The Doll's House - Review

Author: The Doll's House

Genre: Horror / Novella

Format: eBook

Pages: 98

Lisa Unger is one of the writers that I always had their books to my TBR, or library list, but for one reason or another, I never picked those books. There's no reason, I want to read them, it's why I add them to my TBR. For some reason I just never pick them. I don't know if it's an object pertinence thing where it's out of sight, out of mind, or something else. But the other day I was looking for quick, spooky reads to add to my TBR when I came across The Doll's House by Lisa Unger, I had just added another of her books, and I thought it perfect timing. 

I'm so glad that I added this book. I started Sunday after work, thought about it all day Monday at work, and devoured it before work on Tuesday. This was a wild ride for a book that is only 98 pages. So much is jammed back into this book, but it all flows together into a perfect story that keeps you on the edge of your seat. It's part a ghost story, part a story about how trauma shapes you and the decisions you make. 

It was beautiful, and I will definitely be picking up more of Lisa Unger's books.

What I really liked about The Doll's House was that it works as a short story. There is a clear beginning, middle, and end. All the questions have answers and you feel satisfied with how things are wrapped up. This is a full story, but it does feel like parts of this story were rushed. No major parts, the jump scares were on point, and everything that happened with Jules had my heart racing as I devoured her last couple of chapters with Kirin. But I would have loved to spend more on the mystery of it all, on Kirin's obsession, and on the ghost aspect of the story.

While this works as a novella, it also would have worked as a full-fledged novel. I would loved a deeper dive into Kirin's backstory with his story, and watching Scout and her new friends uncover it all. But, it would have been filler. On its own, how it stands, this book works and is great. It's spooky, said, and as a happy-for-now ending. It was a great way for me to test the waters with a new author because it was low risk, high reward. 

If you need a quick read this Spooky Season that is more thriller with a dash of spooky, get this one on your TBR!

HAPPY READING!!

Waiting on Wednesday

 

Can't-Wait Wednesday is a weekly meme hosted by Wishful Endings to spotlight and talk about the books we're excited about that we have yet to read. Generally, they are books that have yet to be released but don't have to be. It is based on Waiting on Wednesday, hosted by the fabulous at Breaking the Spine.

Over the last century, Betty Crocker has created thousands of well-tested, wonderful recipes, some especially that spark fond memories today, whether they were made by a grandparent, served at holiday meals, or were part of a trend of the time. In Betty Crocker Found Recipes, you’ll find these rediscovered vintage but timeless favorites. Some of these rare recipes were most frequently requested by lifelong Betty Crocker fans, which you'll see in the Found Lost Recipe features throughout the book. Others are ones that rose to the top of the Betty Crocker Test Kitchens recipe boxes over the years. And, during the search for favorite recipes to be included in this book, Betty Crocker fans shared stories of favorite recipes they’ve lost and couldn’t find—so the Betty Crocker Kitchens recreated them for the Recreated Lost Recipes features, along with the fans’ heartwarming memories behind them.

The comprehensive chapters are organized by occasion and course, from Holiday Celebrations, Memorable Main Dishes, and Warm from the Oven Breads, to Irresistible Cookies & Bars, and Better than Ever Desserts, and the specially curated recipes include nostalgic favorites like:

-Eggnog French Toast Strata with Cranberry Syrup
-Hush Puppy–Fried Chicken
-Beef Burgundy
-Coconut Chicken with Chutney
-Parmesan Bread Bowls
-Chocolate Buttermallow Cake
-Peachy Custard Squares
-Oatmeal Refrigerator Cookies
-Strawberry-Raspberry Fool

Betty Crocker Found Recipes shares these timeless, rediscovered recipes, with full nutritional information, for the next generation of home cooks and bakers to enjoy for years to come. These tasty dishes are lost no more!

Why I'm Waiting: I love cookbooks with older recipes. I always scour thrift stores for them. So I'm excited to see what Betty Crocker is going to put together.

HAPPY READING!!

New Release Tuesday

 

In the second volume of this middle-grade graphic novel series, our heroes search for the mysterious school of wizardry, but are thwarted at every turn by thick mist, winding woods and fearsome creatures!


Our heroes are lost.
Squire and Sir Kelton have promised to get Cade to the school of wizardry. Strangely though, the path they’ve taken has brought them into a bewildering, misty forest, rife with fearsome gnolls and a boisterous rival knight. To get them out, Squire tries every trick in the book, but books don't hold all the answers. Can he muster up his confidence, remember his duties, and find a way to escape the forest?

HAPPY READING!!

Cult Following - Review

Author: J.W. Ocker

Genre: Nonfiction

Format: Hardback

Pages: 272

J.W. Ocker is one of my favorite authors at the moment. I enjoyed his first two books (Cursed Objects and United States of Cryptids). So when I heard he had a new book coming out I smashed the keyboard to add it to my TBR, and when Quirk Book offered me a copy right before publishing day, I jumped at the chance.

