Category: Release Of the Week

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Featured New Release of the Week: On the Corner of Love and Hate by Nina Bocci

This week we are looking at an excellent tale of small town life and life long best friends who have a tumultuous history as adults. This week, we are looking at On the Corner of Love and Hate by Nina Bocci.

I gotta admit, I really, really liked this one. It is no real secret that I am a former political activist who actively left a political project to start this very project. In that former period of my life, I even ran for City Council twice in a town very similar to Hope Lake, and indeed the things pushed by our narrator and her family and friends are actually similar to my own goals for that town back in the day. So I really identified with this book. 🙂 For those who need a political fix but don’t want to pay attention to real world news, this can be your Nicorette. 🙂

But even without such a personal connection, this book is genuinely solid in a Hallmark movie kind of way. Lots of angst, quite a few misunderstandings, and even a nefarious opponent or two. Maybe my only minor quibble is that I like the actual title of a book to show up in the text somewhere, and that is missing here – though the title does indeed describe our narrator’s struggle quite well.

Excellent work, and very much recommended.

And as always, the Amazon/ Goodreads review:
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Featured New Release Of the Week: Things You Save in a Fire by Katherine Center

This week we look at an intriguing book about a female firefighter dealing with fires both physical and metaphorical. This week, we’re looking at Things You Save in a Fire by Katherine Center.

One of my favorite songs growing up and even to this day has been Garth Brooks’ Standing Outside the Fire. For me, it has always been a source of inspiration to overcome any obstacle set before me – no matter what it is, where it comes from, how hard the solution is, or anything else. But what does it have to do with a book about a female firefighter? Don’t firefighters make it a habit of standing inside fires?

Well, in this book our heroine has a problem. You see, we open up with her being awarded her city’s most prestigious award for valor for her efforts in saving a group of kids no one else could. She truly is among the best, if not the best, firefighters in her (not small) town – of any gender. But she’s standing outside the fire in her relationships. She got metaphorically burned pretty damned severely on her 16th birthday by multiple people, and a decade later she hasn’t managed to move on. She’s acted like she has, and she’s become a “model citizen”. To the outside world, she is perfectly awesome. But because she’s been outside the fire and has yet to actually deal with the burns she got on her 16th birthday… her life is about to spiral out of the tight control she’s maintained over it for the last decade.

In the process, she’ll grow. She’ll learn things about everyone involved in the dumpster fire of her 16th birthday, she’ll meet new people and learn about them, and most importantly she’ll learn things about herself.

Overall an excellent tale that uses a reliable and relatable first person narrator well. Very much recommended.

As always, the Goodreads/ Amazon review:
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Featured New Release of the Week: All the Lovely Pieces by J. M. Winchester

This week we are looking at one of the darkest, most disturbing books I’ve read in quite some time. This week, we are looking at All The Lovely Pieces by J.M. Winchester.

At the back of this book, in the author bio, it notes that Winchester is a pseudonym for an author that primarily writes bubblegum pop level romance novels but who wanted to take a shot at psychological suspense. After reading this book, I can tell you first hand that if you went in expecting a bubblegum pop romance, well, those notions would have been dispelled in the first few pages. By the time you get to a rape scene fairly early in, the darkness has already been well established. So it is likely a very good marketing decision indeed to keep those two product lines separate.

That said, this was an absolute mind fuck of a book, particularly in the exceedingly dark and oppressive first half. As I say in the Goodreads review below, I really was questioning my desire to finish it, it was *that* dark. To the level that I’m actually glad I was alone when reading this one, just so no one else was impacted by how dark I became while reading it. It was an amazing effort, it really was. Winchester’s ability to bring the reader’s mind to such darkness was truly superb – and a bit disturbing. By the end, the story does in fact brighten up a bit, if only by a shade or two, and this was probably necessary just to preserve the reader’s sanity and ease them back into the real world outside the book.

This is an excellent book for a dark winter night laying around the fire reading, but probably a bit dark for the beach. (Scratch that, I was reading a fair amount of that first half while actually on a beach – there is no probably there. You really don’t want to take this one to a beach. But fall is coming anyway. 😉 )

And as always, the Goodreads/ Amazon review:
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Featured New Release of The Week: The Black Shepherd by Steven Savile

This week we look at an explosive tale of kidnapping, homelessness, brainwashing, and human trafficking. This week, we’re looking at The Black Shepherd by Steven Savile.

