitely made me think. It raises a lot of intriguing questions about reality. We live in a world of big-budget TV shows, holograms, Photoshop, and ultra-realistic special effects. Sometimes the line between real and fake can be blurry. As our technology advances, “real” and “not real” may get even more perplexing. Zoo’s confusion about the plague is completely believable. Something terrifyingly real is happening in a reality-show world where nothing is real. It messes with Zoo’s mind.

I love that this book attempts to show reality TV from the point-of-view of a contestant and a viewer. The show’s editors manipulate Zoo’s “reality” to make it entertaining for the TV audience. Zoo and the viewers are experiencing the same manufactured events in different ways. The reader gets to see those differences.

“They'll wait until I'm asleep—or nearly asleep—to strike. That's how they do it; they blur the line between reality and nightmare. They give me bad dreams, and then they make them come true.” – The Last One

I enjoyed the chapters that are told from Zoo’s point-of-view, but I got bored with the chapters that describe the show. Even though I watch a lot of reality TV, the show in this novel didn’t interest me at all. I wasn’t invested in it and didn’t completely understand the rules. Imagine you’re listening to your coworker tell you (in great detail) about a TV show you’ve never seen and don’t care about. That’s what those chapters feel like. I was tempted to skim them to get back to Zoo.

The pacing is also slightly slow. This is another post-apocalyptic novel where the character spends the majority of the book wandering around. Zoo meets some unusual people, but those meetings are interspersed with long periods of wandering.

“The brain is a terrifying and wondrous organ, and all it wants is to survive.” – The Last One

Like I said, I enjoyed half this book. It’s interesting to watch Zoo come to terms with what has happened to the world. She faces some unique problems that aren’t usually seen in post-apocalyptic literature. The author is a good writer and has fascinating ideas. I just never felt fully invested in the story because I didn’t care about the reality show.

TL;DR: What is reality? This novel does a brilliant job of exploring that question, but I got bored fairly often.

Review: Elizabeth Is Missing – Emma Healey

Elizabeth Is Missing – Emma Healey

Maud, an aging grandmother, is slowly losing her memory—and her grip on everyday life. Yet she refuses to forget her best friend Elizabeth, who she is convinced is missing and in terrible danger. 

But no one will listen to Maud—not her frustrated daughter, Helen, not her caretakers, not the police, and especially not Elizabeth's mercurial son, Peter. Armed with handwritten notes she leaves for herself and an overwhelming feeling that Elizabeth needs her help, Maud resolves to discover the truth and save her beloved friend. 

This singular obsession forms a cornerstone of Maud's rapidly dissolving present. But the clues she discovers seem only to lead her deeper into her past, to another unsolved disappearance: her sister, Sukey, who vanished shortly after World War II. 

As vivid memories of a tragedy that occurred more than fifty years ago come flooding back, Maud discovers new momentum in her search for her friend. Could the mystery of Sukey's disappearance hold the key to finding Elizabeth?

Review: This book destroyed me in the best possible way. It’s narrated by an elderly woman who is losing her memory. There are people in my family who have dementia, and that disease is freakin’ terrifying. I never want it to happen to me. Nope, nope, nope. This novel shows dementia in all its awfulness.

The story is narrated by Maud, who has lost her short-term memory, but still remembers her childhood in the years after WWII. She remembers that her sister Sukey left her house one day and never came home. Now Maud is worried that the same thing has happened to her best friend Elizabeth. She can’t remember the last time she saw Elizabeth. Her daughter and Elizabeth’s son keep telling her that her friend is safe, but Maud doesn’t believe them. She’s convinced that Elizabeth is missing, and she’s the only one who can find her.

I feel so bad for all the characters. Maud thinks nobody takes her seriously because she’s losing her memory. Maud’s daughter, Helen, is struggling to be a good caretaker. It’s hard because Maud is not an easy person to care for. She’s so obsessed with Elizabeth being missing that she tends to wander around the neighborhood and create havoc. She has an affinity for digging up the neighbors’ gardens and breaking into homes. Her loyalty to Elizabeth is very sweet, though. Nothing will stop Maud from finding her friend.

“But it’s not true. I forget things—I know that—but I’m not mad. Not yet. And I’m sick of being treated as if I am. I’m tired of the sympathetic smiles and the little pats people give you when you get things confused, and I’m bloody fed up with everyone deferring to Helen rather than listening to what I have to say.” – Elizabeth is Missing 

“I feel rather drab and shy for a few minutes. But then I remember that I am old and nobody is looking at me.” – Elizabeth is Missing

I was kind of stunned to learn that this is the author’s debut. It’s so well-written. Since the narrator is losing her memory, the story could have been confusing, but it’s not confusing at all. I’m impressed. Either the author is a superhero, or this book was incredibly difficult to write.

