What It’s About: A bunch of high school kids do obnoxious high school kid stuff, but maybe someone sinister is pulling the strings.
A Word From The Nerd: So first off, I grabbed this because it takes place in Adena, Ohio, which is a small, fairly run-down town less than an hour from where I am, and I thought that was cool. Apparently, the author just liked the name or something, the town he described is nothing like Adena, and seems to be on the wrong side of the state. But whatever, creative license, we all know the drill. But the story was just so meh. It’s an interesting idea, that the narrator is some kind of evil entity pushing students to do insanely awful things like posting nasty stuff on social media. But it never goes anywhere. There’s a sort-of big climactic fight, but most of the participants are characters who’ve never been mentioned, and in the end, nothing is really resolved or explained.
The Nerd’s Rating: TWO HAPPY NEURONS (and a baggie of oregano).
Quick Bite: A great book with an ending so bad that I am personally offended.
What It’s About: They are the six golden kids – high school seniors, rich, beautiful, about to graduate and rule the world. Until a daredevil prank goes wrong, and three people end up dead. Megan offers to take the blame for all of them, in exchange for whatever she asks for when she gets out of prison. Twenty years later, Megan is out, and it’s time to pay up.
A Word From The Nerd: Y’all. This was a seriously FANTASTIC setup, one of the best I’ve seen in quite a while. The characters are decent, the pace is brisk, and what Megan asks of the others is seriously OMG. Then the last chapter happens, and it’s not a shocking twist, it’s just dumb. I don’t even feel like saying anything else, I’m too busy wallowing in the disappointment.
The Nerd’s Rating: TWO HAPPY NEURONS (and a small cherub statue, for all my skull-smashing needs).
Short Take: “I am your father’s brother’s nephew’s cousin’s former roommate…”
(*I voluntarily read and reviewed an advance copy of this book. All thoughts and opinions are my own.*)
So here we are again, my beloved nerdlings. The winter doldrums have truly set in, and although I was expecting calmer winds on the “current events” front, well, the storms are still raging, and growing worse all the time.
So I can’t tell you how relieved I have been to dive into something deliciously dishy, a girly, soapy romp through a fabulous ancestral mansion, for a few decades in book-time.
But these girls aren’t exactly sugar and spice.
In the late 1980’s, fourteen-year-old orphan Beth has been going back and forth between living with her Aunt Caroline, and to a group home when Caroline has to travel for work. Still reeling from the deaths of her parents and older brother, Beth’s biggest comfort is playing the violin. So it’s a marvelous stroke of luck that one of Caroline’s business contacts makes them an offer: Markus’s daughter, Nina, is a shy, sweet, very lovely girl, and their ginormous mansion has plenty of room. Why not let Beth stay for a while to be Nina’s companion?
And so Beth becomes part of the family at Raven Hall, joining Markus, Nina, and Nina’s mother Leonora for a few weeks that turns into much longer. For Beth, it’s nearly a dream come true – she has adults who seem to genuinely care for her, a best-friend-slash-sister to explore the grounds with, and even a cute boy who comes by to swim in the lake and hang out sometimes.
Of course, nothing is perfect, and there are very strict rules about what the girls can do and where they can go, and occasionally, Markus and Leonora ask some very odd favors of Beth. But all things considered, life at Raven Hall is so much better than what she had previously. Until it isn’t.
In the present day, Sadie is a struggling actress who is trying to figure out how she’s going to make rent when she gets a great offer: Play a role at a murder mystery party at the long-abandoned Raven Hall, and she’ll be well compensated. Dressing in glamorous clothes, hanging out in a somewhat restored mansion, and paying the rent with one weekend’s work is irresistible, of course, so Sadie, like Beth three decades earlier, jumps at the chance.
And of course, my duckies, Past And Present Collide, and Dark Secrets Are Revealed, and there are many, many (SO MANY) Twists and Turns.
First, the good stuff. Ms. Rous is great at balancing the various timelines, and keeping the identity of one narrator hidden for half the book was a brilliant stroke. The push-pull tension of Beth and Nina’s friendship-slash-sisterhood-slash-codependency was perfectly executed – Nina, desperately lonely and Beth, always on a tightrope of needing the security of the family while seeing and fearing their dark side.
What’s hanging this nerd up are the multitudinous twists and accompanying turns, not to mention the occasional swerve or dodge or dip or loop. There’s this existential pang I can’t quite shake. I love me a good twist, and a WHOA reveal flibbers my gibbets like nothing else, but can there be too much of a good thing?
