Book Review: The Beloveds by Maureen Lindley

The Beloveds by Maureen Lindley
My rating: 🌟🌟🌟 (3 stars)
Publisher: Gallery Books

The summary really drew me to The Beloveds (okay, so did that cover!) but I did not (nor could I have) anticipated a narrator as sour as Betty/Lizzie. Wow. She was so thoroughly demented and unreliable a narrator that I disbelieved that none around her ever got the sense that anything was amiss. Not even her psychoanalyst sister, Gloria. My eyebrow quirked permanently from about a third of the way through the book.

Book Review: Dead Letters by Caite Dolan-Leach

Dead Letters by Caite Dolan-Leach
My rating: 3 of 5 stars
Publisher:  Random House


Summary:   Ava Antipova has her reasons for running away: a failing family vineyard, a romantic betrayal, a mercurial sister, an absent father, a mother slipping into dementia. In Paris, Ava acquires a French boyfriend and a taste for much better wine, and erases her past. But two years later, she must return to upstate New York. Her twin sister, Zelda, is dead.

Review: Quiver

Quiver by Holly Luhning

My rating: 2 of 5 stars



2.5 stars. I had this on my Kindle for about a year & have decided in 2013 to get some of the lingerers read & done. The best thing I can say is that my task was completed & I finished reading this book. It was well written but a true slog.

Dani annoyed me for much of the story because I was able to see that Maria was a serious problem & not a very nice person but Dani was pulled in & dismissed just about everything because she believed Maria's story about Bathory's diary. It just reached a point with the chaos ensuing that I no longer cared about Dani & her obsession. Foster was quite interesting but even that bit of the story unravelled for me. The excerpts of the diary were fairly harrowing but they didn't really anchor anything else going on with the story to feel to me as anything but a macabre sideshow. I lost the will to gawk long before Dani so it was a bit wasted on me. The epic finale/showdown fell a bit flat because of course that was going to be the outcome & the reader figured it out hundreds of pages earlier. That said, Dani does have growth as a character by story's end, so that's better than nothing.



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