Shark Heart: A Love Story

 Shark Heart:  A Love Story by Emily Habeck                Literary Fiction/Magical Realism/Fantasy

(from Goodreads)  Newlyweds face the unimaginable in this epic tale about marriage, motherhood, and enduring love.  For Lewis and Wren, their first year of marriage is also their last. A few weeks after their wedding, Lewis receives a rare diagnosis. He will retain most of his consciousness, memories, and intellect, but his physical body will gradually turn into a great white shark. As Lewis develops the features and impulses of one of the most predatory creatures in the ocean, his complicated artist’s heart struggles to make peace with his unfulfilled dreams.  At first, Wren internally resists her husband’s fate. Is there a way for them to be together after Lewis changes? Then, a glimpse of Lewis’s developing carnivorous nature activates long-repressed memories for Wren, whose story vacillates between her childhood living on a houseboat in Oklahoma, her time with a college ex-girlfriend, and her unusual friendship with a woman pregnant with twin birds. Woven throughout this bold novel is the story of Wren’s mother, Angela, who becomes pregnant with Wren at fifteen in an abusive relationship amidst her parents’ crumbling marriage. In the present, all of Wren’s grief eventually collides, and she is forced to make an impossible choice.  A sweeping love story that is at once lyrical and funny, airy and visceral, Shark Heart is an unforgettable, gorgeous novel about life’s perennial questions, the fragility of memories, finding joy amidst grief, and creating a meaningful life. This daring debut marks the arrival of a wildly talented new writer abounding with originality, humor, and heart.

(My Review)

I've never read a book like this before.  Falling in love and getting married is hard enough, but what if you find out that he is going to turn into a great white shark?  This is a beautiful story of the dramatic journey this couple takes during their first year of marriage.

In the Lives of Puppets

In the Lives of Puppets by T.J. Klune                                      Fantasy/SciFi/Fiction/LGBTQ+

(from Goodreads)  In a strange little home built into the branches of a grove of trees live three robots – fatherly inventor android Giovanni Lawson, a pleasantly sadistic nurse machine, and a small vacuum desperate for love and attention. Victor Lawson, a human, lives there too. They’re a family, hidden and safe.  The day Vic salvages and repairs an unfamiliar android labelled ‘HAP’, he learns of a shared dark past between Hap and Gio – a past spent hunting humans.  When Hap unwittingly alerts robots from Gio’s former life to their whereabouts, the family is no longer hidden and safe. Gio is captured and taken back to his old laboratory in the City of Electric Dreams. So together, the rest of Vic’s assembled family must journey across an unforgiving and otherworldly country to rescue Gio from decommission, or worse, reprogramming.  Along the way to save Gio, amid conflicted feelings of betrayal and affection for Hap, Vic must decide for can he accept love with strings attached?

(My Review)

This book was so delightful!  Vic, a human, lives with in a family of robots, including an inventor who collects broken robots.  Vic secretly repairs an android, Hap, and to learn more of his past (or to escape from it) they set off on an adventure.  This was a beautiful little retelling of Pinocchio, with hints of Frankenstein and Wall-E.  The characters was so lovely, and at times I found myself laughing out loud.  I loved the found-family aspect of this story. This was by the same author as The House in the Cerulean Sea which I also recommend.

The Invited

 The Invited by Jennifer McMahon                                       Ghost Mystery/Suspense

(from Amazon)  In a quest for a simpler life, Helen and Nate have abandoned the comforts of suburbia to take up residence on forty-four acres of rural land where they will begin the ultimate, aspirational do-it-yourself project: building the house of their dreams. When they discover that this beautiful property has a dark and violent past, Helen, a former history teacher, becomes consumed by the local legend of Hattie Breckenridge, a woman who lived and died there a century ago. With her passion for artifacts, Helen finds special materials to incorporate into the house--a beam from an old schoolroom, bricks from a mill, a mantel from a farmhouse--objects that draw her deeper into the story of Hattie and her descendants, three generations of Breckenridge women, each of whom died suspiciously. As the building project progresses, the house will become a place of menace and unfinished business: a new home, now haunted, that beckons its owners and their neighbors toward unimaginable danger.

(My Review)

This was a seriously spooky book. It was a great story, but it dragged a bit, but it was really worth it at the end.

