Tag: five stars

ARC Reviews, Reviews

The Return

A Morrow

An edgy and haunting debut novel about a group of friends who reunite after one of them has returned from a mysterious two-year disappearance.

Julie is missing, and the missing don’t often return. But Elise knows Julie better than anyone, and she feels in her bones that her best friend is out there, and that one day she’ll come back. She’s right. Two years to the day that Julie went missing, she reappears with no memory of where she’s been or what happened to her. 

The Return by Rachel Harrison was un-put-down-able.

I had so much fun reading this and stayed up way too late more than once to reach the end of the story. The Return was everything that I wanted in a modern horror, mystery novel: it’s murky, compelling, hypnotic, and slowly ratchets up the tension with a masterful hand. If you like horror, or even if you like thrillers or mysteries and want to try something new that isn’t too gory, this is the book for you. I highly recommend it.

This book is ultimately about friendship. As dark, mysterious, and grisly as it gets, what makes this book so great is the emphasis of the strength of female friendships through it all. If you’ve had a group of girlfriends for a long time, you know how far you would go for them. Or do you? Regardless, The Return makes you face this question over and over and over again as Elise, Julie, Molly, & Mae have to figure out the answer to this question themselves.

The friendships and characters alone were enough to keep me reading. The book shifts POVs occasionally, but I most loved and related to the primary POV character: Elise. She was broke and a little bit judgemental, sarcastic and a little crass sometimes, while giving in too much in others. She was, more than anything, just so relatable. All of her feelings, thoughts, and choices that she has to face in the story after her missing friend returns after so many years, they felt real and natural, like how I would probably react myself. Their friendships are real and deep, despite their struggles and so much time apart. Anyone who’s tried to reconnect with an old friend after too many years will find so many of their most painful moments so relatable. Mostly, I enjoyed that a group of women friends were center-stage for this story. Especially in the horror genre, I find that to be a beautiful and powerful thing in its own right.

More than anything, The Return was just engaging as hell. Even if I hadn’t known it was a thriller, each page felt like it turned itself as I couldn’t stop reading. Reading about them trying to reconnect after such an odd and all-consuming trauma was fascinating in its own right, before anything spooky even begins. After that– well, I couldn’t have put the book down then if I’d tried. Once the shadows start to recede in this mystery, this book breaks out the insane, dark and deadly in such fine form and it was a real treat to read.

Check out The Return when it releases on March 24th, 2020!

Thanks so much to Edelweiss+ for providing me with a copy of this book in exchange for an honest review.

See you all on Tuesday! x

Find more recommendations on: Instagram | Twitter | Facebook | Goodreads

ARC Reviews, Reviews

Rules for Vanishing

A Morrow

In the faux-documentary style of The Blair Witch Project comes the campfire story of a missing girl, a vengeful ghost, and the girl who is determined to find her sister–at all costs.

Once a year, the path appears in the forest and Lucy Gallows beckons. Who is brave enough to find her–and who won’t make it out of the woods?

It’s been exactly one year since Sara’s sister, Becca, disappeared, and high school life has far from settled back to normal. With her sister gone, Sara doesn’t know whether her former friends no longer like her…or are scared of her, and the days of eating alone at lunch have started to blend together. When a mysterious text message invites Sara and her estranged friends to “play the game” and find local ghost legend Lucy Gallows, Sara is sure this is the only way to find Becca–before she’s lost forever. And even though she’s hardly spoken with them for a year, Sara finds herself deep in the darkness of the forest, her friends–and their cameras–following her down the path. Together, they will have to draw on all of their strengths to survive. The road is rarely forgiving, and no one will be the same on the other side.

Well, what can I say? I enjoyed the hell out of this book.

I had no expectations when I picked up Rules for Vanishing by Kate Alice Marshall. I had never read anything by Marshall before, YA horror was a genre I hadn’t read for years, and I had won this book in a contest before it was published, so- at the time, I didn’t even really know what it was about. I can now say that absolutely none of that mattered. I picked up Rules for Vanishing on a Tuesday night and finished it on a Wednesday afternoon. And not on purpose, mind you, but something about the eerie beginning of this story swept me up almost immediately.

Rules for Vanishing was everything I want around this time of year: eerie, mysterious, spooky, and full of questions.

There were so many things I liked about it that I’m just going to make a list:

One. The format of this book was so much fun to read. Rules for Vanishing is sometimes written like a traditional, first-person novel, but only in some chapters. Most chapters are something different: transcripts from videos found on various characters’ phones, interviews with police, school assignments. This changed the angle of perspective constantly throughout the book which only added a deliciously disorienting effect to an already mysterious story. If this was an homage to the trend of found footage in horror movies in the last few years, it was executed with a very thoughtful eye. It was compelling as hell.

Two. I liked all of the characters. Okay, some of them more than others, but- given they’re a group of teenagers, I feel like that’s only fair. I really felt for all of the main circle though and I feel like Marshall did a great job at giving each of them a unique and relatable vulnerability. They were teenagers, to put it quite simply. Some of them were vain or pretentious or dramatic, but they were also great friends. Their histories were varied and riddled with complications and old wounds and, because of this, their reunion through the story had a sentimental, electric effect. This book made me remember running around with a group of kids at that age, only never in such dire circumstances. I rooted for them.

