This book has such a different feeling and tension in it than the first one did. I am starting to see a vicious plot start to come to fruition and I am on the edge of my seat to see how it ends up. I did get a lagging feeling a bit in the middle of this one, it was a transition moment in the plot that just slowed everything way down. It picked back up though and I’m breezing along now.
The Otherwhere Post by Emily J Taylor
Progress: 6 hours, 11 minutes of 11 hours, 22 minutes
Seven years ago, Maeve Abenthy lost her world, her father, even her name. Desperate to escape the stain of her father’s crimes, she lives under a fake name, never staying in one place long enough to put down roots.
Then she receives a mysterious letter with four impossible words Your father was innocent.
To uncover the truth, she poses as an apprentice for the Otherwhere Post, where she’ll be trained in the art of scriptomancy—the dangerous magic that allows couriers to enchant letters and deliver them to other worlds. But looking into her father’s past draws more attention than she’d planned.
Her secretive, infuriatingly handsome mentor knows she’s lying about her identity, and time is running out to convince him to trust her. Worse, she begins to receive threatening letters, warning her to drop her investigation—or else. For Maeve to unravel the mystery of what happened seven years ago, she may have to forfeit her life.
How it’s going:
I am torn on this one so far. Loving the magic system and the other dimensions. Love the scriptomancy university. Maeve is incredibly boring so far and hasn’t really done much of anything except worry. And why have they might told me what her father’s crime is? We talk about it in very vague, euphemistic ways that don’t actually tell me anything. Whatever he did was bad enough for a young girl to abandon her name and live in hiding but….what was it? It’s getting annoying.
An unprecedented condition is on the rise. It behaves like a virus, with the first symptom being a fever, but those who contract it experience long-term effects no one has ever seen; utter contentment. Soon after infection, people find the stress, depression, greed, and other negative feelings that used to weigh them down are gone.
Almost everyone revels in this mass unburdening. But people in power—who depend on malcontents tuning into their broadcasts, prey on the insecure to sell their products, and convince people they need more, new, faster, better everything—know this new state of being is bad for business. Soon, campaigns start up convincing people that being happy all the time is dangerous. There’s even a vaccine developed to rid people of their inner peace and get them back to normal because, surely, without anger or jealousy as motivators, productivity will grind to a halt and the world will be thrown into chaos.
It’s nearly impossible to determine the truth when everyone with a platform is pushing their own agendas, and two teens from very different backgrounds who’ve had their lives upended in different ways by the virus find themselves enmeshed in the center of a dangerous power play. Can they reveal the truth?
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When I read the synopsis for this book I was interested, but wary. Given the fact that it was published in 2025, it had the capacity to be very preachy about any and all things COVID19. But, Neal Shusterman is an author that has earned by trust in taking topics that could be preachy but are not while in his capable hands. So I dove in and I loved this book.
It was such a unique concept. What would society do with a virus that seems to make your life better? Sure, you still might die from the virus. But if you don’t, you’ll just be blissfully content and at ease with the world. What does society do with something like that? How would different categories of humans react?
In this book, Shusterman explores all of these possible reactions. You have a kid who is desperately depressed and figures that even if he dies from the virus, he’s still better off than he is now so, why not get it? There are people who are desperate to avoid infection because they can’t imagine a world where their emotions are limited in such a way against their will. There are people who have made their fortunes by being ruthless and uncaring about their fellow humans, and now need to make provisions about what will happen to their assets if they get this virus and suddenly feel altruistic. You have people who are so blissfully happy that they feel everyone in the world should get the virus.
Now take all of these stories and focus on 3-4 of the best ones and you end up with this book. I really enjoyed every single storyline and could easily imagine that these are real reactions of real people. I loved it. My only complaint on the character side was that a few of them were desperately annoying, even though their story was interesting. I didn’t really connect with any of the characters either, they were more of a vehicle for the plot than anything else.
It ends on a cliffhanger…of sorts, and there is a 2nd book due to be published at some point in the future. I look forward to seeing where else this story can go because this was a fun ride. I really enjoy how Neal Shusterman’s brain works, he is an automatic read for me these days.
In 2088, humankind is at last ready to explore beyond Earth’s solar system. But one uncertainty remains: Where do we go?
Astrophysicist Reggie Straifer has an idea. He’s discovered an anomalous star that appears to defy the laws of physics, and proposes the creation of a deep-space mission to find out whether the star is a weird natural phenomenon, or something manufactured.
The journey will take eons. In order to maintain the genetic talent of the original crew, humankind’s greatest ambition—to explore the furthest reaches of the galaxy—is undertaken by clones. But a clone is not a perfect copy, and each new generation has its own quirks, desires, and neuroses. As the centuries fly by, the society living aboard the nine ships (designated “Convoy Seven”) changes and evolves, but their mission remains the same: to reach Reggie’s mysterious star and explore its origins—and implications.
A mosaic novel of discovery, Noumenon—in a series of vignettes—examines the dedication, adventure, growth, and fear of having your entire world consist of nine ships in the vacuum of space. The men and women, and even the AI, must learn to work and live together in harmony, as their original DNA is continuously replicated and they are born again and again into a thousand new lives. With the stars their home and the unknown their destination, they are on a voyage of many lifetimes—an odyssey to understand what lies beyond the limits of human knowledge and imagination.
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I came to read this book in a somewhat interesting way. I was given an ARC for the 3rd book in the series, which I accepted without being aware that it was the 3rd book in a series. Once I started reading it, I realized that I needed more backstory for this one and I didn’t think it was fair to read and rate the ARC copy if I wasn’t familiar with the series.
