pickAgatha,an author with a smash debut novel, is struggling to write her follow-up. Her husband gifts her a train ticket from Toronto to Montreal so she can write in peace. When the track breaks down part way through the journey and a fellow passenger dies, Agatha is less worried about her book and more about survival. An easy read with a decent twist. Thanks to NetGalley and Poisoned Pen Press for the ARC.
pickI really loved this one. At first it was like any other fantasy; beckoning us to take a closer look at this train, its staff, and passengers. But don‘t look too closely at the passing landscape. It was dreamlike. The idea of being stuck on a train in the middle of nowhere, with an ever-changing landscape with unknown creatures on the prowl, sounds terrifying. But then it turns ethereal and whimsical, full of magic. The underlying theme is greed…⬇️
“We leave new life in our wake; young vines curling around ancient houses; new shoots stirring in the soil; flora and fauna not found in any of the natural histories so far written. We leave you to find ways to live alongside it, to make the choice that faces us all—whether to turn away from the changes, to fight, to flee; or whether to welcome them in.”
“Within all things, a striving to achieve a more perfect form.”
“…though the crow is a much maligned bird—a creature cannot be good or evil, not like man, who is born good and pure, who must learn evil.”
“This is why we have our rituals, she thinks. This is why they are needed—so that we can lose ourselves for a while.”
“…they take up the years of superstition, the ritual—boundaries have to be marked, after all, and what is it about a line that brings on the urge to leap over it?”
Gave myself a rest day cause it‘s been a crazy couple of weeks. Only the bare minimum for me today, and I think Luna and Sunny agree with my choices 🥰
“The human mind sees what it wants to, the Professor always says. We see faces in the bark of trees, in wallpaper patterns, because we look for ourselves in everything.”