Whereas in the first book in this series The Memory Man (a former Featured New Release here itself), Savile put the Catholic Church firmly in his crosshairs with a tale centered on abuse within the Church, for this outing with Ash and Varg, he picks up a few months after the endgame of that book and puts his crosshairs firmly on a fictitious religion eerily similar to reports of the real-life Church of Scientology. Many of the familiar faces from the first book – at least among those who survive it – show up for this outing, and Savile even fleshes out the Division a bit more here.

Savile does an excellent job of briefly examining the realities of homelessness in Europe (and the Western world for that matter) and having his characters at least consider the impact of what they may well have to do will be on those who can least afford to be further harmed. Yet he never loses focus on the overall mystery involved here, and the action and intrigue are well paced.

The one thing that was a bit off-putting about this book was the rather abrupt ending wherein he blatantly sets a sequel in motion and leaves a bit of a cliffhanger. Perhaps the ending could feel a bit less abrupt with a simple change on the title of the final chapter – instead of calling it just “Chapter 69”, call it an “Epilogue” and the reader would know that this is truly the wrap up / set up the next book chapter, which isn’t always implied just by being the last chapter.

Still, a very strong tale that takes the form of a police procedural / action book to ask much larger questions, much as its predecessor did. Very much recommended, and I’m very much looking forward to the as-yet-unannounced sequel.

As always, the Goodreads/ Amazon review:
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Featured New Release of the Week: The Last Astronaut by David Wellington

This week, we’re looking at another solar system space survival story in the vein of Andy Weir’s The Martian or Lisa A. Nichols’ Vessel. This week, we’re looking at The Last Astronaut by David Wellington.

Story wise, this book takes the idea of “What if Oumuamua wasn’t just a mysterious space rock?” and spins a story from that premise. It is a story neither NASA nor SpaceX will be overly happy with, though the fictional version of SpaceX – in the book, a company named so similarly that I’m almost positive lawyers were involved to make it just different enough – bears the brunt of the book’s criticisms of both agencies. But overall, it is a story that works as both a pyschological horror movie and a creature feature, and Wellington’s ability to combine both of those generally disparate stylings is to be commended.

Structurally, the book bends toward its similarities with The Martian early on during the setup stages of the tale as it uses space jargon pretty heavily. Later it bends to more of its similarities with Vessel and the jargon drops off considerably. The book’s chapters aren’t numbered but instead are named for various events, and just looking at the table of contents gives the reader a rough idea of the arc of the story – though I can assure you, it doesn’t actually give away any of the meat of the story and indeed just the slightest hint of the bones. It uses a mockumentary style blending of both documentary and storytelling similar to the 2005 movie Supervolcano very well and… well, to say more about that would be to drift into spoiler territory.

Overall a solid book, very much recommended, and I’m looking forward to more from Mr. Wellington.

As always, the Goodreads/ Amazon review:
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Featured New Release Of the Week: When We Believed in Mermaids by Barbara O’Neal

This week we are looking at the new book from the author whose 2018 book became only the second Featured New Release of the Week on this blog one year ago this week. This week, we’re looking at When We Believed In Mermaids by Barbara O’Neal.

This book examines trauma and what exactly two sisters will do to cope with what has happened to them, and it opens with one of the better opening lines of any book I’ve ever read. One sister uses the shared traumas to push herself into medical school and a successful career as an ER doc. The other… doesn’t cope so well and eventually takes some pretty extreme measures to escape.

Along with a current timeline story of where the sisters currently are decades after the earliest flashbacks in the story happen (and even 15 years after the one sister’s desperate escape) we get constant flashbacks to different scenes of childhood traumas, and it is these scenes that the waterworks really begin. We see traumas of many forms and brokenness of even more, and O’Neal does a stellar job of putting us in the minds of the girls as they experience them. But she does an equally adroit job of putting us in their heads years later in the current timeline events, when things are going much differently for both sisters.

An excellent book that hit closer to home than some due to me living just hours away from my own brothers and admittedly missing them more than I let on. No, we didn’t have the traumatic childhood these two girls faced – *far* from it – but the sheer distance of physical separation is there, and that alone made this tale particularly relatable.

Truly an outstanding work, though of a much different and much more intense direction than last year’s work – and thus showing signs of just how good of a storyteller O’Neal herself is.

As always, the Goodreds/ Amazon review:
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Featured New Release of the Week: Last Summer by Kerry Lonsdale

This week we look at a book that is explosive until almost literally the very last word. This week, we look at Last Summer by Kerry Lonsdale.

With this book, as she did in her Everything series, Lonsdale yet again explores a memory-related condition while telling a compelling tale of love and, in this case, manipulation. If you haven’t yet read the Everything series, this is an excellent introduction to Lonsdale’s style and ability.

