Reviews and Comments

Human rights lawyer Eve J. Chung draws inspiration from her family’s history to tell the story of Hai, one of the eponymous Daughters of Shandong. Hai is one of four sisters born to the wealthy Ang family. Although the family is privileged, Hai’s life—and the lives of her mother and sisters—is a miserable one of hard work and regular humiliation at the hands of their grandmother. Things get even worse when the Chinese Civil War rips through the country and the Angs abandon Hai, her mother, and her other sisters to keep an eye on the family home until “things blow over.” This novel is difficult to read as the female Angs face violence, hunger, illness, bureaucracy, and relentless sexism...

Read the rest of my review at A Bookish Type. I received a free copy of this book from the publisher via NetGalley, for review consideration.

There are very clear rules about being an assassin and Eveen the Eviscerator (it was one time, she says) follows them very carefully. After all, being an assassin is the only reason that she’s alive…well, not actually alive. She’s undead. In her first life, she made a promise to serve Aeril, the Matron of Assassins, for one hundred years. In P. Djèlí Clark’s beautifully plotted and highly entertaining novella, The Dead Cat Tail Assassins, we get to witness Eveen’s greatest caper...

Read the rest of my review at A Bookish Type. I received a free copy of this book from the publisher via NetGalley, for review consideration.

Louie arrives at the (fictional) Takoda reservation in Louisiana, unwittingly just in time to help his niece Noemi after she suffers a personal tragedy. He’s been gone for years, only coming back for the annual powwow. It’s been ten years since his last visit as Indian Burial Ground, by Nick Medina, opens. Over the course of the novel, we’ll learn what pushed Louie away—and how Noemi came to be stuck in arrested development...

Read the rest of my review at A Bookish Type. I received a free copy of this book from the publisher via NetGalley, for review consideration.

Necessity is the mother of invention. In Kalyna’s case, invention takes the form of cold reading, intelligence gathering, gumption, and a fair amount of lying. The necessity comes from her family. She is the last in a long line of people gifted with the ability to see the future; Kalyna did not get this gift, though she does her damndest to make her customers believe she did. In Elijah Kinch Spector’s highly entertaining novel, Kalyna the Soothsayer, necessity strikes again when Kalyna’s gift is “requisitioned” by a nearby prince and is spirited away by the prince’s agents in the dead of night...

Read the rest of my review at A Bookish Type.

Lao She lives a quiet life in London, teaching Mandarin at the University of London and making eyes at the daughter of his landlady, until he gets swept up in a series of murders and general skullduggery in The Murder of Mr. Ma, by John Shen Yen Nee and SJ Rozan. Lao She (modeled on the author and scholar of the same name) and his commanding new acquaintance, Judge Dee Ren Jie, take the city by storm...

Read the rest of my review at A Bookish Type. I received a free copy of this book from the publisher via NetGalley, for review consideration.

For roughly 100 years, landowners across Scotland forced their tenants off the land. Although economic and industrial factors can explain the Highland Clearances intellectually, from the perspective of people evicted from their homes and left with nowhere to go, this process was devastating. It’s little wonder that the protagonist of Carys Davies’s emotional novel, Clear, is hired to eject someone from the only home they’ve known by people too cowardly to do it themselves...

Read the rest of my review at A Bookish Type. I received a free copy of this book from the publisher via NetGalley, for review consideration.

Vivvy Bouchet would much rather spend her time gazing at the stars, in the remote Texas desert, with the most powerful telescope she can get her hands on. Unfortunately for Vivvy, an old cop friend believes that she has a psychic ability to find the dead and missing. He keeps calling her in to “consult” on cases like the notorious disappearance of a young Dallas-Fort Worth girl. Julia Haeberlin’s outstanding novel, Night Will Find You, keeps us guessing about Vivvy’s abilities. Is she really a psychic? Or is she just very good at observing and intuiting from details others miss?

Read the rest of my review at A Bookish Type.

A.R. Latif’s historical fantasy, Vultures in the House of Silence, has one of the grimmest opening scenes I’ve ever encountered. Our protagonist, Khurafa, is lying near death in an abandoned stone tower. Vultures pluck at the stumps where his hands used to be. They only stop when Khurafa speaks. To spare himself more pain before he succumbs to his wounds, Khurafa tells the story of how he got where he is...

Read the rest of my review at A Bookish Type. I received a free copy of this book from the publisher via NetGalley, for review consideration.

The Night Flowers, by Sara Herchenroether, tells several stories at the same time. There’s the story of Jean Martinez, a detective who is one of the few who isn’t getting too old for this shit in spite of her husband’s hope that they can retire together. There’s the story of Laura McDonald, a genealogist and librarian in the early stages of recovery from treatment for breast cancer. And there’s the story of an unknown woman and two children whose remains are found in a New Mexico national forest in the early 1980s. The three stories converge with the possibility of not only giving the unknown woman and children their names back but also, maybe, justice after almost fifty years...

Read the rest of my review at A Bookish Type.

In the mad, violent days of the Bolshevik Revolution and Russian Civil War, Samson Kolechko finds himself with two near-impossible tasks. The first task is to stay alive—easier said than done in the Kyiv of 1919. The second task is to turn himself into a police detective as quickly as possible. Andrey Kurkov’s The Silver Bone begins with Samson’s first (and certainly not last) brush with death and gallops headlong into a tale of corruption, terror, and absurd weirdness. Boris Dralyuk does sterling work translating this odd, often funny, wild tale...

Read the rest of my review at A Bookish Type. I received a free copy of this book from the publisher via NetGalley, for review consideration.

Hero Tojosoa is used to doing things she doesn’t really like. Honestly, it’s a wonder she has relationships at all since Hero gives such an impression that she’d rather be doing anything else than spend time with friends and family doing what they enjoy. In Parasol Against the Axe, Helen Oyeyemi’s latest metafictional exploration, Hero arrives in Prague for a hen weekend with an old friend. She shows up for spa visits and drinking, but she’d rather be in her hotel reading a book her son gave her...

Read the rest of my review at A Bookish Type. I received a free copy of this book from the publisher via NetGalley, for review consideration.

In Wolf at the Table, Adam Rapp spins a violent family saga based on elements of his mother’s life. Although this book contains more than its share of murders—including appearances from John Wayne Gacy—I found this book to be a fascinating exploration of how encounters with violence and evil can send people on such wildly different trajectories. Even better, the characters in this book aren’t simple fodder for inspiration. The characters are achingly fallible...

Read the rest of my review at A Bookish Type. I received a free copy of this book from the publisher via NetGalley, for review consideration.

Zhenia is content with her life as Katya Apekina’s emotionally stunning novel, Mother Doll, opens. She has a happy marriage to an actor and, even if her own acting career didn’t pan out, her work as a Russian translator is satisfying. She and her husband gleefully comment on their carefree childlessness only to discover, a few days later, that Zhenia is pregnant. Her pregnancy sparks a roller coaster of revelation about what truly brings happiness and a struggle over what it means to be a mother...

Read the rest of my review at A Bookish Type. I received a free copy of this book from the publisher via NetGalley, for review consideration.