abookishtype's reviews
2414 reviews

Navola by Paolo Bacigalupi

adventurous challenging dark emotional mysterious tense medium-paced

• Plot- or character-driven? A mix
• Strong character development? Yes
• Loveable characters? Yes
• Diverse cast of characters? No
• Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated

5.0

The Regulai name is legendary. Davico di Regulai’s ancestors include warriors, politicians, and bankers who shape not just the city of Navola but the world around them. Davico was raised to be the perfect heir to his master manipulator father, but Paolo Bacigalupi’s engrossing new novel Navola is a tale of what happens to people who get caught up in the webs of those who practice to deceive...

Read the rest of my review at A Bookish Type. I received a free copy of this book from the publisher via NetGalley, for review consideration. 

The Undermining of Twyla and Frank by Megan Bannen

adventurous emotional funny lighthearted fast-paced

• Plot- or character-driven? A mix
• Strong character development? Yes
• Loveable characters? Yes
• Diverse cast of characters? Yes
• Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated

5.0

It’s rare (so rare that I can’t think of another example) that I read a sequel that I loved more than the first book in a series, but that’s the case with The Undermining of Twyla and Frank, Megan Bannen’s sequel to The Undertaking of Hart and Mercy. Bookish friends, I read this book in a single afternoon and am kind of thinking about diving back in for another turn...

Read the rest of my review at A Bookish Type. I received a free copy of this book from the publisher via NetGalley, for review consideration. 

What They Said About Luisa by Erika Rummel

adventurous informative reflective medium-paced

• Plot- or character-driven? Character
• Strong character development? It's complicated
• Loveable characters? It's complicated
• Diverse cast of characters? Yes
• Flaws of characters a main focus? No

3.0

In a short note at the beginning of Erika Rummel’s fascinating novel, What They Said About Luisa, the author explains the historical inspiration for the book. Luisa de Abrego, a formerly enslaved woman from Seville, had the first known Christian marriage in the New World. She married Miguel Rodríguez in St. Augustine, in what is now Florida, in 1565. Ten years later, however, de Abrego accused herself of bigamy before the Inquisition in Mexico City...

Read the rest of my review at A Bookish Type. I received a free copy of this book from the publisher via NetGalley, for review consideration. 

The Mirror of Simple Souls by Aline Kiner

emotional informative reflective slow-paced

• Plot- or character-driven? A mix
• Strong character development? It's complicated
• Loveable characters? It's complicated
• Diverse cast of characters? No
• Flaws of characters a main focus? No

3.0

Life for medieval women in Western Europe was supposed to follow a few paths. Women were expected to become wives and mothers, or perhaps take religious vows. Aline Kiner’s The Mirror of Simple Souls shows us one of the few alternate paths for women in the 1300s: beguinage. Neither wives nor nuns, beguines had some freedom to become merchants or scholars or healers. Kiner’s book—elegantly translated from the French by Susan Emanuel—takes us inside the Great Beguinage of Paris in the first decades of the fourteenth century...

Read the rest of my review at A Bookish Type. I received a free copy of this book from the publisher via NetGalley, for review consideration. 

A Ballad of Remittent Fever by Ashoke Mukhopadhyay

challenging informative inspiring reflective medium-paced

• Plot- or character-driven? Character
• Strong character development? Yes
• Loveable characters? Yes
• Diverse cast of characters? Yes
• Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

4.0

Ashoke Mukhopadhyay’s A Ballad of Remittent Fever is a remarkable book that manages the difficult task of balancing engaging characters with entertaining plots and fascinating, important questions that are impossible to answer. The braided plots tell the tales of three revolutionary men, all doctors and all members of the Ghoshal family, from the late 1800s through to the 1960s. It’s a marvel how Mukhopadhyay’s book manages to contain all this in a little over 300 pages. This book is beautifully translated by Arunanva Sinha, who knows just went to leave a word or two untranslated...

Read the rest of my review at A Bookish Type. 

Shanghai by Joseph Kanon

emotional mysterious tense fast-paced

3.0

Daniel Lohr is a cautious man for three reasons. First, his criminal uncle taught him how to watch his own back. Second, he’s a communist. Third, he’s a Jew and it’s 1938. As Joseph Kanon’s new novel Shanghai opens, Daniel is about to board a ship for the only foreign port that doesn’t require an entry visa and is one of the only places European Jews can find refuge. And he doesn’t know it yet, but Daniel is going to need every skill and trick he ever learned...

Read the rest of my review at A Bookish Type. I received a free copy of this book from the publisher via NetGalley, for review consideration. 

This Country Is No Longer Yours by Avik Jain Chatlani

challenging dark emotional mysterious tense medium-paced

• Plot- or character-driven? Character
• Strong character development? It's complicated
• Loveable characters? No
• Diverse cast of characters? Yes
• Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated

1.0

In 1980, the Sendero Luminoso (Shining Path) went to war in Peru. For almost twenty years, Senderistas terrorized anyone who didn’t follow their radical version of communism: urban and rural, rich and poor. Avik Jain Chatlani’s disturbing novel-in-stories, This Country is No Longer Yours, gives us a sense of what living in Peru might have been like in the last decades of the twentieth century. Chatlani shows us revolutionaries, reactionaries, survivors, and victims. Most of all, Chatlani shows us a country in turmoil with itself...

Read the rest of my review at A Bookish Type. I received a free copy of this book from the publisher via NetGalley, for review consideration. 

The White Lady by Jacqueline Winspear

adventurous emotional mysterious tense fast-paced

• Plot- or character-driven? A mix
• Strong character development? Yes
• Loveable characters? It's complicated
• Diverse cast of characters? No
• Flaws of characters a main focus? No

2.0

Linni de Witt is supposed to be retired. She’s definitely earned it, since she worked for the British government during the first and second world wars. And she would be quietly living in her grace-and-favor house in the countryside if people from London hadn’t bothered her new friends, Jim and Rosie Mackie. In The White Lady, Jacqueline Winspear’s protagonist shakes off the (very faint) dust of inactivity to protect the Mackies from the clutches of his criminal family. Alongside this caper, Winspear takes us to Linni’s war years, slowly revealing what drives her strongly protective instincts...

Read the rest of my review at A Bookish Type. 

Love Is a Burning Thing by Nina St. Pierre

challenging dark emotional inspiring reflective medium-paced

4.0

The way we grow up sets our definitions of what “normal” is. Childhood prepares us for the way we interpret and react to the world around us: with fear, with enthusiasm, with curiosity, with anger, etc. In Love is a Burning Thing, Nina St. Pierre takes us into a childhood where constant motion was normal, with a mother who saw plots and divinity everywhere, when a young girl had to be the parent as often as not. St. Pierre’s long look back is full of questions about mental illness, faith, responsibility, and (maybe) forgiveness...

Read the rest of my review at A Bookish Type. I received a free copy of this book from the publisher via NetGalley, for review consideration. 

Black Sheep by Rachel Harrison

dark emotional mysterious tense fast-paced

• Plot- or character-driven? A mix
• Strong character development? It's complicated
• Loveable characters? No
• Diverse cast of characters? No
• Flaws of characters a main focus? No

3.0

There’s a floating aphorism about everyone fighting a battle we know nothing about. This has never been more true in the case of Vesper Wright, the protagonist of Rachel Harrison’s hair-raising novel, Black Sheep. Four years before we meet her, Vesper left her family, friends, and community to scrape together an independent life as a waitress at a TGIF clone of a restaurant...

Read the rest of my review at A Bookish Type.