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brennanbookblog · 2 years
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Our Crooked Hearts
By Melissa Albert
Melissa Albert terrifies and inspires me in equal measure.
Her books have an otherworldly quality that gives you the sense that as you read them you are changing - or the world around you is changing, or perhaps, being revealed for what it truly is - and if you don’t stop, things will never be the same. Our Crooked Hearts is no exception.
I read Our Crooked Hearts late into the night while peering over my pages to make sure nothing was lurking in the shadows. Unspooling in dual narratives of a mother and daughter during their tumultuous teenage years as they discover themselves and their magic, Albert renders a world of misshapen motherhood, flailing youth, forging friendships, and just-this-side of possible witchcraft.
But if we’ve learned anything from The Hazel Wood, it’s that nothing is free. What I love most about Albert’s work is that there is nothing gratuitous or excessive. She manages to conjure fear, terror, sadness and rage - and it all serves a purpose. The characters are all flawed and flailing but not feckless; they strive to protect, to learn, to rectify, to save. This is evident in the conclusion of the book, which I won’t spoil for you here, but what I will share is wholly satisfying and positively positive. Yes, amidst a book that is terror incarnate, there is, dare I say, somehow, hope.
What is also remarkable about Albert is her ability to wield the written word. She is not only writing, she is crafting a new language. Her prose is like if Neil Gaiman and Maggie Stiefvater had a baby and it were raised by Patti Smith. She crashes words together and creates the most unlikely metaphors that make so much sense it hurts. She writes with the angst of a teenager but the wisdom of a beat poet and the heart of a goddess who still loves humanity. Her text is so palpable that in reading it, I feel like I am participating in a secret ritual that may in fact conjure actual magic. Her writing is the stuff of future lore, of fractured spells, of midnight swims in moon-bleeding waters. She is inventing a story and a form - and it’s the perfect love letter scrawled in black magic for the raging teen trapped inside of us all.
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brennanbookblog · 2 years
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Kelcie Murphy and the Academy for the Unbreakable Arts
by Erika Lewis
What if Slytherin had claimed Harry Potter? This is the world of Kelcie Murphy and the Academy for the Unbreakable Arts. What starts as a typically human tale of a museum field trip with a thick-skinned Bostonian foster child transmogrifies into a magical and possibly sinister trial-of-skill in the Celtic realm of fae and fury.
Kelcie Murphy remembers nothing of her childhood. Shuffled between foster homes in the bitter northeast, her only connection to her life before is the curious pendant strung around her neck.  When she is carted away by authorities during a school field trip, she discovers an artifact that is not on display - and for good reason. It’s possible that while wrestling with freezing fae and her understanding of reality in the bowels of the museum, she may have been tricked into incanting a spell that opens a kind of eye of Sauron situation and names her as an heir to a frightening, perhaps world-annihilating power.
Thus she is transported to the Otherworld. Which it turns out, is her true home. On the hunt for her parents, she discovers that she may actually have some powers of her own. But to stay in this world, she first has to get into the Academy of Unbreakable Arts.
With school dens, a whole new magical system and a world steeped in Celtic lore, this is the type of book we need right now: fun, transporting and fantastic.
Run, don’t walk, to get this delightful new magical middle grade debut which will appeal to YA fans and a crossover audience as well! I can’t wait for book 2!
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brennanbookblog · 3 years
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The Raven Cycle 
(The Raven Boys, The Dream Thieves, Blue Lily, Lily Blue, The Raven King & Opal)
By Maggie Stiefvater
I was reluctant to read a book about a group of boys, but the dream elements in The Raven Cycle echoed some of the themes in my own book so I decided it would be valuable research. I tend to eschew male protagonists because I surfeited on a diet of them growing up when I longed to read about intelligent, daring, creative women.
But The Raven Cycle not only boasts a menagerie of multidimensional nuanced male characters, but also fierce, dynamic, wild females as well. I am so glad that Maggie Stiefvater lured me in with her brilliant premise, lyrical prose and unexpected landscape so that I could appreciate this gorgeous gritty tapestry of teen male kinship (and dare I say the sensuality of cars?) through not just a trilogy, but a quartet of books - plus a bonus short story. Oh, and for all of us that curse the end of a good series, guess what? There is a spin-off called The Dreamer Trilogy which I am enjoying now narrated by the brilliantly pliant Will Patten.
