Lost in the Valley of Death

Lost in the Valley of Death by Harley Rustad, 286 pages

Justin Alexander Shetler was always a person interested in exploration and isolation. He learned how to live off the land at a young age, and connected his spirituality to nature and learning about the world. He was also a handsome social media star who documented his world travels through his Instagram and Facebook pages. Seven years ago, Justin traveled to the Parvati Valley in India, a place known for its seclusion and spiritual pilgrims, and also as a place where foreigners have often gone missing, never to be heard from again. As can be assumed from the title, Justin vanished there, during a multi-day hike to a lake with a spiritual guru.

Rustad tells of Justin's life before his final voyage, but he also offers up tales of others who have gone missing in the Parvati Valley, as well as the many theories for what happened to them. I read this with a bit of a cynical eye, perhaps because I'm a bit skeptical of anyone who talks about dedicating their life to connecting spiritually or physically with the natural world but doesn't leave Instagram behind. However, I may be in the minority here, as Justin certainly had a lot of followers, and his disappearance was certainly intriguing. Give it a read and let me know your theories.

Roommates Wanted

Roommates Wanted by Lisa Jewell (2007) 461 pages

Leah lived with her boyfriend across the street from a rather distinctive three story tall building in need of updating. For three years, they watched the comings and goings of the people inside, wondering who the people were: a rather reclusive man with thick curly hair and muttonchop sideburns, a young woman with a guitar, another woman who frequently changed her appearance, a young man of nineteen, and more.

We learn that a poet named Toby was given the house 15 years ago as a wedding present by his absent father. There was one old man, a sitting tenant, who remained in the house when they moved in. When Toby's wife left him after a month, Toby advertised for more roommates to fill the house, preferring to have artists and other creative types, with the rent negotiable. He had no trouble filling the rooms in the house, but basically withdrew from the world, seldom even interacting with his tenants.

Toby learns that his father will be visiting in a few months and wants to see if Toby has been successful in his poetry career and improved his house. (He has not.) When circumstances bring Toby and Leah together in an extraordinary incident, they become friends. Toby confesses that he needs to find a way to get his tenants to leave so that he can sell his house and move on with his life. Leah helps Toby find a contractor to renovate his house and she and Toby plan ways to help his quirky tenants at the same time.

Braking Day

Braking Day by Adam Oyebanji, 359 pages

After more than 130 years in space, the colony ship Archimedes is approaching its destination. As an officer-in-training, Ravi McLeod is one of those preparing the ship for Braking Day, the day cycle on which the ship will flip its thrusters and fire them up — basically, hitting the brakes on their decades-long drift. As he's preparing a remote area, however, Ravi comes across a mysterious un-spacesuited girl floating outside the airlock, and as he sees her again and again, he begins to suspect that he's either going crazy or his cybernetic implants have been hacked. Either way, it's not good for Ravi, the first of his family to break from the criminal life and seek a legit life on Archimedes.

It's hard to describe everything that happens in this book without giving away some major plot details, but the plot is not really where Oyebanji shines. What he's done amazingly well is create a lived-in complex society on the ship, with believable class differences and criminal elements, a water-based economy, and a realistic maintenance schedule for the ship. It's so well done that it's hard for me to believe this is a debut novel. Can't wait to read more from him!

Shades of Milk and Honey

Shades of Milk and Honey by Mary Robinette Kowal, 272 pages

Jane is talented, intelligent, and — at age 28 — an assumed spinster, thanks to her plain looks and awkward social skills. Her younger sister, Melody, is everything that Jane isn't, and her lovely looks and flirtations have garnered the attentions of more than one suitor, much to the delight of their parents. However, as the sisters get to know Melody's suitors and the mysterious glamourist who is creating a magical mural at one of their homes, Jane begins to suspect that something foul may be afoot. Can she convince Melody of the suitor's detriments without Melody blaming Jane's jealousy?

If Jane Austen or the Brontes had added magic into their works, I suspect their books would have been remarkably like this, Kowal's first novel. Having previously only read Kowal's Lady Astronaut series (which is based on hard science and astrophysics), I wasn't quite sure what to expect with this one. Turns out, it was fantastic, and I'm looking forward to reading the next book in this series, which is already on my TBR shelf at home.

The Fountains of Silence

 The Fountains of Silence by Ruta Sepetys, 512 pages.

In 1957 Spain is ruled by dictator Francisco Franco and there are many things Spaniards aren't allowed to do or say. At the same time, Spain has recently opened up to American business, and the tension between the worlds of the American tourists and the employees at the hotels they stay at a palpable. In the summer of 1957, aspiring photojournalist Daniel comes to Madrid with his parents, and quickly stumbles on some of the stories that Franco would rather the world didn't see. One of his windows into these stories is Ana, a maid at the hotel who wants nothing more than to see the world, and her brother Rafa, who works at a slaughterhouse and a graveyard while training his best friend to be a matador. Sepetys artfully weaves stories of a number of a number of characters with different beliefs from all over Madrid (along with excerpts from primary source documents about the period) into an engaging story that is also a very informative history of a little known time.

