The Dark Bones - Loreth Anne White

The Dark Bones - Loreth Anne White

This book had everything I didn't know I wanted in a thriller.  Romance elements?  Yes.  Small town atmosphere?  Yes. Police protagonist who follows the rules and isn't some sort of hotshot savant?  Yes.   The Dark Bones is a story about Detective Rebecca North who returns to her small hometown when her father is found dead of an apparent suicide.  Rebecca isn't so sure and starts her own investigation with the help of her hometown connections who, like any small town, are all interconnected - including Ash Haugen, her high school boyfriend who she left behind in the town but never in her heart.  Who can she trust?  What happened to her father?  Is this connected to darker events of the past?  

This is the second book in the Dark Lure series (which is a fact I didn't realize at the time of my reading).  However, after reading the description of book 1 in the series (A Dark Lure), the books take place in the same universe and characters but not the same plot.  Reading The Dark Bones did spoil the ending of A Dark Lure but I didn't feel like I was missing out on any significant details.  The only part of The Dark Bones that was strange upon reflection and with the knowledge that this was a series was how nonchalantly one character's very dark past was mentioned (I don't want to spoil specifics since that character was the focus of A Dark Lure).  I think reading the series in order would be good for world building, but not strictly necessary from a plot perspective.

My favorite part of this book was the underlying romance elements.  It wasn't overly sappy or romanticized, it felt very realistic and the internal struggle Rebecca had with her feelings vs her job was very well done.  The book is mostly from Rebecca's point of view but does flash back to 20 years prior as well as other characters in the present day.  I felt getting other points of view, mostly Ash's, was integral to building this atmosphere of romantic tension as it showed us the pushing and pulling from both sides.  We understood why Rebecca left all those years ago and also saw directly how Ash was impacted by her decision.  A lot happens in twenty years and it was refreshing to see two adults hashing out their past and not just falling into bed together immediately like nothing happened.  I thought the romance did a nice job of giving the reader a break in the tension and allowed more character development to happen.  Being able to see the other people in the town as well rounded people and not just faceless mannequins for Rebecca to question was key for my immersion in this story.

Honorable mention to a favorite part goes to the small town setting.  As someone who grew up in a small town and then moved to a city for college and remained, I could empathize with Rebecca's feelings of both being at home and being an outsider.  A lot can change in a small town in twenty years and it can be jarring to realize somewhere that always felt the same growing up actually changes so much while you're gone.  I'm not sure how this part would come across to someone who doesn't have first hand experience with small towns, but I found it very realistic and really heightened the story for me.

The part of the book I liked the least was one character - Ricky Simon.  Ricky is a 13 year old kid who ends up being a key piece in Rebecca's investigation.  To me, it felt like Ricky was the most amazing 13 year old to ever exist - there were many times when everything seemed to be at a standstill and then Ricky would remember something or do something that would jolt the plot forward. There's another 13 year old kid in the story who truly felt to me as being 13 so Ricky, in comparison, was even more unrealistic. It felt, at times, that White tried to make Ricky vulnerable and childish, but more times that not he was basically just a small adult who had all the answers.  White did a good job integrating him into multiple character's story lines to try and make him not seem so coincidental and I really liked his relationship with Ash, in particular.  However, I just felt, overall, that he ended up being the key to figuring out a lot of the big plot points in the story and I think the overall story would have been more interesting if some of those plot points were spread out a bit more to other characters.

The Dark Bones - Loreth Anne White
A great thriller with added romance and small town intrigue.
440 pages

The Sex Lives of Cannibals - J Maarten Troost

I can't remember the last time I read a non-fiction book that wasn't some sort of textbook.  I, by nature, am not a non-fiction person.  I live for fiction.  I believe that fiction is worth so much more than people give it credit for.  I even have a tattoo that says "Fiction is the truth inside the lie."  I am seriously all about the fiction.   Now I did not choose to read this out of the want to build character or expand my reading comfort zone.  I actually read this by accident.  I brought this with me to read at my office a few months ago when we had some downtime and on my breaks and lunch.  My mom sent this book to me after she read it and she really liked it.  I didn't look at the book in too much detail before selecting it.  It was a relatively small book, only 272 pages and was a paperback.  Easily transportable I figured.  However, once I started reading it, and discovered that it was a non fiction account of some guy and his wife living on a tropical island, I became quickly uninterested. 