Which brings me to reading this book, the first in the series. Surprisingly this one was a difficult one for me to rate and equally difficult to review. There were some parts of this book that I felt deserved 5 stars. And some parts that deserved 1 or 2. So, a 3 star overall rating seems fair. This is definitely not a hard science fiction book, if you’re looking for one of those then move on to the next one. It’s more fair to call this one a character study in space. Which I liked!
The most interesting portions of this book were the AI system for me. It was compelling and riveting and I wanted to see how the storyline developed. Frankly, I would have sacrificed a lot of the other storylines that weren’t nearly as interesting if we could spend more time with the AI. It was such an interesting problem. You have an intelligent AI system that watches generation after generation of humans (who it is programmed to care about and take care of) pass away and be replaced by another clone of that person, who is the same but not really the same. How can an AI grieve when the ones that are lost are still there? But also not there? I loved that so much and it was my favorite part of the book.
Unfortunately, because of the writing style there was a lot of jumping around with no warning. All of sudden you’re in the middle of a mutiny situation. Then just as suddenly we’ve arrived at the star system and completed 20 years of observation and we’re going home. Then we’re all having an identity crisis on why Earth feels like home even though it shouldn’t. Big, big time jumps between the vignettes and I felt like we lost a lot of great potential story in the middle. I also had a hard time becoming attached to any of the characters because they were going to be replaced by their next clone shortly, and I might not hear from them again until 200 years and 40 clones later.
Honestly, I was kind of surprised that in the course of 1 book we made a thousand year journey to the stars, 20 years of study, 1000 years back to earth, and then time on earth. It’s A LOT. I felt like just the journey to the star system could have covered an entire book. As such, it felt like the story remained very surface level because there was just too much material for 420 pages.
Overall I enjoyed the book and will continue to the next one, but with some reservations.
In Osaka, two strangers, Jake and Mariko, miss a flight, and over dinner, discover they’ve both brutally lost loved ones whose paths crossed with the same beguiling woman no one has seen since.
Following traces this mysterious person left behind, Jake travels from country to country gathering chilling testimonies from others who encountered her across the decades—a trail of shattered souls that eventually leads him to Theo, a dying sculptor in rural New Mexico, who knows the woman better than anyone—and might just hold the key to who, or what, she is.
Part horror, part western, part thriller, Old Soul is a fearlessly bold and genre-defying tale about predation, morality and free will, and one man’s quest to bring a centuries-long chain of human devastation to an end.
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Review: **Disclaimer: I received a free copy of this book in exchange for a review. All opinions are my own. Thank you G.P Putnam’s Sons and NetGalley!**
I had some reservations about this book when I saw it being described a literary fiction and horror. I had a hard time seeing how those two genres meshed together and it made me nervous about the book. But, in the end I loved the book and I completely agree that it is a combination of horror and literary fiction.
This book wasn’t your typical scary horror book. It was haunting. Unsettling. Uneasy. It makes you read with a pit in your stomach that you can’t quite explain. And as the pieces get put together you find yourself reflecting on the book long after you’ve put it down. That was my experience. I was haunted by thoughts on this book long after I put it away and moved on to my next book.
But apart from the horror aspects of this mysterious woman this story is a character study. Each of the main characters are people that are explored in depth by the author. I found this part fascinating. I loved learning more about these people. It also made the horror aspects even more horrifying because I grew to care about them and knew what was likely going to happen to them.
When we got to the ending, I honestly felt like I wanted to scream helplessly into the void. It wasn’t the ending I expected. But, truthfully, it was the correct ending for this book. The ending makes the book even more unsettling than it was before. This was a great book, I highly recommend it.
High school sweethearts Sarah and Caleb Linwood have always been a sure thing. For the past seventeen years, they have had each other’s backs through all of life’s ups and downs, achievements, losses, stages, and phases.
But Sarah has begun to wonder… Who is she without her other half?
When she decides to take on a project of her own, a fundraising gala in memoriam of her late mother, Sarah wants nothing more than to prove to herself—and to everyone else—that she doesn’t need Caleb’s help to succeed. She’s still her mother’s daughter, after all. Independent and capable.
That is until the event fails and Caleb uninvitedly steps in to save the day.
The rift that follows unearths a decade of grievances between them and doubts begin to grow. Are they truly the same people they were when they got married at nineteen? Are they supposed to be?
In a desperate attempt to fix what they fear is near breaking, Sarah and Caleb make the spontaneous decision to join a grueling hiking trip intended to guide couples through rough patches.
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My success with books this week is 0 for 3. 3 books started, 3 books abandoned. I am in a slump that I hope doesn’t continue any further. I only made it about a quarter of the way through this one so the review should be short.
What I hoped to get: A cute little romance about a married couple who have lost each other in the years since their marriage and go on a retreat to find that cute, romantic love story again.
What I got: A rich, spoiled girl who regrets her life choices and decides that it is her husband’s fault that she is unhappy. Proceeds to drag him to a marriage retreat so she can further whine about her own choices.
I hated Sarah so much. Initially I had sympathy for her given the tragedy of her mother. But that sympathy disappeared the longer the book went on. She decided to be a stay at home wife and defers all of her decisions to her husband. She wants him to take charge because she didn’t feel worthy of being with him. So she defers to him for 15 years. And then the one time she decided that she didn’t want him to intervene, she blames him for over a decade of her unhappiness. Caleb is wonderful. He loves Sarah so deeply, and loved her mother too. He became part of their family and it was lovely. Hell, even when Sarah is threatening him with divorce he remembers to bring her Kindle on the retreat, with a portable charger AND remembers what she was reading. WTF?! This is the man she is dissatisfied with? Girl, get a therapist or leave that man alone!
Written Among The Stars 