Monthly Archives: March 2022

books, Horror, Reviews

The Hollow Places by T. Kingfisher

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Stars: 5 out of 5.

This was an amazingly, delightfully creepy book! The older I get, the less I seem to enjoy horror books, especially the gore and guts kind of horror. I still enjoy the atmospheric, psychological horror, but I find it hard to find good book that don’t repeat the same tired clichés or manage to completely botch the ending. I’m glad I picked up The Hollow Places, because this book delivered.

I think the best part about it is how slowly it develops the creep factor. We start in this wonderful little museum of improbable and impossible things that might look scary and unusual, but are, most of them fake. And our protagonist is someone who grew up in that museum. Who knows every nook and cranny of that building, who played among the display cases and hugged the stuffed animals as if they were her childhood friends. To Kara, or “Carrot” how her family and friends call her, the museum is the safest place on earth. This is a refuge when her family life is shattered by a divorce. A chance to regroup and start over.

And the author takes time to set the stage and introduce us to Kara and her uncle, as well as the museum itself. It’s done in such a way that as a reader, I was in love with the little building as well. I was feeling warm and safe there.

So when creepy and unexplained things start happen in this safe place, it completely knocks the ground from under your feet along with the protagonist. The horror of what’s happening has an even bigger impact because it is intruding into this safe zone.

The author also introduces the horrors of the Willows very progressively. At first, it just looks like a slightly creepy, but ultimately benign world. Yes, it’s flooded. Yes, there are bunkers everywhere, but no people. Yes, the willows are strange, but they are just trees, right? As more an more bizarre things happen to our protagonists, as the level of horror slowly ramps up, so did my blood pressure. I felt for them. I felt with them, especially after the school bus and their realization that they lost their bunker, and that they are possibly stuck in this weird no-man’s land forever.

I loved Kara. She is funny, she is a mess, but she is so relatable. Maybe because I’ve been in her shoes, with a messy divorce and a husband that acted exactly the same way. Yes, Carrot was slightly too stupid to live when it came to one particular object, but I can let it slide, because I liked everything else about her.

And Simon! If I had to get lost in a weird in-between place of existence with somebody, he would be my first choice. He is cool under pressure, and funny, and also relatable. 

And special shoutout to Beau, the bestest, most adorable cranky cat in literature. 

As I mentioned, the horror in this slowly builds up and finds its culmination when the safe place suddenly becomes unsafe. Unlike other horror books I’ve read recently, the author didn’t drop the ball here. The resolution is satisfying and the ending is everything I wanted it to be. And even though our protagonist win in th end, they are left with physical and emotional scars, which is also very logical and realistic. 

All in all, this was a very enjoyable book. I will definitely recommend it to my friends and I will check out other books by this author. Heck, I already told my husband he absolutely needs to read it.

books, Dark fantasy, Fantasy, Horror, Reviews, Urban fantasy

Last Exit by Max Gladstone

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Stars: 2.5 out of 5

It pains me to give a less than stellar rating to Max Gladstone, but this is the first book of his I’ve been disappointed with. How can a book about found family, road trip, end of the world, parallel universes and so on be so… boring?

I loved this author’s Craft series. They are wonderfully imaginative and full of interesting characters and thought provoking concepts. So of course I jumped on the chance to get an ARC of this through NetGalley. And my initial state while I was reading this book, before the boredom set in, was that of bewilderment. Is this the author who wowed me with his other books? Am I reading this wrong? What is going on?

Oh, there are glimpses of the author I love in this story. There are moments that are tightly written and intensely terrifying. Like when the Cowboy first becomes aware of Sarah on the interstate, or the confrontation at the Best Western, or when Zelda is in the bug-infested tunnels under an alt New York. Those scenes had me at the edge of my seat, with my heart in my throat, terrified for the well-being of the characters…

Unfortunately, those moments of brilliance are few and far between. And they are bogged down by pages and pages of flashbacks, introspections, inner dialog about how miserable the characters are and how they think that the world is ending. It’s self-pity and self-recrimination on page upon page upon page. So you get this brilliant scene when the action is non-stop, the stakes are high, and the characters in danger… then you have 50 pages of inner monolog topped with a flashback on their first journey. Momentum – shot dead, not by the cowboy in a white hat, but by sheer boredom. In fact, I think that the book is at least 200 pages too long. My Kindle assured me that it was 400 pages long, but it felt like one of those 1000+ pages door stoppers – never-ending.

