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wirewrappedlily

wirewrappedlily

Joined July 2018

review
wirewrappedlily
Pickpick

I am going to have to read this one a few times, but that‘s also to be expected when you‘re reading a full decimation of a principle that‘s been engrained in every part of your life. Read it. Please. It‘s hard and you may not agree with the politics, but that does not make it wrong, either.

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wirewrappedlily
Pickpick

It‘s painful, but utterly necessary. Beautiful and hopeful; and this is a dive into an extremely important change of perspective that ought to inspire.

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wirewrappedlily
River of Teeth | Sarah Gailey
Pickpick

Absolutely fantastic. A good, wild romp. I particularly recommend this as a palate cleanser if you‘ve been in a rut. It‘s fast, it‘s tense, but it‘s still fun.

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wirewrappedlily
All the Crooked Saints | Maggie Stiefvater
Pickpick

Mediative but enthralling all at once. I didn‘t know how much I needed a miracle before this. Now I wonder what form mine would take.

3 likes1 stack add
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wirewrappedlily
These Fleeting Shadows | Kate Alice Marshall
Pickpick

Bit of a slow starter with the kind of real-world tension that makes me want to walk away in shared discomfort, only to very vibrantly turn into the kind of horror Kate Alice Marshall does best. Very worth the read.

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wirewrappedlily
Pickpick

Wonderfully informative and entertaining, definitely a pick for a bunch of info to delight your friends and alarm your family members.

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wirewrappedlily
Harmony Black | Craig Schaefer
Pickpick

A wild ride, and a pleasure.

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wirewrappedlily
The Book of Cold Cases | Simone St. James
Pickpick

Straddles the line between gripping true crime and a ghost story dark and dreary enough that there has to be a deeper story and more answers.

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wirewrappedlily
Pickpick

Delightful, poignant, and mouthwatering.

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wirewrappedlily
Truly Devious: A Mystery | Maureen Johnson
Mehso-so

I will be continuing to the sequel, but this one was a bit of a slog until the last quarter or so. Not for someone as prone to secondhand embarrassment as I am.

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wirewrappedlily
The Eyre Affair: A Novel | Jasper Fforde
Pickpick

An old favourite I can keep going back to. Wonderfully absurd, and as The New York Post so aptly put it: when it comes to Jasper Fforde, “don‘t ask, just read it.”

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wirewrappedlily
Pickpick

Possibly the best remedy for someone trying and struggling with positivity.

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wirewrappedlily
Our Last Echoes | Kate Alice Marshall
Pickpick

Gloriously creepy and weird. I‘m desperate for more of this series.

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wirewrappedlily
Pickpick

Very informative, but very enraging.

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wirewrappedlily
Ghosts of Gotham | Craig Schaefer
Pickpick

Kind of a slow start, but well worth it.

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wirewrappedlily
To Catch a Killer | Sheryl Scarborough
Mehso-so

Unfortunately you can pretty much skip half the book, as the outcome is super-predictable. But it is kinda cute, in a Nancy-Drew-with-an-attitude kind of way.

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wirewrappedlily
Necromancing the Stone | Lish McBride
Pickpick

Even better than the first, balancing light-heartedness with enough emotion to make it feel more authentic than the original. You do have to read the first to get the second, but it‘s well worth it.

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wirewrappedlily
The Vanishing | Wendy Webb
Pickpick

Eerie and tense, with a classic horror-trope of an unreliable narrator, whose unreliability becomes more and more questionable, particularly in the end.

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wirewrappedlily
Pickpick

Very dark humour, and just a little too fast-paced in my opinion: Getting to the conclusion felt like we skipped over all consequences for how we got there.

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wirewrappedlily
The Darkling Bride | Laura Andersen
Pickpick

Pretty good, though not particularly creepy. Listened to the audiobook, so the narrative was a little muddled for me when time periods changed, and some things were a little heavy-handed when it came to allusions of the story, but not bad brain candy.

