fiction

Book Review: A FAMILY MATTER by Claire Lynch

| Jessica Crawford

A Family Matter by Claire Lynch is a 240 page novel from Scribner with a publish date of June 3, 2025.

Genre:

Literary Fiction

Synopsis:

An exquisite and revelatory debut novel about the devastating consequences of one woman’s affair.

1982. Dawn is a young mother, still adjusting to life with her husband, when Hazel lights up her world like a torch in the dark. Theirs is the kind of connection that’s impossible to resist, and suddenly life is more complicated, and more joyful, than Dawn ever expected. But she has responsibilities and commitments. She has a daughter.

2022. Heron has just received news from his doctor that turns everything upside down. He’s an older man, stuck in the habits of a quiet existence. Telling Maggie, his only child—the person around whom his life has revolved—seems impossible. Heron can’t tell her about his diagnosis, just as he can’t reveal all the other secrets he’s been keeping from her for so many years.

A Family Matter is a heartbreaking and hopeful exploration of love and loss, intimacy and injustice, custody and care, and whether it is possible to heal from the wounds of the past in the changed world of today.

Opening Line:

Five and a half hours after he found out he was dying, Heron drove to his favorite supermarket.

My Thoughts:

This is an emotional story of family, love, and grief. It’s based not off a specific event, but the period of UK history (recent – 1980s) when lesbians would often lose any and all access to their children, the court claiming cutting these women out of the children’s lives would protect from immorality and save them from the shame of having a gay parent and the public ridicule it might bring.

Heron has raised Maggie by himself since she was 4 years old, and the book opens with him, now in his sixties, receiving a cancer diagnosis. Chapters rotate through 4 POVs, and a big chunk of them follow Maggie, now 43 years and dealing with many things this reader found relatable – aging parents (and in her case, having to face a parent’s mortality head on), marriage along with all of its features and bugs, raising children (including a patronizing teenager), and never feeling like there is enough time.

She is prone to thoughts like this lately, about time passing too quickly, or running out altogether. About everything slipping out of her grasp. When she told Conor she felt this way, he said it was just her age, textbook midlife crisis. Maggie had advised him, on the grounds of his own health and safety, not to offer that as an explanation again.

Another line I liked:

There ought to be more to life than washing machines and emails and remembering to put the recycling out on the right day. But life is also this. It is all of this.

Other chapters follow Dawn, Maggie’s mother, in 1982. Dawn is married and has a young daughter when she meets Hazel.

Dawn couldn’t understand it, the way Hazel made her nervous. The feeling that her mouth was full of all the things she would say if she wasn’t too embarrassed to put herself into words.

An affair is scandalous enough, but two women falling in love was even more taboo at the time. In an effort to still be able to see her daughter, Dawn suffers through indignity after indignity, like the court officials grilling her on the specifics of her sex life.

There is a lot of beautiful writing in this book, but my one complaint is that it seemed uneven in its telling. The beginning had a heavy focus on Heron and his illness, and then by the end this trail of narrative seems to kind of peter out. Maggie and Dawn have chapters throughout, but last parts of the book belong much more to the two of them. And then those just sort of end as well, without much of a climax or any sort of denouement. There were also several Britishisms that threw me a bit, but obviously that is not a fault, just something to be aware of.

I wish the parts of the story, Heron’s mortaltiy/navigating family life/what makes it all meaningful, etc etc, and Dawn’s love story along with its tragic and infuriating outcome, were brought together more cohesively. As it is, it seems kind of like two separate stories, requiring one to be dropped partway though in order to tell the other. But I really did enjoy the writing and the sentiments – Heron knowing the hardest thing about his cancer is watching his daughter watch him dying, Maggie understanding that it is important and necessary for her children to grow away from her in some respects, and Dawn’s reckoning:

Later-I mean years later-I realized the worst thing had already happened to me. When I worked that out, I was invincible.

A beautiful heartache of a story that ultimately offers hope.

My thanks to NetGalley and Scribner for the eARC in exchange for my unbiased review.

Book Review: THE LAST FERRY OUT by Andrea Bartz

| Jessica Crawford

The Last Ferry Out by Andrea Bartz is a 320 page standalone novel published in Ballantine Books May 20, 2025.