Blue Sergeant chronicles the names of the dead as the pass on the ley line each year. A seemingly ungifted seer in a house of talented female clairvoyants, Blue never seems to “see” anything until she sees the ghost of Gansey. This encounter catapults Blue into an adventure with a group of misfit prep school boys in search of a legend king.
With the kind of grand reveals that make a reader do a double take, Stiefvater builds a wholly unique world full of fantastical nightmares and earnest possibility that exists just a stumble away from our own.
Written with the intelligence of an adult but the poetry and wisdom that we lose as we age, this southern gothic tarot phantasm has the imagination of Erin Morgenstern and the dark possible magic of Melissa Albert’s The Hazel Wood.
So, let’s hear it for the boys, and for an author who has rendered such vivid multidimensional heroes - and heroines - to add to the canon of YA literature.
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brennanbookblog · 4 years
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The Hazel Wood & The Night Country

By Melissa Albert
The Hazel Wood and its sequel, The Night Country, are stories I almost wish I could experience again for the first time. An exploration of the fairytale underworld, the tales follow Alice, a beleaguered, haunted teenager, as she lives a piece-meal life, constantly moving cross-country with her mom. The duo flees makeshift homes regularly, with bad luck always nipping at their heels.
 
Though Alice and her mom live modestly, Alice’s grandmother is world-renowned, the author of a sublimely notorious and equally hard-to-find compendium of fairy tales. After receiving word that the estranged grandmother has died, mother and daughter finally settle in NYC, sighing with relief that their bad luck is behind them. Finally, Alice has a chance at a normal life. 

But then, Alice’s mom goes missing and all clues point to the grandmother’s mansion, and beyond - to the morbid world of her concocted fairytales, tales that are starting to materialize on the streets of NY. 

The Hazel Wood is a gritty Brothers’ Grimm bumming a cigarette, a jaded teenager stuck on the dark side of a NYC daydream, a haunted subway ride. It’s the stuff of nightmares but more gruesome and modern than Grimm. Imbued with young adult emo, it is also surprisingly poetic - much like our teenage years. 
The Night Country follows in its footsteps, imagining a world that would make Mary Shelly shiver. 
Albert’s world is a fanatical escape for these dark times if you want to get away and indulge simultaneously.
 And for those hungry for more of Albert’s macabre marvels, the actual book of grandmother’s fairytales is slated to be released this winter. A book within a book. How apropos for a tale like this… Just take care you can separate story from reality. Fairytales are, after all, only make believe… aren’t they?
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brennanbookblog · 4 years
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The Starless Sea
by Erin Morgenstern
Fans of The Night Circus rejoice! Imagineer Erin Morgenstern has released her second magical journey into the world of storytelling. The Starless Sea is a book lover’s dream, a storyteller’s story and a reader’s safe harbor. It is a riddle wrapped in an enigma encased in a mystery shrouded in layers and layers of well-crafted narrative.
Morgenstern is such a skilled storyteller that she is of the ilk of wordsmiths I actually resent for not having more published books. Upon reading her literary theatrics, though, it’s easy to see why she doesn’t. These meticulously crafted tales must take years of careful attention and thoughtful planning. This book isn’t one story. It is a whole library. A body of work disguised as a single book.
At its heart, The Starless Sea is a story about a boy who finds a door etched into a wall as a child and wrought with uncertainty, does not reach to open its chalked knob. He spends his life lamenting his tentativeness, always feeling like his story is missing a piece. That is, until he discovers a book. A book with a story in it. A story about a boy, wrought with uncertainty, who does not turn a doorknob. But that is just one facet in this tapestry of a tale.
This is also a story about a pirate sentenced to death and the maiden who rescues him. It’s a story about Fate and Time, about owl kings and forgotten princesses. It’s a story about an orphan boy and a girl who is also a bunny who consummate a relationship outside time. It’s about a secret society and an underground library. It’s a story about the sun and the moon, about broken-hearted knights, a burned dollhouse, about bees and swords and keys, oh, my.
