I took forever to read this book and I am not sure why. It’s exactly the kind of story that I like. It’s a quiet story that’s mostly a character study of folks living in a small town. Once I started reading it, I loved it and wanted to keep reading it.
If you enjoy action action action, this will not be the book for you. It’s quiet. It’s slow paced. It’s intricate, slow and also about things that haunt you from your past/memories. I enjoyed it and look forward to more from this author.
With gratitude to edelweiss and Europa Editions for an advanced copy in exchange for an honest review
This book has the most intriguing premise: woman receives text from her dead ex that he needs to talk to her and she should meet him under this one tree. When I read that, I knew I would be interested in reading the story and understanding how the author navigated this plot.
And it didn’t disappoint.
The story is twisty and turny and I really couldn’t stop reading it once I started. I really enjoyed that it wasn’t trying to be too clever and that it didn’t have a conniving unreliable narrator. It was just a great mystery!
with gratitude to netgalley and Harper Perennial and Paperbacks for an advanced copy in exchange for an honest review
I read this book about two weeks ago and I will be honest that I have forgotten most of it. I picked it up because Espach has a new book coming out this year which I loved so I wanted to go back and read her earlier work. Even though I don’t remember much of this novel, I remember thinking that I really liked it and thought it covered similar topics to the new one and with similar wisdom but it wasn’t as good. I will go back and read more of her work. I’ve liked each of her books that I’ve read so far and this was no exception.
This is the story of the author bravely telling the story of sexual harassment they have had to endure while they were a manga artist working for a famous artist. The story is told unflinchingly and it’s not possible to read it without feeling the tense and horrific experiences they have had to endure and the ways in which these experiences can last a lifetime and impact so much more than the moments in which they happened.
I am not picky about which genres I read but the amount of YA I’ve been reading has declined quite a lot in the last few years. I think it’s mostly that when you read a lot of them, they start blending into each other, and you are not engrossed or surprised easily after a while. But when I saw this book in emily’s review I wanted to read it. I am a fan of the groundhog day trope, and one of my favorite YA books of all time also had a similar plot so I wanted to see if I would like this one as much.
And I did.
This is a thoughtful story as the main character is trying to figure out why his day keeps repeating. He is dealing with the grief of his own mother’s death and as the day keeps repeating he opens up to see more, understand better, and drop into his own feelings more as well.
There are many trigger warnings in this story so please proceed with caution but, for me, it was a thoughtful read.