Genre:

Thriller, Mystery

Opening Line:

Blood hits limestone and splatters for a second before the rain beats it back, diluting it and sluicing it away in pink rivulets.

My Thoughts:

What a nice, original thriller!

Abby’s fiancée died four months ago while spending a few weeks on an isolated Mexican island in order to finish her capstone project in a peaceful location free of distractions. Eszter had died from an apparent allergic reaction. Now, Abby herself travels to Isla Colel in an effort to feel closer to her lost love, to see how she spent her last days alive, to understand how the unthinkable could have happened. As Abby meets and learns the secrets of the island’s residents and the group of expats who have fallen in love with the desolate locale (as well as the blank slate it offers), she begins to see that she never knew the woman she loved as well as she thought she did.

Abby was a wonderful main character, a grieving woman who learned to survive by being bold and valuing efficiency. Eszter was the daughter of Hungarian immigrants, and desired her parents’ approval despite their strictness and unyielding expectations. Isla Colel was a beautifully evocative setting, with the fonda, tropical beaches, limestone cliffs, and bioluminescent bay…and also with the abandoned resort hotel and rusting comm tower lending a more menacing air.

Just before her death, Eszter texted Abby, “There’s something I need to tell you.” The mystery of this story stems from Abby trying to understand what that might have been, and as she talks to the people her fiancée spent her last days with, it becomes clear that someone knows more than they’re saying. This was a refreshingly unique and decently smart mystery/thriller. Some readers are happy with the works of certain prolific authors who can’t be bothered to fact check the details in their books or to worry that the plot makes sense, as long as they’re telling an interesting story. To me, this book was a cut above that type of thing, for sure. And then just when you think it’s over and the resolution complete, out trots a twist that is just ::chef’s kiss::. Good stuff! 4.5 stars.

Thank you to NetGalley and Ballantine Books of Penguin Random House for the eARC in exchange for my unbiased review.

Book Review: THE LANGUAGE OF THE BIRDS by K. A. Merson

| Jessica Crawford

The Language of the Birds by K. A. Merson is a 368 page standalone debut novel from Ballantine Books with a publish date of May 13, 2025.

Genre:

Mystery, Thriller

Opening Line:

Arizona cradles the figure-eight pendant between her thumb and finger and counts the days since her dad died–seventeen, the same as her age, and a prime number.

My Thoughts:

This is an impressive debut by an author who cites the following influences: Andy Weir for showing that science and math writing can be accessible, Blake Crouch for demonstrating how genres can be blended and bent seamlessly, Steig Larsson for writing an inspirational heroine, and Stephen King for inspiring others to make a serious effort at writing.

Arizona is a neurodivergent seventeen year old traveling with her mother to spread her recently-deceased father’s ashes in some of the places he loved. After her mother goes missing at Bodie State Historic Park in California, Arizona receives a phone call from a stranger – he is part of a group that has her mother, is familiar with Arizona’s idiosyncrasies, and demands that she help them solve a cryptic puzzle if she wants to see her mother returned safely. But how do they know this about her, and how is the group that kidnapped her mother tied to her late father?

There were flavors of The Davinci Code in this story, as Arizona works her way through multiple puzzles using ciphers and all sorts of logic exercises with which I can’t pretend to be familiar. There are a lot of diagrams and maps in this book, as we follow Arizona and her dog Mojo along on this high-stakes adventure. Did I skim over many of the parts trying to explain how she figured out what the encrypted messages and riddles meant (fractals, Euclidean space, monoalphabetic substitution ciphers, frequency analyses)? You bet. Did I get a kick out of the story featuring the history of alchemy and U.S. history and geography anyway? Heck yeah!

This books tells a smart puzzle-filled adventure of a story while also showing us personal growth in Arizona as she learns a bit more about learning to trust people enough to form relationships, and that emotions can’t be dealt with in the same way as mathematical equations. On display is the author’s own love of historical mysteries, literature, and even topography/U.S. geography and an outdoor/nomadic lifestyle. Well done!

I received an eARC of this book from NetGalley and Ballantine Books of Penguin Random House in exchange for my unbiased review.

