Book Review

Book Review: THE FULL MOON COFFEE SHOP by Mai Mochizuki, translated by Jesse Kirkwood

| Jessica Crawford

The Full Moon Coffee Shop is a Japanese novella in translation that was originally published in 2020.

From the synopsis: “In Japan, cats are a symbol of good luck. As the myth goes, if you are kind to them, they’ll one day return the favor. And if you are kind to the right cat, you might just find yourself invited to a mysterious coffee shop under a glittering Kyoto moon.”

This is a sweet, cozy story that also manages to be thought-provoking and inspiring.

A substitute teacher and the group of students she would walk home at the end of the school day once showed great kindness to some cats. Now, years later, the Full Moon Coffee Shop shows up for each of them. The coffee shop is run by speaking cats who can change into human form, and who are each named after a different astrological body. They choose specific food and drink tailored to each customer, and offer to read their star charts. In this way, the cats of the coffee shop are able to help each of these former schoolmates understand what is holding them back in life, and how to get back on course. There are lessons on being less hard on oneself and others, improving one’s state of mind and focus by making one’s surroundings more pleasant, admitting one’s true desires to oneself, and more. It’s a very nice story!

I am not 100% sure about the English translation of this book, as there were some idioms that miss the mark – although I suppose it’s possible these are expressions used in the UK and not the US and so I’m just not familiar with them (just as the book uses the British English term “anticlockwise” rather than the American English “counterclockwise”). Things like “plumping for a suit” , “looking pretty flash”, “splashing out on” the fancy dishes, and referring to singles (as in romantically unattached people) as singletons. I was a bit worried when the book opens with a male tortoiseshell cat, which, while not impossible, is unlikely (1 in 3000 tortoiseshell cats are male, and that’s because they are born with an extra X chromosome). Although I suppose it’s certainly not less likely that the cat will also be the physical form of a heavenly body come to bestow wisdom on people who have earned favors by being good to cats!

This is not the kind of book that will keep me thinking about it for a long time to come, but it IS the kind of book that gave me warm fuzzy feelings while also offering opportunities for introspection. 3.5 stars

Bookshop.org

Goodreads

Bookstagram

Book Review: COFFEE ADVENTURES: QUESTS FOR THE PERFECT CUPPA JOE

| Jessica Crawford

Coffee Adventures: Quests for the perfect cuppa joe is an anthology of short stories published by Raconteur Press in 2024, edited and illustrated by Cedar Sanderson. Authors include Jesse A. Barrett, J.L. Curtis, Kevin Harris, CE Hughes, Callie Johnson, Christopher Markman, Sherri Mines, J. Kenton Pierce, and Medron Pryde.

What a fun collection of short stories!

I read this anthology because a coworker and friend of mine wrote one of the entries. My understanding is that Raconteur Press is a small publishing operation that accepted submissions with an interesting prompt: choose one of the many blends of coffee served by neighboring business King Harv’s Imperial Coffee and write a story about how it came to be. I may not have the details exactly right, but it was something to that effect.

The results did not disappoint! Not only are there quality stories that were tightly edited here, the editor herself also apparently created custom art for each one, displayed as illustrations at the beginning of each entry. These were just wonderful.

These stories are mainly fantasy or science fiction. With a subject like coffee, many of them fit into the “cozy” subgenre, and most of them are adventurous in nature. Several were quite funny. I was very impressed!

It’s got hyena sorcerers, coffee liches, ghouls, deities, feral space girl scouts, geishas, and more. Including, of course, a whole lot of coffee. What’s not to love?

If you like short stories, fun, and, perhaps most importantly, coffee, you most definitely should give this a read.

Goodreads

Bookstagram

Book Review: HEADSHOT by Rita Bullwinkel

| Jessica Crawford

Headshot by Rita Bullwinkel is a 224 page book published by Viking, and has been longlisted for the Booker Prize 2024.

Genre:

Literary Fiction

Synopsis:

An unexpected tragedy at a community pool. A family’s unrelenting expectation of victory. The desire to gain or lose control; to make time speed up or stop; to be frighteningly, undeniably good at something. Each of the eight teenage girl boxers in this blistering debut novel has her own reasons for the sacrifices she has made to come to Reno, Nevada, to compete to be named the best in the country. Through a series of face-offs that are raw, ecstatic, and punctuated by flashes of humor and tenderness, prizewinning writer Rita Bullwinkel animates the competitors’ pasts and futures as they summon the emotion, imagination, and force of will required to win.

