Morgan Reads

new reviews Wednesdays and Fridays fantasy, romance, non-fiction, and more

[morgan--reads]

Death of My Aunt - C. H. B. Kitchin

Summary: When called to his aunt’s house to discuss business investments, Malcolm is horrified when she dies, obviously as a result of poisoning. Terrified to find himself in the midst of murder, Malcolm attempts to solve the mystery of his aunt’s death before he is framed for the crime. 

Quote: “I was appalled too by the thought that every action which I had performed and should perform during the next few days might, however trivial and irrelevant, play a part in the drama.”

My rating: 3.5/5.0  Goodreads: 3.48/5.0

Review: Fun, but forgettable, this mystery has a lot of the structure and elements of a classic Golden Age detective story, but it falls short of a classic Christie in a few ways. Having the bumbling narrator and the detective be the same person leads to some funny moments—such as when Malcolm convinces himself he is guilty of the murder—but also means that no particular cleverness is on display in the solving of the crime. The police do most of the work and the breadcrumbs left for the reader are obvious but lack meaning without the narrator providing context. The motive was uninspiring and the suspect pool too broad. In spite of the book’s flaws, I still tore through it and found it a pleasant way to spend an afternoon.

[morgan--reads]

Ghostland - Colin Dickey

Summary: An overview of supposedly haunted buildings in America and the histories that led them to acquire their reputations. 

Quote: “We tell stories of the dead as a way of making a sense of the living. More than just simple urban legends and campfire tales, ghost stories reveal the contours of our anxieties, the nature of our collective fears and desires, the things we can’t talk about in any other way. 

My rating: 2.5/5.0  Goodreads: 3.74/5.0”

Review: I expected the book to be analysis-heavy, but I was disappointed to find that there were no real ghost stories to accompany the analysis. Dickey introduces a wide variety of spaces in his book, but very few of them have ghost stories that accompany their histories and, even when they do, Dickey seems uninterested in sharing a good yarn. His definition of haunted is broad, and he wants to make points about American consciousness and beliefs surrounding death, not to talk about ghosts. It’s a shame because the personal element of the stories—he traveled to most of these places in person—could have made room for more affect. But, instead of shivers down my spine, I was left cold.

[morgan--reads]

Children of Ash and Elm - Neil Price

Summary: A history of the Viking Age grounded in archeology and material culture that attempts to get at the lived experience of the Vikings. 

Quote: “The Viking mind is far away from us today, but occasionally just about tangible.”

My rating: 4.5/5.0  Goodreads: 4.18/5.0

Review: Price’s clear and evocative writing could make any subject interesting, but the mysterious and strange world of the Vikings doesn’t need a lot of help. The book is enormous, covering death rituals, trade patterns, violence, gender, and crafting, for a start. No matter the subject, Price presents fascinating detail on the archeology and textual evidence that allow scholars to make informed guesses on how the Vikings experienced their world. He attempts to sketch out not just their physical landscape, but their mental and emotional one as well, never straying too far from the rigorous standard of evidence he has set himself. 

The audiobook, read by Samuel Roukin, is long but brilliant.

[morgan--reads]

The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland in a Ship of Her Own Making - Catherynne M. Valente

Summary: When 12-year-old September is whisked away from her Omaha home to fairyland, she couldn’t be more pleased. Armed with instructions from the Green Wind on how to behave, September sets out on a quest to rid the land of the tyranny of the magic-hating Marquess. 

Quote: “When one is traveling, everything looks brighter and lovelier. That does not mean it IS brighter and lovelier; it just means that sweet, kindly home suffers in comparison to tarted-up foreign places with all their jewels on.”

My rating: 4.0/5.0  Goodreads: 3.95/5.0

Review: A charming middle-grade novel that has the perfect balance of fairytale wonder and fairytale menace. The rules imposed on September are promisingly tricky and the situations she’s put in are desperately dire, but she’s also a determined child, with a true hunger for adventure. Her companions—including a key always chasing her, a Wyvary (half library, half wyvern), and personified wind—are complex and interesting, none more so than the villain of the piece, who remains dastardly even after her depths are revealed. The illustrations are also sweet, though I expected more of them when I first got ahold of the book.

[morgan--reads]

Reprieve - James Han Mattson

Summary: In 1997, an escape room challenge at a full-contact haunted house ends in the death of one of its participants. Reprieve follows the lives of those involved in the years leading up to the tragedy to show how it unfolded. 

