House of Salt and Sorrows

 

Stars: 3. I am not a gothic, horror fan, but this was still a good read, so three stars. I don’t need to read it again, but it was worth the time. 

My Thoughts:

What grabbed me was the title and the quote “In a manor by the sea, twelve sisters are cursed.” I also realize that as an island person myself, I like to read novels where the sea is a prominent character. This did not really pan out to be the case, however, the mystery and horror was pretty intriguing. 

This is a first person narration story from the point of view of one of the older sisters, Annaleigh. There is a little bit of discombobulation as a reader because of the first person POV, but that makes for a good read to not always know as a reader what is real and what is imagined. 

I believe there is another book with younger sisters Verity, but I am ok leaving this book as a stand alone. I think the dead should stay dead. 

From the Publisher:

Annaleigh lives a sheltered life at Highmoor, a manor by the sea, with her sisters, their father, and stepmother. Once they were twelve, but loneliness fills the grand halls now that four of the girls' lives have been cut short. Each death was more tragic than the last—the plague, a plummeting fall, a drowning, a slippery plunge—and there are whispers throughout the surrounding villages that the family is cursed by the gods.

Disturbed by a series of ghostly visions, Annaleigh becomes increasingly suspicious that the deaths were no accidents. Her sisters have been sneaking out every night to attend glittering balls, dancing until dawn in silk gowns and shimmering slippers, and Annaleigh isn't sure whether to try to stop them or to join their forbidden trysts. Because who—or what—are they really dancing with?

When Annaleigh's involvement with a mysterious stranger who has secrets of his own intensifies, it's a race to unravel the darkness that has fallen over her family—before it claims her next.

Man Made Monsters

 

My Thoughts:

This is not my genre. I think I just said this a couple of weeks ago for She is a Haunting, but this collection of tales through an extended family of Cherokees is a terrifying romp through America. Although this is not my genre, this is my publishing house and I trust the diverse taste that the editors at Levine Querido provide, so I quickly picked this up.

This collection gave me Something Wicked This Way Comes vibes. The Ray Bradbury classic about a circus that comes to town, the seduction and promise with a pulse of horror is mirrored by this collection by Cherokee YA author Andrea Rogers in her debut that will be a classic. 

This book was so terrifying that I also borrowed the audiobook just to hear the pronunciation of the Cherokee language in my ear as I was listening and reading. It also has one of the best lines I have read in a long time:

Tsalagi should never have to live on human blood, but sometimes things just happen to sixteen-year-old girls.

The above quote is from the first story, "An Old-Fashioned Girl," about Ama Wilson. The German haunts me still.  With these types of books, I appreciate a good genealogy chart like this one, as well as language without translation. 

Some of the other stories that I am still thinking about include: "Maria Most Likely," "Amaʻs Boys," "Deer Women," "I Come From the Water," and the final story "The Zombies Attack the Drive-Inn!"

I gave away my advanced copy I picked up from NCTE, but I will definitely order more. 

From the Publishers:

Making her YA debut, Cherokee writer Andrea L. Rogers takes her place as one of the most striking voices of the horror renaissance that has swept the last decade.

Horror fans will get their thrills in this collection – from werewolves to vampires to zombies – all the time-worn horror baddies are there. But so are predators of a distinctly American variety – the horrors of empire, of intimate partner violence, of dispossession. And so too the monsters of Rogers’ imagination, that draw upon long-told Cherokee stories – of Deer Woman, fantastical sea creatures, and more.

Following one extended Cherokee family across the centuries, from the tribe’s homelands in Georgia in the 1830s to World War I, the Vietnam War, our own present, and well into the future, each story delivers a slice of a particular time period that will leave readers longing for more.

Alongside each story, Cherokee artist and language technologist Jeff Edwards delivers haunting illustrations that incorporate Cherokee syllabary.

But don’t just take it from us – award-winning writer of The Only Good Indians and Mongrels Stephen Graham Jones says that "Andrea Rogers writes like the house is on fire and her words are the only thing that can put it out."