After reading The Perfect Guests, I think… maybe? Or not? Because as I was flying through those last few breathless chapters (and make no mistake, the pacing was EXCELLENT) and alllllll the many many MANY secrets were getting unburied, part of me started to do the OH COME ON thing that we all do when it just goes too far.
But I tried to pick out a set of revelations that I thought could be cut, and I couldn’t. Because every part of the story holds up every other part, and somehow, the whole is perfectly equal to the sum of its parts, and it works. It’s an extremely delicate balancing act, spinning plates on upright toothpicks, a breath away from complete failure.
And it’s also outrageously fun.
The Nerd’s Rating: FOUR HAPPY NEURONS (and some hot chocolate – hold the extras.)
(*Note: I received an advance copy of this book for review.*)
Good mornings, my lovely nerdlings! We are right in the thick of the hottest part of the year, and it’s been a record-setting scorcher in my little corner of the world. And I don’t know about all of you, but as much as I hate freezing my soft parts off, I’m starting to not like summer very much either. I usually love lazing around in the sun like a pasty lizard, but multiple weeks of 90+ days are just too much. Can’t we just have some normal-hot days, instead of this-is-miserable-I’m-never-going-outside-again weather?
There are advantages to staying inside, however, namely catching up on my reading (duh) and today we’re going to talk about Megan Goldin’s The Night Swim.
Rachel Krall is a getting-seriously-famous true-crime podcaster who is headed to the small east coast town of Neapolis to cover a rape trial which (as such trials tend to do) is tearing the town right down the middle. It’s a sadly common story – a mousy teenage girl has too much to drink, an encounter with the local football hero happens, and it’s left to the legal system to determine whether or not a crime was committed.
(Sidenote – As someone who lives very close to Steubenville, Ohio, I can’t say enough about how Ms. Goldin handled this topic. I felt a deeply uncomfortable sense of deja vu while reading, which means that she nailed the small town range of reactions, the ingrained misogyny that runs rampant through people who would deny ever feeling such a thing even as they spew it far and wide. BRILLIANT.)
It’s just as Rachel is arriving in Neapolis, however, that a second case is brought to her attention. Via a series of letters, Hannah Stills tells Rachel the story of her sister Jenny According to Hanna, Jenny was murdered twenty-five years earlier, but the authorities wrote her death off as an accidental drowning.
Despite having plenty to do already, what with the podcast and the actual present-day hot-topic trial happening, Rachel is compelled to look more closely into Jenny’s death. As is to be expected, the town’s Darkl History Comes To Light, and Terrible Secrets Are Revealed. And of course, in the end, it’s all tied up in a very satisfying way.
The Night Swim flips between Rachel’s narration of current events, from both transcripts of her podcast and more traditional perspective, and Hannah’s retelling of events leading up to Jenny’s death, but only through her letters. Rachel’s sections were spot-on, moving at a nice clip, rounding out characters, and giving out important plot points at just the right time to build the suspense and keep me hooked.
The sections from Hannah’s perspective, however, were a different story, and my only real complaint with The Night Swim is the writing style in Hannah’s letters. I don’t know if it was what the author’s reasoning was, but Hannah writes like a creepy male stalker, the wannabe sociopath in high school who writes his essay, badly, from the point of view of the serial killer.. Overly descriptive, stilted and pretentious. Trying too hard and overwrought. Her sections felt gimmicky and fake, and I wanted to skip to the end to find out what her real story was, but there was none, just a good writer putting me through too many chapters of bad writing, for no purpose except maybe to draw a clear line between Hannah and Rachel.. The story was fascinating, but the style was grating.
Overall though, The Night Swim delivers for fans of small-town thrillers (read: EVERYONE) and the podcast angle feels like something new and different.
The Nerd’s Rating: FOUR HAPPY NEURONS (and a nice big margarita. Or five.)
Short Take: Get in loser!! (You totally want to go for this ride.)
(*Note: I received an advance copy of this book for review.*)
Hello my lovelies! I am pleased to announce that after drowning in winter doldrums, we had a freakish seventy-degree day here over the weekend, meaning I was able to go out with the Spousal Unit and Junior Nerdling for some much needed fresh air and today I feel MARVELOUS. So I’m here to bring some of that joy to all of you, or, you know, to tell you about the book I just read which is pretty much the same thing, right?
Nestled in the beautiful Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia, the Goode School began a century ago as a boarding school for unwed mothers or other types of incorrigible, socially unacceptable girls, the kind of girls who read novels and had opinions. Now it’s where the best of the best go to work their perfect little hineys off in exchange for a golden ticket – admission to the college of their choice, followed by a lifetime of success in their chosen field.