I think this approach would have worked if I cared for any of the characters, but I didn’t. They are all unlikeable, selfish people who wear their failures like a badge of honor and wallow in self-pity for most of the book. And since the reader has to follow them and be privy to their most inner thoughts, it makes for a very painful read, and not in a good way. 

Also, it is constantly hinted that their first journey to find the crossroads went horribly wrong and resulted in Sal’s downfall, but the book drags the actual story over pages and pages of hints and self-pity. By the time we actually learn what happened it feels… anti-climatic? I was like, “So all this misery is because of this? Are you kidding me?” Not a good thing when Sal’s downfall and Zelda’s guilt about it are the cornerstone of this story. 

By the end of the book I was so bored with the story, that I just skimmed through the last 10%. Also not good. The ending is supposed to be rewarding. It’s supposed to justify the effort the reader put into sticking with 400 pages of story. It was anything but that. And the big reveal and twist wasn’t all that shocking either. 

When I had finished the other books of this author, I had a sense of satisfaction and joy. I had wanted to savor the story, to re-read passages that I liked the most. When I finished Last Exit, all I had is a sense of relief that the slog was finally over and that I could delete the ARC from my Kindle. 

I will not recommend this book. Max Gladstone is a wonderful author though, so I suggest you read his Craft series instead. 

books, Reviews, Urban fantasy, YA

The Cat Who Saved Books by Sosuke Natsukawa

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Stars: 2.5 out of 5

I’m always eager to discover new voices in literature, especially if they come from other cultures. Those authors always have very unique outlooks at life that you won’t find in our Western civilizations. It definitely broadens my horizon as a reader. So I was very eager to pick up this book when I saw it on NetGalley – a translation of an new Japanese author, and we have a talking cat who saves books? What is there not to like?

Well, the writing, as it turns out. 

The story itself is interesting and rather uplifting – we follow Rintaro, a very shy and introverted high school student, who is trying to deal with the sudden death of his grandfather, who had been his only family for all these years. It doesn’t help that Rintaro is a literal shut-in with severe social anxiety, and that the safe bubble that he’d built in his grandfather’s bookshop is about to burst. Then a talking cat appears and takes him on a fantastical adventure to save books and find his own voice. By the end of the journey, Rintaro finally discovers his own value and decides what he wants to do in life. 

It is a nice coming of age story that would definitely appeal to a younger audience… and a book I would never have picked up if I’d known it was aimed at the younger adult audience. I don’t read YA. This book just reaffirmed all the reasons why I don’t. 

The writing, as I had mentioned earlier, is simplistic at best. I don’t know if it’s due to so many nuances getting lost in translation, as they inevitably do, or if the original was written this way as well. It might have been, if it was intended for a 12+ audience, even if it was classified as General Fiction (Adult) on NetGalley.

Problem with this book is that it does a lot of telling and almost zero showing. Everything has to be spelled out for the reader. We are told how Rintaro feels and what he thinks of his few friends or people he encounters, but there is nothing in the writing that shows these reactions. It might also be that the author is Japanese, so he relies on Japanese stereotypes that would be familiar to a younger Japanese audience, but that are rather foreign to us. For example, Sayo, the class representative, came across as pushy, rude, and judgmental of Rintaro every time I read about her… Yet, he admires her for being a straight talker and very dedicated to her duties. And he just takes her verbal abuse like it’s normal. 

Another problem is that I can’t even visualize these characters. What does Rintaro look like? His only distinctive feature are his glasses that he likes to fiddle with. Same for Sayo. She could be any other Japanese high school student from the street and it wouldn’t make a difference. Or Akiba? Heck, the only character who gets a real description is Tiger the cat. Maybe that’s normal for Japanese novels. Maybe relying on common stereotypes is good enough for that audience. Me, it just left me rather bored. I felt like I was following a shadow play on the wall, where characters are blank cutouts. 

So all in all, it really wasn’t my cup of tea, even if it gave me a peak, of sorts, into the life of an insecure teenage boy living in a second hand book store somewhere in Japan. I wanted a bit more than that though, but it was probably just a matter of managing my expectations.

PS: I received a free copy of this book from NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.