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wirewrappedlily
The Scholar | Dervla McTiernan
Pickpick

This was a good ride, though it stuck a little with me how mindlessly juvenile things were at times. Yes, more than likely a fair-on depiction of a cop transferring to a new precinct when that precinct is questionable, but by the third time I want to box one the garda‘s ears for being as dumb as a bag of rocks just for the sake of being contrary, it got a little old.

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wirewrappedlily
Mehso-so

Quite familiar if you‘ve read more of Webb‘s material, but creepy nonetheless. Then again, I may have a bias towards finding terrifying little girls creepier than other would.

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wirewrappedlily
Pickpick

A teensy bit predictable, but still good enough that I‘m going to read the sequel.

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wirewrappedlily
The Ruin | Dervla McTiernan
Mehso-so

This is a good read, if you can handle the claustrophobia of the antagonist being in a position of quite a bit of power, with a conspiracy to back them up. I am going into the sequel hoping that it won‘t perpetuate the cliffhanger, but I‘m iffy about it.

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wirewrappedlily
Pickpick

Creepy enough to keep me up until the end.

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wirewrappedlily
The Sun Down Motel | Simone St. James
Pickpick

Simone St. James is definitely a great supernatural-mystery author, and between this, and Broken Girls, I am on the edge of my seat for her next entry into the genre. While I will admit I did pick up on her twist sooner than I would have liked, it was still an worthwhile read/listen.

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wirewrappedlily
Pickpick

Wonderful and beautifully dark. Reading the description last night, I ended up with nightmares (I was far too young when I first watched The Ring), but this book is not the thing of nightmares, really: it‘s twisted and dark, but the heart of it is beautiful.

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wirewrappedlily
Playing with Fire | Derek Landy
Pickpick

I laughed for the first time in ages. Definitely worth the read/listen.

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wirewrappedlily
Skulduggery Pleasant | Derek Landy
Pickpick

This was surprisingly delightful. I was a little shaky on it at first, as there is a bit of home invasion at the beginning and I have issues around that, but once I got through that part, it gripped me hard enough that I couldn‘t stop.

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wirewrappedlily
The Broken Girls | Simone St James
Pickpick

Holy shit, I loved this book. It‘s creepy without being over-done, and a whodunnit in a suspension of time as the two timelines unfold. It‘s tense without being overdrawn, and its element of the supernatural is tantalizing even though the logic of the narrative doesn‘t give it the power to cast full doubt. Definitely read it.

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wirewrappedlily
Pickpick

Great for teenage murderinos. It did have a tiny bit of drag, but the creepier blips of possible threat were peppered in nicely.

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wirewrappedlily
Panpan

Predictable, and heavily reliant on gross-out horror instead of a good story. Disappointing.

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wirewrappedlily
Relic | Douglas J Preston
Pickpick

Creepy, sardonic, and wonderfully terrifying. An absolute must for any fan of both crime and horror.

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wirewrappedlily
Horrorstr | Grady Hendrix;
Mehso-so

Genuinely freaky, but I can‘t say I actually enjoyed the ride.

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wirewrappedlily
From Here to Eternity | Caitlin Doughty
Pickpick

Good grief did this kick up my wanderlust with a vengeance. Beautiful, interesting, and deliciously morbid.

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wirewrappedlily
Pickpick

I loved this. Macabre, but beautifully so.

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wirewrappedlily
The Martian | Weir, Andy
Pickpick

I am a huge nerd, and I wear that title with pride. This book was wonderful, and I don‘t think I‘ve laughed as hard in a long time as I did reading this.

5 likes1 stack add
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wirewrappedlily
The Hunting Party | Lucy Foley
Pickpick

Not a terrible whodunnit, only made better by the mystery not only of the identity of the killer, but also of the identity of the victim. Though I did see who the victim was likely to be, the book is set up in such a way that you have rather too much of a wealth of choices for who the corpse will turn out to be, let alone who the murderer is.

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wirewrappedlily
The Lady Rogue | Jenn Bennett
Pickpick

This was a romp that just about harkens back to The Mummy (1999), with just enough magic and mayhem to add some kick to the wild adventure through the Carpathian Mountains. I listened to the audiobook, but I enjoyed it so much I‘ve ordered an actual copy.