Quote: “Horror tests limits. Horror shows who we are. When we’re faced with a monster, or a ghost, or a serial killer, what we’re actually made of comes forth. I like to see what people are made of. Therefore, I like horror.”

My rating: 1.5/5.0  Goodreads: 3.40/5.0

Review: Trying too hard to be about universal human experiences without having the writing chops to back up those ambitions, the book often falls back on cliches, stereotypes, and gimmicks. The horror and tension of the plot is destroyed completely by the glut of everyday detail that fills each thread of the narrative. While billed as horror, it feels a lot more like literary fiction and, instead of fear, I mostly felt disgust at the ordinary nastiness of most of its characters—their misogyny, racism, and unhealthy obsessions making them distinctly unlikeable.

[morgan--reads]

Lady Romeo - Tana Wojczuk

Summary: A biography of the 19th century American actress Charlotte Cushman. 

Quote: “From girlhood she was taught that theatre was sinful, yet Charlotte Cushman became an actress and then America’s first celebrity. For much of Charlotte’s career theatre audiences were mainly men, and women were not allowed to attend the theatre alone. Yet she inspired passionate responses in both men and women. To men, she embodied the man they wanted to be, gallant, passionate, an excellent sword-fighter. To women, she was a romantic, daring figure, their Romeo.”

My rating: 3.0/5.0  Goodreads: 3.84/5.0

Review: Charlotte Cushman is an incredibly interesting subject—a vibrant queer woman with personal ambition and a blazing talent much admired in her own time—so it's a shame that the prose of her biography is so mediocre. It feels almost like a bullet-point summary, lacking charming detail and interesting context. I felt rushed through the events of Cushman’s life and wanted to linger more, particularly on the years she spent living in Italy with a group of women artists. 

The audiobook, read by Tavia Gilbert, is fun, and presents a distinct voice for Cushman. 

[morgan--reads]

Don’t Look Now - Daphne du Maurier

Summary: A collection of eerie short stories. 

Quote: “The experts are right, he thought, Venice is sinking. The whole city is slowly dying. One day the tourists will travel here by boat to peer down into the waters, and they will see pillars and columns and marble far, far beneath them, slime and mud uncovering for brief moments a lost underworld of stone.”

My rating: 4.5/5.0  Goodreads: 4.04/5.0

Review: Uneven and slightly ridiculous in places, the collection is nonetheless relentlessly compelling, du Maurier’s flare for atmosphere present in each tale. “Blue Lenses”, in which a woman undergoes a surgery and wakes up to find that everyone’s head has been replaced with an animal’s, and “The Birds”, the basis for the Hitchcock film that shows a family’s increasingly desperate attempts to survive a strange phenomenon, are my favorite stories of the collection. They both, as with other stories in the collection, left me with a sense of doom without being so obvious as to show the actual doom occurring.

[morgan--reads]

Most Ardently - Gabe Cole Novoa

Summary: To meet society’s expectations, Oliver Bennett is forced to live much of the time as Elizabeth, but he relishes the chance to go out in the clothes of a young gentleman. On one such outing, he meets with Fitzwilliam Darcy, a young man who had been rude to “Elizabeth” at a recent assembly, but who gets along well with Oliver. As Oliver’s feelings for Darcy grow and pressure from his mother to marry mounts, he must decide how much he is willing to risk to live the life he wants to live. 

Quote: “I have struggled for some time, and I won't allow it any longer. If your feelings are still what they were earlier this month, please tell me so, but I can no longer contain my own. I admire you, Oliver Bennet. Your spirit, your wit, your open honesty-I have thought of nothing else since we first met.”

My rating: 2.5/5.0  Goodreads: 4.1/5.0

Review: I fully support trans historical fiction which, in spite of historical norms, a trans character can live happily and fully in all ways. However, the easily overcome conflicts—perpetuated by the almost cartoonishly villainous Collins and Wickham—and the almost immediate love and support Oliver receives as soon as he reveals his identity makes the book almost too candy-sweet for me. Though some allowances can be made for the book being YA—the use of “boy” and “girl” to describe people who are socially adults is on thin ice—much of the complexity of the original story has been flattened by the change of key details and Darcy and Oliver feel like much flatter characters when they don't engage in witty repartee or show any signs of pride or fierceness. I think the story would have benefited enormously from freeing itself from Austen’s shackles to tell a unique queer Regency story that wouldn’t feel the need to pay, often unsuccessful homage, to Pride and Prejudice plot points. 

[morgan--reads]

You All Grow Up and Leave Me - Piper Weiss 

Summary: A combination memoir of Weiss girlhood in the 90s and true crime story of her tennis coach, who stalked and attempted to abduct another student when Weiss was fourteen. 

