Book Review: The Life and Death Parade by Eliza Wass

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The Life and Death Parade by Eliza Wass

**This book was provided for review through NetGalley**

What it's about:

      One lovely summer night lit with fairy lights and filled with the sounds of laughter and children's games, Nikki Bramley visits a psychic, who tells him he's going to die.

     A year later, Nikki's family and Kitty, the girl who loved him, are reeling with the bizarre and traumatic circumstances surrounding his death.  When Kitty goes looking for answers, she finds much more than she bargained for in the Life and Death Parade, a group of psychics who pray to a myriad of saints and may or may not be all that they seem.

What I thought:

      Ok, so real talk: This book sounded so interesting and cool.  Psychics? Creepy portents that come true? REVEALING THE MYSTERIES OF LIFE AND DEATH AND WHAT THE HECK HAPPENED TO NIKKI BROMLEY?! Yes. It all sounded so good.

     HOWever, in my opinion, this book was a bit of a letdown.  The first half of the book seemed like a bit of a hot mess.  The characters felt like miserable cardboard cutouts, and I didn't really care about what happened to them, because all this dramatic stuff goes down right off the bat, and I felt no connection to them.  I feel like, in order to feel something for the characters in a book, you should know them and be connected with them first. Throughout the first part of the book I just felt vaguely annoyed with everyone, because nothing had really been explained or described character-wise.  Another thing I noticed was that the characters often said something, then two pages later, completely changed their minds and said the exact opposite thing.  It was like none of them could keep their story straight and everyone was either lying or just confused about how they felt.  

     The story itself feels kind of like it's being summarized by someone who read an actual book--sort of like a rambling sparknotes version.  There's a LOT of descriptive language about the scenery and the actions of the characters, but no really solid storyline that tells the reader where we've been and where we're headed.  Every time we come to some new information, it's like one step forward, two steps back.  Instead of becoming clearer, the story just gets weirder and more confusing.  At one point when I checked to see how far I was, expecting to be about 10% through, I discovered that I was 30% done with the book, but nothing really had happened yet.

     The back and forth between the present and the flashback scenes is not very well executed.  The flashbacks seemed to be out of order and don't actually explain anything, they just make Nikki (which, tbh, totally seems like the female version of this name to me) look crazy and psychotic, which is sort of an established fact, since they keep referencing how he went nuts after the psychic foretelling his death.  Also, you know, he's now dead via mysterious circumstances surrounding a creepy psychic visit.

That being said, things did definitely pick up for the better during the second half of the book. There were some big twists that I totally was not expecting, and I'm glad I didn't DNF the book, like I saw that some people had done on the goodreads page for the book.  One of my favorite parts was the actual Life and Death Parade scene. I feel like it was vivid and beautiful; one part psychic fair, one part foresty Burning Man.  Once we got more information from that scene, the story did really start to come together and make more sense and get much more interesting! I enjoyed how the mystery of Nikki's life and death was revealed, and the ending was unexpected, but in a good way!

Overall, I think the first part of this book didn't grab me and pull me in the way I would have wanted, but the second half of the book was interesting and mystical and just a tad bit creepy, but in a good way!

Rating: 3 stars.

Book Review: A Million Junes by Emily Henry

A Million Junes by Emily Henry

What it's about:

     Ever since Jack O'Donnell IV can remember, her parents have warned her to stay away from the Angerts.  Their families are linked from way back, and when members of each clan cross paths, bad things happen.  Like her father's mysterious and sudden death.

     When Jack (known also as June, Junior, JuneBug, etc) runs into Saul, the youngest member of the Angert family (who has been gone from town for years), she expects the worst--but nothing bad seems to happen.

     As the two grow closer, the magic of the O'Donnell's family farm and the mystery surrounding the curse shared by their families is slowly revealed--changing what they thought they knew about their entire lives.

