This review was originally published in and is reposted with permission from Shelf Awareness.
Bonnie Falls is chronically unable to make her way in life. She left university before completing her English degree, her attempts at becoming a writer have resulted in nothing but a collection of unfinished stories, and she moves between casual work with indifference. About to turn 30, she moves out on her own for the first time, at her parents' request. In a dingy flat cluttered with abandoned possessions of previous tenants, she meets landlady Sylvia Slythe, who shares without details that she once knew Bonnie's mother, and Bonnie herself when she was a young child. Sylvia becomes interested in one of Bonnie's unfinished stories, one where a young woman in a seaside town is hounded by mysterious messages, and Bonnie is inspired to continue it. Although Bonnie says the setting is fictional, Sylvia believes she recognizes it and urges Bonnie to accompany her on a trip there to find out how the story ends.
Alison Moore (The Pre-War House and Other Stories) has crafted a taut, economical work of psychological suspense that often echoes Daphne du Maurier's Rebecca. Interrupting the main narrative with portions of Bonnie's story as well as writings that slowly reveal Sylvia's past and the deeper roots of her interest in Bonnie, Moore builds a slow burn within a brief novel that contemplates the power of stories--both the kind we read and write, and the kind we tell each other about our futures. This is an eerie, tense novel about compulsion and control that will linger with readers for far longer than the time it takes to read. --Kristen Allen-Vogel, information services librarian at Dayton Metro Library
Discover: A feckless young woman becomes subject to the manipulation of her mysterious landlady in a haunting work of psychological suspense.

This review was originally published in and is reposted with permission from Shelf Awareness.
"Marley was dead: to begin with," as Charles Dickens wrote in the opening line of A Christmas Carol, but as a matter of logic there must have been a time in Scrooge's life when he was not. In Marley, Jon Clinch (Belzoni Dreams of Egypt) imagines a hostile partnership, one that makes Scrooge's fortune and forges the chains that bound the first ghost who visited him in the classic story. From the time they meet in school, Marley shows a talent for persuasion and deception while Scrooge's gifts lie with managing the financial books. Their shipping company prospers while they skirt legality, but Scrooge's beloved Belle Fairchild, a member of a family of dedicated abolitionists, will not marry him so long as Scrooge and Marley deal in the slave trade. Even as the date for the trade to be outlawed in England approaches and eventually passes, Marley resists giving up the business, and he and Scrooge enter a shadow war to ruin the other while protecting their own assets.
Clinch's prose, both accessible and old fashioned, delights with sentences such as "The deliveryman has a wooden leg that belongs to him, and a horse and wagon that don't." Readers will be enchanted by the Dickensian atmosphere and style, whether it be a foreboding description of a sordid corner of London or understanding a character in a moment thanks to an aptly chosen name. This novel's humor, warmth and charm demonstrate Clinch's right to build on Dickens's legacy. --Kristen Allen-Vogel, information services librarian at Dayton Metro Library
Discover: Marley offers a clever and atmospheric imagining of the events that might have brought Scrooge to A Christmas Carol.

After having read Ta-Nehisi Coates's nonfiction over the past few years, I was eagerly awaiting his first work of fiction. It follows Hiram Walker, an enslaved orphan with a photographic memory but none at all of his mother. He's had a couple of strange, almost supernatural experiences, but until he can learn to use this ability, he serves as a companion to his half-brother, the master's son and heir, until his death in an accident, and eventually becomes an agent of the Underground Railroad in both the North and the South.

The magical realism in this novel is very faint, for as much as is made of it in many reviews. It's just a method of escape to freedom, important as a metaphor for the power of story, history, and memory, but not something that would necessarily affect the plot all that much if it were removed. This is no Colson Whitehead's The Underground Railroad where the fantasy elements are involved. As you might expect from Coates, its strength is its prose. This is an old story, but it is told powerfully.

Overall: A

When I looked at other reader reviews of this book I saw a lot of people who were surprised to find out that this wasn't a memoir or a book on writing, in spite of the words "selected nonfiction" right there on the cover, so I'm going to start by making it as clear as I possibly can that this is collected nonfiction by Neil Gaiman. Various essays, introductions to other people's collections or reprints, speeches. Some of them were new to me, some of them I've read before, one of the speeches I was present for.