Frenetic, surprising, and strikingly original, Headshot is a portrait of the desire, envy, perfectionism, madness, and sheer physical pleasure that motivates young women to fight—even, and perhaps especially, when no one else is watching.

My Thoughts:

You know how your very favorite books are not necessarily the same as what you would call the best books you’ve ever read? You can really appreciate the writing and what an author has done with their work, but then there are those books that just make you feel All the Things and just the experience of reading them brings you joy?

I would say HEADSHOT is well written literary fiction that’s really special in what it says about its characters—each individual girl’s life, motivations, hang-ups, and sheer physicality—and yet it didn’t really do much for me personally.

There are several powerful lines for quoting. For instance:

The desire to please people is the desire to not be singular.

In this way, decades into the future, boxing will be for Andi Taylor a kind of failed identity marker—something she tried on and wore around but that she later realized wasn’t her, or didn’t fit with the rest of her life, or her as a boxer didn’t fit the way the world needed her to be in order for her to survive.

It is this ability of Kate Heffer’s to rewrite the reality of her own desires that will allow her to turn every narrative of her life into a self-fulfilling truth. She is, in this way, able to perceive and remember only those events that fit with her current perception of the world around her.

There are people who, just by looking at disasters, implicate themselves in the violence at hand. These people, the self-implicating people, are far less likely to be victors, but they are more emotionally intelligent, and more likely to be able to see details that others might miss.

But I just wasn’t that into the story, such as it is. I got less and less interested in it as I read on. It gives play by plays of each match in the Daughters of America boxing tournament, and detours into making statements about each girl and her life—but the story ends when the two day long tournament does, and so there is no real call to become invested in any of the characters. And then it just kind of ends with a whimper.

Oh well, not for me, but I still appreciated some things about it, like the structure and insights into the characters and basically life as a human in general.

Bookshop.org

Goodreads

Bookstagram

Book Review: A LETTER TO THE LUMINOUS DEEP by Sylvie Cathrall

| Jessica Crawford

A Letter to the Luminous Deep: The Sunken Archive: Book One by Sylvie Cathrall is a 400 page novel published in 2024 by Orbit.

Genre:

Cozy Fantasy Romance/Mystery

Opening Line:

Dear Scholar Clel,

Instead of reading further, I hope you will return this letter to its envelope or, better yet, crumple it into an abstract shape that might look quite at home on a coral reef.

Synopsis:

A charming fantasy set in an underwater world with magical academia and a heartwarming penpal romance, perfect for fans of  A Marvellous Light  and  Emily Wilde’s Encylopaedia of Faeries.

A beautiful discovery outside the window of her underwater home prompts the reclusive E. to begin a correspondence with renowned scholar Henerey Clel. The letters they share are filled with passion, at first for their mutual interests, and then, inevitably, for each other.

Together, they uncover a mystery from the unknown depths, destined to transform the underwater world they both equally fear and love. But by no mere coincidence, a seaquake destroys E.’s home, and she and Henerey vanish.

A year later, E.’s sister Sophy, and Henerey’s brother Vyerin, are left to solve the mystery, piecing together the letters, sketches and field notes left behind—and learn what their siblings’ disappearance might mean for life as they know it.

Inspired, immersive, and full of heart, this charming epistolary tale is an adventure into the depths of a magical sea and the limits of the imagination from a marvelous debut voice.

My Thoughts:

This epistolary novel is told through a formal academic yet delightful tone, and is full of fantastical mystery and cozy romance. There is queer and disability representation, which is great. Although there is a romance, there is no steamy content, and there is no violence. The overall story was intriguing, but the execution was kind of a miss for me.

This book is comprised entirely of letters, journal entries, excerpts, reports and such. And while the writing is amusing and did in fact have me laughing out loud at times, every character has the exact same voice. Everyone sounds absolutely indistinguishable from anyone else in their manner of speech…er, writing. Though the ideas behind the story are enchanting, with this voice problem and the relatively slow and plodding pace, it wound up being a bit boring to get through. I had to talk myself into picking it back up to read on.

And then of course it doesn’t really end because it turns out it is the first book in a planned (series? duology?), a fact I was not aware of until after I had it in my hands.

I generally don’t like comps because they so often disappoint, as reading is such a personal and unique experience for each reader, but I personally agree with the comparison between this book and Emily Wilde’s Encyclopaedia of Faeries, tone-wise, although I myself enjoyed the latter much more.

Epistolary, cozy academic romance, and underwater sci-fi/fantasy mystery are all terms that appeal to me, but in the end the detractions outweighed the delights for me, and I don’t think I will bother picking up the sequel.