Quote: “Tennis has a renewed sex appeal with a narrative to match. Agassi, the stud; Pete Sampras, the handsome young underdog. The epic rivalry of Steffi Graf and Monica Seles. And the prodigy, Jennifer Capriati—who, a few months earlier, replaced Mary Lou Retton as every little girl’s Olympic hero, ringing in the nineties in her Stars and Stripes windbreaker at the Barcelona games, raising her gold medal as high as her hair-sprayed wall of bangs. In a year, eighteen-year-old Seles will be stabbed on the court by a deranged Graf fan, and in two years Capriati will become a cautionary tale, but in this moment, both represent tennis’s emerging new star: the teenage girl.”

My rating: 4.0/5.0   Goodreads: 3.28/5.0

Review: Weiss balances the two sides of her narrative well. She presents a heart-aching portrait of what it was like to be a teenage girl, vulnerable and in desperate need of approval. It is also an open-eyed portrait of her tennis coach, Gary Wilensky, a man that she once had great affection for but now understands as a predator. She isn’t sympathetic to Wilensky—as the scope of his crimes become clear throughout the story it becomes more or less impossible to be—but she’s honest about the appeal he had as a coach and mentor when she was young, using the evidence of her experience to reinforce the factual narrative about how Wilensky operated as a child predator. It can feel rambling in places, but the two narrative threads coalesce into a surprising and powerful conclusion. 

The audiobook, narrated by Brittany Pressley, is full of personality. 

Read-alike: For a similar mix of memoir and true crime, try We Keep the Dead Close - Becky Cooper

[morgan--reads]

The Pisces - Melissa Broder

Summary: After her career and relationship hit rock bottom, Lucy’s sister invites her to housesit in LA for the summer. While participating in group therapy for love addiction and going on terrible Tinder dates, Lucy meets a strange but alluring man who she only sees swimming in the ocean at night. 

Quote: “Was it ever real? The way we felt about another person? Or was it always a projection of something we needed or wanted regardless of them?”

My rating: 2.0/5.0   Goodreads: 3.30/5.0

Review: This review contains spoilers. 

No book where the heroine kills a dog through negligence is going to win me over. Dominic, her sister’s sweet dog, is the only fatality but Lucy treats everyone in her who isn’t a man showing her sexual attention terribly. That’s the point, of course, but besides a realistic portrait of what the need for male attention does to some women, I don’t really know what this book is saying. The moment where Lucy realizes the danger that Theo’s love presents a danger to her—mermaids have a habit of drowning their lovers—is a powerful one, but I don’t know that Lucy’s ultimate rejection of death demonstrates real growth. Thought the sex scenes are compelling, both the mermaid element and the Sappho element are underutilized and, though the book has a unique premise, it feels like a lot of the worst kind of literary fiction—unpleasantness and unkindness without meaning.

[morgan--reads]

I Never Promised You a Rose Garden - Mannie Murphy

Summary: Murphy explores both the queer and hate-filled cultures and histories of Portland, Oregon in this work of graphic non-fiction. 

Quote: 

My rating: 4.0/5.0  Goodreads: 3.57/5.0

Review: Powerful and disturbing, the blue-wash art pairs perfectly with the drifting, melancholy story. Murphy uses the short life and death of River Phoenix as an unexpected jumping off point to explore cruising culture, drugs, and white supremacy, but the main character is the city of Portland itself. The picture painted is a bleak one, and the tragedies of the city are clearly personal to Murphy.

[morgan--reads]

People from My Neighborhood - Hiromi Kawakami

Summary: A series of vignettes documenting life in a small surreal town. 

Quote: “Even the smallest hole is enough to send a balloon spiraling to the ground. The falsification of memory is like that. All it takes is one individual who remembers the truth, said Romi, for the whole edifice to collapse.”

My rating: 4.0/5.0  Goodreads: 3.54/5.0

Review: Gently surreal and warmly non-judgemental, these bite-sized stories are rarely extraordinary in their own right, but build up a picture of interlocked community using anecdotes that manage to be very human despite the surrealist twist to most of them. Sometimes the stories are too unmoored in time—they take place over decades and jump back and forth—but that makes sense for such a collection.

[morgan--reads]

How the Word is Passed - Clint Smith

Summary: An examination of how the history of slavery is taught—or not taught—at cultural heritage sites. 

Quote: “The history of slavery is the history of the United States. It was not peripheral to our founding; it was central to it. It is not irrelevant to our contemporary society; it created it. This history is in our soil, it is in our policies, and it must, too, be in our memories.”

