At its core, this is a ghost story, a violent, horrifying ghost story about the kids banished to a reformatory for committing petty mostly pretty crimes.  The main character, a young Black boy incarcerated in a reformatory school for defending himself in a fight. Everything about this book is dark, graphic, and depressing, except maybe the very end, but by then it was too late for me to appreciate that.  I don't like horror or graphic violence, so this was just not for me at all. 

I suppose I wish I were the kind of person who could tolerate this level of historically accurate misery better, but even with what could be considered an empowering ending, I just couldn't get a lot of the terrorizing scenes out of my mind and while that might have been justified by the context of the story or even the point of the book, the gore and horror of it was too much. 

Do not recommend.
​
Click here to purchase this book and support My 50 Bookish Friends blog project.

Just because there is a "surprise twist" ending that makes someone not creepy doesn't mean that their behavior isn't creepy.  The wealthy, benevolent old man troupe whom we are supposed to love and trust, while thinking he is sweet and quirky just didn't sit well for me. It is obvious throughout the book that there is more to this buy who shows up in a town and extracts everyone's life stories, always tainted with a trite, judgey, Christian message just didn't play for me the way it did for many other readers.  As the protagonist works his way through meeting everyone in town and getting them to share their life with him, we get a tour of the whose who of Christian failings--early on starting with the abortion regret story, but continuing with so many preachy, trite messages.  

As if that wasn't bad enough, the book is slow paced and boring.  I kept waiting for a plot to develop in which he was actually a serial rapist or con artist, anything to make it interesting.  I think we are supposed to be drawn in by this slow paced old guy who slows everyone down and "sees" who they truly are and empathizes with their pain, but really I was just irritated with such a obvious ploy to clock Christian propaganda as literature.

Absolutely do not recommend this.
​
Click here to purchase this book and support My 50 Bookish Friends blog project.

The premise of the book was interesting enough, but the execution was kind of dark and broody.  A golem and a jinni find each other living parallel lives from Syria to New York, navigating a life of otherness, interspersed with kindness from strangers they befriend and lovers they become entangled with in various ways. I did appreciate the historical depiction at the end of the 1800's in those locations.  Overarching themes of loneliness and trying to connect when your very nature seems to disallow for connection make this a melancholic,  intellectual read. In some ways, the ways in which the golem, in particular, avoided abuse of lovely people who protected her and her secret was heartwarming, but the overall mood of the book left a sad haze over me that I couldn't shake and didn't love. But I for sure can see how folks who love this type of fantasy could love this tale.

Not recommended.

Click here to purchase this book and support My 50 Bookish Friends blog project.

One of two books by this author, with very similar premises.  Spent time in Venice, reassess your life, fall in love, explore the city.  Nothing more than a light, kind of fun read, but set in the city I was traveling in, which did add value to the story.  
Not not recommended.

​Click here to purchase this book and support My 50 Bookish Friends blog project.

Set in 1962 Ireland, this is a marginally interesting period piece that recounts the bleak existence of a small town second-generation doctor and his adult spinster daughter who "keeps house for him."  Living under the rigidity of the Catholic Church and a cloud of grief since the death of the doctor's wife and the daughter's mother, the first three parts of the story drag on with detailed descriptions of mundane events that I suspect "real" lovers of literature find beautiful and enthralling.  I got all the way to part four and realized that only about two or three weeks of time had passed in the storyline. 
 
By Part Four, a few things happen.  We meet another character, whose life is also dismal.  A young teen, his father is an alcoholic and his mother the kind of run down and sad that comes from a lifetime of being dependent on alcoholics. The poverty and pain of the story continues on until the Time of The Child.  At this point, well into the last part of the book, the plot seemed to begin.
 
Now, I am not saying the book isn't well crafted or that it wasn't at times informative of an historical period in a place that is often ignored, but I am saying that it was boring and those things weren't enough to pull me along.
 
Not recommended.

​Click here to purchase this book and support My 50 Bookish Friends blog project.