Bookshop.org

Goodreads

Bookstagram

Book Review: THE GOD OF THE WOODS by Liz Moore

| Jessica Crawford

The God of the Woods by Liz Moore is a 496 page novel published by Riverhead Books in 2024.

Genre: Literary Mystery

Opening Line:

The bed is empty.

Synopsis:

When a teenager vanishes from her Adirondack summer camp, two worlds collide

Early morning, August 1975: a camp counselor discovers an empty bunk. Its occupant, Barbara Van Laar, has gone missing. Barbara isn’t just any thirteen-year-old: she’s the daughter of the family that owns the summer camp and employs most of the region’s residents. And this isn’t the first time a Van Laar child has disappeared. Barbara’s older brother similarly vanished fourteen years ago, never to be found.

As a panicked search begins, a thrilling drama unfolds. Chasing down the layered secrets of the Van Laar family and the blue-collar community working in its shadow, Moore’s multi-threaded story invites readers into a rich and gripping dynasty of secrets and second chances. It is Liz Moore’s most ambitious and wide-reaching novel yet.

My Thoughts:

This character-driven mystery was super engaging, managing to be both propulsive and emotionally resonant. It’s a missing persons mystery (two, actually, and the question of whether or not they’re related) with a generous helping of Rich People Behaving Badly. I don’t know that it really does anything that new or different, but a short way into reading this book I found I didn’t want to set it down, and finished it all in what I think was basically two sittings!

Rich people, thought Judy–she thought this then, and she thinks it now–generally become most enraged when they sense they’re about to be held accountable for their wrongs.

The story takes place on a wilderness preserve in the Adirondack Mountains in New York State, where characters have learned a healthy respect for the forest, its bounty as well as its dangers (AKA it’s features as well as it’s…bugs. Ha!) Chapters follow a rotation of several people: the missing teen’s bunkmate, their camp counselor, the investigator looking into her disappearance, and the mother of the missing children. The timeline also jumps back and forth from the 1950s, 1961, 1973, and the summer months of 1975, and the author makes this clear through the use of a header at the beginning of each chapter. I think Alice’s chapters hit me the hardest–how small her husband made her feel, the purity of her love for Bear.

Only with her son did she have a connection that existed outside any hierarchy of authority. She loved him plainly, without condition or complexity. And she believed he loved her the same way.

I’m going to miss being with these characters. I’d say there is an excellent chance this book will wind up as one of my top ten reads of the year!

Bookshop.org

Goodreads

Bookstagram

Book Review: STILL THE SUN by Charlie N. Holmberg

| Jessica Crawford

Still the Sun by Charlie N. Holmberg is a 299 page novel published by 47North in 2024.

Genres: Fantasy (primary), science fiction, romance

Opening Line:

Something is missing.

Synopsis:

An ancient machine holds the secrets of a distant world’s past for two intimate strangers in the latest romantic fantasy adventure by Wall Street Journal bestselling author Charlie N. Holmberg.

Pell is an engineer and digger by trade—unearthing and repairing the fascinating artifacts left behind by the mysterious Ancients who once inhabited the sunbaked planet of Tampere. She’ll do anything to help the people of her village survive and to better understand the secrets of what came before.

Heartwood and Moseus are keepers of a forbidding tower near the village of Emgarden. Inside are the remnants of complex machines the likes of which Pell has never seen. Considering her affinity for Ancient tech, the keepers know Pell is their only hope of putting the pieces of these metal puzzles together and getting them running. The tower’s other riddle is Heartwood himself. He is an enigma, distant yet protective, to whom Pell is inexplicably drawn.

Pell’s restoration of this broken behemoth soon brings disturbing visions—and the discovery that her relationship to it could finally reveal the origins of the towers’ strange keepers and the unfathomable reason the truth has been hidden from her.

My Thoughts:

Well wasn’t this just a wonderful fantasy/sci-fi story! I was a little nervous going into this because I felt a bit lukewarm about the other book I’ve read by this author, but this was quite good!

Our POV character Pell is a short, dark, strong woman with a passion for tinkering with unearthed Ancient tech. She lives in a small community with no children, in a desert, next to an impenetrable pink crystal wall and an inaccessible tower, where the sun remains in the same place in the sky at all times, although there are cycles when a tone is heard throughout the world and mists descend. As you learn about this world she lives in you will have no idea what is going on, but just sit back and relax and all will be explained in good time!