In this novel, you get two mysteries for the price of one. Elizabeth is missing, and Maud’s older sister is also missing. I knew that the two mysteries were linked, but the author kept me guessing about how they were linked until the very end. I kept changing my mind about if Elizabeth was really missing. Maud isn’t a reliable narrator, so I questioned everything she said. Has something bad happened to Elizabeth, or did Maud just forget where Elizabeth went? It’s a compelling mystery.

“I remember when the houses used to whiz by as I walked—nearly running—to and from home. Ma would ask me afterwards about what I’d seen, whether certain neighbours were out, what I thought about someone’s new garden wall. I’d never noticed; it had all gone past in a flash. Now I have plenty of time to look at everything, and no one to tell what I’ve seen.” – Elizabeth is Missing

It’s hard to come up with complaints about this novel, but I do have two. First, the book could have been shorter. I basically inhaled the beginning and the end, but my attention started to wander in the middle. I felt like we weren’t making much progress on either mystery. Luckily, the book has a satisfying conclusion.

Second, I questioned why Maud’s daughter couldn’t have been clearer about where Elizabeth was. I know that would’ve ruined the mystery, and then the book would be pointless, but Helen is pretty sure she knows what happened to Elizabeth. Why couldn’t she write the answer on a giant sign and stick it on Maud’s wall or something? That’s what I would’ve done. That’s what Helen did when Maud kept burning toast. Why can’t she put the “Where’s Elizabeth” sign next to the “No more toast” sign?

Those are fairly minor complaints. I really like this book. It’s one of those stories that teach you not to take your memory for granted. You never know how long you’ll have it.

TL;DR: Excellent mystery with unusual characters. I’ll happily read whatever the author writes next.

Review: The Wolf Road – Beth Lewis

The Wolf Road – Beth Lewis

In the remote wilds of a ravaged land, Elka has been raised by a man who isn't her father. Since finding her wandering in the woods when she was seven, he has taught her how to hunt, shoot, set snares and start fires—everything she needs to survive. All she knows of the world outside is gleaned from whispers of a cataclysmic event that turned the clock back on civilization by a hundred and fifty years and reduced governments and technology to shambles, leaving men at the mercy of the elements—and each other.  

Everything changes when Elka learns that the man she has been calling father is harboring a terrible secret. Armed with nothing but her knife and her wiles, she decides to escape his clutches and sets out on a long journey to the frozen north in the hope of finding her long-lost parents.  

But as the trail of blood and bodies grows in her path, Elka realizes that daddy won't be letting his little girl go without a fight. If she's going to survive, she'll have to turn and confront not just him, but the truth about what he's turned her into.

Review: I’m starting to think I don’t like road trip books, even post-apocalyptic ones. There’s just something about watching a character wander around that’s really, really . . . tedious.

Elka lives in the ruins of what was once British Columbia. As a child, her parents went north in search of gold, leaving her to be raised by a man called Trapper. Elka and Trapper live deep in the forest and rarely see other people. On one of her rare trips into town, Elka learns that Trapper is wanted for the murder of a young boy. She decides to run away and find her parents. With Trapper on her trail, the police hunting for her, and a head full of secrets, she might not make it through the wilderness.

When I opened this novel and read the first line, I immediately groaned and closed the book. It’s written entirely in dialect, like Elka is talking to the reader. I don’t like dialect because it slows down my reading so much that I get frustrated. But, I decided to plow through this book. My reading life needs challenges, right? The mystery of Elka’s past was compelling enough that I wanted to read it. I’m glad I did. The dialect isn’t too hard to understand, and I got used to the writing style fairly quickly.

“Ain't no monster. Monsters ain't real 'cept in kids' imaginations, under the beds, in the closets. We live in a world a' men and there ain't no good come out of tellin' them they monsters. Makes 'em think they ain't done nothin' wrong, that it's their nature and they can't do nothin' to change that. Callin' em a monster makes 'em something different from the rest of us, but they ain't. They just men, flesh and bone and blood.” – The Wolf Road

I think Elka is a realistic post-apocalyptic character. She’s not very likeable. She knows how to survive in the wilderness, but she’s uneducated and doesn’t have any people skills. (I can totally relate to her in the people-skills department. I don’t have those either.) She would rather do things by herself instead of relying on another person.

Actually, Elka’s character development is kind of amazing. She changes a lot over the course of the novel, and all of the changes are believable. She starts off completely denying the awful things she did while living with Trapper. As the story progresses, she struggles to live with herself because of what she’s done. Eventually, she has to admit to her past and figure out what to do with her future.

