Chez Aloysius

I seem to be struggling with Anne Tyler at the moment...
I gave A Spool of Blue Thread a try but didn't get very far.
The opening chapter is one quite confusing conversation and then almost 50 pages of summary, skimming over about ten years in the history of a particular family.
I didn't connect with any of the characters and wasn't interested enough in their story to want to carry on.

Game Changer by Rachel Reid is the first in the book series that has recently garnered a lot of attention because of the TV adaptation of the second instalment - Heated Rivalry. I watched the show but was more interested in the Scott/Kip storyline than Shane/Ilya, so was delighted to discover that this first book is all about them.
I listened to the audiobook, which may not have been the best choice, because the narrator's attempt at Kip's Brooklyn accent wandered around Boston, Minnesota and Australia by turns, and his intonation choices for several of the more peripheral characters were rather off-putting in various ways.
I also couldn't envisage the actors from the TV show as the characters in the book, since they're described very differently and the voices were obviously not the same.
And, lastly, it was very disconcerting to have explicit sex scenes playing out through my headphones while I was collecting my medication from the pharmacy or buying toilet paper...
All that said, I largely enjoyed this book!
It was good to see this story play out in more detail and have all the gaps filled, and a lot of it was very sweet. It did start to drag a bit in the second half (I'm not prudish about explicit sex in books, but I do find it gets boring if it's not informed by the specific characters involved - and it wasn't really here) and I found some of the power dynamics a bit unsettling in places - but I liked where it ended up and I'm glad I gave it a try.
I don't know if I want to carry on with the series because the next two books are read by the same narrator - and I really didn't like how he portrayed Ilya when he turned up briefly in this one...


The Other Side of Happiness by Brock Bastian has a tagline on the front that says: Embracing A More Fearless Approach To Living. So, I was expecting an easy, self-help read. But it turned out to be much more academic and rooted in scientific study than I thought. It covers psychological responses to pleasure and pain, how overcoming adversity makes you more resilient, and the ways in which shared difficulties brings people closer together. It didn't contain anything that was particularly new to me - but it was interesting to read about the data behind all the theories, and it's always good to be reminded of stuff like this, which may run counter to your instinctive or learned approach to life.

What You Are Looking For Is In The Library by Michiko Aoyama is a collection of inter-connected short stories about people who visit a particular library in Tokyo, where the Librarian gives them guidance about how to improve their lives through book recommendations and bonus gifts of felted objects.
And it was fine.
Each story in the audiobook is told by a different narrator and I liked some more than others. The same was true of the main protagonists, as I connected to some more than others. I wasn't keen on a couple of the male protagonists - particularly in the way they reacted to the Librarian's size. And, while each story had its good points and I liked the overall message, they all felt a bit nothing-y.
I did like the way various characters turned up in more than one of the stories, especially when the protagonists of previous stories became part of how later protagonists changed their lives.
It was an easy listen, but not a book that's going to stay with me.

The Fox Wife by Yangsze Choo follows Snow, a fox spirit, and Bao, a private detective, who are tracking the same man across China and Japan in 1908. Overall, it's a complex, layered, involving tale about family connections, folktales and second chances.
The narrative is split between the two protagonists, with Snow's tale written in the past tense and Bao's tale in the present tense - and I couldn't figure out why this decision was made, since they take place at the same time.
Also, for most of the book, the chapters are very short (3-5 pages) - which is usually a technique for thrillers to increase the pace but, here, it actually has the opposite effect, since it makes it feel like we're not getting anywhere in either storyline. It felt very slow to me, and also a bit repetitive by the end.
I did love how the two stories eventually came together, though, and the ending was both surprising and satisfying in a way that made me glad I'd persevered and left a positive impression of the book in my mind.


