I know that the writing in this book is well loved by a lot of readers, but I just could not get into it.  The western, masculine world of the wild west just isn't for me. It was a bit of Don Quixote, a bit of Lonesome Dove, and a lot of expecting Brokeback Mountain without an ounce of romance. It was just men making their way in a world of other men--and horses-- in a way that just did not resonate for me.  It did make me want to go back and read Lonesome Dove, though, since I loved that series in the 1990's and I wonder whether it holds up such that I would like it now or would I find it as boring as this novel was.

​Not recommended.

This is an odd little read.  The concept of the book is really intriguing.  There are two stories and you can read either one first. If you have the paper version, you flip the book upside down to read the second story.  It is such a cool concept, especially when within the story there is a book that is a a dairy in the back behind a printed book.  

It is also a complex murder mystery with intergenerational secrets held by an erudite family. It is hard to keep up with the story and I lost track of some of the characters and plot strings.  Although the books are set 50 years apart, they are intricately linked together as the first book holds the key to solving the murder in both the first story and the second.  I do love a clever premise and I usually appreciate a really complicated storyline, but this one lost me one too many times, especially as I was trying to figure out how the two books went together. Maybe I just wasn't patient enough, but the constant games and unreliable narration definitely worn on my attention span.

Very clever, but not recommended.

It is hard to know what to make of this book. It is a story written by a young white woman on a high school gap year who travels to Nepal and decides to open an orphanage and school there. On the one hand, it is just really amazing to hear her story of learning to run a non-profit, of initially raising the money by babysitting and dog walking at home in New Jersey before learning how to raise big money with fancy galas, and how she built the connections with locals to make her vision a reality.  On the other hand, this is so problematic.  The problems of white savior attitude and of the non-profit industrial complex are on display here in so many ways, but every time it was especially horrifying, she acknowledged it, really owned it.  She looks back on the experience with remarkable balance, at once telling the story of this audacious passionate young adult who does this amazing thing, while pointing out all the ways in which she should not have been doing this.  It made for a more more sophisticated and interesting read than I thought it was going to be when I started it.  She can't undo this thing she did--and it seems like she wouldn't if she could. She is still tied to this community that she fell in love with and where she build as an outsider with outsider ideals and money and approaches, but she also worked hard to work in tandem with locals who shared her vision and once the program was successful, she stepped further and further back, still fundraising and visiting/living there, but allowing the program to grow up and away from her involvement. Until at the end, the self-awareness of the push/pull of her privilege to choose to live there while still staying connected to the resources her Americanness provided was front and center of the story.  I am not sure I would recommend the book because at the end of the day, it is still a story of a problematic model of charity that I just can't get behind.

Not recommended.

I was entirely unprepared for this book. As a general rule, I love starting a new story with no idea what it is going to be about, but I was entirely unprepared to be in a mellow space only to start this book about a natural disaster occurring in a city I know well. It isn't post-apocalyptic.  It is the actual apocalypse--the moment when the world changes and the entire story takes place in that day, with flashbacks that fill in the backstory, but without a future whatsoever set out for the reader.  This is made even more vivid since the first person narrator is 9 months pregnant as the story unfolds.  It is entirely horrifying. The descriptions of Portland and the damage to infrastructure and neighborhoods and stores that I know well was scary. Overall, the writing was so good, really sucking me into the story, getting my heartrate up and making me invested in the story and characters. But, ultimately, while it is the kind of book that I have thought and talked about a lot since finishing it, I was just so unsatisfied with the story ending without resolution. We don't know anything about the future, about the world beyond the disaster, or any of the characters we met and learned about and got attached to along the way. I mean, this might be what happens in a future world like this, but in a story, I want more.

​Not recommended.

A intergenerational tale of trauma and resilience, this is a book that I probably should have liked a lot more than I did.  From the healing midwife to the witch trial to the women who raised children alone without men to the women who helped women end unwanted pregnancies to institutionalization of spirited women, the story took every trope from this genre and spun it out as far as it could go and beyond.  I felt like I have just read so many variations of this same story and that this one didn't really have anything new to offer. I know it was written to try to get me to feel the empowerment of survival, but I just didn't feel that. I mostly felt the tedium, the exhaustion of intimate violence, handed down generation after generation against women who did not fit the feminine expectations.  I think the book tried to do too much and as such there wasn't enough character development.  I might have liked it better if it slowed down, maybe covering one generation per book and made it an extended series where each lifetime and personality was explored more in depth and with more detail. There was so much here, I sometimes lost track of the characters only to go back and realize that the person I couldn't remember was newly introduced without any clear indication that was happening.
​
​Not recommended.

This tale builds an alternate reality that defies all rules of physics and common sense, setting a scene in which a parallel world exists of creatures who collect regretted decisions, turn them into birds and cage them. In that world, destiny is tattooed on a baby at birth and there is not free will or choice. It is fueled by the collection of regretted choices that people in this world don't want to or can't bear. They give away the memory of the choice in exchange for freedom from the weight of that choice.