I feel like this book is an example of where Sepetys really shines, and found it overall stronger than I Must Betray You. This book is, like all of her others, very informative and very sad, and I definitely found myself drawn into Daniel's story in particular. This book is very multifaceted, and definitely worth the read.

Dead Man in a Ditch

 Dead Man in a Ditch by Luke Arnold, 416 pages.

This is book two of the Fetch Phillips archives and things have not gotten much better for our friend Fetch. The lights are still out, the magic is still gone, and people are still dying slow deaths without it. So when an industrialist shows up looking an awful lot like he was killed by magic, people get pretty excited. And since Fetch has accidentally gotten a reputation as the guy who's investigating the magic coming back he finds himself right in the middle of the mess. 

This was a really twisty mystery and I enjoyed it. There were multiple times in the first hundred chapters or so when I thought the case was solved and wasn't sure what the rest of the book was going to do, only to find out that the solution we were just given was practically nothing in the grand scheme of things. I really like this setting, and I feel like this book dug deeper into the details of how it works, which was also cool. This was a strong sequel, and I'm looking forward to reading the next one. 
 

A Calling for Charlie Barnes

 

A Calling for Charlie Barnes by Joshua Ferris (2021) 342 pages

I have to admit that this novel had what I considered a slow start. Charlie Barnes—a 68 year old guy from Danville, Illinois who never made it big, who had several failed marriages, who told stories that might not have been exactly true—is convinced that he has pancreatic cancer and will die soon. No one seems to believe him, because he's been that sort of man. He just wasn't that loveable or relatable for me. But after I looked again at the cover of the book and saw a glowing blurb by Andrew Sean Greer, whose own character, Less, has been one of my favorite quirky characters, I gave Charlie another chance.

At first there was the mystery of the narrator (which was also a thing in Greer's book), but once that was settled (or was it??), then the story improves by leaps and bounds, yanking my brain with surprising turns. Entertaining and philosophical. I recommend it!

House of Dreams: The Life of L. M. Montgomery

 House of Dreams: The Life of L. M. Montgomery by Liz Rosenberg, 339 pages.

A reading challenge I'm participating in includes a task to read a biography of an author you admire. On seeing someone recommend this book I realized that, despite having read Anne of Green Gables *a lot* of times, I didn't know anything at all about the author. 

This is a really effective biography. It follows Lucy Maud Montgomery (who usually just went by Maud) from the time she was born to her tragic death. Rosenberg draws heavily on Montgomery's own journals and letters, but also other archival sources, which prove useful for when Montgomery is either not seeing her own life very clearly or is unwilling to admit to difficult truths. Montgomery's story is often sort of beautiful and hopeful, and many of the nicer and more uplifting aspects of it went into her novels (I had not realized how many things in the Anne books are at least semi-biographical). The biography, much like her own books, is also an interesting look into life at the end of the 19th century and early 20th century. It's also often quite sad. Maud suffered a lot of terrible things, both internally and externally, and it can be hard to read how much everything fell apart for her in the later years of her life. I would definitely recommend this book to fans of L. M. Montgomery, but don't expect a very happy story.

I Must Betray You

 I Must Betray You by Ruta Sepetys, 321 pages.

Under the rule of dictator Nicolae Ceaușescu seventeen-year-old
Cristian Florescu is unwillingly recruited as an informant for the Romanian secret police. Many things are illegal in communist Romania in the 1980s; making fun of the regime, talking to foreigners, accepting American currency, and certainly the secret journal where Cristian records his honest thoughts. Cristian is recorded as an informer, but he's far from the only one, and the mistrust of every citizen for every other is a life-draining weight on the country. Here we follow Cristian as he desperately tries to find a way to have a better life not just for himself, but for his country as well.

As always Sepetys is a master of extremely sad and well-researched historical fiction. This wasn't my favorite of her books (I found the first half a little slow and repetitive), but it was still quite good, and it was good to learn about a historical period I knew literally nothing about going in. I would probably recommend Between Shades of Gray as the better introduction to the author, but this was still definitely worth the read.

Note: Throughout (but especially near the end) there's some pretty graphic violence that may take people by surprise in a young adult book, so be prepared for that.

A Carnival of Snackery

A Carnival of Snackery: Diaries (2003-2020) by David Sedaris, 566 pages; 17 hours on audiobook, read by David Sedaris and Tracey Ullman

David Sedaris is one of my go-to audiobook authors (I think I've listened to just about everything he's published), so OF COURSE I had to give this a listen too. Covering 17 years of his adult life, this collection of diary entries runs the gamut from inane musings to jokes from book events to the truly random stories that Sedaris tends to attract. While these can sometimes be crass and absurd, perhaps the most unnerving are the entries from the last few years, covering the Trump administration, the early days of COVID-19, and the racial protests of 2020. It's odd to hear him — or Tracey Ullman, who narrates the entries written in the UK and Australia) — discussing things that are still ongoing, when most of Sedaris' previous writing has been about either less impactful things (what to name a squirrel, for example) or well in the past. That said, it's a delightful listen, and I loved it.