This is yet another recent book that explores a particular concept that is finally becoming more recognized in the mainstream, even though yet again this book doesn’t use the preferred term for the situation, and there seems to be a growing consensus among fiction writers who broach it – carrying on a relationship while disagreeing on this situation pretty well dooms the relationship moreso than any other factor. To reveal the particular situation would be to toe the line of spoilers if not cross it, and that isn’t something I want to do in these posts. So go read the book to discover the situation I am referring to here. 😉

As always, the Amazon/ Goodreads review:
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Featured New Release of The Week: The Ingredients of Us by Jennifer Gold

This week, we’re looking at a tale of the entire life cycle of a marriage which is told in a rare and possibly unique manner. This week, we’re looking at The Ingredients of Us from debut author Jennifer Gold.

Overall, the book is an interesting if slightly depressing look at the entire life cycle of a marriage, told via a present day storyline and multiple flash backs to various events. Stylistically, this book uses dates rather than chapter numbers, always with a reference to a particular event as the anchor. And while it works to an extent, it also leaves the reader a bit confused as the dates jump all over the place with no discernible order and little contextual clues as to what may be coming.

But my one real quibble with the book is that the author doesn’t seem to know of the existence of childfree people or the nascent movement to get such people more recognition and equal rights. Instead, the central conflict comes down to one partner wanting kids and having left a former spouse over the issue vs the other partner being childfree and yet not knowing or recognizing it, and instead agonizing over what they could do differently despite the fact that they really don’t want kids. In this manner, while the book at least addresses an issue not commonly seen in fiction these days, it does so in a bit of blundering and arguably even bigoted fashion where it could have been transcendental had it been handled a bit better.

Truly a very much recommended book, even with the childfree issue. Very much looking forward to more from this author… maybe even a follow on tale with this very couple… 😉

As always, the Goodreads/ Amazon review:
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Featured New Release of The Week: Dear Wife by Kimberly Belle

This week we look at a twisted tale reminiscent of Gone Girl. This week, we look at Dear Wife by Kimberly Belle.

Structurally, this book is told from three perspectives – a woman on the run, a husband she is running from, and a cop investigating the disappearance. And this structure very much works for this tale to keep the reader guessing until the point the author wants to begin to clue the reader in on what is really going on.

The tale itself is a tad too similar to Gone Girl up front, with a missing wife and the husband being targeted by police and media. And honestly, through this section I was looking at a 4 star review based on that. But instead of the mind-warping shift at the middle of the book presented in Gone Girl, instead here we get a more gradual revelation of what is really going on – and that is very much appreciated by at least this reader. And what is actually happening is enough to get the book its 5th star – truly great work. While it does have its issues along the “content warning” level, I don’t really do those and to my mind revealing what they are would go into spoiler territory in this particular tale.

At the end of the day, if you enjoyed Gone Girl or at least didn’t have particularly strong feelings against it, you’re probably going to enjoy this book. If you hated Gone Girl, you’re probably not going to like this one much either. If you’ve never heard of Gone Girl… what rock have you been living under for the last several years? 🙂

This was my first book from this author, and it won’t be my last. Very much recommended.

As always, the Goodreads/ Amazon review:
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Featured New Release of the Week: Ever Faithful by Karen Barnett

This week, we’re looking at a summer romance that is actually a historical fiction that is marketed primarily at the Christian fiction crowd. This week, we’re looking at Ever Faithful by Karen Barnett.

This was a solid summer romance – it takes place over an extended summer mostly at Yellowstone Park in 1933 and includes a happily ever after, satisfying the Romance Writers of America crowd. Which makes it a historical fiction novel – literally, a fiction novel set at some real point in the past. And while its publisher primarily targets the Christian fiction market (and is well known within at least that sphere), the “Christian” parts of this book are not truly preachy at all and are just people living their faith – and living pretty believably for the time period. So the Christian crowd that looks for more preachy books might not like this one as much, but I’m not one of that crowd and I really appreciated the almost understated nature of the Christianity of this book.

I should also note that technically this is book 3 of a series where apparently Barnett takes a different national park over the course of (so far) 6 yrs or so and tells a completely independent story at each. As such, even though you may see “Book 3” marketing around it, it really is a perfectly find stand alone and entry to both this series and this author – as it was for me.

This was also only my second paper book this year, both ARCs from this same publisher, and paper has gotten rather… interesting… for me to read these days. I have to provide a light and manually flip the pages, which is a weird experience after so long with eReaders near exclusively. 😀

Excellent book, I’ll likely wind up going back to the other two in the series at some point. Good summer escapism, and very much recommended.

And as always, the Amazon/ Goodreads review:
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