Man-Made Monsters is a masterful, heartfelt, haunting collection ripe for crossover appeal – just don’t blame us if you start hearing things that go bump in the night.

Publication Information:

Author: Andrea Rogers

Illustrator: Jeff Edwards

Publisher: Levine Querido (October 4, 2022)

Print length: 306 pages

Faraway: Fairy Tales for the Here and Now (audiobook)

My Thoughts: 

Amazon has a series of original stories using familiar fairy tale characters but putting a modern spin on it. Each of the these YA authors offers up a story: Rainbow Rowell, Nic Stone, Soman Chainani, Ken Liu, and Gayle Forman. 

In book form they are separate short stories with audio narration. But I listened to this together like an anthology of shorts with different narrators and sometimes multiple narrators. Each was eerily, disturbingly good in its own way, and every time I thought, this is the best one, another one sucked me in. 

I was going to write about my favorites, but of the five, four of the five were my favorites as I was listening to them. I will just write about the first one but if you have Sora for your class or school, and you can borrow the audio, these are great shorts for personal "reading" time.

"Prince and The Troll" is one of my favorites by Rainbow Rowell. Rowell does a great job with odd relationships like Fangirl and Pumpkinheads.  This story is about Adam, a human male (the troll female character, no name, calls him a prince) who meets a bridge troll in the mud when he drops his phone. There is something sinister about the ROAD, the wizard's ravens, the climate shifts and the weird tension tied to the mud, and the hedge. Then there are the seasonal menu changes of Starbucks. Super intriguing and tense. I don't want to try and spoil it, but I was waiting for claws and teeth to gnash and chomp. 

From the Publisher:

A charming everyman and a mysterious something-under-the-bridge cross paths in a short fairy tale by the number one New York Times bestselling author of Eleanor & Park and the Simon Snow series.

It’s fate when a man accidentally drops his phone off the bridge. It’s fortune when it’s retrieved by a friendly shape sloshing in the muck underneath. From that day forward, as they share a coffee every morning, an unlikely friendship blooms. Considering the reality for the man above, where life seems perfect, and that of the sharp-witted creature below, how forever after can a happy ending be?

From the Publisher:

Two anxious young lovers lost in the woods. A beckoning mansion in a dark clearing. A short modern-day retelling of Hansel and Gretel by the number one New York Times bestselling author of Dear Martin.

It’s bad enough that Hazel and Gray have defied the demands of Hazel’s foul stepfather. The Monster has forbidden their romance. Now they’ve awakened in the forest, phones dead, hours past curfew. But not far away is a grand estate in the middle of nowhere. The door is open. In this short story about choosing your own path, the fury of the Monster that awaits them back home may be nothing compared to what lies ahead.

 

From the Publisher:

The victims are the most popular girls in school, each murdered and arranged in a grim fairy-tale tableau. To find the killer, rookie detective Callum Pederson has gone undercover where the Princes hold court. He’s found enough secrets among the bros to bring them in for questioning—but he could very well get lost in the games the Princes play.

From the Publisher:

Touch the past or wash it away? Two sisters have a choice in this unforgettable short story of everyday magic and the power of memory by the Hugo and Nebula Award–winning author Ken Liu.

Gui is a professional cleaner at A Fresh Start, scrubbing away the unpleasant layers of memory that build up on the personal objects of his customers. Memory-blind himself, he can’t feel those wounds. Clara can, and she prefers them irretrievable. Until her sister, Beatrice, ultrasensitive to memory, raises one that could change Clara’s mind. For Gui, the past is gone. For Clara and Beatrice, deciding what to remember reaches to the heart of their shared history.

From the Publisher:

The reviled villainesses of Snow White, Cinderella, and Rapunzel team up to set the record straight in a subversively funny short story by the number one New York Times bestselling author of If I Stay.