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Book Review: VICTORIAN PSYCHO by Virginia Feito

| Jessica Crawford

Victorian Psycho by Virginia Feito is a 208 page standalone novel published in 2025 by Liveright, imprint of W. W. Norton & Company.

Genre/subgenre:

Horror, Satire, Gothic, Historical Fiction, Dark Comedy

Synopsis:

From the acclaimed author of Mrs. March comes the riveting tale of a bloodthirsty governess who learns the true meaning of vengeance.

Grim Wolds, England: Winifred Notty arrives at Ensor House prepared to play the perfect governess—she’ll dutifully tutor her charges, Drusilla and Andrew, tell them bedtime stories, and only joke about eating children. But long, listless days spent within the estate’s dreary confines come with an intimate knowledge of the perversions and pathetic preoccupations of the Pounds family—Mr. Pounds can’t keep his eyes off Winifred’s chest, and Mrs. Pounds takes a sickly pleasure in punishing Winifred for her husband’s wandering gaze. Compounded with her disdain for the entitled Pounds children, Winifred finds herself struggling at every turn to stifle the violent compulsions of her past. French tutoring and needlework are one way to pass the time, as is admiring the ugly portraits in the gallery . . . and creeping across the moonlit lawns. . . .

Patience. Winifred must have patience, for Christmas is coming, and she has very special gifts planned for the dear souls of Ensor House. Brimming with sardonic wit and culminating in a shocking conclusion, Victorian Psycho plunges readers into the chilling mind of an iconic new literary psychopath.

Opening Line:

Death everywhere.

My Thoughts:

Well, that was wild!

I personally got 3 star book enjoyment from this one, but it has 5 star writing, so I guess I’ll compromise with 4.

This is basically super gory satire about the Victorian era. It was weird, and I often like weird books, but this style of weird wasn’t 100% to my tastes – although the absurdities did make me laugh out loud several times. I also prefer suspense and psychological horror to the straight up grotesque. It lacked the depth that really draws me personally as a reader into feeling connected to a story (and in this case, thank goodness for that!) But for what the author was going for, the writing really hits the nail on the head.

So clearly, I have mixed feelings on this one!

Examples of the humorous satire about a truly psychopathic governess living in Victorian times:

As advised by the Ladies’ Journal, I am clothed in a ‘plain and quiet style of dress; a deep straw bonnet with green or brown veil’ (brown, in my case, as the drab color blurs the identifying features further, obscuring my expression of unfathomable emptiness to resemble one a casual observer might mistake for solemnity).

When Mrs. Pounds makes an inquiry into her health, he scoffs at his wife’s ‘slight hysterical tendency’. She has been languishing on settees and refusing meals since witnessing the drowning of their youngest son.

‘Nothing a good rest devoid of intellectual strain can’t cure,’ Mr. Pounds says brightly.

‘Agree wholeheartedly,’ Mr. Fishal says. ‘Mrs. Fishal said writing energised her, so I took away all her quills and now she’s decreed that she’ll write in her own blood if she must.’

There is some good-natured tittering around the table, some good-natured shaking of heads. Women! Theatrical bitches.

If large quantities of gore in an effort to effect satire don’t bother you, you should most certainly read this book. But if you consider yourself on the squeamish side, you should probably give this one a pass.

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Book Review: HOW TO SEAL YOUR OWN FATE by Kristen Perrin

| Jessica Crawford

How to Seal Your Own Fate by Kristen Perrin is a 320 page novel, the second in the Castle Knoll Files series, from PENGUIN GROUP Dutton with a publish date of April 29, 2025.

Genre:

Mystery

Synopsis:

Kristen Perrin is back with the second novel in her Castle Knoll series. Annie Adams is caught in a new web of murder that spans decades, returning us to the idyllic English village that holds layers of secrets.

Present Annie Adams is just settling into life in Castle Knoll when local fortune teller Peony Lane crosses her path and shares a cryptic message. When Peony Lane is found dead only hours later inside the locked Gravesdown Estate, Annie quickly realizes that someone is out to make her look guilty while silencing Peony at the same time. Annie has no choice but to delve into the dark secrets of Castle Knoll in order to find out just what Peony Lane was trying to warn her about, before the new life she’s just begun to build comes crashing down around her.

