October Review

Samantha Gross
Oct 31, 2018
9 min read

Witches and mystery

tales of fer and great fights

these are the tales I read

on my bleak October nights

What's this? A spooky theme for my monthly book review? Wild.

Work has been Crazy, but I somehow still managed to read several books this month, just so I could tell you cool cats to read most of them yourselves. Fun times. Let's get started.

Circe by Madeline Miller

Madeline Miller is a master storyteller. The way she writes is unlike anything I've ever encountered. She's Homer for the 21st century, Shakespeare for modern age. She makes me want to write until I bleed and then wring out the blood I've spilled to use as more ink for writing. I finish her book and I feel hollow, like the story that filled me for so long has finished and gone and left me feeling incomplete for having no more of it to continue.

As a lover of Greek classics, Miller's research speaks as much about her craft as her brilliance with wording. She wields myths like something" and casts broad pen strokes across our understanding of history. She uses Ovid and Homer and makes something new, something unseen and beautifully painful.

Circe had its slow points, but to tackle centuries of time in a book is brave, and even in her slower years, Circe was unwavering in her intensity and tenacity. She was a legend and a myth and a woman alone on an island, lonely and powerful. So even when I was slow to read, I still kept coming back to the story, thinking we could just tackle another decade, another couple thousand years on the island of Aiaia.

Miller's more famous work, The Song of Achilles is one of my favorite books. And while Circe isn't as well beloved, it still carries the same mortal beauty, the same epic language that Miller creates. They are books cut from the same cloth, stories passed down and retold in a way that shines so brightly other people can't help but take notice.

Circe is a book and a titan, and both of them contain multitudes of regret, despair, yearning, fear, love, so much so that several centuries are needed to parse out all the pieces. And even then we will never truly understand everything that is offered to us.

How very mortal of us, to tackle the stories of the gods and think we can understand them.

Twister by Juliette Forrest

This book definitely resides much deeper in the young young adult category than I usually read. That makes it a little harder to review, since the standards are different and I tend to be a lot more particular/strict with my judgement. But I will try.

It took a but too long to get into the moving plot, setting up stuff that felt a lot less important/interesting than what was promised from the book. The bigger action happened a little too quickly once it did show, but the nature of children's fiction is that it doesn't draw out the truly terrifying climax too long, since everything for children seems to move fast in real life.

The magic was clever and the main character, Twister, was scrappy and eager. Following her story was exciting, and the language used in the novel fit her characterization so well. It really provided great insight into the character and her world.

The ending message didn't quite fit as well as I hoped it would. Things didn't tie together as neatly as I expected them to, and as such felt a little preachy. The problem with writing children's books is that so often it turns into teaching an obvious lesson rather than learning something through a story. This book started out really well, but by the end whatever message it was trying to convey got a little lost among the weeds and the preached announcement of self empowerment felt forced. To me, the message felt more like a warning for children not to always trust adults in power. The witch maymay helps twister, but it puts her in more danger. Her mother and aunt honey care, but they can't help twister as she grieves for her father. White eye wants nothing more than to hurt her. Even her teacher can't do much in the face of bullies, and in the end it's twister acting on her own beliefs and strength to save the people around her. She learns that being selfless is great, but that it's also okay to look out for herself, to make sure that she's aware of her own worth.

If the book had stuck to that trajectory I think i would have liked it more. As it stands, I really did like pieces of the story. It was compelling and spooky and a good story for chilly October evenings.

The Trap by Melanie Raab

This book was a quiet romance tied into the last few moments of a wild, psychological thriller. And I probably should have seen the romance coming, but really the whole thing blindsided me.

Linda's madness and the way she fell into her books and her mind so easily had me questioning her the entire book. Up until the very end, when everything is revealed in its entirety, I was still sitting there debating whether or not she was actually mad. Whether we really knew who killed her sister.

The novel within a novel is a (haha) novel idea and something that I've seen before. With this, it took me a moment to recognize that I needed to be reading Linda's novel about Sophie as part of the original story, filling in the gaps from Linda's sister's murder and the interaction she had with the investigators afterward.

The language Raabe uses is very spiraling, which gives us a great glimpse into Linda's thought process, dropping right into every spiral, every panicked moment. I believed Linda and then I didn't and then I didn't know who or what I believed, only that a woman was dead and the killer had gone uncaught for eleven years.

Wink Poppy Midnight by April Genevieve Tucholke

This was one of those books that I really liked until the twist. The characters were compelling and so different, but tangled and messy and interesting, and I followed the book for them more than the situation, mostly because the characters were the situation. At least, until the end twist. Then things were, well, twisted. And that was compelling too, yeah, but not in the same way. I really only liked who Wink became in the end, and even then it was only because of how deeply into her head she dove, becoming a darker version of herself that was presented throughout the book.