Having known nothing about Herbie Hancock other than the heavily electronic version of Rock It from my childhood, I was surprised by a lot of this memoir and I can image that for someone interested in jazz, jazz fusion, and the evolution of electronic music and particularly synthesizers, that this book would be fascinating.  I learned a lot about these topics, despite what might be surprised as a lack of general interest in them, which is one of the great things about reading in general.  Hancock's background in engineering, touring with Miles Davis, and general likeability made for good storytelling, even if it sometimes fell into the name-dropping trap that I often find so irritating in these types of memoirs. 

I will say that I found his lack of political engagement to be disappointing, especially considering the opportunities and relationships that he had connection to. The parts of the book where he wrote about his struggles with addition to crack cocaine were probably the most moving, but his repeated discussion of his Buddhist chanting practices reminded me of Tina Turner's memoirs (My Love Story and Happiness Becomes You) in terms of leaving me with a sense of superficiality.

I am definitely see what others love about this book, but I think I expect more emotionality from a memoir like this unless I have an independent interest in the historical topic.

Not recommended--unless you are a music or jazz lover, then I would recommend it for you.

Click here to purchase this book and support My 50 Bookish Friends blog project.

Yet another story about Americans traveling to Scotland for a vacation read in Virtual Voice.  I need a setting that excludes these from view, although having now read three of these, I have definitely learned my lesson.  The Voice here isn't as horrendous as Valentine's Day In Venice, but it still takes away from the story, which is saying a lot since the story was nothing compelling to start with.  Retired, disgruntled cop and his wife housesit in Scotland for a change of scene and get asked to help solve a blackmailing mystery for a neighbor.  Predictable and bland.
Not recommended

Click here to purchase this book and support My 50 Bookish Friends blog project.

Mindless romance between American ex-lovers traveling to Scotland.  Nothing offensive.  Not not cute.  But, the point of reading stories about a place I am going to visit is to learn something about the people or place and although these two journalists purport to be there to write a story about locals, that part of the story was never developed and really could have taken place in any one of hundreds of places around the world.  Overall a disappointment.
Do not recommend.

Click here to purchase this book and support My 50 Bookish Friends blog project.

I will preface this by saying that I am not a fan of horror, either in books or movies, but part of this project is that I read and finish every book and in this case, even though the bottom line is going to be a Not Recommended label, I have to say that I thought and talked about this book a remarkable amount for not recommending it to anyone. 

This book is about truly awful, abusive mothers with borderline personality disorders who torture and haunt their children, even after their death.  The lack of clarity about whether the haunting is real or a shared delusion as a result of the trauma these mothers inflicted on their children, step-children, and children-in-law, is truly horrifying and the book in general was, indeed, horrific. 

That said, the ending was so clever and the cleverness of the ending only adding to the horror of the story.  Although it is a full book, it had the pacing and feel more in line with that of a short story, including the way the ending of the story lands with the slow realization of what is happening having the feel of The Gift of the Magi or The Lottery. 

If you are a fan of horror, then this may very well be for you, but I can't really recommend it otherwise. I did give serious thought to a Not Not Recommendation, but ultimately decided that it really was just too disturbing for that.

Not recommended.

Click here to purchase this book and support My 50 Bookish Friends blog project.

In many ways this is a traditional masculine war novel. It is set in Leningrad during World War II, but I am not sure that I got the sense that the narrative was true to that era.  To be fair, I know very little about the Russian front in WWII, but there was something about significant pieces of the plot that seemed unlikely to be true and to a large extent it felt like another example of "historical fiction" that imports model progressive values into historical scenarios that I am not at all sure that people experienced at the time and that just feels like a erasure of actual historical experiences. 

​Here, it is a young woman posing as a boy and a Jewish boy pretending to be a soldier, both "hiding in plain sight," who just happen to come into contact again and again by people who step up to protect him that felt too much like a story about how many saviors there were in a time and place where we know that these types of heroes were few and far between.  The chances that they would come into contact with this many just ignores how unusual that probably would have been. And there were just so many little examples of this, like the way sex workers are treated with so much respect and compassion by the protagonist solider and his friend also felt so unlikely that I couldn't get into the story. There was something not just about the substance of these interactions, but the voice that just did not feel congruent with other writing from and about that era that I spent the entire book thinking about whether the book was researched and historical accurate and not about the actual story itself.  I found it distracting for this reason and just couldn't get into it. 

Not recommended.
​
Click here to purchase this book and support My 50 Bookish Friends blog project.