One day a tall, pale stranger (there are no strangers on this world!) shows up at Pell’s door asking for her help. He and his companion have access to the tower and it’s filled with broken machines that they desperately need functional once more. Can she figure out how to repair them? While working on the machines, Pell begins to experience visions that feel like they might be hidden memories…She has fixed these machines before.

As I said, for a good portion of this book you have no idea what’s going on, and I got pretty annoyed with Pell and her associates at times (SO MANY TIMES she says, “I need answers, and you have them!” and they refuse to tell her anything or even explain that there is a good reason why they can’t tell her, so she gets angry and has a tantrum, over and over again ad nauseum). Additionally, I lost count of the number of times a character smiling is described as “his/her lip ticked”. And all the details about the machine repairs made my eyes glaze over.

But once we finally get some answers about what this world is and what is truly going on, it was absolutely epic. I will spoiler tag the rest only because when you start this book you’re supposed to be as clueless as Pell, but it was really quite wonderful. SPOILER, BEWARE! You’ve got full lore about different types of gods fighting a war against Ruin, and a plan to actually halt a planet from turning in order to imprison the enemy and stop him/it from destroying, well, everything. And demigods diminished by tendrils of the void. Epic! END SPOILER

I found this story to be unique and interesting and pretty rad once revealed in its entirety. I will now gladly read more of this author’s work!

Note: there is a romance, but any steaminess that happens is fade to black and not explicitly on the page. And if you’re reading this book BECAUSE you like romance, just know that the falling in love bits already happened before this book starts (and were just forgotten for…reasons I cannot reveal without spoiling things). As far as violent content, there is one pretty mild physical confrontation.

Bookshop.org

Goodreads

Bookstagram

Book Review: MARY: AN AWAKENING OF TERROR by Nat Cassidy

| Jessica Crawford

Mary: An Awakening of Terror by Nat Cassidy is a 405 page novel published by Tor Nightfire in 2022.

Genre: Horror

Opening Line:

There’s a corpse in the bathtub.

Synopsis:

Mary is a quiet, middle-aged woman doing her best to blend into the background. Unremarkable. Invisible. Unknown even to herself.

But lately, things have been changing inside Mary. Along with the hot flashes and body aches, she can’t look in a mirror without passing out, and the voices in her head have been urging her to do unspeakable things.

Fired from her job in New York, she moves back to her hometown, hoping to reconnect with her past and inner self. Instead, visions of terrifying, mutilated specters overwhelm her with increasing regularity and she begins auto-writing strange thoughts and phrases. Mary discovers that these experiences are echoes of an infamous serial killer.

Then the killings begin again.

Mary’s definitely going to find herself.

My Thoughts:

“Don’t call yourself crazy. That’s a word people use to make you small. Don’t do it for them.”

Holy moly, this book is bananas, but in the best way!

Normally I much prefer spooky supernatural horror to gory horror, but although this book is capital G Gruesome, there is so much more to it. I don’t know that I’ve ever read anything quite like it!

Mary is coming up on her fiftieth birthday and she’s not doing so great. Twice in this book she visits a male doctor and tells them each about the insomnia, the panic attacks–she even tells one of them the full truth, that she can’t look into a mirror without seeing her face in the reflection bubble up and burst in putrefication. Both doctors respond with, “And when was your last period?”

Due to an unfortunate series of events, Mary finds herself making the trip back to the isolated desert town she was born in, the town that was terrorized by a serial killer until he was killed by police nearly fifty years before. And then the killings start again.

You might like this book if you like unreliable narrators, vengeful spirits, true crime podcasts, and cults. You might like this book if you like your horror with a side of the absurd to surprise a laugh out of you now and then. You might like this book if you’re familiar with the nightmare that is perimenopause. You might like this book if you cheered when Neville Longbottom finally stood up for himself, but even moreso if your response to Stephen King’s Carrie was, “Good for her.”

Just bear in mind there is a whole lot of grisly subject matter here. If, like me, you’re able to look past that to all the amazing things about this story, then buckle in and get ready for one wild ride!

This book includes no steamy content, but all of the explicit on-page violence.

Bookshop.org

Goodreads

Bookstagram

Book Review: THE LOST STORY by Meg Shaffer

| Jessica Crawford

The Lost Story by Meg Shaffer is a 352 portal world fantasy novel published by Ballantine Books in 2024.

Genre: Fantasy

Opening Line:

Once upon a time in West Virginia, two boys went missing.

Well this was just a lovely story!

Two teenage boys went missing in the woods for six months. Now as adults, Rafe has no memory of their time away. Jeremy does, but he’s not telling; what Jeremy DOES do is find missing people and things with seemingly supernatural ease.