My rating: 4.5/5.0  Goodreads: 4.72/5.0

Review: Smith combines beautiful writing and clear analysis to paint a nuanced picture of how cultural heritage organizations deal with the history of slavery. Every chapter is rooted in Smith’s own experience of a site and the people who work and visit there. Smith is a clear-eyed, but compassionate observer and he presents a very human view of the successes and failures of education at these sites. From Monticello to Angola prison to the House of Slaves, each chapter presents a deeply personal experience that is used as a base for well-researched and compelling historical discussion.

The audiobook, read by the author himself, is absolutely fantastic.

[morgan--reads]

The Roommate - Rosie Danan

Summary: Cautious east coast socialite Clara Wheaton throws caution to the wind to join her crush at a house in LA only to find that he’s leaving for a tour with his band. While he’s gone, he’s sublet his room to Josh, whom Clara soon discovers is a famous porn star. Frank discussions about sex and pleasure soon turn into a business idea, but they also spark something more. 

Quote: “Women need this. No. Women deserve this. Women need to know that their pleasure matters.”

My rating: 3.0/5.0  Goodreads: 3.57/5.0

Review: Fun, but a bit of a mess, this book is trying to do too much at one time. Trying to tackle stigma around sex work, class differences, the evils of the porn industry, advocating for women’s pleasure, and the burden of family expectations is difficult to do while maintaining a light-hearted sexy romance. Clara and Josh have chemistry, the sex scenes are proof of that, but there’s too much distracting from their romance to really root for their happy ending.

[morgan--reads]

Other Russias - Victoria Lomasko 

Summary: A portrait of those living on the social and political margins of Russian society.

Quote: 

My rating: 3.5/5.0  Goodreads: 4.27/5.0

Review: Simple and effective, this graphic novel clearly showcases the voices and lives of ordinary Russians. Lomasko’s art is perfect for its task, evocative and full of personality. However, while hearing the stories of Russians outside of the mainstream—including LGBTQ Russians, immigrants, political dissenters, and sex workers—is valuable and interesting, the collection doesn’t add up to more than a sum of its parts. There’s no overarching point that Lomasko is driving home, which keeps the book as not much more than an interesting read.

Read-alike: Though in a completely different format, Svetlana Alexievich’s Secondhand Time takes a similar documentary-style approach to the Russian people.

[morgan--reads]

The Sunset Years of Agnes Sharpe - Leonie Swann

Summary: When the group of seniors living at Sunset Hall receive a visit from the police about a murder, they’re relieved when the murder in question is different than the one they’ve just committed. However, when it turns out that both murders were committed using the same gun, they’re drawn into the investigation. 

Quote: “I’m watching you! was what the gun was saying. I know what you’re up to! Maybe it was even saying: You’re next!”

My rating: 4.0/5.0  Goodreads: 3.52/5.0

Review: The strengths of this book are its unique point-of-view and its delightful cast of characters. Agnes is cynical, funny, and smart, and she also suffers from moments of disassociation and deafness that complicate her ability to solve the crime. Her fellow residents of Sunset Hall also have quirks born from old age, and all of them have skill sets that make them well-suited to solving crimes. The mystery becomes easy to solve relatively early on, but the investigation is fun and interesting every step of the way due to the charming, quite ruthless group of elderly people solving it. 

[morgan--reads]

The Water Cure - Sophie Mackintosh 

Summary: The three sisters Grace, Lia, and Sky have been raised in total isolation from men other than their father, taught to fear men and the outside world. One day, after their father disappears, two strange men and a boy wash up on their shore, asking for help. 

Quote: “I understand that he is trying to shame me for my need, but unfortunately for him and for me I am totally shameless in this regard, I will demonstrate my need over and over for anyone who asks. I would take my strange and incapable heart out of my chest if I could, display it, absolve myself of responsibility.”

My rating: 3.5/5.0  Goodreads: 3.25/5.0

Review: Like Mackintosh’s other work, Cursed Bread, this story centers on the desire for love and affection and Lia’s longing for it suffuses the book. The generally sinister atmosphere of the island in combination with that longing creates a compelling mood, but the details of the story don’t often hold up to serious scrutiny. This is very much a vibes-based story. It isn’t clear whether or not this takes place in a near-future or alternate world or if the girls have just been led to believe in a very different reality. The uncertainty unbalances, sometimes in an interesting way and sometimes in an irritating one.

Content warning: abuse, self-harm