Zachary Ezra Rawlins in the son of a fortune teller. Aforementioned boy at a magical door, he is now a literary graduate student studying media and gaming at a Vermont college. At the school library, he happens upon an unmarked book with no author called Sweet Sorrows. As he reads, he blinks incomprehensibly at its pages as they recount not only the story of a pirate telling a story, but a story that happens to recount his past.
Unseated by this mystery, he starts to investigate the origins of the curious book and discovers that it was part of a much larger donation by an untraceable foundation. He also deciphers a series of symbols from the book: a bee, a sword and a key that lead him down a rabbit hole to a NYC literary ball, happening, as luck would have it, just a few days from now.
So, Zachary Ezra Rawlins, son of the fortune teller, traipses off in the snow, a strapping young man in a suit, on nothing but a hunch.
At the literary ball, a bibliophile costume party cum Sleep No More theatrical experience, Zachary Ezra Rawlins dances with Max, King - or Queen - of the Wild Things. In his quest to find a necklace with a bee, sword and key, he finds himself back in the closet, but this time, with a whiskey handsome storyteller, who whispers the story of Fate and Time, a story that unbeknownst to him, Zachary Ezra Rawlins, is already a part.
Erin Morgenstern’s book is heavily layered and each story subtly shifts the others, expertly interweaving in an intricate tapestry of a tale. Like a document with a dozen carbon copies - each copy bears the ghosted impression of the original though a different color entirely. It is a story about stories, but it’s simultaneously a thesis on how we tell them.
A door to the fantastical and dangerous is waiting behind this cover. Are you daring enough to open it?
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brennanbookblog · 5 years
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The Farm 
by Joanne Ramos
At one day past my due date, I am currently in either the best or the worst position to review Joanne Ramos’ thought-provoking page-turner The Farm.
At the moment, the slightly-too-plausible premise of farming out pregnancies via pricey surrogacy does not seem so bad. Having endured morning sickness occurring all times of day that does not cease after 1st trimester, exhaustion tantamount to being hit repeatedly by a bus, never-ending constipation and pains in places I didn’t know existed, might I hire someone to trade places? Tell me where to VENMO.
And yet, in a way, this isn’t even what The Farm is about. The bookstore employee suggested it was like The Handmaid’s Tale, perhaps in an effort to warn my obviously gestating self that it might not be the best time to read it. In fact, it is only really like The Handmaid’s Tale in that there are pregnant women at its center.
It’s also not about the price of motherhood, the high-achieving women who are penalized at work for having children, nor about the fact that the US is the only developed country without paid maternity leave. These topics could have doubled the size of the book - and I would have gladly read more. 
What The Farm is about is far more personal and insidious - a sort of collective history and culpability woven into the fabric of the American flag - Betsy Ross stitching in her trinity kitchen all the while going blind.
The story follows Jane, a young Fiipina mother, trying to survive in NY. Her cousin presents her with an opportunity: interview at Golden Oaks, a resort-style surrogate facility, where the wealthiest clients pay top dollar to outsource their pregnancies. The facility provides comprehensive nutrition, weekly prenatal massages, yoga, wellness tracking and ...alpacas. There she meets Reagan and Lisa, two caucasian “hosts,” who pull her into their orbit. With the payouts for healthy babies so huge, each “host” has her own reasons for signing up for 10 (yes, look up how long pregnancy actually is) months of incarceration, so to speak.
In addition to a brilliantly-paced speculative fiction thriller, what starts to unfold is a social commentary about opportunity, access, immigration, and skin tone.  And by the end of the novel, as Jane marvels at her own brave smart daughter, I start to wonder about the American Dream - who has been duped and who is benefitting from doing the duping. We expect it to pay its dividends in one lifetime. Come “your huddled masses yearning to breathe free” not well,...three generations down the road. And when my own great-grandmother emigrated, gnawed family photo in hand, I wonder if she ever thought about three - and any day now, four - generations down the line, and where her sea voyage would lead.
And perhaps it’s not that the American Dream is dead - perhaps we just always thought it was free. What if it’s always been pricey? And the questions are: how much are you willing to sell? And how much are you willing to pay? 
Let the bidding begin.
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brennanbookblog · 5 years
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The Warehouse 
by Rob Hart
Blake Crouch told me to read this book.
Ok, not personally, but still. 
Initially, I read the first chapter, shrugged and put it down, slightly discouraged by the glossy magazine-sheen styled tone.