One of my favorite genres is true crime, followed by my weird nonfiction books. Cult Following falls into both categories. It's a bit of true crime because most of these cults are hinky, and a lot weird because most of these cults, well I'm still confused about how anyone would follow them. It just seems so out there.

Yet here we are.

I will say I only knew maybe four of these cults, some only the bare facts, or one moment in their history. The rest of this book was completely new information to me. This makes books like this a lot more fun because I'm not reading about the same groups repeatedly. It made this even more of a roller coaster ride because that's exactly what it is.

A roller coaster ride. This went from one extreme to the next. Ocker starts us off nice and slow with some crazy cults but benign. Dangerous but not that dangerous, and that was about as chill as this book was. Because after that it was all downhill and each chapter jumped from one extreme to the next. 

Like after a couple of chapters I needed to take a break because holy crap. Holy crap. This was not something I could marathon through because I needed a break with something happy and shiny. Because holy crap. This was one of those books where you read something so extreme that you need to share it. Bless my roommate for dealing with me just unloading this book on her.

Holy crap.

I will say you can tell how much research and time that Ocker put into this. Thankfully the chapters are short, Ocker sticking to the pertinent information for each cult. Though he didn't hold back any punches, and thankfully his own opinion in places. Because honestly that little bit of humor was needed to break up the crazy.

This was an amazing read, and I'm so excited to add it to my J.W. Ocker collection. Cult Following was a wild ride cover to cover. If you are a true crime lover or an avid nonfiction fan, this one is for you! I cannot recommend these Ocker's books enough, he's three for three for me!

HAPPY READING!!

Cover Runway Sunday

  

They say you shouldn't judge a book by its cover, but we all know we do it. Sometimes the cover initially catches our eye, drawing us to give a book a closer look. It's the first thing we see, our first impression. Every Sunday I'm going to post some of my favorite covers of books coming soon!

Madeline Brimley left small town Georgia many years ago to go to college and pursue her dreams on the stage. Her dramatic escapades are many but success has eluded her, leaving her at loose ends. But then she gets word that not only has her beloved, eccentric Aunt Rose passed, but she's left Madeline her equally eccentric bookstore housed in an old Victorian mansion in the small college town of Enigma. But when she arrives in her beat-up Fiat to claim The Old Juniper Bookstore, and restart her life, Madeline is faced with unexpected challenges. The gazebo in the back yard is set ablaze and a late night caller threatens to burn the whole store down if she doesn't leave immediately.

But Madeline Brimley, not one to be intimidated, ignores the threats and soldiers on. Until there's another fire and a murder in the store itself. Now with a cloud of suspicion falling over her, it's up to Madeline to untangle the skein of secrets and find the killer before she herself is the next victim.

HAPPY READING!!

Mini Reviews

This was absolutely adorable! It's perfect for younger readers this spooky season and a lot of fun for older readers. It has a Wednesday Addams feel to it. This book is about being yourself and that sometimes it's okay to like the weird things and not fit inside the box. Because that weird thing makes you unique. 

BestGhost is a sample of a book that author C.J. Daley published to introduce to another book he's working on. And, if this was the introduction I'm all in. This was the perfect quick read this Spooky Season as two friends go into their town's most haunted house to prove, or disapprove in Boomer's case, that ghosts exist. Only they got more than they bargained for. I love that this has an open-ended ending. For a second I thought I knew how this was going to end, but I was wrong. That last little chapter turned everything on its head. If was the intro to what Daley is working on, he has my attention! 

HAPPY READING!!

Waiting on Wednesday

Can't-Wait Wednesday is a weekly meme hosted by Wishful Endings to spotlight and talk about the books we're excited about that we have yet to read. Generally, they are books that have yet to be released but don't have to be. It is based on Waiting on Wednesday, hosted by the fabulous at Breaking the Spine.

A

Enter the dark side of discover the monsters, witches, and nightmarish traditions behind one of the most celebrated holidays in the world When we imagine the origins of Christmas, we picture halcyon images of mangers, glowing fireplaces, and snow-blanketed winter hills. But the holiday is celebrated during the darkest time of year in the Northern Hemisphere—a season so dark it has given rise to the most outlandish traditions imaginable. In The Dead of Winter, Oxford-trained historian Sarah Clegg delves deep into the folkloric roots of Christmas in Europe, comparing their often-horrific past to the way they continue to haunt and entertain us now in the 21st century. Detailing the hideous masks and curling horns of "Krampus runs" in Austria, the fearsome horseheads of "hoodenings" in Southeast England, and the candle-crowned young witches of Finland's St. Lucy Festival, the author captures the wild revelry at heart of the winter madness.   In Clegg’s fascinating investigation, these strange, wonderful traditions are cast in their illuminating historical context. And the closer we get to the dark magic and bright enchantment described in The Dead of Winter, the more we start to see how fun it might be to let just a bit of the ancient darkness in.