Holly

Holly by Stephen King                                        Psychological Thriller/Horror

(from Amazon)  Stephen King’s Holly marks the triumphant return of beloved King character Holly Gibney. Audiences have witnessed Holly’s gradual transformation from a shy (but also brave and ethical) recluse in Mr. Mercedes to Bill Hodges’s partner in Finders Keepers to a full-fledged, smart, and occasionally tough private detective in The Outsider. In King’s new novel, Holly is on her own, and up against a pair of unimaginably depraved and brilliantly disguised adversaries.  When Penny Dahl calls the Finders Keepers detective agency hoping for help locating her missing daughter, Holly is reluctant to accept the case. Her partner, Pete, has Covid. Her (very complicated) mother has just died. And Holly is meant to be on leave. But something in Penny Dahl’s desperate voice makes it impossible for Holly to turn her down.  Mere blocks from where Bonnie Dahl disappeared live Professors Rodney and Emily Harris. They are the picture of bourgeois respectability: married octogenarians, devoted to each other, and semi-retired lifelong academics. But they are harboring an unholy secret in the basement of their well-kept, book-lined home, one that may be related to Bonnie’s disappearance. And it will prove nearly impossible to discover what they are up to: they are savvy, they are patient, and they are ruthless.  Holly must summon all her formidable talents to outthink and outmaneuver the shockingly twisted professors in this chilling new masterwork from Stephen King.

(My Review)  

First of all, I did not know this was a part of a series - although I did read "The Outsider" (they had completely different feels).  However, it did not affect my reading of this book.  I loved this!  This was probably one of the best Stephen King I have ever read, and I definitely want to go back and read the other Holly Gibney book.  I felt it was a bit different from other King books I've read, in that it was more thriller and less supernatural (even from the first Holly Gibney book).  It was a solid thriller, and even though you know who the evil-doers are, the suspense is held all the way to end.

You're Not Supposed to Die Tonight

 You're Not Supposed to Die Tonight by Kalynn Bayron                          YA Horror

(from Amazon)  Charity has the summer job of her dreams, playing the “final girl” at Camp Mirror Lake. Guests pay to be scared in this full-contact terror game, as Charity and her summer crew recreate scenes from a classic slasher film, The Curse of Camp Mirror Lake. The more realistic the fear, the better for business.    But the last weekend of the season, Charity’s co-workers begin disappearing. And when one ends up dead, Charity’s role as the final girl suddenly becomes all too real. If Charity and her girlfriend Bezi hope to survive the night, they’ll need figure out what this killer is after. As they unravel the bloody history of the real Mirror Lake, Charity discovers that there may be more to the story than she ever suspected . . .

(My Review)  This was a fun, campy but scary read.  It had many of the classic horror movie/book themes (teens at a summer camp), that kept me reading.

Fourth Wing

Fourth Wing by Rebecca Yarros                                            Fantasy, Action, Dragons

(from Amazon)  Twenty-year-old Violet Sorrengail was supposed to enter the Scribe Quadrant, living a quiet life among books and history. Now, the commanding general—also known as her tough-as-talons mother—has ordered Violet to join the hundreds of candidates striving to become the elite of Navarre: dragon riders.  But when you’re smaller than everyone else and your body is brittle, death is only a heartbeat away...because dragons don’t bond to “fragile” humans. They incinerate them.  With fewer dragons willing to bond than cadets, most would kill Violet to better their own chances of success. The rest would kill her just for being her mother’s daughter—like Xaden Riorson, the most powerful and ruthless wingleader in the Riders Quadrant.  She’ll need every edge her wits can give her just to see the next sunrise.  Yet, with every day that passes, the war outside grows more deadly, the kingdom's protective wards are failing, and the death toll continues to rise. Even worse, Violet begins to suspect leadership is hiding a terrible secret.  Friends, enemies, lovers. Everyone at Basgiath War College has an agenda—because once you enter, there are only two ways out: graduate or die.    

(My Review)

This book has been wildly popular - and hard to get a copy of.  I felt it lived up to the hype.  Young Violet is well-suited for a life among scholars, but her life is turned upside down when she is summoned to join the "dragon riders".  As a "dragon rider" cadet, she faces many dangers, not just trying to bond and ride a dragon, but also from other cadets (due to who her mother is).  What Violet lacks in physicality, she excels in intelligence and quick thinking.  She even finds romance.  

Yellowface

Yellowface by R. F. Kuang                                                  Asian American Literary Fiction

(from Amazon)  Authors June Hayward and Athena Liu were supposed to be twin rising stars. But Athena’s a literary darling. June Hayward is literally nobody. Who wants stories about basic white girls, June thinks.

So when June witnesses Athena’s death in a freak accident, she acts on impulse: she steals Athena’s just-finished masterpiece, an experimental novel about the unsung contributions of Chinese laborers during World War I.

So what if June edits Athena’s novel and sends it to her agent as her own work? So what if she lets her new publisher rebrand her as Juniper Song—complete with an ambiguously ethnic author photo? Doesn’t this piece of history deserve to be told, whoever the teller? That’s what June claims, and the New York Times bestseller list seems to agree.

But June can’t get away from Athena’s shadow, and emerging evidence threatens to bring June’s (stolen) success down around her. As June races to protect her secret, she discovers exactly how far she will go to keep what she thinks she deserves.

(My Review)

June is a struggling author, who makes a life-changing decision when her successful-author friend, Athena Liu, dies in her presence, along with a manuscript she has just completed.  June decides to re-edit it, and claim it as her own.  This satire is such an interesting discussion of authorship, plagiarism, and representation. Interesting read.