Then I received a BookBub email with Blake Crouch’s recommendation to read The Warehouse.
Having just acknowledged in my last B3 post that I might in fact jump off a bridge if the man suggested, I figured it was reasonable to read his book recommendation instead.
Naturally, I finished The Warehouse within a couple days because as the narrators and perspectives switched so did the tone of the book, making it as palatable as a CloudBurger at LivePlay. But I’m getting ahead of myself.
Enter a world where The Cloud is king. Naturally, said world has gone to pot: climate change makes temperatures unendurable, unemployment is ubiquitous, water unpotable, meat scarce, and prospects dire for small business.  But at The Cloud, with fully stocked shelves of shiny goods, air-conditioned dorm rooms, built-in healthcare and tram cars, not to mention LivePlay entertainment and readily available Cloud Burgers, life is good. Well, not necessarily good, but tolerable. Well, not necessarily tolerable, but air-conditioned. 
So what if the shifts are 12 hours long, or there’s a $6 bank transfer charge, or you get docked ratings for not volunteering for extra work time? And so what if the bathrooms are constantly out of order, or the cinderblock rooms are the size of closets or your every move is tracked with a wristband?
The Warehouse is like if The Circle were written about Amazon and Apple combined featuring Steve Jobs and Lisbeth Salander set to an employee training video.
But don’t you enjoy having everything delivered at the click of a button? And for a such a reasonable cost? Have you ever wondered after you click “buy now” who is paying for the deficit? 
*B3 received an ARC from Netgalley in exchange for an honest review.
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brennanbookblog · 5 years
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Recursion 
by Blake Crouch
Could Blake Crouch please write more books so I can start a novel and then read until the wee hours of the morning every single night of my life?
For some reason, I keep on thinking, If Blake Crouch told me to jump off a bridge, I just might. Though it’d have nothing to do with peer pressure. I think I’d step off that bridge just because I wouldn’t be surprised if his concept of time, space and reality so far transcends mine that that small time continuum disturbance would save the world in some way. 
Crouch is simply a master sci-fi storyteller. Do you love slightly alternative worlds to ours? Check. Love near-plausible catastrophic worldwide scenarios? Check. Love books that blow your mind with their theories? Check.
Recursion starts with a world that is suffering from False Memory Syndrome, a seemingly isolated disease in which people experience “false memories” of a life they never lived while simultaneously living the life they do. This naturally causes many a psychotic break. Because what if you remembered a world where you had a spouse and child and rewarding job and suddenly find yourself single, childless and bankrupt?  
I almost don’t know how to write about Recursion because there comes a time while reading Crouch’s books where my meager astrophysical understanding of the world collides with reality to create a fissure through which I can peek into a distinct possibility that he is not the storyteller of a fictional tale, but rather a harbinger of a real impending doom.
I read Dark Matter in one sitting. I opened it at bedtime. I turned the last page before I fell asleep.  Recursion I savored over the course of a 24-hour period, though from self-control or fear for our precarious world, I cannot say which.
In some way, Blake Crouch writes the stuff of nightmares: science, power, playing God. The problem is: sometimes it’s hard to tell whether or not we’re awake.
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brennanbookblog · 5 years
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The Whisper Network
by Chandler Baker
Once I had turned the final page of The Whisper Network, I revisited how the book was categorized. How was this page-turning whodunnit and what was actually done catalogued? Was this a thriller? A piece of literary fiction? A crime novel? Adult fiction? What I found it under was “Women’s Fiction.” 
Hm.  Then I wondered, is there a “Men’s Fiction” section?
When I started reading the book, I didn’t know what I was getting into, ostensibly a high-functioning office politics drama. But The Whisper Network is delightfully decadent and also so literary that I found myself highlighting passages because they rang so true. This has become more of a rarity in my experience of crime-type dramas and so-called “women’s fiction.” Books of this ilk tend to sacrifice savvy for salaciousness and three-dimensional characters for two-sided arguments. This book does neither. It creates a complex tapestry of the inner workings of a corporation, particularly the legal department - an apt department indeed, considering sexual harassment becomes the topic of debate. Where better to hash it out than amongst the best legal council possible? 