Why I'm Waiting: I do love creepy holiday books, and this sounds like the perfect creep read next to our lit-up Christmas Tree.

HAPPY READING!!

New Release Tuesday

 

Faolan Kelly’s grandfather is dead. She’s alone in the world and suddenly homeless, all because the local powers that be don’t think a young man of sixteen is mature enough to take over his grandfather’s homestead…and that’s with them thinking Faolan is a young man. If she revealed that her grandfather had been disguising her for years, they would marry her off at the first opportunity.

The mayor finds a solution that serves everyone but Faolan. He hires a gunslinger to ship her off to the Settlement, a remote fort where social outcasts live under the leadership of His Benevolence Gideon Dillard. It's a place rife with mystery, kept afloat by suspicious wealth. Dillard's absolute command over his staff just doesn't seem right. And neither do the strange noises that keep Faolan up at night.

When Faolan finds the body of a Settlement boarder, mangled by something that can’t possibly be human, it’s clear something vicious is stalking the palisades. And as Settlement boarders continue to drop like flies, Faolan knows she must escape to evade the creature’s wrath.

HAPPY READING!!

Cover Runway Sunday

  

They say you shouldn't judge a book by its cover, but we all know we do it. Sometimes the cover initially catches our eye, drawing us to give a book a closer look. It's the first thing we see, our first impression. Every Sunday I'm going to post some of my favorite covers of books coming soon!

How Victorian male doctors used false science to argue that women were unfit for anything but motherhood—and the brilliant doctor who defied them

After Elizabeth Blackwell became the first woman to graduate from medical school, more women demanded a chance to study medicine. Barred entrance to universities like Harvard, women built their own first-rate medical schools and hospitals. Their success spurred a chilling backlash from elite, white male physicians who were obsessed with eugenics and the propagation of the white race. Distorting Darwin’s evolution theory, these haughty physicians proclaimed in bestselling books that women should never be allowed to attend college or enter a profession because their menstrual cycles made them perpetually sick. Motherhood was their constitution and duty.

Into the midst of this turmoil marched tiny, dynamic Mary Putnam Jacobi, daughter of New York publisher George Palmer Putnam and the first woman to be accepted into the world-renowned Sorbonne medical school in Paris. As one of the best-educated doctors in the world, she returned to New York for the fight of her life. Aided by other prominent women physicians and suffragists, Jacobi conducted the first-ever data-backed, scientific research on women's reproductive biology. The results of her studies shook the foundations of medical science and higher education. Full of larger than life characters and cinematically written, The Cure for Women documents the birth of a sexist science still haunting us today as the fight for control of women’s bodies and lives continues.

HAPPY READING!!

Library Haul

 

You know when you put books on hold at the library, but the hold line is long, so you need to remember about them? No, just me. Cool. Cool. Well, that just happened twice in the same week. I had forgotten that I had physical books on hold. Mostly because for a while I was reading a lot on my Kindle. However, past me figured I'd want these in physical form. So here we are. 

The upside is that one of these is in the vibe for Spooky Season, and the other is a good way to pivot from my book about cults and the creepy haunted house. So I've got that going for me. As well as TBR that spans several bookcases, piles, and a nook. I really wish the buying habit and the reading habit crossed over more. 

But, I'm looking forward to jumping into both of these! Hopefully tonight, after my shift. Because I shouldn't need to be at work all day. Maybe. Hopefully. My fingers are crossed!

HAPPY READING!!

October Spotlight Read

 

I've been a fan of Lish McBride for nearly a decade. Her books are fun and make me giggle. The Necromancer is my favorite series she's created, but I'm also excited when she has another book out. And wouldn't you know it, she's got a new one coming out in October!

Faolan Kelly’s grandfather is dead. She’s alone in the world and suddenly homeless, all because the local powers that be don’t think a young man of sixteen is mature enough to take over his grandfather’s homestead…and that’s with them thinking Faolan is a young man. If she revealed that her grandfather had been disguising her for years, they would marry her off at the first opportunity.

The mayor finds a solution that serves everyone but Faolan. He hires a gunslinger to ship her off to the Settlement, a remote fort where social outcasts live under the leadership of His Benevolence Gideon Dillard. It's a place rife with mystery, kept afloat by suspicious wealth. Dillard's absolute command over his staff just doesn't seem right. And neither do the strange noises that keep Faolan up at night.

When Faolan finds the body of a Settlement boarder, mangled by something that can’t possibly be human, it’s clear something vicious is stalking the palisades. And as Settlement boarders continue to drop like flies, Faolan knows she must escape to evade the creature’s wrath.

HAPPY READING!!