The novel is presented to ask the question of who is the hero, who is the villain, and who is the liar. And even when I thought I had it figured out, I was never sure. That was super compelling, the question of who believed they were what, because its all about belief and perspective when it comes to labels that large and fantastical.

And while the twist at the end overthrew those preconceived notions, rewriting the story as we knew it, it also destroyed the idea of someone being the hero or the villain. Because, in the end, they were all just liars. The book tried to make it a dramatic look at the human spirit, an insightful glance at human nature, but it just felt kind of forced. Like, of course, one person can't be just the hero or just the villain. Every person is both, its the classic good vs evil residing within humanity and their choices trope. And I was kind of hoping for something different from this book.

I was happy that Midnight got away from Poppy and Wink, but everything about him still felt undecided. Still felt trapped and a little too close to a boy yearning for a manic pixie dream girl. I don't think he ever crossed that line, because he could see Poppy and Wink as more than just an idea, but sometimes his pursuit of something beyond himself felt like trying to use another person--one of the girls around him--as an excuse not to develop a personality of his own. Midnight floats and Poppy and Wink were his anchors, at least he thought so until the twist reveals neither of them were as solid as Midnight believed.

I suppose my review feels very metaphysical and displeased, but the writing was brilliant. Tucholke has a great hold on her characters, and they were each so different and individual, taking the boy next door, mean popular girl, and weird witchy child tropes to use in a new way. I appreciated that, even if I didn't really like the end of the book.

We Were Liars by E. Lockhart

I hate books where the twist turns out to be (spoiler alert) ghosts. "They were dead all along" is such a frustrating trope that used far too often in teenage mystery.

That being said, I did really enjoy the confronted truths presented in this book and the characters it contains. Tackling the inherent privilege of the rich white folks who summer on the island in a way that paints the teenagers as both sympathetic and simultaneously perpetrators of the damage done.

It took time for me to grow to like the main character, Cady. In the beginning, she seemed like just another rich white teen trying to be edgy, dealing with first world problems and white guilt in a counterproductive way. And while I did eventually grow to see the layers in Cady, the way she viewed her privilege on the island and the way she wanted to do better, my affection for her ebbed and flowed over the course of the story as we dug deeper and deeper into the mystery of what happened during summer fifteen.

Cady talked in a way that was sometimes hard to interpret. Hyperbole to express her emotional pain using blunt physically violent descriptions. I kept second guessing what she was saying, misunderstanding her patterns of speech. I had to double back a few times, and I think by the end I realized that she used physical wound descriptions to convey her emotional pain because in a way it was all self-inflicted. Cady didn't intentionally harm herself physically, but her headaches and subsequent illness were her methods of coping with the terrible accident that killed the three people she loved the most.

But then. BUT THEN. The ghost bomb gets dropped, and it was a tragedy and heartbreaking, but mostly I was upset that this book had been so promising up until that point. It felt sloppy, and the build-up towards something that was ultimately Very Preventable was both sad and stupidly frustrating. That's probably the point though--I was supposed to get mad over this unfortunate thing that could have been prevented and delve into the tragedy of it all. And I was, but a good chunk of that disappointment was at the book direction and presentation, rather than the actual course of events.

Regardless of my frustration with Lockhart's trope usage, I did really appreciate their writing skill. Character descriptions and varied sentences structure and all the things writers can do write existed in this book. It was beautifully crafted and I adored the scattered way we glimpsed into Cady's head, the stripped bare way we got to see into this character's life.

The Doll's House by M. J. Arlidge

Confession time: I haven't actually finished this book yet. It's the third in a series where I skipped the first two (hell yeah, church book trade, I was ten chapters in before I realized), so that probably explains why there's so much background and information the narrators keep expanding on.

So, I'm not done yet, but it fits the theme for this month and I'm more than halfway, so I figure the review can go here and I'll come back and change it if by the end I suddenly like it.

Because, honestly, I don't really like it. Am I going to finish it? Yes. Will I enjoy it? Maybe, we'll see how the last half goes.

A lot is happening throughout the course of the novel, with switching perspectives and multiple woven story lines. It was all just too much and made it a little boring in places because it took away from the action and suspense. I don't care about the in-station rivalry or the main characters dominator (which, also, what??), I care about whether or not the serial killer's latest abducted girl lives!!

Circling back to the dominator thing (which. Still, what??), this book is half about the mystery being solved and half about detective Helen Grace, but unfortunately Helen's supposedly super interesting life is not really doing much for me. I'd really prefer her to just catch the bad guy, since that's really the only reason I'm still reading. I'm rooting for Ruby, Helen is just a means to maybe get her alive.

But, I will reserve complete judgment for after I finish the book.