1967: A year has passed since her friend Emily disappeared, and teenage Frances Adams finds herself caught between two men. Ford Gravesdown is one of the only remaining members of a family known for its wealth and dubious uses of power. Archie Foyle is a local who can’t hold down a job and lives above the village pub. But when Frances teams up with Archie to investigate the car crash that claimed the lives of Ford’s family, it quickly becomes clear that this was no accident—hints of cover-ups, lies, and betrayals abound. The question is, just how far does the blackness creep through the heart of Castle Knoll? When Frances uncovers secrets kept by both Ford and Archie, she starts to What exactly has she gotten herself into?

Opening Line:

Her name had always been too plain, she thought, as she looked at the prison register in front of her, which required her signature.

My Thoughts:

This was another engaging murder mystery in the Castle Knoll Files.

I do think I would have benefitted from rereading How to Solve Your Own Murder before jumping into this one, to better remember the characters we were previously introduced to, their relationships and motivations. In general they are an interesting collection of folk from a seemingly idyllic English countryside, one of whom offers the possibility of a future romance for our main character, Annie.

This time, it’s the intriguing figure of Peony Lane, the fortune teller who set Great Aunt Frances on her life’s course of trying to solve her own murder before it occurred, that gets caught up in the middle of the action. What might she have to do the Foyles, Sparrows, as well as the Gravesdowns of yore? And why do these crimes always seem to come knocking right at Annie’s door?

Alternating chapters between Annie’s current timeline (in present tense POV) and young Frances’s diary entries got a bit confusing to me, as both included many of the same characters and events, and so it became difficult to keep straight who already knew what in their respective investigations. And the particulars of this mystery wind up being quite convoluted and at times a bit of a stretch.

That being said, I was still definitely entertained by this contemporary whodunnit, and would happily read the next installment of Annie’s adventures in investigating secrets in order to solve crimes.

Thank you to Dutton, Penguin Random House, and NetGalley for the eARC in exchange for my unbiased review.

Book Review: EMILY WILDE’S COMPENDIUM OF LOST TALES by Heather Fawcett

| Jessica Crawford

Emily Wilde’s Compendium of Lost Tales by Heather Fawcett is the third book in the Emily Wilde series. It is 358 pages and was published by Del Rey in 2025.

Genre:

Fantasy

Subgenres:

Cozy, academia, Fae

Opening Line:

If there is one subject upon which Wendell and I will never agree, it is the wisdom of attempting to drag a cat into Faerie.

Synopsis:

The third installment in the heartwarming and enchanting Emily Wilde series, about a curmudgeonly scholar of folklore and the fae prince she loves.

Emily Wilde has spent her life studying faeries. A renowned dryadologist, she has documented hundreds of species of Folk in her Encyclopaedia of Faeries. Now she is about to embark on her most dangerous academic project studying the inner workings of a faerie realm—as its queen.

Along with her former academic rival—now fiancé—the dashing and mercurial Wendell Bambleby, Emily is immediately thrust into the deadly intrigues of Faerie as the two of them seize the throne of Wendell’s long-lost kingdom, which Emily finds a beautiful nightmare filled with scholarly treasures.

Emily has been obsessed with faerie stories her entire life, but at first she feels as ill-suited to Faerie as she did to the mortal How can an unassuming scholar such as herself pass for a queen? Yet there is little time to settle in, for Wendell’s murderous stepmother has placed a deadly curse upon the land before vanishing without a trace. It will take all of Wendell’s magic—and Emily’s knowledge of stories—to unravel the mystery before they lose everything they hold dear.

My Thoughts:

“We should start with…the old queen’s ladies-in-waiting.” “Most of them have fled.” “Or they’ve been killed,” Lord Taran said. “Oops.”

What a treat it was to return to the world of Emily Wilde and Wendell! But ultimately this third installment of their tale seemed a bit gratuitous.

When Emily and Wendell travel to the latter’s realm in Faerie to take their places as its rulers, they find that the old queen, in her defeat, has cursed the land. Emily believes the answer to how to address this problem lies in the stories told in Faerie, as the rules of that place don’t necessarily follow the same logics that the mortal world does.