The book stayed at work for no real reason other than I kept forgetting to put it back in my bag to bring home.  It sat on a shelf at my desk for a few months until one day last week when I had some time between meetings and I needed something that would help me kill time.  It was more out of necessity and boredom than anything else, but I'm glad I finally got around to reading it.  It was enjoyable enough that I'm considering putting the sequel (of sorts) on my to-read list.

The Sex Lives of Cannibals is the account of the two years J Maarten Troost and his girlfriend, Sylvia, spent living on a remote island in the South Pacific.  Sylvia was placed there for a job and Troost seemed to just tag along.  There isn't any real plot that carries the novel, just the chronological order of events that took place over the 2 years they spent on the island.  Where this book shines is the humor with which these scenarios play out. 

I have never been a fan of the tropical climes and after reading this book, I'm 500% sure I have no desire to be anywhere near the equator.  Troost is an excellent storyteller and I found myself flipping pages quite quickly to see what the next situation would bring.  As the book progresses, the reader can definately sense how Troost adjusts to island living.  My favorite part of this book was the matter of fact way that Troost recounts the events that happened.  I never got the sense that Troost thought he was better than the native people.  The chapters seemed to go:

1: this is a thing that happened

2: I was a bit confused

3: someone explained it to me

4: ah, i get it now

There were, of course, some comparisons to life back in America, but they became few and far between as the book progressed.

The only part I didn’t like about the book was when Troost went into the history of the island.  Now, I completely understand that this is 100% my personal preference.  I understand why the history was there.  I thought it did enhance the story and deepen the narrative, but I just didn't want to get away from the action of the story to delve into the history.  I would have preferred a bit less historical background, but I think that I wouldn't have this opinion if non-fiction was my go-to genre.  In any case, I skimmed most of the historical parts of the book and then continued on my way.

In the end, I thought this was a fun and quick read and it made me think about some of the everyday luxuries that we in the developed world take for granted.  I don't think I could ever do what Troost did, but I'm glad he took the time to write about it. 

The Sisters Brothers by Patrick deWitt

The Sisters Brothers – Patrick deWitt

You should read this book.  Seriously.  This book is freaking fantastic.  To be completely honest, I finished reading this book about 10 months ago and the only thing I can remember is how much I liked it.  This is the story of two brothers who are hired guns in the Wild West  and it is pretty much exactly what you think.  Lots of gun play, lots of tension, lots of horses.   What makes this story different, however, is that one of the brothers is having an internal conflict and is

My favorite part of this book is the amount of snarky-ness in it.  I grew up watching Clint Eastwood westerns and was really expecting this book to be that kind of dry, serious, very tense read.  However, there were more than a few times that I laughed out loud at a line or situation.  The humor did a good job of breaking the tension that slowly builds as the story progresses.  The relationship between the brothers is crafted tremendously well.  I usually have a fear when a story has two strong lead characters that it will be hard to follow or that I will have a problem being immersed in the story because the characters seem to be trying to one-up each other.  This was not the case in this story.  I found that each brother had a strong, but different personality.  One was definitely the protagonist of the story and I found that wonderfully helpful when it came to following the plot of the novel.  The two characters felt like brothers in the way they bantered and picked on each other and I found this aspect of the novel to be the most well-crafted.

