Information

• Goodreads: 3.95 out of 40,826 Ratings
• Age Category: Adult
• Genre: Thriller
• Series: None

Summary

An exhausted and drained mother who works the night shift strangles her deadbeat husband after he leaves a huge bruise across her stomach. With nothing left to do but try and get away with it, she goes to her coworkers for help. The audience then gets a peek into the Yakuza, the psychology of committing these crimes to escape their shitty lives, and how the detectives and determined amateurs toy around with one another.

Review

I have a love-hate relationship with this book. I’m going to talk about what I hated first, because it was only the ending of the book. I’m sure it had something to say, but I still feel it could have been done differently. The ending chapters have two-three (depending on how you look at it) rape scenes. One is a man reflecting on a past rape + murder he committed and how he has glamorized it in his head. That part I don’t mind. This is a thriller and he’s sadistic. Checks out. However, there is one other instance of rape. It is actively happening on page from the man’s perspective. It’s gross. But then, the scene happens all over again, but we’re in the woman’s perspective this time. And this was an intriguing portion – she talks about hating her body and the man because her body is responding to him. It’s a completely normal thing that a lot of women have conflicting emotions about because it feels like a betrayal and is an excuse men use – “Clearly she was enjoying it.” What I absolutely hated is how we see her grow to care about the man raping her and even tries to save his life. And then, for a small moment, wants to continue to live for him. No. Fuck that, it’s fucking gross. It is entirely possible that I’m missing something here, but I cannot and will not reread to see what it was.

Everything else was phenomenal. This is a slow burn mystery/thriller. Yayoi has killed her husband and desperately needs her coworkers help. I thought that would be the book, but there’s more. We get to see how this act deeply impacts each person. Yayoi, desperate for intimacy and friendship, becomes overly trusting and naive. She begins to see her part of the crime as less than because she’s consistently comparing her coworkers’ disposal method to her own crime. Kuniko becomes greed itself. She is driven by money and never learns her lesson. She tries to manipulate everyone around her, but is also kind of bad at it with everyone but overly trusting Yayoi and will not hesitate to sell the women out if it benefits her. Yoshi becomes stronger is some places but continues to be weak in others. She’s fragile, but able to take power where and when its available. Then, there is Masiko. Our main character, the heart of the story, the glue that holds everyone together – even if she is unraveling herself. She has a mysterious past that everyone is interested in and she’s stern and tough.

Through our characters, we get to see what it can look like for greed, paranoia, and general disdain to tear a group of women apart from the inside out. That’s really all this book is to me and I loved it. It’s a character study on how such extreme conditions can lead to people committing acts they would have never thought themselves capable of. A mother who works the nightshift taking on an extra job of dismembering corpses because she’s desperate for money? Color me intrigued. However, the slow burn character study could often be difficult to continue to read because this is a longer book and it just took so long. The ending felt like it was just going off the rails, particularly with the showdown/rape scene. It had so much going for it and so many conversations that I was genuinely interested in, but the ending just lost me.

What did you think of the book? Let me know!

Information:

• Goodreads: 4.05 out of 650 Ratings
• Age Category: Adult
• Genre: Horror
• Series: None

Summary:

Misha was told to do the one thing a gay man who just wants to make authentic, queer horror novels never wants to hear: either kills his gay characters off after they admit their love for one another or make them straight. Why? Because queer stories only sell when they are filled with tragedy. Misha, being a half-closeted gay man who shows his feelings and sexuality through his stories, refuses. And suddenly, all of the monsters he’s written as characters begin haunting him. He and his bestie, Tara, are put on a timeline to figure out what is wrong before one of his own creations yanks out their bones, grinds them to dust, and smokes them.

Review + partial spoilers:

We all know that corporate greed and the media’s unwillingness to show queer stories is a real thing. Even one of my favorite shows, Supernatural, allowed one of their characters to finally admit his feelings only when that character sacrificed themselves to save everyone else. Queer tragedy is everywhere in media. While I do think we’ve come a decent way in books (Kind of), there’s still a long way to go in television.