“I didn't take well to pitying yourself. It weren't worth the effort or time and it pissed people off.” – The Wolf Road 

 

“You can't admit to someone else what you're too damn afraid to admit to yourself.” – The Wolf Road 

 

“One a' them rules is don't go trusting another man's path . . . People do it, they do what their mommies and daddies did, they make them same mistakes, they have them same joys and hurts, they just repeating. Trees don't grow exactly where their momma is; ain't no room . . . I weren't following no one up through life.” – The Wolf Road

Elka is an unreliable narrator. She’s hiding some horrific secrets. If her secrets get out, she could be executed. The mysteries in Elka’s past were compelling enough to keep me reading, even though I wasn’t loving the book.

I had a really hard time getting into this story. Part of the problem was the dialect, and part of it was the slowness. Elka spends a lot of the book walking through the forest. She does occasionally run into danger, but the dangers are separated by long stretches of walking. I didn’t become truly interested in the story until halfway through, when Elka encounters Penelope. The strange and wonderful people who Elka meets are more thought-provoking than a walk in the woods.

The characters who Elka crosses paths with give the reader a better sense of the post-apocalyptic world. The world is my favorite part of the story. It has a Wild West feel. It’s lawless, unpredictable, often gory. I love the vividness of it.

I didn’t like this book as much as I thought I would. I enjoyed the world, and Elka is an intriguing character, but I was underwhelmed with the plot. I feel like I spent a long time waiting for something to happen.

TL;DR: A creepy mystery and a believable world, but you need the patience to wander through the woods first.

Review: The Penelopiad – Margaret Atwood

The Penelopiad – Margaret Atwood

Margaret Atwood returns with a shrewd, funny, and insightful retelling of the myth of Odysseus from the point of view of Penelope. Describing her own remarkable vision, the author writes in the foreword, “I’ve chosen to give the telling of the story to Penelope and to the twelve hanged maids. The maids form a chanting and singing Chorus, which focuses on two questions that must pose themselves after any close reading of The Odyssey: What led to the hanging of the maids, and what was Penelope really up to? The story as told in the Odyssey doesn’t hold water: there are too many inconsistencies. I’ve always been haunted by the hanged maids and, in The Penelopiad, so is Penelope herself.”

Review: Honestly, if this book hadn’t been written by Margaret Atwood, I probably wouldn’t have read it. It’s a retelling of The Odyssey, and I usually don’t like retellings for two reasons.

Reason 1: They stick too close to the original story, and then they are predictable. If I already read a story once, I usually don’t want to read it again in a slightly different form. 

Reason 2: They stray too far from the original story, and then they are not a retelling. They’re an original story with some vague similarities to another story.

As you can probably see, it’s nearly impossible to impress me with a retelling. That’s why I usually avoid them. I decided to give The Penelopiad a shot because it’s Margaret Atwood. If anybody can pull off a retelling, she can.

This novel retells The Odyssey from the point-of-view of Penelope, Odysseus’s wife. It tries to answer all the questions that are left unanswered in the original myth. Who is Penelope? What was she doing during those twenty years when her husband was fighting wars, banging goddesses, and getting lost? How did she really feel about the suitors who came to compete for her hand in marriage? And, most importantly, what role did she play in the murders of her “maids,” the twelve slave girls?

“Daughters of Naiads were a dime a dozen in those days; the place was crawling with them. Nevertheless, it never hurts to be of semi-divine birth. Or it never hurts immediately.” – The Penelopiad

I read The Odyssey for the first time when I was in college. I remember thinking that Odysseus is less of a hero and more of a colossal jerk. He disappears for twenty years because he keeps getting himself into trouble. Then he randomly shows up at home, slaughters all the dudes who are trying to marry his wife, murders the slaves who were “disloyal” to him, and interrogates his wife to make sure she didn’t cheat on him while he was gone. Um . . . dude?! You went to war and disappeared for twenty years. Everybody assumed you were dead. Give them a break.

My review of The Odyssey.

In Margaret Atwood’s version of the tale, Odysseus isn’t a hero. Penelope has doubts about his over-the-top war stories, and she’s traumatized by the murders of her slaves, who were her friends and secret allies. They distracted the suitors and helped her escape from unwanted male attention. They made Penelope’s life less miserable while Odysseus was missing. Then Odysseus returns and murders them all. Understandably, Penelope is a bit angry at her husband in this story.

“Also, if a man takes pride in his disguise skills, it would be a foolish wife who would claim to recognize him: it's always an imprudence to step between a man and the reflection of his own cleverness.” – The Penelopiad

Like all of Atwood’s books, this one is quirky and full of smart wordplay. Penelope’s chapters are written in prose, but the other chapters are written in verse and narrated by a Greek Chorus of murdered slave girls. The Odyssey is written in verse, so I appreciate that Atwood wrote part of her retelling that way. It’s both creative and bizarre.