The part of the book I liked the least is a bit difficult to explain without going into spoilers.  But, in general, there's a part in the book that delves into chemical science.  I just didn't find that aspect of the story at all believable.  Now, I didn't bother to do any research and investigate if that sort of technology would have actually been available back then so I can't say if it is factually inaccurate.  But what I can say is that it sort of abruptly appears in the story and I found that it didn't quite fit in the world that deWitt had created.  I feel like it fit in the plot alright.  I understood why it was there and there needed to be some sort of extra stuff revealed toward the end, but I'm not sure if the chemical stuff was the right choice.  

The Sisters Brothers – Patrick deWitt

A fun, a-typical, Western full of adventure, gun play, and snark.

325 pages

Gone Girl - Gillian Flynn

Why yes, it has been over a year since I last updated this blog.  I did finish two books in that time (only two! My middle school self would be ashamed) but I never got around to updating this with the reviews.  So here’s the first one: Gone Girl.

Gone Girl – Gillian Flynn

I would like to point out, first, that I finished this book before the movie came out and, second, that I have not seen the movie.  I’ve been horribly disappointed so many times by movie adaptations of books that I have stopped going to see them.  It seems no matter how much I temper my expectations it just never seems to help and I regret wasting 10.00 and two hours of my time. 

                But I digress…

I would characterize Gone Girl as a mystery-thriller.  On the day of Amy and Nick Dunne’s 5^th anniversary, Amy goes missing.  From the state the house was left in, possibly abducted.  And, as all we TV crime drama watchers know, the husband is always the prime suspect.  As the investigation unfolds in the small town in Missouri, the reader sees the happy façade of a young couple slowly crack and crumble.  But, the question remains, where is Amy?

I thoroughly enjoyed this book from beginning to end. It was a fast paced read for me and I couldn’t put it down.  It was just the book to get me back into wanting to read when I hadn’t touched a book in months.  The narrative switches point of view between Amy and Nick, which is a style I’ve always been a fan of.  In respect to this novel, I don’t think it would have been nearly as exciting as interesting if it wasn’t for the point of view changing.  The first half of the novel is set in the present in Nick’s chapters but in the past in Amy’s part.  The couple’s history is recounted through Amy’s chapters – from them meeting, falling in love, and their elegant life before moving to the Midwest.  When Amy’s story catches up with Nick’s in the present, about half way through, that’s where the twist in the plot occurs and the second half of the story is filled with tension as the reader follows the two parallel story lines.  The back and forth narrative structure really helps build this tension and keep the reader turning pages until the end.

The one thing I disliked about this novel was the ending.  Without going into too much detail (as this is a spoiler-free space) it felt like a deadline was approaching and Flynn needed to get the story wrapped up as quickly as possible.  In the last 20 pages or so, it felt like Flynn was getting all her little ducks in a row and then slapped a big bow on top and called it done.  I found it unsatisfying and felt like the ending didn’t do justice to the journey the characters had been on since page 1.  I would have preferred a sort of cliff hanger ending.  About 20 pages before the end there’s a huge plot event (this is real hard to describe without going into spoilers) and everything after that is just filler and lining the ducks up.  I would have preferred it if right after the big event, the story ended.  The relationships between all the characters in the novel are so complex and messy, it would have felt right to just leave the future up in the air and let the reader speculate.

Gone Girl – Gillian Flynn

A fast paced mystery thriller that will have you questioning how much you know about the people around you

415 pages

Divergent - Veronica Roth

First book of 2014 done within the first two weeks, a pretty good start to stay on track for the rest of the year.

This first book is Divergent by Veronica Roth, a dystopian novel about 16 year old Beatrice finding her place in the world.  In this world, society has been split into five different factions, each one with a core value that its people live by.  Each year, the 16 year olds of all factions decide what faction they will live with for their adult lives.  Some choose to stay in their home factions, while others choose a different path. 