And yet, this plot makes the arguments regarding sexual harassment and power in the workplace that much more nuanced. Because if a list were to surface - say, a list of individuals to avoid in your career - would you take it an a gift and sidestep? Or would you see it as an offense against said individuals’ possibly very reputable characters? 
And I simply could not put it down. I couldn’t wait to see what happened to our varied heroines as they navigated the muddy waters of their careers. Because in those moments, they were us - waffling, debating, discerning, hashing, taking action, failing, and regretting, - plotting, researching, networking, investigating, reflecting, discovering, raging and triumphing. And so the craftiest bit of the novel is this - a device I cannot recall having seen - or, read. The book shifts regularly to first person plural. 
What? the Literary geek in you exclaims. 
Yes, “we” are included for whole chapters. And with each “we” it’s possible I’ve been manipulated into reading on and on, or it’s possible "we” includes me in the war so I don’t feel so alone in my own. But in the end, we don’t care one way or another, because just like in life, we don’t feel like there’s anywhere to go but forward.
*B3 received an ARC from Netgalley in exchange for an honest review.
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brennanbookblog · 5 years
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Nothing to See Here
by Kevin Wilson
Kevin Wilson has done it again. You may remember Kevin Wilson from his darkly comedic Royal Tennenbaums-eque take on the hapless performance art family in The Family Fang. Or perhaps from his alternatively optimistic commune of utopian ideals in A Perfect Little World. 
While similar in tenor, imbued with Wilson’s quixotic hopefulness and unexpected chaos, Nothing to See Here is wholly unique in premise and scope.   
Lillian, a smart girl from the wrong side of the tracks, fights her way into a privileged prep school where she and her rich roommate, Madison, bond during their first year. Then an infuriating circumstance (which I won’t spoil here) leads to a split. Fast-forward ten years later when Madison, now married to a senator, summons Lillian for an urgent, yet mysterious, job opportunity.  Lillian, still stuck in a dead-end life, jumps at the chance and quickly finds herself dousing the flames of the senator’s twin offspring. 
Literally. 
Because they self-immolate when they get agitated. 
Wilson writes in such a way that I simultaneously want to ask him to be my friend and tell him to get out of my head. His commentary sometimes made me laugh out loud in doctors’ office waiting rooms. He describes a spoiled little boy removing toys from a chest: “like clowns from a VW bug, out came so many stuffed animals that I felt like I’d dropped acid.”  And on feeling out of place: “I felt like some mermaid who had suddenly grown legs and was now living among the humans.” He expertly describes “bread that cracked open like a geode” that makes me crave a loaf immediately.  And then he subversively sneaks in plenty of touching real-life wisdom about things like life, parenthood and meditation: “And I had never thought about it this way, had always assumed that whatever was inside me that made me toxic could not be diluted, but each subsequent breath made me a little more calm.”
Wilson’s is the type of voice we need more of in the world: unfailingly witty, unexpectedly original and always, and perhaps most importantly, relentlessly hopeful, even when it seems like the world is burning down around us. 
*Netgalley provided B3 with an ARC in exchange for an honest review.
Release Date: November 5, 2019
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brennanbookblog · 5 years
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All the Impossible Things
by Lindsay Lackey
“There is nothing like clean middle-grade fiction,” my Aunt recently told me. 
I have long eschewed the genre finding it overly trite, predictable, and patronizing. Then I received the ARC for All the Impossible Things in the mail and with my Aunt’s wisdom ringing in my ears, I started reading.
Finally, a middle-grade story that is sweet without being saccharine and heartwarming without being cloying. The characters are nuanced and conflicted, their stories concurrently fantastical and realistic without feeling contrived or heavy-handed. 
With an addict mother in jail, Red, our tween protagonist, counts down the days until her Mom’s release and their reunion. In the meantime, she is unceremoniously shuttled between foster homes, leaving unidentifiable destruction in her wake, because, well, her emotional life is connected to the wind.
Could her latest home at the curiously fascinating Groovy Petting Zoo tame her wuthering ways? Or is she destined to destroy everything in her path just like her mother? 
This book offers parents and children a plethora of opportunities to discuss what happens when we keep all of our turmoil bottled up inside. Because if Red’s wind were a ubiquitous phenomenon among young people, I suspect that our disconnected culture would find itself with much stormier weather...