It is of course, a very strong collection. In a way I became a Neil Gaiman fan by reading his nonfiction more than by his fiction, since when I had only read a couple of his novels I became a devoted follower of his blog. Again, much of the material is about other people's work- mostly writers of fantasy or comics- so some pieces may be more appreciable for people who are familiar with their subjects, but on the whole I would say that they can be enjoyed without background and you may discover a new author. If it has one fault, I'd say that it's maybe not ideally suited for the way I typically read, a hundred or so pages of the same book in a day if I have my way, and that's when I'm not on an award committee and am just reading for leisure. As a collection of previously published pieces with no prior relationships with each other, many of which relate to Gaiman's background as a reader as well as a writer, there are stories that appear multiple times in different pieces, so there is some repetition if you read it straight through, and in large pieces. This is an ideal book for browsing, for picking up when you have the time to read a piece or two and putting down again, and for selecting the pieces which most strike your fancy.

Overall: A-

I always say that nobody describes Cat Sebastian books as well as Cat Sebastian, so I'm going to start with her description, "Agatha Christie, but make it gay." And indeed, this is probably the most likely of the several romance/mystery books I've read over the course of the last year or so to tip over the genre line into being a mystery with a strong romantic plot.

Margaret Hoggett, a charwoman in a small country village, is dead through either accident, murder, or possibly a combination of the two (was she drugged by accident in an attempt to murder somebody else?). Her employer is under suspicion for certain dealings around the recently concluded war, so Leo Page, intelligence agent, is sent to investigate her death. There, his path crosses again with Dr. James Sommers, who stitched up a wound for him during the war. Suffering from what then would have been called battle fatigue, Sommers has returned to the peaceful village where he spent holidays during school. He's not prepared to be dealing with violent deaths again, but confronted with the fact that his village is no longer as peaceful as he thought, he's prepared to do what is necessary to help Page put things right.

I am famously not much for cozy mysteries, in the sense that the term is usually used currently. I'm not sure this IS a cozy mystery in the sense the term is usually used currently, as there are multiple deaths and a professional detective. (Most of my issues around cozy mysteries involve sustained series combined with an amateur detective; I can accept dragons, but I have problems with believing that the same donut shop owner has to solve every crime that happens in town.) But it does have a charming cast of country village characters, with plenty of secrets to go around. There's little to no tension around Page and Sommers romance; that's really just a matter of time for them to get together, and particularly Page getting used to the idea that he could have a home and somebody who loves him. It would probably be appealing to many fans of cozy mysteries, provided that they're good with some violence and on page sex.

I enjoyed everybody in this book and I hope that the promise of "Page and Sommers: Book One" leading to more is fulfilled.

Overall: A

Germaine Johnson is one of those never-actually-specified-but-probably-on-the-Autism-spectrum characters. She's a math genius but after having been fired from her job at an insurance agency (she is told her resignation was accepted, but doesn't actually remember resigning during The Incident), the only job that she is able to get, with the help of her cousin, is at the local government's senior citizens' helpline. But it turns out the mayor has some special, secret projects for her, involving some troublemakers at the senior citizens' center who are particularly making things difficult for the owner of the neighboring golf club, who happens to be a Sudoku champion whom Germaine has long admired. As events unfold, Germaine comes to realize that things may not be as she first thought.

This was a fun, sometimes funny, sometimes awkward book. At times I wasn't sure the reader was even meant to like Germaine, but I found myself wondering if I pitied her more than I was meant to; she's been taught a specific metric for success towards which she's striving, and she doesn't know what she's supposed to be going for outside of that. She also never really seems aware of exactly how terribly she was treated at her previous job; it goes way beyond the promotion for which she was passed over, leading to The Incident. For these reasons, it feels a bit rough around the edges. It is a debut, and it was generally enjoyable, so I will be interested in seeing what Collette writes next.

Overall: B

This review is based on an ARC received from the publisher.