One of the things I liked most about this book is the consistent dynamic between the different factions.  The five faction values are honesty, selflessness, bravery, intelligence, and peacefulness.  While the different factions live in different areas of the city, the children all go to school together until they reach 16 years old.  While in school, it seemed like the factions were more like cliques in the school.  However, once the teens chose which factions they would go with and the initiation began, the characters still stayed true, in one way or another, to their faction's belief system.  This made the many characters easier to distinguish from one another as well as give a sort of interpersonal hurdle for Beatrice to overcome.  While this is a dystopian novel and there are bigger problems in the world than just teenage drama, the tension between factions kept the book, for me, from getting too serious and kept it away from feeling like a long training montage portion of an action movie.  Also, it speaks to a deeper theme of the book that, no matter what your reasons are for leaving home, you always carry your past with you.  There were times in the book where Beatrice (who grew up in the selflessness faction) would have a gut reaction to a situation and would often say what she was feeling without thinking first and the other teens would make comments about how that is typical of someone from her faction to think that way.  And Beatrice makes those generalizations as well about other factions.  Overall, I found the faction basis of this world in this story to be interesting and was glad to see that it was, at later points in the book, used to further the plot and wasn't just used to insert clique drama into a dystopian world. 

Over all, I really enjoyed this book and it was a quick read.  However, I had a hard time moving past the point that this book felt extremely similar to the Hunger Games series.  I found myself drawing similarities between the two in the following ways:

1: Both are dystopian teen fiction set in a future United States
2: Both separate what is left of society into divisible sections with a clear explanation as to what each section of society is responsible for
3: Both feature a female protagonist who leaves her home and learns to fight
4: Both see the protagonist go from the underdog to the leader
5: Both have extensive use of technology that the protagonist has to fight against in order to survive

There were other similarities that jumped up in specific scenes, but the above five are the main ones that stuck with me and that I can mention without spoiling much.  This isn't to say that Divergent is just a copy of The Hunger Games, they discuss different themes and explore different aspects of their respective dystopian landscapes, but the similarities are there and they were just a little too distracting for my tastes.  And this could be because I just finished the second Hunger Games book about a month ago and haven't read anything in between.  I also thought maybe these are just the themes of the genre of dystopian fiction and this is a relatively new and trendy genre at the moment so it is getting a lot of attention.  I'm sure the same sort of general parallels could be drawn between two science fiction books or two detective fiction books.  It was just, for me, in this particular reading, the similarities were a bit distracting and took away from my immersion in the story.


Divergent - Veronica Roth

A fast paced, dystopian teen novel that holds your attention throughout the story.

487 pages

Rating: 4/5.  Everything I wanted from a dystopian teen novel with a few extra themes for thought that I didn't expect.

The Intimate Adventures of a London Call Girl - Belle de Jour

This book isn't exactly what you think it'll be.  I mean, it is the diary of a London call girl, detailing events in her personal and professional life.  But it is not erotica.  I'll admit, I thought this book was going to be along the same lines as 50 Shades of Gray, as in publicly acceptable erotic fiction with just enough plot to give it some backbone and keep it off the 'adult' shelves.  It soon became apparent that while there are explicit descriptions of equipment (both plastic and flesh) it was presented in a very factual way and wasn't overly, hardly at all actually, romanticized.  This makes sense, looking back on the premise of the book.  It is just a day at the office for Belle, so these encounters aren't particularly special.  The details get a little more steamy when it comes to her personal life, but still nothing too scandalous.  

This book is a memoir of an actual call girl who, from what I've gathered from Google, has moved on to being a full time author and speaker about sexy-time related topics.  While still working as a call girl, Belle started a blog and used it as a sort of diary, writing about her personal life, work life, and anything else that seemed worth writing about.  The blog was highly popular and a book deal was made.  There are six books in the series and the series has been made into a TV series that is actually how I heard about the books.  The series is pretty good, but they stepped up the sex content a bunch, which isn't surprising. 

