The Real, Honest, Word on Books
By Emma Donoghue This book is about the Great Flu during 1918, specifically in Ireland, on a maternity ward over the course of three days. Both beds and medically-trained staff are scarce due to the preponderance of the illness. The reader follows the day-to-day tragedies and miracles of Nurse Julia Power. Masterfully crafted by Donoghue,…
By Alex North This book is about a horrible child murder that sparks an urban legend following and copycat killings over the years. Nearby woods to the crime form the perfect, eerie, remote setting; referred to by locals as The Shadows. The original players in the crime are all still deeply scarred years later, except…
By Seanan McGuire This book is about children who return from other lands through secret, impossible, and sympathetic doors. I’ll get back to the sympathetic part. Upon their return, their parents assume they were lost or kidnapped, and the children have created these fanciful stories as coping mechanisms to endure their trauma. These lands are…
By Rachel Harrison This book is about Julie, who goes missing for two years only to reappear with no memory of what has happened to her. It is also, moreso, about her friend, Elise, who refuses to lose hope the entire time Julie is gone. Elise refuses to believe she is dead during the funeral,…
By Ottessa Moshfegh This book is about an older widow, alones in the woods around her house, who finds a note claiming to mark and name a dead body. The catch is that there is no body to be found. Where is she? What happened to her? Why? By whom? And so begins the spiral…
By Riley Sager This book is about a young woman, Maggie Holt, going back to the house that scared her family away in the middle of the night twenty-five years ago leading to her father’s nonfiction bestseller. Baneberry Hall is still in the family, to her shock, and she is given the keys along with…
By Silvia Moreno-Garcia This book is about Noemi Toboada traveling to a remote part of Mexico to “rescue” her cousin, Catalina, from either her new husband, insanity, or debilitating sickness – maybe a combination thereof. Catalina has sent a rambling letter to Noemi’s father requesting aid from the “voices in the walls” that are speaking…
By Rachel Beanland This book is about a Jewish family in Atlantic City in the years before WWII explodes. The Adler family has gained affluence through years of diligence and hard work, but that does not protect them from tragedy as the reader discovers early in the book’s pages. From that heartbreak, the reader looks…
By Janie Chang This book is about the turmoil in China during WWII. Japan attacks viciously from the East, civil war further breaks the country apart from within, and the wealthy keep gaining wealth while the impoverished have less and less. Sound familiar? I have to admit my ignorance in that I didn’t know China…
By Max Brooks This book is about Bigfoot. That should be enough, but if not, it is by the same author who did World War Z, and is a horror show of what Bigfoot probably would do if he/she exists. (I am reserving judgement either way, much like Nessie and UFO’s, both sides of existence…