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wirewrappedlily
Bailedbailed

I‘ll start this off bluntly: by the midway point, I skipped the end in order to get to the point of the main character finally dying. At its heart, this would be an interesting commentary on how one views the world and just how unreliable our narration on that world can be, but for a horror, there was way too much time spent navel-gazing on this, and nowhere near enough actual suspense/scare.

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wirewrappedlily
Imaginary Friend | Steven Chbosky
Mehso-so

This one came up in my recommendations list, and it was enticing enough that I decided to give it a shot, first as an audiobook, then as a paper copy from my library. I absolutely can‘t recommend this one as an audiobook, because it does get into some grammatic visuals that don‘t quite make it through narration in my opinion. And, overall, if you don‘t have a yen towards the Christian doctrine, it‘s not that great a read.

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wirewrappedlily
The Girl in Red | Christina Henry
Pickpick

I will start with the warning that this book is not for the faint of heart; but anyone who has read any of Christina Henry‘s remixed fairytales would likely start the same way. This is the gritty reality, even with the fairytale twist, and if you are looking for a brightly lit path to Grandma‘s house, then give this book a miss. But if you wonder what happens down those roads less travelled, then this is a book for you.

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wirewrappedlily
The Elementals | Michael McDowell
Pickpick

A great take on a twisted ghost story. In the first few chapters, I wasn‘t sure if I would get through it, but it somehow managed to catch me and keep me. Definitely worth a read.

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wirewrappedlily
Raven King | Maggie Stiefvater
Pickpick

To be completely frank, I read this entire series over the course of about five days, and I have neither showered nor gotten a lot of sleep, but it is over and I almost screamed (at five in the morning) when I was through. 10000%, if you have a weakness for myth, magic, and/or Y/A lit, this is a must read.

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wirewrappedlily
The Haunted Forest Tour | Jeff Strand, James Arthur Moore
Pickpick

Pretty good spooky story. Very gruesome, and plenty gory (I am not squeamish under any circumstances, but it did make me cringe a few times), and it does suspense pretty well. Definitely a good pick for a fan of watching Jurassic Park after a long day (just to prove that, as bad as your day was, it‘s not as bad as theirs).

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wirewrappedlily
Famous Last Words | Katie Alender
Pickpick

This is a solid ghostly whodunnit, I have to admit. I have read some recommendations saying that the only fully-fleshed character is the main character, but to that I have to pose the challenge: how deeply did you care to see into those around you as a teenager? Keeping that in mind, this is a pick.

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wirewrappedlily
The Stranger Diaries | Elly Griffiths
Mehso-so

Not a bad whodunnit, but the twist is a little...trite? It was sprinkled with enough misdirection for me to get my hackles up over the overdone tropes typical of murder mysteries. I‘m not panning this book simply because it was not quite as far into the tropes as I‘d feared (but it is a close thing, because it‘s really damn trope-y).

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wirewrappedlily
The Bone Houses | Emily Lloyd-Jones
Pickpick

I have made a grave mistake. I haven‘t slept in two days. And now I‘ve started this book I‘m a little less than halfway through and stopping is not an option. #badlifechoicegoodreadingmaterial

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wirewrappedlily
Kill Creek | Scott Thomas
Bailedbailed

If it would be plausible that your only strong-female-character would tear out your spinal cord through your throat and then make you floss with it for your portrayal and over-sexualization of her, then you may want to...not try to write female characters? Like, ever? Maybe give up the writing and just have ghostwriters who can take your ideas and make it so I don‘t have to take a silkwood shower for the violence I want to be wrought upon you?

batsy Omg! Thank you. I hated this aspect of the book & it baffles me that so many positive reviews just ignore that. 4y
1 like1 comment
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wirewrappedlily
Rules for Vanishing | Kate Alice Marshall
Pickpick

I fucking loved this book! Like, I have been in such a rut for the last year when it comes to what I‘ve been reading; this, I could not put down and did not have to talk myself into continuing. It was creepy and thrilling and just the right amount of loose ends to make me absolutely voracious for more. If you love a good ghost story, pick this book.