Remember when I said I don’t like retellings? This book is good, but it didn’t change my mind about retellings. For me, this novel is too close to the original Odyssey. I like that Penelope and her servants have backstories, but there were times when I felt like I was just reading a summary of The Odyssey. I wish this book moved farther away from the original. There isn’t much in this retelling that’s really different or surprising.

I also wish this story addressed the miscommunication issues between Penelope and Odysseus. The slaves weren’t being disloyal to Odysseus. They were following Penelope’s orders. I understand that Odysseus didn’t consult Penelope before he murdered her maids, but why didn’t she bring it up afterward? She’s just going to spend the rest of her life being silently angry at him?

This isn’t my favorite Atwood book, but I know she’s written other retellings, and I’m curious about those. I’ll get around to reading them someday.

“Happy endings are best achieved by keeping the right doors locked” – The Penelopiad

TL;DR: Good for hardcore fans of Margaret Atwood or The Odyssey. If you’re not either of those things, you probably won’t miss much by skipping this one.

Review: Marrow Island – Alexis M. Smith

Marrow Island – Alexis M. Smith

Twenty years ago Lucie Bowen left Marrow Island. Along with her mother, she fled the aftermath of an earthquake that compromised the local refinery, killing her father and ravaging the island’s environment. Now, Lucie’s childhood friend Kate is living within a mysterious group called Marrow Colony—a community that claims to be “ministering to the Earth.” There have been remarkable changes to the land at the colony’s homestead. Lucie’s experience as a journalist tells her there’s more to the Colony—and their charismatic leader—than they want her to know, and that the astonishing success of their environmental remediation has come at great cost to the Colonists themselves. As she uncovers their secrets and methods, will Lucie endanger more than their mission? What price will she pay for the truth?

Review: This is one of those novels that have everything I like in a book. A remote setting, a narrator with a complicated past, an island full of nature-worshipping hippies, and a lot of secrets. It’s also one of those novels that have a massive amount of potential but end up being “Meh.”

Lucie Bowen left Marrow Island after an earthquake destroyed everything. It damaged the refinery, which killed Lucie’s father and polluted the island so badly that it became uninhabitable. When Lucie moves away from the island, she leaves behind her best friend and occasional lover, Kate. Twenty years after the earthquake, Kate writes to Lucie and tells her that she has moved back to Marrow Island. Kate is part of Marrow Colony, a group of religious hippies who are using mushrooms to repair the environment. Lucy eagerly goes to visit her old friend, but after a night of partying with the colonists, she finds herself in deadly trouble.

The story takes place on two timelines. In the present day, Lucie is living in a ranger station and dealing with the fallout of the events that occurred on Marrow Island. Kate is in prison. There are flashback chapters that show what happened on the island. I love this structure because it builds tension. Lucie is still really messed up from her near-death experience in Marrow Colony. She’s also still involved with the colonists, even though they almost got her killed, and most of them are in prison. I kept reading because I had to know what happened at the Colony. What secrets were they hiding? What did they do to get themselves thrown in jail?

The setting in this book is beautifully described. It made me want to visit the Pacific Northwest. If you’re interested in climate change and environmental issues, I’d recommend this novel. To me, it seems very realistic and well-researched.

My main issue with Marrow Island is the pacing. It feels like it takes forever for the action to get started, and once it does start, it’s over quickly. Lucie is a very self-absorbed person. She spends most of her time alone in the forest, thinking about her life. She doesn’t have any meaningful connections with other people, so most of the characters are flat. They’re just random acquaintances. The reader doesn’t learn much about them. I didn’t find Lucie’s thoughts very compelling to read. I wanted her to do something. Or meet someone. Or think about something besides herself.

“So much of our thinking is involved with things we’ve already done and things we have yet to do. It’s almost impossible not to be thinking about some future moment or some past mistake or tragedy.” – Marrow Island

When she (finally!) reaches the island, she gets a long lecture about mushrooms and the environment. Again, I had a hard time staying interested in this. Before Lucie became a self-obsessed forest-wanderer, she was a newspaper reporter, so I expected her to immediately start digging for Marrow Colony’s secrets. She didn’t. She got high and discovered the secrets by accident. I guess that’s realistic, but after spending so many pages waiting for something to happen, I was slightly disappointed. I wish Lucie had more agency. Most of the events in this book seem like accidents.

“When I let go of my own work, my own priorities, I lost the qualities he had been attracted to in the first place. That's how he put it. He loved the woman I was before I was in love with him.” – Marrow Island

Maybe this book would have benefited from being longer? It’s quite short. I think I would have liked more past-Lucie and less present-Lucie. More time on the island would have helped me understand the other characters better. I wasn’t always sure about their motives.

If you’re interested in environmental issues, then this book is worth reading, but I was disappointed with the meandering plot and underdeveloped characters.

TL;DR: Too much navel-gazing, not enough action.