Putting aside my initial confusion regarding the lack of steamy sex scenes I was expecting, I actually liked Intimate Adventures quite a lot.  I thought the characters were well done and I didn't have a hard time distinguishing between them, even though she would only use the first letter of their first name, which got confusing at times.  Belle was especially well developed, as can be expected.  There wasn't a whole lot of first person explanation of who she is as a person, which I liked.  The reader is pretty much just left to grab on to tidbits here and there about Belle's past and her personality.  Belle is sharp and funny and her voice is always present, even in the most mundane of circumstances.  The secondary characters aren't as well developed, but that's to be expected.  I think I just needed more scenes with them and Belle together to really get to know these other characters but I guess that's what books 2-6 are for.

At the beginning of the book, I thought that maybe I'd accidentally picked up the second book in the series because it seemed like I was missing some essential information.  There was missing back story to these characters and their relation to Belle, missing information that did eventually come through, but for about the first third of the book, every few entries, I was left with a feeling that I'd missed something important.  Also, I found the sparse diary entries a little off-putting.  I know that this is a memoir and mostly taken directly from Belle's original blog, but I wanted more.  There were times where there was a sudden shift in a relationship or some other big life event that I could tell happened in the time between entries, but that continuity issue never quite sat right.  I think my slight annoyance with this part is because I'm used to reading fiction where we would see whatever family drama unfold as it happens, or we would get a long, detailed diary entry.  Where as this memoir-diary style was very much dropping information into the readers' laps and then backing away and leaving the readers to put together these little puzzle pieces of information.  I'm not sure if this is just the way Belle writes or if she did it this way so as to not be super obvious about her identity.  In any case, it took some getting used to, but by about half way though, I was so wrapped up in the characters and developing relationships that the sparse diary entries stopped bothering me.

All my little nit picks aside, I thought this was a fun read.  It was something different than what I normally read, but I enjoyed trying something new.  It reads quick, is entertaining, and would be a perfect summer beach read.  I will be picking up the second book in the series for sure.

 The Intimate Adventures of a London Call Girl - Belle de Jour

Sexy summer beach read, a perfect guilty pleasure book.

288 pages

Rating: 3/5.  A bit lacking in plot , but fun nonetheless.

Oryx and Crake - Margaret Atwood

Full disclosure right from the beginning: I didn't finish this one and I'm ashamed.  I haven't not finished a book in years.  Usually, if a book sounds good enough for me to start reading, I finish it.  This was not one of those books.  I tried to finish it because I've heard good things about this book, about the author, and it seemed right up my alley.  However, it just wasn't working out. 


Oryx and Crake is a dystopian fiction  set after the fall of civilization.  It opens on a boy called Snowman who is living in the woods like Tom Hanks in Castaway.  No real shelter, scrounging around for scraps of food, hasn't bathed in ages, that kind of stuff.  The story of this fall of civilization is told through the flashbacks of Snowman, in which Oryx and Crake both play significant roles.  Snowman's father works at some sort of bio-engineering lab where they are trying to grow human organs inside pigs for easy harvesting and transplant options.  Snowman and his family live in the lab's compound area in order to keep out impurities (of what kind, I'm not exactly sure).  Eventually, his dad gets a new job, they move to a new compound, and that is where I stopped reading. 

I've been trying to read this book for the past month, a few pages here, a few pages there, but it just wasn't able to hold my attention.  I didn't find anything endearing about Snowman or the fall of this society.  I think the flashbacks are what killed the book for me.  I generally don't like stories told like that unless there is action in both times.  However, most of the flashbacks started when Snowman was thinking about something and when the flashback scene was over, nothing is different about Snowman.  And in the scenes when we're with him, he doesn't do much except wander around his little camp area.  After this going on for a third of the book, I was done.  It took me a month to read about 100 pages and I just couldn't force myself to read any more.

On the upside of things, I think that Margaret Atwood is a terrific writer.   She has great descriptions and the world that she created in this book was very detailed and well thought out.  I think I really would have liked this book if it was told either as the civilization fell, or if we just got the aftermath part with Snowman trying to survive.  But the back and forth wasn't working for me.

Oryx and Crake - Margaret Atwood

Give it a try, it didn't work for me, but I know lots of people who liked it.

376 pages

N/A rating for not finishing