With notes of The Great Gilly Hopkins and All the Bright Places, an added touch of magic makes this lovely little novel a worthy addition to the cannon of children’s delightful and discussion-worthy reads.  
*B3 received an ARC in exchange for an honest review. 
**All the Impossible Things will be released September 3, 2019. 
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brennanbookblog · 5 years
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Vox 
by Christina Dalcher
Vox made me angry. I tore through it in 48 hours and felt my rage rise by the page. But oh, the satisfaction in reading a book so infuriating. It stoked all of my justified feminist rage. 
Imagine a world like ours where puritanical values prevail,  - wait, a little too close to home for your taste? Well, in this world, females are relegated to a word count of 100 or less a day. The words are tallied by a nifty and strategically marketable (Look, Mom, it comes in purple!) wristband which electrically zaps the woman at increasing volts with each additional infraction.  And it starts in childhood, so little girls no longer learn to read and write. Naturally, work outside the home is impossible, as is any reading, writing, access to language and computers, and well, you’d be astounded by just how much of our lives incorporates words. It’s a little Handmaid’s Tale meets All Rights Reserved.
Our protagonist, Jean, is not only a mother of boys and a girl, but a highly-regarded doctor and expert in aphasia. Restless and stuck at home, when an aphasia-related tragedy rattles the government, who but our doctor can save the day? Add in a forbidden romance, and really, Vox is a veritable politically-charged speculative page-turner.
My one complaint: The book ended too soon; I could have read another 100 pages - or I could, at least, until the government fits me with a wristband.
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brennanbookblog · 5 years
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The Harry Potter Series 
by J.K. Rowling
I have never posted about the seven-book magical phenomenon because I suppose I assumed that implicit in being a reader is having read Harry Potter and the (insert item here), perhaps even multiple times.   
I just spent the last month rereading the series, finishing, all too appropriately, on July 31st, the birthday of our reluctant hero.  Considering Rowling started writing them in 1990, with The Sorcerer’s Stone published in 1997 and the final installment, The Deathly Hallows, published in 2007, they hold up incredibly well over the past, oh, 20 years.  I read each book as it was released originally, have seen the films dozens of times, and still, rereading them, I was fully immersed in Rowling’s unparalleled world-building, character-crafting and plot twists. 
These books are simply a joy to read. 
And don’t be fooled if you are one of the hold-out adults from the series. The prose has a lot of integrity and is peppered with sage advice without being dogmatic.
And for those of you out there who have only seen the films, bibliophiles may always say this, but the books are still better. As well-cast and excellently-imagined as the films are, they cannot compare with the specificity and magic of the books. There are, indeed, whole plot lines and characters left out of the films - bits of information, I, too, forgot from my initial reads. 
So, if you want a highly satisfying and swift read, incant, “Accio The Sorcerer’s Stone!” After all, books are the closest to magic muggles like us can hope for.
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brennanbookblog · 5 years
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Dry 
by Neal Shusterman & Jarod Shusterman
Drop everything right now and get this book and a liter of Smart Water.
It is not surprising that Dry is an unblinking-eyes-glued to the page-terror-filled car-crash that you can’t look away from type of read. It does, after all, have Neal Shusterman at its helm. Co-written with his son, Jarrod Shusterman, I suppose is proof that genius may in fact be genetic.
You may remember Shusterman from earlier entries about the incredible and terrifyingly possible world of The Unwind Dystology. If you were a fan of that, you will surely be a fan of this. A little Michael Grant’s Gone Series paired with Emmy Laybourne’s Monument 14 world but wholly Shusterman in eloquence and verisimilitude to our world today.
Dry opens with a sputtering faucet, as the Morrow family tries to fill Kingston’s water bowl. The tap is dry. So begins the “Tap-Out,” a water crisis for all of Southern California. Seemingly not an unsurmountable event- well if it weren’t for all of SoCal becoming a dust bowl in recent years and the Frivolous Water Act draining all swimming pools, fountains and the like.  Because people can survive for a time without transportation, electricity and adults - but every body needs water.
So embarks the tale of three misfits: the stalwart Alyssa, her younger brother Garrett and the survivalist creepy kid next door, Kelton. Three shortly turns into four and then five once a gifted street urchin and preppy spoiled business kid join the mix. This motley collection of characters proves that even the unlikeliest alliances can form during a catastrophe. 