Friends Like These by Kimberly McCreight is a thriller and those can easily go either way for me. It wasn't a great start, with eight different viewpoint characters, four different timelines and two different tenses (unevenly applied) - all a bit much. I also only really liked one of the characters (the detective) and even she felt overwritten in terms of her backstory and reactions to things.
But I was intrigued by the story - a group of rich university friends gathering in a remote house with lots of different secrets bubbling under the surface and one already dead and one missing before the book even started. And it did keep me reading (I finished it in three days) - though the main twist felt like it came out of nowhere and was quite annoying.
But the very end, with what happened to the detective, was great on multiple levels and thus edged it more into a positive than a negative review.


The Measure by Nikki Erlick is a thought experiment with the premise that, one day, everyone in the world wakes up to find a box on their doorstep, which contains a string showing how long their life will be. Moving on from that concept, it explores a lot of really interesting ideas about what would happen and how this would affect the world, along with following the individual stories of multiple characters, mostly based in New York.
I really liked a lot of the speculation here, especially when I would think, "But what about...?" and then the book would almost immediately answer that question.
But, at least for the first two thirds or so, it did feel much more like an intellectual exercise than a proper story, with the characters largely just tacked on top of the wider discussion of the ramifications of the situation. Every few chapters, it would introduce a new viewpoint character with a multi-page summary of their life up to receiving their box, and then later, another summary of their life since receiving their box, before folding them properly into the plot. This meant we got the first few months of life after the arrival of the boxes over and over again, and the reportage style made it feel more like a series of character studies than a layered story.
That said, things definitely got more emotive and more involving in the latter sections, with the narrative focusing more on direct action and interaction between the characters - and the end definitely got me in the feels on multiple levels. Though the epilogue did run like those text cards you get at the end of films based on a true story, where it lists what happened to the various people...

The Forever Home by Erica James seemed like a sure-fire win for me.
Second chances, found family, interesting female protagonists, a cute dog...
And for the first two thirds, I largely enjoyed it - despite large sections of summary background, a very perky audiobook narrator and the three main narratives feeling rather disconnected.
I had some issues with one of the main viewpoint characters - Cassie - because she shared a lot of my worst flaws, which made her hard to warm to, particularly since she spent a lot of time thinking about what a terrible person she was but not doing anything about it.
But it was an easy listen and I was invested enough and liked most of the characters enough to want to find out what happened to them.
And then it took a turn. A terrible, terrible turn, which just got worse and worse in a way I really didn't expect from a book that had 'heartwarming' and 'delightful' plastered all over the cover...
I wanted to give up on it but I had to see it through so that the storylines weren't abandoned in my head at their lowest points. And apart from a huge (and blatantly lampshaded) coincidence very near the end, I was happy with where the book ended up.
But how it got there - just no.


Dinner At The Homesick Restaurant by Anne Tyler has been on my shelf for a while, and on and off several recent monthly TBRs. I finally got around to giving it a try, but I gave up pretty quickly because it was very dreary, with an awful lot of summary and very little direct action - and I couldn't see either of those points improving much as the story went on (though I could be wrong about that).


Copper Script by KJ Charles was recommended to me by a fellow BookTuber and I gave it a try in audiobook form at the gym. But the story didn't grab me and I found the way the narrator did all the character voices really off-putting, so I didn't get very far with it.

The Garden of Evening Mists by Tan Twan Eng was supposed to be my reread for February, but I gave up on it after about 35 pages, because I decided I didn't want to read a story that combined war atrocities with characters experiencing mental decline...
Beautifully written but just not what I want in my life right now.


The Enchanted Greenhouse by Sarah Beth Durst is the follow-up to The Spellshop, which I loved. It's set in the same world, and touches on the story of the first book tangentially, tracking the character who created the sentient spider plant, Kaz, who is a main character in The Spellshop.
I listened to the audiobook, which may have been a mistake, since the narrator was extremely perky, exacerbated by my previous audiobook have a very flat narrator. A lot of the characters were given over-the-top voices, as well, which made them seem like caricatures rather than real characters. In contrast, the love interest was very quiet and almost dour, which made it harder for me to like him.
It was a fun story about found family banding together to protect something beautiful - which is exactly what I was looking for, but it didn't really land for me and the central romance didn't feel earned.
I liked the ultimate conclusion and enjoyed it overall but it was just okay.


