Pink Fiction Club

  I have wanted to read this book for a while now, ever since I have watched the movie based on it. Finally, I found a used copy in a charity shop and decided to purchase it. It has been a while since I have watched a movie, at least a few years, so I have forgotten some details, but enough have remained in my mind that I’m sure it has impacted my reading experience, especially when it came to the big reveal towards the end of the novel. Jane Harper’s debut novel ‘The Dry’ follows Aaron Falk, as he hesitantly returns to his hometown of Kiewarra, a small farming community in the outback of Australia. He is now a federal investigator, working on financial cases, but when he gets a letter from his childhood best friend’s father, asking him to return, he cannot refuse it. Luke Hadler, his friend, is being accused of murdering his wife and a young son and then himself, but as Falk begins to investigate this more, he realizes that everything is not as it seems in this small, crumbling co...

  This was another book that I found out through booktook and was convinced I would enjoy. All I knew about it before I got it was that it was LGBT, dark academia and that the main characters were quite horrible and pretentious people. Everything about that sounded like it would be right up my alley, so I decided to purchase this from my local Waterstones. Unfortunately, while ‘These Violent Delights’ was compared to ‘The Secret History’, it only served to remind me of how much Donna Tartt’s novel was superior, even if I did not enjoy that one very much either. The novel follows Paul and Julian, who meet as college freshmen in Pittsburgh and strike up a relationship that soon turns into a dangerous game of obsession and desire. We learn that they are from different classes entirely, Paul is from a working class Jewish family while Julian is an epitome of WASP-iness. Still, they see each other as only intellectual equals, and look down on pretty much everyone else. Their two charact...

  For a while, it was impossible to exist in any of the book review spaces on the internet without someone bringing up this book and praising it intensely. However, a few of my friends whose opinion I cherish have read it, and hated it. This is also the story of how I ended up adding it to my goodreads want to read list that my husband stalked in order to buy me books for my birthday. Since I had a physical copy, courtesy of my amazing husband (love you very much) I decided to see this for myself. This is just as much of a train wreck as I expected it to be. The premise of the novel is that we follow Violet (or Violence as her enemy-to-lovers guy insists on calling her) who was supposed to be studying to be a squire get thrown into school where they will learn how to become riders or die trying. Violet has no personality beyond being small, not like other girls, has silver hair (how many times can an author remind us how special Violet is because of this) and horny to all hell. The...

This book has been on my TBR for this year since the start of the year and as we are nearing the end of 2024, I decided it was finally time. Perhaps, the fact I did not check the novel summary before reading it influenced my experience reading it, as I was not in the mood for the post apocalyptic novel where the end of the world has been caused by a disease. Fair or not, I did not enjoy this novel at all, as I found it rather dull and uninspiring, leaving a lot to be desired. Unfortunately, it was another case of a somewhat interesting idea done not so well. The main character and the narrator is a young woman of Chinese heritage, Candace Chen, living in New York city. The narration is split between the now where the world has already ended and the past. In the new, Candace joins a group of survivors, who are all led by Bob as they try to make it to ‘The Facility’, scavenging for what they need along the way while her past is showing her mostly dull daily routines until the two timel...

  ‘Wild and Wicked Things’ is imagined as a sapphic retelling of ‘The Great Gatsby’ , set in the jazz age with a sprinkle of magic and historical fiction. What’s not to like? Unfortunately, while  ‘The Great Gatsby’ will remain etched into the American and world literature, not because of the glitz and glam of the age, but because of the criticism of it, I am afraid that ‘Wild and Wicked Things’ has not even gotten close to the level needed for that kind of veneration. The story follows Annie, a naive young woman, who came to Crow Island, a place filled with magic and mystery to settle her father’s estate. However, as she moves about, she gets intertwined with the forbidden magic and meets Emeline, the local witch. This, in combination with the idea that all of this is set post WWI in which magic is very much real but forbidden drew my attention. I really wanted to like it, but the author did so little in so many pages I found myself skimming through so many pages of Annie’s q...

  I have not heard of this book at all until I have seen two of my best friends read ‘Follow Me to Ground’ and love it on Goodreads. As I trust their judgment, I decided to give this one a go. I have not had a very good reading month in September, so I was very excited to announce I have adored everything about this novel and found it incredibly eerie, haunting and magnificent all in one. The book is very ambiguous, but I believe it gives the reader just enough clues to follow the narrative and understand the horrifying things happening in the novel. It is one of the best uses of magical realism I have read in a long time and I truly hope that Sue Rainsford’s other work (that I will definitely be reading) is just as successful as ‘Follow Me to Ground’ The novel follows Ada and her father, who are not entirely human, but creatures who have the ability to heal humans, or ‘Cures’ as they call them of most illnesses, either by breaking them apart or burying them in the ground and allow...

  I am not even sure where I came across this book, but the title and the overall plot looked interesting enough to download it on my kindle. Additionally, I have been on a mission to read a bit more books outside of my usual genres and cannons, so a contemporary novel by a well renowned Japanese author seemed like a very good idea for that. However, I believe that I was simply not the right audience for ‘Lonely Castle in The Mirror’. It is far from a bad book, but at times I found it quite childish and not mature enough to be dealing with the themes it has tackled. I do have to put a disclaimer here that I am thirty years old, while the characters in the novel are much much younger than that, as they are all pre teens. In that sense, it is logical that I would not relate entirely to them and their problems and I could imagine that somebody much younger would appreciate this book more than I did. Also, I have read this in English translation, so I am leaving the option that some o...