This wasn’t as tightly plotted as the previous books of the series, but it was still a real pleasure to spend time in Emily’s wondrous world, oftentimes as horrifying as it is amusing.

Faerie snails possess a crude intelligence and value their dignity above all things; as such, they spend most of their lives occupied with revenge quests. While their vengeance may be slow in coming, they will always have it in the end.

I do wish I had reread the previous installments before staring this one, as there were several secondary characters I simply did not remember. But this was overall still quite a lark, and I will happily read on in the series should the author choose to write more!

Book Review: A DROP OF CORRUPTION by Robert Jackson Bennett

| Jessica Crawford

A Drop of Corruption by Robert Jackson Bennett is the second book in the Shadows of the Leviathan series with a publish date of April 1, 2025.

Genre:

Fantasy, Mystery

Opening Line:

Before there was memory, before there was history, there were the leviathans: the colossal, monstrous creatures that lumbered ashore each wet season and went wandering the plains, bringing death and panic with them.

My Thoughts:

“You know, you are not a stupid person, Din.”

“Thank you, ma’am,” I said, pleased.

“Or, rather, not an unusually stupid person.”

“Thank you, ma’am,” I said, far less pleased.

Ana and Din return in this solid installment in the Shadow of the Leviathan series, investigating another puzzler of a crime.

The events of this book take place in a different corner of the fantasy world than those of book one, but magical corruption and contagion are still things to watch out for. The Empire is in negotiations with the kingdom of Yarrow regarding its impending annexation when a member of the Imperial treasury goes missing from a locked room at the top of a tower, parts of him later found floating in the canals. Once Ana and Din arrive to look into the matter, they come to realize they are pitted against a mastermind of uncanny intelligence and the ability to parse patterns and predict their next moves before they themselves even know what they plan to do.

The investigation sees our unusual duo team up with the local wardens led by a woman named Malo, and an organization of Apoths tasked with obtaining the reagents that provide the people of this fantasy world with their special augmentations directly from the corpses of the dreaded leviathans. We also delve more into Din’s circumstances, his desire to return to Talgaray in service to the Legion in order to both be a hero and to be closer to his lover, as well as into the mystery of what, exactly, Ana is that allows her to accomplish the things she does.

The mystery was good and twisty, and the writing amusing, and the lessons once again go beyond magical mayhem to say something about the ills that come part and parcel with society. I will certainly continue reading on on this series to see what Ana and Din find themselves dealing with next.

Thank you to Del Rey of Random House Publishing and NetGalley for an eARC in exchange for my unbiased review.

Book Review: CAT’S PEOPLE by Tanya Guerrero

| Jessica Crawford

Cat’s People by Tanya Guerrero is a 304 page standalone general fiction novel from Delacorte Press with a publish date of April 1, 2025.

Genre:

General Fiction, Cozy

Opening Line:

Cat knew to stay in the shadows.

Synopsis:

A stray cat brings together five strangers over the course of one fateful summer in this heartwarming novel about love, found family, and the power of connection.

Núria, a single-by-choice barista with a resentment for the “crazy cat lady” label, is a member of The Meow-Yorkers, a group in Brooklyn who takes care of the neighborhood’s stray cats. On one of her volunteering days, she starts finding Post-It notes from a secret admirer at the spot where her favorite stray lives—a black cat named Cat. Like most cats, he is rather curious and sly, so of course he knows who the notes are from. Núria, however, is clueless.

Are the notes from Collin, a bestselling author and self-professed hermit with a weakness for good coffee? Are they from Lily, a fresh-out-of-high school Georgia native searching for her long-lost half-sister? Are they from Omar, the beloved neighborhood mailman going through an early mid-life crisis? Or are they from Bong, the grieving widower who owns her favorite bodega? When Cat suddenly falls ill, these five strangers find themselves connected in their desire to care for him and discover that chance encounters can lead to the meaningful connections they’ve been searching for.

My Thoughts:

This is a heartwarming story about a stray cat, the people he interacts with, and how he brings them together and facilitates the connection they could all use.