What I thought:

     I ADORED this book.  The first thing I thought when I started reading about June's dad and his stories was the movie Big Fish--a dad who tells these really crazy magical stories like they actually happened--and maybe they did, maybe they didn't happen the way he says.  This book is what you would get if you took Big Fish, Romeo and Juliet, and the Hatfields and McCoys, stuck them in a blender, poured them into a glass, and sprinkled them with a bit more magic. And I couldn't be more pleased with this strange combination.

     The writing in this book is poetic and beautiful and very dreamlike--while also staying true to the story of June in the present. It kept me completely riveted and wanting to know more. I read Emily Henry's previous book, "The Love That Split The World", which I liked, but I really loved this one so much more.

     The entire first half of the book--as I fell in love with the characters and the strange circumstances surrounding this big DO NOT GO NEAR THE ANGERTS mystery--I kept waiting for something truly awful to happen.  That feeling of dread *almost* hindered my capacity to become entirely smitten with Saul (kudos to the author, by the way, for making the name Saul seem super attractive in this day and age), but I was able to overcome and totally got into the romance that blooms between the children of the warring families.

     Once the mystery begins to be solved, the story takes a real turn emotionally.  From a sweet forbidden romance, it becomes something much deeper in both depth and meaning, leading the characters through the grief they've felt for a decade, and that which has followed both of their families for generations. The writing is *so* poignant and touching, I found myself not sobbing with sadness, but consistently finding tears leaking from my eyes.  My heart ached along with June and Saul as they uncovered more about their family histories in both the present and in the past.

     I don't want to give too much away, because I really think this is one that's better when you go into it not knowing a whole lot of details. I loved trying to guess what was going on and found that a lot of my hunches were correct, which sort of added to the entertainment of reading it!  I will say that this is definitely a book I'm going to be grabbing a hard copy of to take its rightful place on my bookshelf!

Rating: 5 stars.

Book Review: Fellside by M.R. Carey

Fellside by M.R. Carey

What it's about:

Jess is convicted of starting a fire that accidentally killed a young boy living in her apartment building.  She is sent to Fellside, a correctional facility on the Yorkshire moors, to a ward where the worst of the worst reside under maximum security.  It looks like she's there for life when something happens that gives her hope--Alex, the boy who died in the fire, is trying to make contact, and he's not sure that she is the one who killed him after all.

What I thought:

Firstly, I'd like to say that I love the way M.R. Carey writes. It's concise and descriptive and just very well done.

However, the majority of this book did disappoint me. Now, I suppose that a little more research into the plot or already existing reviews would probably have given me a little bit of a clue as to what this book is really about, but with authors I've read (and liked) before, I read the blurb and accepted the story as something I would like to read.

So here I was, expecting some mysterious and intriguing supernatural story taking place in a prison, and to some extent, this story was just that. However, it came along with a whole other plot arc that had very little to do with the "main plot" until they solidly converged...at about 60% through the book.

Jess's pov was interesting to me, and what she was doing kept me invested enough to keep reading to find out what was happening with her side of the story, but the other chapters followed other inmates/employees of the prison and their convoluted drama with a drug smuggling ring gone awry.

Now, I appreciate that the secondary arc makes sense. We're in a prison, things like this are bound to happen. I'm not sure if the author was trying to make a point about corruption and power inside a correctional facility, but to me, it felt like this part of the story had sort of been thrust upon me without my approval. It felt a little like a non-comedic version of Orange is the New Black, and frankly, if I had any desire to read something like that, I already would have. 

These bits dragged on for me and *literally* put me to sleep (no, really. I fell asleep multiple times during these chapters. Possibly a result of reading in bed, but if it had been engaging, I would have felt more awake, right?).

That being said, I really liked the supernatural aspect of the story. The Other Place was a really unique in-between world and I liked that we learned about it as Jess & Alex remembered/traveled through it. This part of the story had twists and turns that I wasn't expecting, and once the two storylines came together, I think it worked out well.

It just didn't happen soon enough for me.

Rating: 3.5 stars