This book hits on how important having more representation than self sacrifice and tragedy can have an impact on audiences everywhere. While those stories do still definitely have a place, it cannot be the only place that people who identify with these characters can find someone like them. Misha, our main character, shows his sexuality and his trauma through his stories. He’s good at what he does because it comes from such an authentic and personal space. Misha makes the initial call of refusing to kill off his characters, resulting in the agency sending twisted versions of Misha’s own trauma, the monster he’s created, to kill him. And when he ultimately decides to go with what they want to save his life – the monsters are still coming for him because that’s what’s bringing the agency money now. It’s a small percentage more profitable to kill him and watch his spiral than it is to keep him alive and allow him to share his stories. It takes Misha convincing an audience to want happy queer stories for the agency to allow him to live – while still erasing A-sexual and A-romantic representation. This is ultimately their complete downfall.

We watch Misha face his monsters throughout this story. We get to see what it can be like for our main character to be able to rely on his queer friends/boyfriend without any of them having to sacrifice themselves to solve this story. His support system helps him cope and process through this. The writing is able to get the guilt of feeling unable to come out phenomenally. There was even a moment that I genuinely teared up – when Misha had an altercation with his friend and his friend’s brother. He has never been accepted for who he is until he met these two people who stand by his side no matter what. Even when what he tells them sounds absolutely bonkers, he has surrounded himself with people who show him care and love in a way he’s never experienced before.

Even when the media is shown that queer stories can be profitable, they then take it overboard. No more queer tragedy and conflicts. Only happy, good stories here. Pride flags every where, false positivity, and calling everyone ‘girl.’ The media takes one aspect they have seen of queer culture and turned the dial to 100 – exactly what we see every single June when companies who do nothing for the community any other month of the year suddenly are a hundred percent pro-queer community, as if we can’t tell most of it is performatory.

This book was fun, with body horror and a main character losing his mind as he’s hunted down by his own creations. It’s engaging and seamlessly weaves in the commentary. I loved it. It didn’t absolutely floor me and there were things that I didn’t find as enjoyable. Zeke, Tara, and pretty much everyone who wasn’t Misha felt one note. They served their purpose and nothing more. There were also moments when it felt as if I could put the book down and not pick it back up, but those moments were few and far in between.

I’d love to know what you thought of the book as well!

Information

• Goodreads: 3.81 out of 125 Ratings
• Age Category: Adult
• Genre: Horror; Thriller
• Series: None

Summary

Cancel culture is back at it in this book, but taken to a bit of an extreme.

Willow has experienced her worst nightmare: being canceled after a tweet, therefore being fired from her job, losing her fiancé, and having her life generally just fall to complete shit. There’s only one thing to do when you’re being canceled and receiving hate mail – and death threats: go to a secluded camp in the middle of the woods that doesn’t allow cell phones, obviously. Unfortunately, there’s someone here who takes cancel culture quite literally and people very quickly begin to lose their heads.

Review

Listen, I love to go camping. It can be so nice and fun. No one can argue that it doesn’t feel good to disconnect from our devices and reconnect with nature. It absolutely makes sense in my noggin that a character going through what Willow is going through would be tempted with an opportunity to just let it all go. But without a phone? You could never catch me doing that. I know, I know. The point of the camp is to disconnect from devices, I get it. I’m all for it. But you aren’t gonna catch me not having my phone so that I can call 911 if I needed to.

Despite this silly move on everyone’s end, I was expecting the atmosphere to be phenomenal. I was expecting it to be creepy. It wasn’t. There were some spooky aspects. I would be fucking terrified if someone was randomly knocking my on door three times at night. Something about it just didn’t click for me, though. Maybe it was the characters. None of them really had much to them to keep me interested.

It felt like Josh was trying to have a conversation about cancel culture, but I didn’t feel as I, personally, got anything from it. We all know that cancel culture can absolutely suck and a lot of people don’t deserve as much of the backlash as they get. I, for one, feel as though we should hold people accountable when it’s necessary. The book seems to take on the message that no cancel culture is good and there’s always something worse that someone is doing – such as murder. And I could get behind that, if we weren’t using the most bland and irritating character to show that. Willow isn’t even her real name. She’s an actor who has lost her job due to tweeting – in character – about the LGBTQ community. She meant the tweet in good faith, being part of the community herself, but it wasn’t taken that way. But maybe she wouldn’t be in this situation if she didn’t talk and tweet as if she were that character. Or maybe I just really didn’t like her, I’m not sure. I don’t feel as if this is something Josh has done wrong, I’ve liked his writing before. This just didn’t hit. It’s marketed as adult but, good god, does it read like cheesy YA. I just didn’t have a good time with this one. Whomp, Whomp.