Against this odd backdrop. the adventure is when the worlds collide and the characters explore what a life in which you did or didn't have choice would be like.  The fantasy of the story is quite odd as they jump through puddles that connect space and time, fly on origami cranes, and encounter zombie babies.  

I mostly did not find the fantasy world enthralling enough to overcome the too-obvious symbolism in the book and I didn't find the philosophical reflections about choice and destiny to be enough to overcome the lackluster worldbuilding.  For sure, there were lovely moments and some of the interpersonal relationship development was well done.  I can see how folks find this "enchanting," as the book cover suggests. I was just never really captivated by it.

​Not recommended.

This is a collection of short stories about immigration to the US from India.  I didn't realize that they were entirely independent stories, so I kept waiting for the individual stories to come together in some way or to relate to the others in a more cohesive way, so the ending came as a complete surprise to me since that never happened. I found that a huge disappointment, perhaps because none of the stories have endings so the entire experience of writing this book left me feeling abandoned--like when a friend moves away, closes their Facebook, and you entirely lose touch with them.  For that reason, even though I enjoyed the stories and found the themes they explored to be thought-provoking, I would have liked it to come together in some nice tied up way. It is one of the things I love about books, that they have an ending.

​Not recommended.

Typically, I am not a big fan of stories told via a series of letters, so this book had a lot to over come and, small spoiler alert, it did not.  It started just really disjoined and boring and this went on for a really long time-- at least half the book.  I dutifully plugged along wondering what all the hype was about.  

And then, all of a sudden it got really interesting.  The unlikeable main character started to show some likeable qualities and I started to have some compassion for her. An aging attorney, losing her sight, she is a prolific writer of letters and emails to friends, family, acquaintances, and authors. The story unfolds as these letters are written, making it a one-sided narration. For most of the second half of the book, where we watch her explore her grief over the loss of her child, is heart wrenching and compelling.  The problem was that once she unloads the horrific secret she has been holding about that death, I was just unimpressed and found it someone misogynistic.  The book itself has a tread of distain for her commitment to her career, at the cost of being the kind of parent that society expected her to be.  That the ultimate conclusion of the book reinforced those stereotypes--that a working mother is inherently negligent and her children will suffer or even die because of that--just didn't sit right with me. I am surprised how many professional women are drawn to this book, but perhaps that is the internalized message we have all received that career women are terrible moms.  No thanks.

​Not recommended.

I don't know all of a sudden in the last two years I am getting a plethora of horror recommended to me.  Prior to last year, I didn't even know there was a "feminist horror" genre.  Perhaps it is because Here Lies A Vengeful Bitch ended up being a surprise (to me) 2025 hit, I find myself unexpectedly in what turns out to be not just suspenseful, scary stories, but actually terrifying ones with these twist endings that are disturbing.  The graphic violence in this book pushed me to the point of almost throwing up at one point.  It was too much.  Just too much.  

Yes, the plot was clever and progressive and maybe even ultimately empowering at some level in a warped kind of way, but it was also just sad and depressing, as well as gross in places.  

Did it also suck me in and create a ghostly world that I was invested in and wanted to know what happened? Also, yes. But, I am not sure I ended up wanting to know--even though the writing was good and the plotting above average.

SPOILER ALERT:

*******
While this is a book that starts as a story about a woman caught in an abusive relationship with her house, in the end it is actually her husband who is the abuser. All the rest is the story survivors convince themselves is true in other to survive--is it mental illness, a failing of religious faith, or is it really the ghost in the house there to protect you from your abuser?  There is perhaps some comfort in the Good-bye Earl/Janie's Got a Gun/kill-your-abuser-to set-you-free narrative, but at some level the fantasy that it frees you doesn't hold together for me anymore and this story is no exception. When it turns out it was the supernatural house that that killed him, then turned on the cops, but let her and her daughter survivor--well, it was just a bit too  much for me.
*******

Not recommended.

This is a story about stories, a sort-of memoir that writes about writing.  I really liked the premise of the book, which, in a nutshell, is to notice the stories we tell ourselves and others about our lives and to think about how those stories impact us and those around us.  I loved the narrative that reminds us to break intergenerational cycles of storytelling that harm us and our children. The indigenous lens focused perspectives I don't often read.  There was so much to appreciate here and to reflect on. 

The only problem was that the book did not draw me in.  It took me a very long time to finish. It was like the opposite of a page-turner--I got stuck on parts, put it down, and forgot to come back to it. It's slow pace, reflective voice while soothing and thoughtful just could not keep me engaged. The fact that this made me feel like it was a personal failing of mine that I could not mount the kind of love for this book that many people I really respect did just made me feel insufficient, which is of course a reflection on me and not the book, but nevertheless leave me unable to recommend the book, despite how much I really wanted to be the kind of person who would recommend it.

​Not recommended.