Let's get straight to the first question everybody is going to ask: Mary Emmons, aka Eugenie Beauharnais, did have two children with Aaron Burr- the DNA is in on that one. The family story is that they married at some point after Theodosia (whose first husband first brought the then-enslaved Mary/Eugenie to mainland America) died, but there doesn't seem to be any documentation to back that up apart from said family story. (Scott seems to take the marriage as much more definite than I can find other assertions of. Is the fact that the children used his last name supposed to be a sign that he acknowledged them at some point? Mary was still enslaved by his family when those children were born; she used a last name distinct from her enslavers', but does that mean that the children definitely would have used her last name unless Burr married her?) As the afterward tells it, all else that is known about Mary is that she was probably born in Calcutta, that she came to the future United States by way of Haiti, and that by the 1790s she was living as a free woman in Philadelphia. (Her children are much more present in the historical record, the daughter having been part of an unsuccessful attempt at free African American emigration to Haiti after which she returned to the U.S., the son a prominent abolitionist.)

As a result of the thin historical record on Mary herself, most of this story as it regards her life is invention. Alas, what is invented is quite thin. I never felt like I had a sense of Mary as a person and not just a window into a time and a place and a condition of slavery. She exists in this book to convey a narrative, and that narrative is not new. And familiar though it is, it's disturbing, and not in a way that feels intentional. Although Mary does seem to enjoy Burr's company when they first meet, their sexual association begins with rape, and it's never entirely clear if the reader is meant to understand if she comes to love him, or if she decides to submit pseudo-willingly to being his mistress in hopes that it will help her win freedom for herself and her children, or if she merely submits for as long as she has to. In the prologue, looking back from decades later, she claims that he loved her (though whether or not she loved him goes unremarked on), but one sees precious little evidence of that in the main narrative of the book.

Given the first person narration, there's no reason why the heroine should remain such a cipher, or that it shouldn't take a stronger stance on the relationship that forms the heart of the book.

Overall: C

This review was originally published in and has been reposted with permission from Shelf Awareness.
A creature who named himself Johann steals and kills on the streets of a dark, northern city called Elendhaven. Johann can't be killed and has decided there's only one proper name for what he is: "monster." He stalks fragile-looking, isolated Florian, evaluating him as a victim, until he realizes the young man is a sorcerer. When Johann proposes a partnership that will grow into something at once disturbing and tender, they begin a campaign of revenge that could bring the city down around them.
In The Monster of Elendhaven, debut author Jennifer Giesbrecht has created a beautifully nightmarish blend of horror, dark fantasy and cruel romance. While Johann and Florian carry out their plan for vengeance and evade traveling hunters of sorcerers, readers slowly learn the full history of what drives Florian in his deep bond with Johann. The result is reminiscent of what Frankenstein might have been if the eponymous doctor had more sympathy for his creature and much less for the rest of the world. Elendhaven would be the sort of place a reader might expect Frankenstein's creation to take refuge--a dark, bleak city at the end of the world. Giesbrecht vividly depicts the setting in strong, sometimes lurid prose, all within a story that can be read in one evening.
This brief work transports readers into a haunting, gothic dreamworld in a fairy tale of the darkest sort, which one would never share with children. --Kristen Allen-Vogel, information services librarian at Dayton Metro Library
Discover: An original gothic tale of dependence and revenge for two different kinds of monsters.

This review is based on an advance copy received from the publisher.

The setting is late 17th century Iceland. Rosa, until recently a spinster, has agreed to marry a rich man from a remote village in order to support her mother after her father's death. She finds her husband distant and domineering,  in particular forbidding her to enter the locked room in his loft or to associate with the other women of the village. From what contact she does have with them, she comes to realize that all may not be as it seems regarding the death of his first wife.

My immediate thought when I picked up this book was "So, it's Rebecca in Iceland." And essentially it is, although I found Rosa to be a more compelling character than the unnamed narrator of Rebecca. (In general, I find I like other Rebecca-esque gothic novels better than their predecessor, due to narrators that are typically stronger personalities.) The setting helps to develop the sense of isolation and menace, and the conflict between Christianity and Paganism adds another layer of tension between Rosa and the world to which she is asked to conform herself.

A rich, historical tale with an interesting setting for fans of gothic suspense.

Oveall: A-