I’m curious, if you’ve read it, what did you think? Did you have similar critiques as I did or did you find yourself enjoying the characters? Let me know!

Information

• Goodreads: 4.00 out of 13,053 Ratings
• Genre: Fantasy Romance
• Series: The Veiled Kingdom
• Age Category: New Adult

Summary

Nyra’s dad is a bitch. He’s the king and he does not make life easy for his family or the ones within his kingdom. He makes them participate in a thing called the tithe – which where everyone has to give him a certain amount of their power. This is unfortunate for Nyra (Whose name is not Nyra) because, even though she is his daughter, she knows that he just kind of kills everyone who doesn’t give him anything. And she doesn’t have any power to give. So, she tries to escape, using the tattoo of the rebellion to assist her through it (I could be misremembering why, but I don’t think it’s fully explained and might also be a plot device to get the two characters together, but that’s none of my business because it worked). Her escape does not go well – she ends up in the dungeons, then being rescued by the actual rebellion – Dacre, the commander’s son, is the one doing the rescue. And they immediately do not like one another. She’s a traitor, he’s a traitor, they both have attitude problems, he thinks she’s weak, she thinks he’s mean as shit. It’s a good time.

Review

Listen, I’m not going to sit here and say that everything about this book is a masterpiece. I was told our girl would be combat training and we see little to none of that. There aren’t great action scenes – there’s actually only 2 larger ones that I can think of off the top of my head. The beginning, where Dacre and Kai go into the Dungeon to rescue Wren and end up rescuing Nyra as well. And then there’s the scene where a man from the palace tries to kill her and Wren, resulting in Wren and Dacre’s father strangling Nyra. She’s meant to be training for combat to serve Dacre’s revolution, but all the training scenes last 2 sentences and end in smut. This just isn’t a book you come to for the action – you come here for the characters and the smut.

The world of this book is interesting. There are fae, but it took me around half the book to realize that’s what they are. They don’t have the pointed ears or supernatural beauty. They just have magic and an underground kingdom. Which I thought was cool and well done. It was more of a ‘yes, this is what we are’ rather than a full on in your face thing. The magic is interesting, but we don’t know much about it because our main character doesn’t know much about it. We do know that Kai is a shadow daddy and Dacre has the elemental magic of fire. Is all Fae magic elemental? We don’t know, it isn’t really explained. But the kingdom’s subjects are forced to give the king some of their magic. I also liked that Nyra isn’t human – at least I’m assuming she’s not as this moment. She isn’t a lost human who finds herself in the Fae world; she’s actively already a part of it while still having that concept of ‘odd girl out’ finding herself in a place that’s vastly different from what she knows. There are tropes and I love them.

Are the characters fantastic? No. Are they living rent free in my noggin? Absolutely. Dacre pisses me off and Nyra gets on my nerves. There aren’t really in-depth character analysis’ or development. Dacre is still who he is at the beginning and neither of them really feel like a full/real person just yet. But seeing them together just quite simply hits, okay? I love the dynamic of two people who don’t trust and kind of really hate one another also being attracted to one another and slowly falling for one another over time, despite everything in their brains telling them not too. And, folks, is what we have here. We have the same bed trope, the ‘Who Did This To You’, the Best Friend’s Brother, the enemies to lovers, the borderline abusive smut that’s only really hot when there’s either after-care or you’re only reading it in the book. Holly Renee can, indeed, write smut. And that’s what this book is. It’s a fun story full of fantasy with two people who hate one another engaging in fun adult activities. It’s a ‘no thoughts, head empty’ I just want to read about two people who hate each other banging. And I ate that shit up. I then forced a few of my friends to read it so that they could suffer through waiting for the next book right along with me.