Of course nothing that fabulous is easy, as Ash Carlisle will soon discover. When both of her parents die suddenly, she leaves Oxford in hopes of Starting A New Life at Goode. Although the dean of the school, Dr. Ford Julianne Westhaven (and omg y’all THAT NAME) is willing to help her with the transition, and Ash is smart enough and disciplined enough to keep up with the work, there’s a whole ‘nother pack of problems in the form of the 199 other girls at Goode.
Let me be the cleverest nerd in the world, and point out that although these are Goode girls, they are not necessarily good girls. Despite a strict honor code, there’s drinking, drugs, secret societies whose over-the-top hazing is pure teenage girl sadism and the occasional dalliance with cute townie boys – and not just for the students. Ford also longs for escape (Ford Escape?) from the school, despite a many-years tradition of its leadership being passed from mother to daughter.
Of course, Ash herself has a few secrets of her own that could Cost Her Everything. As both Ash and Ford (seriously FORD) struggle with their place at Goode and in the larger world, keeping each other’s secrets while maybe also hastening each other’s downfall, one student then another is killed, the truth starts to dribble out, and the final set of twists slams it all home.
Good Girls Lie was a seriously fun, twisty book, with incredibly rich characters, a setting I couldn’t get enough of (I read way too much stuff that takes place in suburbia), and a killer (heh) pace. Ms. Ellison has a knack for cranking the tension, bit by agonizing bit, until everything inevitably explodes and I do love me a good tension explosion.
I really have only one complaint with this one, and it’s put me in a bit of a conundrum. There’s a character who is just TOO mastermind-y, too difficult to believe for a lot of reasons that would be spoilers. So I’m going to break one of my most iron-clad rules here, and just say that this character didn’t work for me, without explaining why. I hate to do that, because I like to imagine that I’m important enough for all authors to care about my opinion (by the way, Stephen, CALL ME! I have some very important feedback on that last one!), but this was a book I genuinely enjoyed despite that one little blemish, and I wouldn’t want to ruin anyone else’s good time with it. Because it really IS a good (or Goode)(heh) time! The Nerd’s Rating: FOUR HAPPY NEURONS (and a shot of dresser-drawer vodka. Is it spring yet??)
*Note – I received a free copy of this book for review.*
What’s with publishers mislabeling books? Deep Zero popped up on my recommended reading shelf under “Mystery and Thriller”, but honestly, it was neither. It was the story of two female attorneys who have long discussions with their families and other attorneys about legal issues.
Seriously.
The basic premise of the story is that DA Dana Hargrove is investigating a case in which a high school girl committed suicide after being bullied by her classmates. (Note: there are only a few paragraphs dedicated to the actual investigation. Followed by long discussions as to whether the mean girls can be charged, what can they be charged with, what is a jury likely to convict them of, etc. Long, tedious discussions.)
It would appear that Dana’s case is jeopardized when a party thrown by another kid in the school gets out of hand, resulting in injuries and property damage. See, both of Dana’s children were barely, tangentially, kind of remotely involved in the incident, which led to them being subjected to long discussions with their parents on legal technicalities, as well as long legal discussions with other attorneys in the DA’s office regarding questioning the kids and so on. The incident also results in like 37 other cases being opened, each one complete with its own series of discussions.
There’s a subplot regarding Dana’s husband, who’s handling a case regarding a convicted killer who wins a medical malpractice suit, and who should get the money from that settlement. It adds absolutely nothing to the main story, other than more lengthy legal discussions. There’s also another main character, Vesma, who occasionally works as a criminal defense attorney. She thinks that kind of work is beneath her, however, so we don’t get to see her in action. Most likely because that might have been kind of interesting. Vesma’s daughter is friends with Dana’s son, which, thank goodness for that, because otherwise, we might have missed out on a few legal discussions about the possible conflicts in all these cases.
As for the multiple cases themselves, there’s no mystery. It’s spelled out pretty clearly who did what. There’s no nuance or buildup or any real tension. There are no contentious courtroom scenes (except for the speeches lifted right out of an 80’s movie slow clap climax. It’s worse than you think.) Deep Zero is a Law & Order episode where all we see are the attorneys sitting around talking to each other.
Oh, and it’s written like a children’s book. Consider this snippet, and keep in mind, this is straight narration, NOT, as you would think, dialogue from a very young character: “Well, the whoops and cries were so loud that Judge Jones had to bang the gavel over and over again! The hammering was forceful, but the judge really didn’t look mad. A big smile was on his face.” (See? 80’s movie slow clap, in book form.)
The Nerd’s Rating: One Happy Neuron (and caffeine. Please send caffeine ASAP.)
Short Take: Not at all what I was expecting. It was better.
