Welcome to Litsy!

Oh boy. All right, first, I saw almost all the twists coming, so that was frustrating. The story was middling. Here‘s the BIG problem, though: A.L. Herbert is a pseudonym for a writer who is neither Black nor female, yet presents as such. I don‘t believe that every writer writing from a different perspective is guilty of cultural appropriation (it depends on how they do so and how they present themselves in the attempt) BUT 👇🏻

This is such a cool book. A family moves to a deserted house where a murder took place years before. A sex obsessed father, a mother who tries to save their marriage and their smart lovely kid, who is intrigued by the murder. More characters are introduced as is the sleepy town of Broken River, almost ghost town like. The setting, the atmosphere, the characters, the plot, the genre bending: it‘s all so good!!

Pic: Rabat, Morocco

A fun epistolary murder mystery, that slowly reveals everything you need to solve the puzzle yourself. Told mostly through emails and whats app messages, ‘The Appeal‘ has a double meaning. Both as a fund raising effort for a poorly child, and for the efforts to release the wrongly convicted murderer of the late revealed victim. Clever and witty but takes commitment. It‘s not short, and there‘s a LOT of characters! But I found it worth the effort.