The Thumbed Page

Finding lovely worlds and adventures all around me.                                                   bookstagram @thethumbedpage

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Review: One by One by Ruth Ware

REVIEW: One by One by Ruth Ware, 3/5 stars. Everyone knows Ruth Ware is on fire when it comes to thrillers…but is her latest chilly nightmare worth the hype? I think so! This book cuts through like many of other of Ware’s thrillers – it has buttery soft prose that allows readers to glide through the pages. Also, like other of Ware’s works, there is a unique tech proponent…in this case Snoop, a…

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Review: Three Women

REVIEW: Three Women by Lisa Taddeo 5/5 Stars. Thank you @AvidReaderPress for this review copy. Women having complicated sexual histories is nothing new to many readers…of fiction. However, this is one of the first time where the real life stories of women were not told through the lens of their motherhood, their wifehood, their sisterhood, their career, or their struggle. Instead, Taddeo reports…

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Review: Chasing the Scream

REVIEW: Chasing the Scream by Johann Hari 3/5 stars. Chasing The Scream, published in 2016, was often overshadowed by Dreamland by Sam Quinones. As someone deeply interested in the way America deals with addiction, I was excited to dig into this book. Although Chasing the Scream covers a wider geographical area, exploring approaches to drug addiction and drug laws from around the world, it does…

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Review: Beach Read

REVIEW: Beach Read by Emily Henry, 5/5. Beach Read is the exact book I needed to liven up my end-of-summer blues. This summer, it’s safe to say, has been unlike any other and quite challenging. That being said, reading this with my book club helped me grow as a reader and remember that, no matter what, sunshine should always be enjoyed. Tess a few years ago would have rolled her eye at this…

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The Appointment by Katharina Volckmer

REVIEW: The Appointment by Katharina Volckmer 3/5. Thank you so much, @AvidReaderPress, for the digital review copy. This book is easily one of the strangest I’ve read in 2020, so I’ll let the blurb give you an overview: “Sarah, the German-born, London-based 30-something narrator, opens the book by relating her sexual fantasies of Hitler to Dr. Seligman, her Jewish gynecologist. As Seligman…

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Review: When No One is Watching

Review: When No One is Watching

“Rear Window meets Get Out in this gripping thriller from a critically acclaimed and New York Times Notable author, in which the gentrification of a Brooklyn neighborhood takes on a sinister new meaning…” Sounds like a great quote…but is it worth the hype? I would say it, more or less, is! I really felt the themes of Get Out – the confusion, the uncertainty, the self doubt, and the racial…

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Review: The Hierarchies

Our guide throughout The Hierarchies, set in the seemingly semi-neat future where robots have become a part of everyday life, is Sylv.ie. Sylv.ie is a sentitent sex robot who works her way through ‘life’ and dealing with the robot/human divide. In a heartwarmingly human way, she soon develops deep curiosity about the small world that surrounds her. Her ‘Husband’, the man who bought her, keeps her…

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Review: The New Me by Hallee Butler

*REVIEW* The New Me by Hallee Butler, 5/5. The New Me presents an almost haltingly normal plot – a temp trying to become a full time hire at a job she hates but feels like she *needs* to do, part of a long line of things she *needs* to do but seemingly doesn’t want to. As the pages and the days pass her failures continue to grow which gives rise to a voice in her head that becomes wholly…

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Review: The Book of Koli

REVIEW: The Book of Koli by M.R. Carey, 4/5. Thank you Netgallery & Orbit for the review copy!

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I went into The Book of Koli by M.R. Carey nearly blind, and I suggest all others do the same. In that spirit, I’m going to keep my review as spoiler free as possible. Koli, in addition to being our main character, is also our teacher. Unlike other fantasy novels that invest in broad…

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Review: A Woman is No Man

A Woman is No Man rushes you quietly into the corners of the lives of conservative Arab women in America, specifically New York. We focus on Deya, a young high school girl with her parents mysteriously absent, who is beginning the courting process and wanting to find herself despite the pressures out upon her. On the flip side, we experience the world 10+ years earlier through her mother’s eyes,…

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Review: The Whisper Man

The Whisper Man Review, 3/5 stars.

⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀ The Whisper Man was one of those #bookstagram reads for me. After seeing it, and the author Alex North, so frequently featured by some of my favorite reviewers, I had to give this multi-generational father/son unlikely search for a child predator serial killer a try. However, although the plot was incredibly engaging and included several…

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Review: Melmoth by Sarah Perry

Review: Melmoth by Sarah Perry, 3/5 stars.

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Have you ever really, really wanted to love a book? But…couldn’t? That’s how I feel about Melmoth. Perry’s The Essex Serpents became one of my favorite reads shortly after reading it and I had high hopes for her next novel, Melmoth. Melmoth covers the myth of Melmoth, a dark-robe wearing woman who haunts those guilty of complicity and…

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Review: The Poison Thread

Review: The Poison Thread by Laura Purcell, 4/5 stars. In this gothic horror novel with an ending reminiscent of The Turn of the Screw, Purcell tells the story of two very different ladies – 25 year old, wealthy Dorothea Truelove and imprisoned, impoverished, and abused 16 year old, Ruth Butterham. In alternating chapters the lives of these two women tangle and thread themselves into a tale so…

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In Pain: A Bioethicist’s Personal Struggle with Opioids

Review: In Pain: A Bioethicist’s Personal Struggle with Opioids, 4/5. There are a lot of books about the opioid crisis – Dreamland, Fentanyl Inc, and Dopesick to name a few. While many offer second hand accounts and interviews, but In Pain offers a rare, in my mind, first hand account about how Travis Rieder, a professor at Georgetown and Johns Hopkins, dealt with America’s broken pain management…

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Review: The Memory Police

The Memory Police Review, 3.5/5 “A heart has no shape, no limits. That’s why you can put almost any kind of thing in it, why it can hold so much. It’s much like your memory, in that sense.”― Yōko Ogawa, The Memory Police

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The Memory Police whisks the reader away to an unnamed island off an unnamed coast where only one thing is constant: objects disappear. First, we see small…

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Review: Foe

The novel opens with the reader meeting  Junior and Henrietta. The couple seems to be quite caring and live a comfortable, yet solitary life, on their farm. This farm is quite a ways out from the city and so when one day they get a knock on their door by an unexpected visitor their world changes forever. This visitor has announced that Junior has been randomly selected to travel far away from the…

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Review: Ghost Wall

Ghost Wall, a slim tome from Sarah Moss, begins in the wilds of the north of England with a scene that is ripe with terror but seems far back into the past – before written language, before the comforts of modernity, and a time deeply mired in superstition. However, in Ghost Wall the past rarely stays in the past. For two weeks, Silvie and her family are joining an anthropology course that is set…

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