It’s been an unusually rainy and stormy late summer, but I’m not mad about it because it’s been perfect reading weather.
I knocked out a handful of books this month, including some spooky books that already have me excited for Halloween.
(As a reminder: I always track my reading on Goodreads.)
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Things We Do in the Dark by Jennifer Hillier
Recommend
I surprisingly really enjoyed this thriller to the point where I devoured it in two days. The main twists were fairly predictable, but I did still enjoy the writing and the overall plot — which was more believable than a lot of thrillers I’ve read. I didn’t find the writing to be juvenile or grating, and I was pretty ambivalent to the main characters (which I consider to be a good thing since I hate so many characters in thrillers).
The Thursday Murder Club by Richard Osman
On the fence
I wanted to like this book, I really did. A bunch of retirees in an independent living facility getting together to solve murders over cocktails? What’s not to love? I keep seeing the third installment of this series (“The Bullet That Missed”) on several recommendation lists so I figured I’d start the series, but I had a really hard time staying focused. The murder(s) ended up taking a backseat to several random meandering side stories, and I found it hard to keep track of who was doing what. There were way too many characters introduced throughout the book — many of which never made an appearance and many of which died. Many of the character hypotheses were confusing to stay on track of, and even though I finished this book, I never really got fully into it.
The Hacienda by Isabel Cañas
Recommend
I could not put this one down! With nowhere else to go, Beatriz is quick to marry Rodolfo, the patron of San Isidro Hacienda, following her father’s murder in the wake of Mexico’s War of Independence. However, Beatriz soon finds that the safe and comfortable life of solace she was hoping to find in the Mexican countryside is anything but. Something is wrong with the hacienda, and nobody will help her. This book was very verbose, but not distractingly so. It did fall into a few tropes – I rolled my eyes at the ninth reference of “the darkness uncurling” — but the cliffhangers at the end of each chapter kept me going. I devoured this spooky fall novel in a single day.
The Uproar by Karim Dimechkie
Recommend
“The Uproar” tells the story of Sharif, a man who believes he’s a good person and desperately wants to be seen by others as a good person. Sharif is a white social worker working in Brooklyn, New York, awaiting the birth of his first child with his Black progressive wife Adjoua. When Sharif and Adjoua attempt to temporarily rehome their dog with Emmanuel and his son Junior, two Haitian immigrants Sharif has worked with through his job, all hell breaks loose. This book filled me with anxiety the entire time. I absolutely hated every single character in this book and yet, I loved this book. It’s paced well, and the characters feel real, and it brings up several thought-provoking questions on race, immigration, class and gender.
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