Shifting in narration amongst our rogue troupe while alternately periscoping outside into the unraveling martial law mob landscape compounds the growing tension in the narrative. We learn the sum of all the stories whereas each character only sees from one perspective, and in this case, maybe ignorance is bliss. 
I almost started to reread this book as soon as I turned the final page. It was that good. It made me simultaneously want to stock up on perishables and take shorter showers. But this is the type of book-satisfying hydration that is not just skin deep. It is worthy of book-group discussions about mob mentality, about what lengths people will go to in order to survive, about conservation and climate change. But then, this at the core of all Shusterman novels: a serious question about humanity disguised as a YA page-turner.
And doesn’t that make you a little bit thirsty?
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brennanbookblog · 5 years
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How to Walk Away & Things You Save in a Fire 
by Katherine Center
I have long believed that you have to be in the mood to read a certain type of book. Like with any relationship, the timing must be right, otherwise, you won’t be open to the writing voice/style/ content. Hot tea doesn’t quench every thirst and sushi doesn’t sate every palate. It’s possible Katherine Center’s books are the exception to that rule.
In content, the ironically and aptly titled How to Walk Away and Things to Save in a Fire, are vastly different. How to Walk Away follows a lovelorn protagonist as she suffers quite immediately from a tragic accident throughout her complicated recovery; Things to Save in a Fire follows a stoic firefighter as she navigates a new bro-filled New England landscape.
In style, Center manages to create reading experiences that are simple without being simplistic and heart-warming without being heart-cloying. In short, they are satisfying reads - well crafted with personal triumph at the center, padded with bits of romance, conflict and existential crisis. The books are well-written, practically paced, bittersweet and fluid and with enough complication to keep the pages turning. And what’s particularly gratifying about these books is that the happy endings are not necessarily what you’d expect.
Things You Save in a Fire will be released August 2019, but you can grab a copy of How to Walk Away now. In fact, I just saw it on sale in Barnes & Noble.
It’s refreshing to know that there are books out there that are enjoyable no matter what the season. Like iced tea - a little sweet, a little tart, but extremely satisfying whenever you are thirsty for something tasty. 
*B3 would like to thank St. Martin’s Press for the ARCs!
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brennanbookblog · 6 years
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The Dream Daughter
by Diane Chamberlain
I have been trying to pin down exactly what is so unique about this genre-crossing piece. As a time travel story, it bleeds from sci-fi into a domestic tale into a historical reexamination. It is a reinvented Time Traveler’s Wife with a mother/ daughter relationship at its center, steeped in the conflicted history of Vietnam.  I read it over the course of a few afternoons, but now, weeks later,  I think I’ve finally teased out what is so insightful and perspective-altering about The Dream Daughter:
It begins in the past.
So many time travel stories begin in the present and the characters revisit the past or leap to the future. In this, our protagonist’s present is the past and as a result, we as readers are immersed in an entirely different storytelling perspective.
This is one for which the cover doesn’t feel quite right for some reason, so don’t judge this book by its cover.  It’s deeper, more nuanced and more timeless than the image suggests.
Diane Chamberlain plots twists and reveals across the span of half a century. Surprising, unexpected, and thoroughly enjoyable, The Dream Daughter will appeal to light historical fiction and light sci-fi fans alike.
*B3 would like to thank @stmartinspress for the ARC!
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brennanbookblog · 6 years
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The Good Demon 
by Jimmy Cajoleas
This book is the perfect treat for the fall. Jimmy Cajoleas has created a delightfully dark YA unlike anything I’ve read. The Good Demon delves down the twisty terrain of southern dark magic in the bible belt from the perspective of a young possessed - or, formerly possessed teen.
Clare’s demon was exorcised. And Clare wants “Her” back.
So ensues Clare’s twisty macabre quest to reclaim her inner demon. Cajoleas excels at rendering a thoroughly creepy, gruesome backdrop for his tale while also honestly depicting Clare’s disturbing reality. The piece is a breeze to read, and so easy, in fact, it would be simple to overlook the depth of its message.
This deceptively light YA book may house a fable a la The Ocean at the End of the Lane.  So not be fooled by its dark magic. It may just be your own inner demons trying to trick you.
*B3 would like to thank the publishers for the ARC!
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