Three. The main character, Sara, was particularly competent in a way that just makes me so happy. I love reading a character, especially when she’s a woman, that does the best they can and generally doesn’t do anything supremely stupid, barring normal human error anyway. People are flawed, and so is Sara, but it can also be refreshing to read about a character who is driven, prepared, and competent to do what they’re doing. Or- for the most part, at least. Especially in YA, I liked seeing her fortitude and drive being front and center.

Four. Damn, Kate Alice Marshall did a fantastic job of rendering The Road in all of its mysterious, terrifying, glory. The environments in this story are often shrouded in darkness or lost to the unknown, but the way that the author chooses to render them to the reader was done particularly well. Marshall’s descriptions were focused on all the right things to bring you right into the moment that these characters are living and forget about the world around you. I couldn’t put the book down, mostly because I just couldn’t stand not knowing what insane, spooky obstacle would come up next. The plot and the atmosphere are drenched in fog and confusion and malevolent spirits and I loved every twist.

Five. I love horror, scary movies, scary books, and all things Spooky Season so I’m not an easy scare. While I wouldn’t say this book “scared” me per se, it kept me on the edge of my seat the entire time, wanting more. Too often with YA horror/thriller it feels like something is being held back, either in the writing or in the topics, but I didn’t feel that here. Marshall took me to some dark places, both in the story and conceptually, and I genuinely enjoyed myself along the ride. I commend her for taking those risks because they paid off.

So- I guess I really recommend this book. Especially if YA is your thing and/or spooky books are your thing! This book had a little bit of all of that and then a little more, and a ghost story on top of the whole thing. Rules for Vanishing is on shelves now! I hope you enjoy it as much as I did.

Thank you so much to BookishFirst who provided me with an advanced copy of this book in exchange for an honest review.

See you tomorrow! x

Find more recommendations @ Instagram | Twitter | Facebook | Goodreads

Reviews

One True Loves

A Morrow

“In her twenties, Emma Blair marries her high school sweetheart, Jesse. They build a life for themselves, far away from the expectations of their parents and the people of their hometown in Massachusetts. They travel the world together, living life to the fullest and seizing every opportunity for adventure.

On their first wedding anniversary, Jesse is on a helicopter over the Pacific when it goes missing. Just like that, Jesse is gone forever.

Emma quits her job and moves home in an effort to put her life back together. Years later, now in her thirties, Emma runs into an old friend, Sam, and finds herself falling in love again. When Emma and Sam get engaged, it feels like Emma’s second chance at happiness.

That is, until Jesse is found. He’s alive, and he’s been trying all these years to come home to her. With a husband and a fiancé, Emma has to now figure out who she is and what she wants, while trying to protect the ones she loves.

Who is her one true love? What does it mean to love truly?

Emma knows she has to listen to her heart. She’s just not sure what it’s saying.”

All of you here on my site know that I’ve been going through a Taylor Jenkins Reid-volution lately! After finally getting around to reading Daisy Jones and the Six and falling in love with that story and Reid’s writing style, I went on to devour her other highly-lauded book The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo. Another smash hit. I loved these books so much that Reid has launched herself right onto the list of my favorite authors, and definitely the authors that I’m watching right now. In that vein, I was curious to see what else she’d written and so I went searching, which is when I found One True Loves.

From the synopsis, One True Loves had my attention. I don’t know about you, but I am a sucker for the whole “loved one back from the dead” trope. All the emotion, the reconciling with new realities, the nuance of human experience in that extreme, all of that appeals to a fascinated part of me. I knew I was going to like this book and, you know what? I did. I really did.

One True Loves is not a simple, sweet, linear love story. That is what I loved best about it. This is a messy story about the messiest parts of our lives: the times when we have to reevaluate everything we thought we knew about life. The main character, Emma, has her life turned upside-down twice in this book: once, when her first love and husband Jesse is lost at sea, and again, years later when he is found and brought back home. This may be a romance novel, but it is also about how we pick ourselves up and move forward after heartbreak. It’s about grief and time, and about how we love in so many different ways.

I cared for the characters in this book. I cared about them. I know that I was wholly swept into this book because it mattered so much to me what happened to them. Reid does such a nuanced and beautiful job of pulling apart all of the tangled, blended emotions that her characters feel in this story. I cheered for them and snarked at them and even rolled my eyes a few times, but mostly I just wanted them to be happy. That’s a powerful thing when an author can create that. Creating characters with depth and complexity seems to be a trend throughout all of Reid’s novels so far and I applaud her for it. It is so masterfully done and creates such an emotional impact.

One True Loves was a quick read but I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention how perfectly sized, paced, and planned it was too. The book felt like it moved effortlessly from thought to thought all the way until the end, which was– perfect, actually. I loved it. The ending left me happy and teary-eyed and so impressed with the love and nuance used throughout this book.

One True Loves was romantic and sad, beautiful and sweet, and somehow even funny sometimes. All in all, this was a book that I truly enjoyed. I hope you do too.

You can find One True Loves here @ Goodreads & Amazon

Hope you all are surviving the Monday! x — A

Instagram | Twitter | Facebook | Goodreads