Chapters alternate POV. There’s Nuria, a barista in her thirties who works with Trap/Neuter/Return programs and rescue organizations; Collin, a struggling author with severe social anxiety; Omar, a cheery mailman who doesn’t know what he wants to do with his life; Bong, a widowed bodega owner deep in his grief; and Lily, a young woman come to NYC from the South in search of the half-sister she only just learned she had. And of course, we get chapters from Cat’s point of view!

This reminded me a lot of the cozy stories coming out of some Asian countries these days (The Full Moon Coffee Shop from Japan, Marigold Mind Laundry from Korea), although the writing style on display here suits me a bit better – possibly just because it’s more like what I am used to. That being said, it certainly isn’t going to be winning any literary awards. But it succeeds in its aim of being a cozy, heartfelt, inspiring story that also exudes a love for cats and coffee (I am the target audience here!)

This was such an overall sweet story that it took me be a surprise when there was an occasional F-bomb dropped in out of nowhere. It includes queer representation, and gets bonus points for the couple who named their daughter Bernie in honor of the senator they ferociously campaigned for in 2016! For me, this was a 3.5 star read rounded up.

Thank you to NetGalley and Delacorte Press and Ballantine of Penguin Random House for the eARC in exchange for my unbiased review.

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Book Review: SALTWATER by Katy Hays

| Jessica Crawford

Saltwater: A Novel by Katy Hays is a 336 page standalone novel from Ballantine Books with a publish date of March 25, 2025.

Genre:

Thriller, Family Drama, Mystery

Opening Line

(After a news article regarding the death of a woman while vacationing with her wealthy family in 1992.)

Money is my phantom limb.

Synopsis:

In 1992 Sarah Lingate is found dead below the cliffs of Capri, leaving behind her three-year-old daughter, Helen. Despite suspicions that the old-money Lingates are involved, Sarah’s death is ruled an accident. And every year, the family returns to prove it’s true. But on the thirtieth anniversary of Sarah’s death, the Lingates arrive at the villa to find a surprise waiting for them—the necklace Sarah was wearing the night she died.

Haunted by the specter of that night, the legendary Lingate family unity is pushed to a breaking point, and Helen seizes the opportunity. Enlisting the help of Lorna Moreno, a family assistant, the two plot their escape from Helen’s paranoid, insular family. But when Lorna disappears and the investigation into Sarah’s death is reopened, Helen has to confront the fact that everyone who was on Capri thirty years ago remains a suspect—her controlling father Richard, rarely-lucid aunt Naomi, distant uncle Marcus, and their circle of friends, visitors, and staff. Even Lorna, her closest ally, may not be who she seems.

As long-hidden secrets about that night boil to surface, one thing becomes not everyone will leave the island alive.

My Thoughts:

Saltwater by Katy Hays is a tense and twisty thriller featuring family secrets and Rich People Behaving Badly, with a strong sense of place transporting the reader to the glistening shores and plummeting cliffsides of the Italian island of Capri.

The Lingate family is Old Money with a fixation on maintaining appearances, even when this means closing ranks when one of their own dies suspiciously. As an adult, Helen, the daughter of the deceased, just wants to live in the present, but her family seems tied down by the past. She would do anything to escape the bonds of her overly controlling family in order to experience true freedom for the first time in her life. Lorna is similarly ready to free herself from the life she is forced to live in the shadow of the rich and powerful. The two women plot together to free themselves from the unwanted constraints of the Lingates and other families like them.

This was a decent thriller with conspiring, betrayal, and murder, all set in enticing locales such as an Italian villa and on the waters of the Mediterranean Sea. Who can trust whom? One aspect of this story that didn’t work so great for me was that the chapters alternating amongst three timelines, but each occurring in the same locations with almost the exact same characters present, got confusing at times. “Okay, so this chapter picks back up with Helen on a boat with Ciro, but is this the time Freddy was there with them, or Lorna? Was this before or after that other event? I can’t remember!”

Things get a tad bit convoluted and farfetched as truths are revealed, but overall I enjoyed this bracing story of suspense.

There is sexual content in this story, but nothing that happens on the page. There is violence, but nothing super graphic.

Thank you to Ballantine Books and NetGalley for the eARC in exchange for my honest review.

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