I’ve been on kind of a lady-thriller kick lately, and I haven’t been writing reviews, mainly because most of them tend to travel similar paths, and they all kind of blur together after a while. It was the scheming best friend, and/or the husband/boyfriend, always. I guess I’ve been craving some literary comfort food, not to mention that when I figure out the ending, I can congratulate myself on my mental superiority, no matter how obvious the clues were. I’m quite clever that way.
Except for the book that actually had a “they were dead THE WHOLE TIME!!” ending twenty years after that stopped being surprising. Seriously, that “shocking twist” is neither shocking nor a twist anymore and that particular trend in fiction needs to die out already.
But I digress. After The Woods looked to be more of the same – two girls go into the woods, and one comes out. The second girl emerges days later, traumatized, and unable to fully remember what happened.
It’s a familiar story on the surface. The prologue shows us Liv and Julia, best friends, out for a run in the woods. When Liv pulls ahead, she is grabbed by Donald Jessup, a sex offender with a huge knife and some very strange fixations. Julia catches up, tackles Jessup, and is taken hostage while Liv runs for help.
The book then jumps to nearly a year later. Julia is in therapy, trying to remember what happened during the time of her captivity, and Liv is self-destructing with a violent new boyfriend, drugs, and an eating disorder. The press is gearing up to hound Julia for more juicy sound bites on the anniversary of The Event. And another girl’s body is found in the woods, but Donald Jessup has committed suicide months before, taking all of his secrets to the grave. Julia is left as the one to try to figure out exactly what happened, and more importantly, why.
Adhering to my strict “no spoilers unless the book was really terrible and deserves it” policy, I’m not going to elaborate on the final outcome, other than to say that it caught me completely off-guard. I expected to be angry at [redacted] but ended up feeling pity and sorrow, along with hope for their future. That’s…. unusual for a genre in which the bad guy is always a nasty schemer with no conscience. Don’t get me wrong, there’s at least one of those (and oh what a piece of work they are!) but the humanity and empathy the author gives even her “bad” characters is unexpected, and quite lovely.
The opposite, yet equally compelling side of that is that the “good” characters have plenty of unlovely moments. Julia’s trauma often comes out as bitterness, anger, and sarcasm, and her mother, trying to protect her from further upset, usually just looks clueless and out of touch.
Another tasty little surprise was the author’s willingness to kill off her bad guy early on. It’s hard to build tension when the immediate threat is neutralized for pretty much the entire book, but Ms. Savage handled it so smoothly that Jessup’s absence was barely felt. It was a gutsy move that could have tanked the whole thing, but it worked.
My only real complaint with After The Woods was its large cast of minor characters. I get that the author was going for a claustrophobic small town vibe, but there were just too many students, teachers, parents, neighbors, newspersons, police, and even members of the clergy for a smallish book. Many of them only appeared in a scene or two, and could probably have been edited out or consolidated in some way. My sugar-soaked brain can only handle so many imaginary people in it before it rebels, especially right after the holidays.
All in all, however, After The Woods is a wonderfully layered novel. There’s the obvious surface mystery, but also so much more in the depths. I wasn’t expecting to see such nuanced examinations of friendships between high school girls, and mother-daughter relationships, and the ways in which we see and don’t see the people close to us.
The Nerd’s Rating: FOUR HAPPY NEURONS (and an old-school composition notebook. Great for nostalgia AND organizing one’s very dark thoughts.)
Short Take: If Carrie Bradshaw had a really ugly past.
Confession time! Way back when it was on HBO as a series, before the movies (I don’t talk about those), I LOVED Sex & The City. It was fun and fizzy and girly, it was about the dumb dating mistakes we all made in our 20’s, and it was about epic friendship and fabulous clothes.
But in looking back, the show was also 100% about the present. Carrie, Miranda, Charlotte and Samantha went careening through life, never acknowledging they had pasts, let alone learning from or regretting them, never planning for the future beyond the next hot date or perfect pair of shoes. I envied the hell out of them. They just WERE, you know? No family ties or leftover high school drama. They had a freedom that most of us can’t imagine.
Ani FaNelli has that life. She’s a rising star of a writer at a super-well-known women’s magazine, she lives in Manhattan, her clothes, hair, shoes and nails are always impeccable, and she’s just gotten engaged to Luke Harrison, a gorgeous, Wall Street, old-money type who’s a catch by any metric.
But behind the meticulously constructed image, there’s TifAni FaNelli (yes, weird capitalization and all), the new kid at the prestigious Bradley School. TifAni is desperate to fit in, and willing to do almost anything the popular crowd demands of her.