Envious queen? Evil stepmother? Kidnapping hag? Elsinora, Gwendolyn, and Marguerite are through with warts-and-all tabloids, ugly lies, and the three ungrateful brats who pitted them against each other and the world. But maybe there’s more to the stories than even the Wickeds know. Is it time to finally get revenge? After all, they’re due for a happily-enough-ever-after. Even if they have to write it themselves.

The Wellspring Trilogy: The Crystal Key

Description:

The sun has not shone in over a thousand years. Sixteen year old Felicity lives in a world where the Dark rules. Humanity stays to the Wellsprings, illuminated swathes of land where the light of eternal fountains keeps the skies bright all day long. But beyond that, the world is wrapped in eternal shadows, filled with monstrous Horrors who pray on the unsuspecting. When Felicity discovers that she is a Turnkey, a guardian selected to protect the Wellsprings, her life unexpectedly changes. Not only is she gifted with a magical Key with amazing abilities, but her fate soon takes her deep into the Dark, where with the help of a mysterious boy named Tobin she must survive astonishing odds. For it is soon that the Horrors begin hunting her, and a race to get home is only the beginning of her worries.

My Thoughts:

This is a great book for tweens and middle schoolers who like Harry Potter without the bulk of reading Harry Potter. This first in the trilogy takes a girl with hidden talents thrust into a world she is not familiar with who must face horrors and zombies and things that go bump in the Dark. If you like magic, quests, a little romance and things that can kill you in the dark, this is the book for you.

A Few Words:

"Tobin - " she began.     He looked up languidly. "You shouldn't call me that. It's not my name."  "It is," Felicity insisted, grabbing his hand and squeezing it. "To me, you are Tobin. I've never known you by anything else. Besides, some people can name themselves, why not you. I like that name."

An ARC provided by Net Galley for an honest review

Scarecrow Princess

From the publisher:
Morrigan Moore has always been moody, but her new home is the worst. Her novelist mother has dragged her to the countryside, drawn by the lost myth of the King of Crows, a dark figure of theft and deceit, and the Scarecrow Prince, the only one who can stand against him. When Morrigan finds herself swept up in the legend, she'll have no choice but to take on the Scarecrow Prince's mantel, and to stand and fight. For her town, her family, and her own future. This lushly drawn graphic novel will pull you into its sinister secrets and not let go till the final page. For fans of Coraline and Over the Garden Wall.

My thoughts:

The publishers say that this book is similar to Gaiman's Coraline, and I agree that like Coraline, this graphic novel uses the drawings to set the mood of the book. This story is downright spooky and perfect for the Halloween season. I can feel the cold coming off the pages. In addition, if you have never seen Hitchcock's classic movie The Birds in black and white, watch it so you know what I mean when I say that the crows felt claustrophobic and nightmarish. 

I am not sure if the final version will be in color. My advanced copy was in black and white and I think that made this even more creepy. I used to love watching horror movies because they take you to the brink of wanting to look away when you hear the music. Well, even without the "music" in this novel I found myself speeding up and wanting to look away because I knew what was coming but I wanted to speed forward anyway and then I could not shut my eyes fast enough.  This was fun spooky and young readers will enjoy it.

Odd Thomas

Odd Thomas by Dean Koontz



Reading level: high school/adult

I read this after I read the graphic novel version of this series called In Odd We Trust. I really liked the graphic novel, but I wasn't ready for the horror of this audiobook. I believe that authors are trying to reach out to a different audience when they do a graphic novel of their novel series, but I wasn't prepared for this. The graphic novel doesn't hint at the full extent of what I see as the horrors of the actual novel. The graphics are not designed like

Odd Thomas, the 20-year-old fry cook of the small desert town of Pico Mundo, still is an innocent, quirky character who sees dead people, but the kinds of living monsters that he has to deal with is quite disturbing when the earbuds are in my ear.

I can't figure out where In Odd We Trust actually fits in with this first Odd Thomas book, but I can't say why without spoiling the ending.

Long story short, Odd continues to be a likeable character, but be ready for monsters disguised as normal people.