Faves for this month were the two Uketsu books and An Academic Affair.

Heated rivalry, Rachel Reid (re-read)
Long game, Rachel Reid (re-read)
Good girls don’t die, Christina Henry
The Quins at Quayles, Winnifred Norling
The pink marine, Greg Cope White
Dinosaur sanctuary 7, Itaru Kinoshita
Into the raging sea, Rachel Salde
Darkly, Marissa Pessl
Bookish, Lucy Mangan
Strange pictures, Uketsu
Strange houses, Uketsu
Glorious Exploits, Ferdia Lennon
Little nothings, Julie Mayhew
An Academic Affair, Jodi McAlister
Appointment with death, Agatha Christie

Heated rivalry, Rachel Reid (re-read)
Long game, Rachel Reid (re-read)

I have not watched the TV series - yet - but there was all this publicity about it and so I re-read these two. HR is still great. LG - well. It’s okay, but it slips out of my mind pretty quickly afterwards.

Good Girls Don’t Die, Christina Henry. Three women wake up in turn in increasingly unnerving situations - the first, in a house with a family and a job that she doesn’t remember, the second in a cabin with friends where they are being stalked by something, the third forced to run through a maze of death to survive - unfortunately the first two stories are significantly more compelling than the third, and the reveal (spoiler - yet another evil techbro who doesn’t like losing fights with women on the internet) is weak and the resolution weaker. I thought this was going to do more with the storylines being different sorts of book, but no.

The Quins at Quayles, Winnifed Norling. I read Norling’s Missing from Mallingford’s when I was young, and quite liked it, and I’ve read a few others of hers. This was, however, not good. Five cousins with almost no characterisation start at a new school and investigate a mysterious house (the book is published in 1940 so you can possibly guess some of the mystery), no-one ever says anything, and I actually took a few months to read this because I kept putting it down.

The Pink Marine, Greg Cope White. Made into the Netflix series Boots, this is about a scrawny gay teenager in the late 70s, who follows his straight best friend into the Marines - once he gets past being repeatedly underweight on the medical. I failed to read the blurb on this so hadn’t realised it was pretty much just boot camp and him deciding that the Marines were the best thing ever, and so while it’s readable and if I wanted background material for a story set in that time period it would be super helpful, I didn’t get much more from it.

Dinosaur Sanctuary 7, Itaru Kinoshita. More dinos. The neglectful father/son who loves dinosaur subplot is not my favourite but I do like Suzume learning that the blind dinosaur she is assigned to is very capable on his own terms.

Into the Raging Sea: 33 Mariners, One Megastorm, and the Sinking of El Faro, Rachel Slade. Picked up from rachelmanija and very good in a throughly detailed and depressing way about how industry practices focused almost entirely on profit can create an environment where there is no room for tolerance of individual bad decisions. I lent this immediately to my friend who works in systems safety.

Darkly, Marisha Pessl. The mysterious Louisiana Veda created the Darklys, horrifying board games with a cult following; although she is now dead, her legacy lingers. Dia (Arcadia) is one of six teenagers offered an internship with Darkly, but when they arrive at the game factory, they discover that they have to solve the mystery of the last Darkly - not just its mysterious disappearance, but the game itself, which is now being played, and causing its solvers to disappear. This coasts on vibes but is sadly all too easy to pick holes in, not least of which is how these games actually work. They’re described as board games that millions of people spend evenings playing, but with only a handful of winners (I guess the analog would be something like Kit Williams’ Masquerade, but that’s not a board game!), and then when we actually see Valkyrie’s (the missing Darkly) game play, it’s a cross between an escape room and an interactive theatre piece, which is something else again. The characters were not compelling enough to distract me from trying to work this out, the romance is irritating, and I also kept wondering how we could possibly be on a deserted island in the middle of nowhere a thirty minute drive from London. Which is annoying, because deadly mysterious board games are a cool idea, as are treasure hunts; I should track down my copy of John Bellairs’ The Treasure of Alpheus Winterborn and re-read that instead.

Bookish: how reading shapes our lives, Lucy Mangan. Her second reading memoir (it’s not really “our”, it’s all about her - this one takes in teenage years, university, marriage, having a baby, COVID, and the death of her father. I have read a lot of the same books as Manga (although inexplicably she doesn’t do f/sf AT ALL), I like her writing, and a number of bits of this ring very true for me.

Strange Pictures, Uketsu
Strange Houses, Uketsu

Also via rachelmanija. Excellently creepy found horror, based around a series of pictures in the first and floor plans in the second; these (mostly) play fair with teh readers for solutions. Pictures is the stronger narrative (and written later) but I do like a floor plan. This has definitely hung around me after reading it and I may even track down hard copies.

Glorious Exploits, Ferdia Lennon. I borrowed this a few times before I finally read it, and somehow in that process I forgot most of the details of the original recommendation apart from believing it was a comedy involving potters & theatre in Ancient Greece. This is not entirely inaccurate but does omit the important fact that most of this book is about the brutal aftermath of equally brutal wars, the theatre is a production of Medea put on by a cast of starving Athenian POWs left in a quarry to rot, and it’s painfully bleak with at the most some moments of dark humour. It’s odd about women but it is good about theatre.

Little Nothings, Julie Mayhew. Liv has never had a group of friends until she meets Beth and Binnie in a new mums playgroup; they get on well until Ange joins the group. Ange, richer and apparently better at everything, pulls the group around her, and Liv struggles to keep up - will an (expensive) catered holiday in Greece bring everyone back together, or tear them apart? Everyone in this is unlikeable and there is a weird why-not-lesbians thing going on where people hassle Liv for making friends with an incredibly rich woman, and imply they’re sleeping together - and tbh that would probably make a better book.

An Academic Affair, Freya McAllister. A romance with footnotes! This alternates pov between two rival Eng Lit early career academics - Sadie (scrappy, rough background, specialises in popular fiction) and Jonah (high-pressured family with senior academic father, specialises in Jacobean drama) who have fought enthusiastically throughout undergrad and postgrad, and then while trying to exist on precarious short-term and temp work, come up against each other for a permanent Lit Studies post in Hobart. Both want it, desperately; of course only one can get it, but then the contract has this clause about partner hire… This is a solid romance as well as being very good about the difficulties of having a career in academia - both characters are union members and there’s a certain amount of satisfaction in watching management hoist by their own petard on the contract negotiations, which is not something I usually read romances for. It’s also another strongly Australian book and I presume it’s the first of another series, because there are two other obvious couples being lined up in this one. I liked it a lot.

Appointment with Death, Agatha Christie. I’m not sure if I’ve read this one before, actually. Set in/around Petra, with the death of a woman who has intimidated and warped her entire family - I did work out who but it was entertaining getting there.