Needless to say, it’s ugly. And we see TifAni spiraling down further and further, until something so terrible happens that I’m actually still having a bit of trouble processing it. TifAni grows up, moves to New York, becomes the glamorous Ani, and tries to never look back.
But a documentary film crew wants to revisit the horror of Tifani’s past, and as she prepares to relive it on camera, we get bits and pieces until the entire awful truth comes out.
Ok. Let’s get this out of the way. This was yet another “If you loved Gone Girl…” book. I think we’re all pretty familiar with how I feel about those by now. But this was different. Instead of seeing the lovely sweet young bride revealed as a sociopath, we see the shallow, selfish, fairly awful young woman revealed as a victim, someone who uses bitchiness as a protective barrier.
Is it predictable? Kind of. I mean, the whole “nasty person was cruelly tormented as a kid” thing is Pop Psych 101. It definitely didn’t have the HOLY CRAP!! DID THAT JUST HAPPEN!!!! thing that Gone Girl had. But that’s not to say this was a bad book. On the contrary, there was a slow burn, a hard ugly nugget of truth revealed layer by layer, like a poisonous flower unfolding.
So in short, Luckiest Girl Alive is nothing like Gone Girl. But it’s still a pretty good book. Jessica Knoll does a great job of getting inside Ani’s head, of showing it all, the good, the bad, and the ugly. She handles other characters, especially Ani’s childhood friend Arthur just as deftly, but it’s interesting that, for example, Luke is pretty much just a picture in a glossy magazine. The people who really know Ani are fully fleshed out, the ones who don’t, aren’t. And that’s actually a testament to the author’s dedication to her main character – when we read this book, we are so completely immersed in Ani’s world.
Is it kind of a lousy world? Oh yeah. But it’s also impossible to walk away from until we understand it fully. The Nerd’s Rating: FIVE HAPPY NEURONS (and a pen with green ink)
Oh, this was a fun one. A quick, nasty little mystery that takes place in both the island paradise of Aruba and also Mean Girls High in Boston.
Anna Chevalier is a high school junior who’s dealing with a lot. Her mother is dying of cancer, and her father has decided that she will transfer to an exclusive private school, where hopefully, her friends’ parents will become his new clients.
After some typical new-girl hazing, Anna becomes best friends with Elise. It’s an intense friendship. They both are good girls with edgy tendencies, and their friendship leads them down some dark paths together.
During Spring Break of their senior year, Anna, Elise, Anna’s boyfriend Tate, and a few of their other friends decide to spend the week at a beach house in Aruba. It’s there that Elise is brutally murdered, and Anna is accused of the crime.
Dangerous Girls flips back and forth between the year or so of Anna & Elise’s friendship leading up to the night of the murder, and the present day trial. There are loads of secrets and rivalries and gossip and instagram and text messages, and all the usual high-school dramas that can be so much fun to watch from the outside. (Note: I don’t know anyone who actually enjoyed this stuff when they were in the middle of it.)
But there’s also a real life and death struggle going on, as Anna desperately tries to prove her innocence. She’s up against a prosecutor who seems to be fixated on her despite having several other promising suspects, and in a foreign country, where the rules are vastly different. There are a few twists, and then of course, a final reveal of the real killer.
Sure it’s formulaic. I’ll admit, I actually didn’t figure out who the real killer was, but there were some pretty convincing red herrings, and truthfully, I wasn’t thinking about it that hard. I was just enjoying watching the whole soap opera play out.
Abigail Haas captured adolescence in all its overblown glory. It’s a time in life when all the emotional dials are cranked to eleven, and we all love harder, laugh more deeply, suffer more from heartbreak, and imbue every decision with so much more importance than we ever will again. There’s an innocence to everything, even bad behavior.
Dangerous Girls also throws in a bit of subtle commentary on how many of us live our lives so publicly now, putting everything on social media. When the prosecutor decides to put Anna on trial, there’s plenty of evidence of bad behavior right at his fingertips, pictures of her drinking, pretending to stab Elise, wearing skimpy clothing, etc. But as the attorney for the defense says at one point “Any one of us could be made to look a monster, with selective readings of our history, but for every photograph he shows you out of context, I can show you another side” and that’s true too. Every single one of us, with just the worst moments of our lives plucked out and examined, would look capable of any crime.
One of my own worst fears is being accused of something terrible, and unable to defend myself against it, while some faceless authority points out every bad thing I’ve ever done or said, and every nasty thought I’ve had. Haas’s portrayal of that was masterful. Anna’s despair, anger, helplessness, and hopelessness were raw enough to bleed off the page.
The Nerd’s Rating: FOUR HAPPY NEURONS (and one non-stabby tropical beach vacation. It’s FREEZING here.)
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