Emilie wants to hire Jeremy to find the body of her sister who was kidnapped as a teen and has been missing ever since. What she finds instead is that what really happened to her sister has everything to do with what happened to Rafe and Jeremy all those years ago, and a magical fantasy kingdom a la C. S. Lewis’s Narnia.

These main characters were delightful! They’re funny and sympathetic and complex, and there is a nice LGBTQIA+ romance you find yourself rooting for from early on, before you even know for sure how the characters feel about one another.

The details of the fantasy kingdom are really pretty secondary to the story about the fact that this magical world exists, and how it came to exist. But I honestly didn’t mind that the nitty gritty of being in a fantasy world seemed rather phoned in, because the rest of these things were so wonderful. If I hugged books, this one would definitely be deserving!

Edited to add:

I initially wrote this post before I had devised my rating systems for sexual and violent content. I think I remember that the sexual content all happens off the page, and the only violence I recall is what Emilie imagines had happened to her sister when she went missing, and perhaps a dash of fantasy battling with evil creatures with swords and bows.

I also see now that the final version of this book includes a lovely little map of the fantasy kingdom of Shanadoah, a nice touch.

Bookshop.org

Goodreads

Bookstagram

Book Review: MIDDLETIDE by Sarah Crouch

| Jessica Crawford

Middletide is Sarah Crouch‘s 288 page debut novel published by Atria books in 2024.

Genre: Literary Mystery

Opening Line:

Gray foam slapped the bow of the Crestliner as it zipped north across the still waters of Puget Sound.

Synopsis:

In this gripping and intensely atmospheric debut, disquiet descends on a small town after the suspicious death of a beautiful young doctor, with all clues pointing to the reclusive young man who abandoned the community in chase of big city dreams but returned for the first love he left behind. Perfect for fans of All Good People Here and Where the Crawdads Sing

One peaceful morning, in the small, Puget Sound town of Point Orchards, the lifeless body of Dr. Erin Landry is found hanging from a tree on the property of prodigal son and failed writer, Elijah Leith. Sheriff Jim Godbout’s initial investigation points to an obvious suicide, but upon closer inspection, there seem to be clues of foul play when he discovers that the circumstances of the beautiful doctor’s death were ripped straight from the pages of Elijah Leith’s own novel.

Out of money and motivation, thirty-three-year-old Elijah returns to his empty childhood home to lick the wounds of his futile writing career. Hungry for purpose, he throws himself into restoring the ramshackle cabin his father left behind and rekindling his relationship with Nakita, the extraordinary girl from the nearby reservation whom he betrayed but was never able to forget.

As the town of Point Orchards turns against him, Elijah must fight for his innocence against an unexpected foe who is close and cunning enough to flawlessly frame him for murder in this scintillating literary thriller that seeks to uncover a case of love, loss, and revenge.

My Thoughts:

Sarah Crouch’s debut novel Middletide is ostensibly a mystery, with a love story to boot. Chapters alternate timelines, from 1994 when the small Washington town’s doctor is found hanging in the forest, to a time period stretching from 1973 up until that event. (I honestly couldn’t say for sure why the author chose to set the main thrust of her story in 1994. Was it because long distance communication and the maintaining of relationships would have been more difficult? To highlight isolation and loneliness?) When Elijah left for San Francisco to try to make it as a novelist, he broke Nakita’s heart. Years later, after failing to realize his dream, Elijah makes his way back to Point Orchards and becomes a homesteader. Can he convince Nakita to give him a second chance? And what do these things have to do with the future hanging death of Erin Landry?

While the mystery was decent, the procedural aspects of it were very hard to swallow. Law enforcement and the court did things I found very hard to believe. I did like many of the characters in this story, and the romance overall was pretty okay, other than a few times when Elijah really had me cringing at his behavior (e.g. his condescending ultimatum to Nakita on New Year’s Eve). The writing on the sentence level was fine, if a bit simple.

What I thought this book did BEST was create a vivid sense of place (a small town and American Indian reservation in the Pacific Northwest), and portray the sense of pride and satisfaction one can take in supporting oneself off the land from the fruits of their labor.

So overall this was a decent read, although it was mostly the vibes I appreciated moreso than the details of the story.

As far as steamy, there is only kissing in this book; in regards to violence, there are just the details of the investigation into a death by hanging that happened off-page.

I have devised a rating system for sexual and violent content for when I review books. Here are the keys:

Bookshop.org

Goodreads

Bookstagram