Our Holiday by Louise Candlish kept me gripped over the course of a weekend involving several long train journeys. It's about locals in a touristy village getting annoyed by holiday homeowners leaving their summer homes empty most of the year when there's a housing crisis for year-round residents. There are viewpoint characters from both sides of the conflict but none of them are remotely likeable. So the book did a good job of keeping my interest, hinting at various secrets to be revealed throughout and providing enough twists and turns and misdirections to keep me guessing. Not one that will stay with me but an entertaining read.

A People's History of Heaven by Mathangi Subramanian tells the story of five young women living in a slum in Bangalore, which has been scheduled for demolition.
And while that is the throughline of the story, what the book actually does is present deep character studies of each of the five girls (and some of their relatives), weaving their backgrounds together to track their lives.
It took me a while to get a hold of the type of story I was reading, and be able to keep track of the different threads, because each section is very short and the narrative jumps back and forth through time a lot. The use of past and present tense also doesn't always feel right for the timeline, which made it confusing in places.
But I loved the first person plural POV, which binds the girls together into a close unit, and I grew to love all five of them (and various of their relatives) over the course of the book.
By the end, it all came together beautifully in a way that had me hugging the book to my chest after finishing it, and I felt like all the characters were good friends.

Yet another great book I got from the Netgalley 'Read Now' shelf!
Come Back to the World by Catherine Ryan Hyde is about single mother Amelia, who has spent years studying the one book written by her favourite author, a woman who disappeared from public life over forty years ago and hasn't been seen or heard of since. When Amelia gets a tip about where this elusive author might be living, she takes a trip to Mexico and finds a lot more than she bargained for.
This is a lovely, lovely book that I thoroughly enjoyed.
I loved all the various relationships, there was a really fun and interesting shift at the midpoint, the characters were great, and there was an awesome donkey!
I love books about authors and writing, and this one made me want to get back to my own writing, which is always a good thing.
There were some long speeches by a couple of the characters that felt a bit too much like 'the author is now on her soap box' but I could definitely overlook that for the story in general and the heartwarming ending.
I also appreciated the presentation of Amelia's anxiety. I've read a fair few books with anxiety presentation, but never one where reading the thoughts and feelings of the protagonists felt *exactly* like being in my own head.
Love this overall.

Face the Fire is the last in the Three Sisters Island series by Nora Roberts, about a centuries-old curse tied to the fates of three different women on a small island.
I mostly enjoyed the first two, despite having various issues with the romance aspects - and I did think I wanted to complete the series and read Mia's story.
But no.
Mia is rightfully angry with her ex, Sam, when he comes back to the island unexpectedly after disappearing to New York 11 years before. And, after she tells him she wants him to suffer and to pay for the pain he's caused her, then disappear again and never come back - his response is to grab her and 'crush his lips to hers' - at which point I noped out of listening to the rest of the audiobook because I actively didn't want them to get together.
Hey ho.

You Are Here by David Nicholls was recommended to me by someone I trust - but it was still a tough sell because the only other book I've read by this author was One Day, which I hated!
Still, I gave it a go and ended up being glad I did, especially since the audiobook narrators were excellent and definitely enhanced the dual perspective narrative.
It's about Marnie and Michael, who are both recovering from bad relationships and meet on a walking holiday, suggested by a mutual friend, who intends to set them both up but with different people. The chapters alternate their POVs, as they end up the only two left walking by day three.
I liked both protagonists, though there were some very painful, awkward, cringey moments (particularly in Marnie's chapters) early on that made me question my dedication to reading more from David Nicholls.
However, Marnie is a freelance copy editor and all the bits about her job (which I share) were absolutely hilarious and also spot on, which definitely add to the reading experience for me. The bits about Michael's teaching job were also both amusing and relatable (I used to be a teacher too).
And I also liked the slow burn of the relationship (it felt slow, even though most of the book took place over only seven days) and how the narrative gradually revealed more about the characters to both the reader and to each other.
Given the perceived 'slow burn' nature of the main narrative, the resolution felt a bit abrupt, but also satisfying overall.