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One of the best debuts from a writer, Tell the Wolves I’m Home is an emotional tour du force

Once in a while a book comes around that reminds me why I love books. It reminds me why I love books about real people. It reminds me why I don’t need an epic to feel like I’ve lived an entire life through a book. Tell the Wolves I’m Home is one of those books, which is even more impressive considering it is a debut.

Tell the Wolves I’m Home tells the story of June Elbus an appropriately weird 14-year-old girl from New York. Her love for the middle ages, which includes her going into the woods and pretending she’s from that time wearing medieval boots, is really only understood by her Uncle Finn, a retired artist from New York City. Her relationship with Finn is one that she believes no one else can understand. She loves her uncle in a way that most people love their spouse. That’s why his slow decay due to AIDS is affecting her in a way that no one else seems to understand.




However, her uncle still communicates with her through notes that he left her that are being delivered by a man that her family seems to despise. One of the notes tells her to “take care of him,” which June does out of respect for Finn, but eventually begins a relationship with the man that makes her understand what it is to love.

Coming-of-Age is a hard genre to master without falling into a formula, however where any other novel would zig, Brunt seems to zag. Her portrait of June is one of the deepest character studies I have ever read. June’s insecurities and growth are so beautifully captured in prose instead of using big set pieces. One of my favorite instances was a passage where she describes what going to a party is like for her:

“That’s what being shy feels like. Like my skin is too thin, the light too bright. Like the best place I could possibly be is in a tunnel far under the cool, dark earth. Someone asks me a question and I stare at them, empty-faced, my brain jammed up with how hard I’m trying to find something interesting to say. And in the end, all I can do is nod or shrug, because the light of their eyes looking at me, waiting for me, is just too much to take.”

Brilliant passages like that are given throughout the book and encompass so many themes. June’s relationship with everyone in her world was drawn out with so much detail. From her relationship with her mother whose own grief doesn’t seem understood to June, her relationship with Finn that represents true love, to her complicated relationship with her sister, Brunt has an understanding of the way humans interact with each other.

In the end, Tell the Wolves I’m Home is an epic meditation on love, grief, change, and the necessity of growing up that disguises itself as a young adult coming-of-age. Though the tropes of our odd heroine, major life event, and life-changing relationship are there, Brunt uses them in a way that I don’t think has been committed to the page before. 9/10

Tell the Wolves I’m Home is available in paperback, hardcover, and e-book on Amazon!

There are a few gems among Kelly Link’s short story collection Get In Trouble that are certainly worth the trouble of reading

I wasn’t sure what to expect going into Kelly Link’s short story collection Get In Trouble. I never read a short story collection before it and I had my apprehensions. However, after just hearing praise after praise about the book and watching the anthology movie “Wild Tales,” I was convinced.

Diving into the book, I didn’t know what to expect. All I knew was that each story has a supernatural element to it. Reading the first story “The Summer People” was a great representation of the rest of the stories in the book. It tells the story of Fran, a teenager in rural North Carolina who takes care of the homes of the people who come to vacation in the town in the summer. However, after her mother mysteriously disappears, she is in charge of taking care of the “summer people,” a group of fairy-like creatures who enjoy playing tricks, but also help provide you with the magical remedies you may need.

The story sets up Link’s distinctly “en media res” style that gives you more background on the characters and stories that take some novels 50 pages to do. Despite the high-concept of a lot of the stories, Link anchors each in the characters.

For example, “Origin Story” opens on a 15-year-old from Iowa, as she arrives at a hotel to meet up with an older man she met online. At the hotel, two vastly different conventions are occurring: a dentist convention and a superhero convention (like actual superheroes with superpowers). However, the girl thinks nothing of the superheroes. That’s the thing with Link’s worlds. What would be abnormal or supernatural in ours are mundane in hers. The superheroes fade into the background and in the forefront is this “who am I?” exploration of this 16-year-old girl.

However, there is one thing that I couldn’t get past that hurt the book as a whole for me. While each story is such incredible deep dives into the characters, and the worlds are realized with such soft strokes but are still easily visualized, the plots of each story don’t seem to hold up. I understand each story is its own short character study, but each story doesn’t feel like it has a payoff. They almost feel incomplete save for a couple that felt full circle.

Maybe I’m just not built to read short stories or maybe I tried too hard to find some satirical meaning behind each narrative, but if you enjoy them then, by all means, you might love Get in Trouble.

Despite my issues with some of the stories, I will say that Link’s prose is some of the most beautiful I’ve read in recent memory. Passages like,

“The boy is loved. The loved one suffers. All loved ones suffer. Love is not enough to prevent this. Love is not enough. Love is enough. The thing that you wished for. Was this it?”

After this wave of YA, easy-to-digest prose, it’s refreshing to read such mature writing that doesn’t patronize the reader. Kelly Link is such an incredibly talented writer. Her world-building is unlike any other author I’ve read recently. She does it with such ease and without the bulkiness of exposition. If you’re looking for an impeccably written set of quirky fairy tales, then Get in Trouble will do the trick. But if you’re looking for twists and payoffs, then I’d stay away.

7/10

Get Get in Trouble on Amazon!

Joshua Ferris’ Then We Came to the End is equal parts stinging satire of working and moving character study about the meaning of life

For me, the best way to tell how I felt about a book is looking at my reaction to the ending. I’m not talking about my reaction to what happens, but more how I feel towards finishing the book and putting it down.Then We Came To The End made me feel something that I rarely feel in finishing a book: the desire for it to go on. Most books end in a satisfying way and I think that’s great. It’s great to come to the end of a book and think that the payoff was worth the journey. But the hilarious, somewhat tragic, and in the end an all-too-real look at the lives of everyone in the workforce had enough to go on.

When I first read this book I was in high school and probably still working at my first job ever as a sales associate at Toys R Us (but that’s a story for another day). I loved it. I thought it was a hilarious take on adulthood and this “real world” that everyone worries about. But reading it a second time when I am now a college graduate working in the so-called real world it turned into this shockingly accurate and tragically real look at what it is to work in an office.

Ferris’ writing is a work of genius. He includes passages of stinging humor like:

“It was madness to leave without your useless shit. You came in with it, you left with it–that was how it worked. What would you use to clutter a new office with if not your useless shit?”

But he also interjects surprisingly vivid and resonant sections.

“One topic — that was all we knew and it tyrannized every conversation. We fell into it helplessly, the way jilted lovers only know one subject, the way true bores never transcended the sorry limitations of their own lives. It was a shrill, carping, frenzied time, and as poisonous an atmosphere as anyone had ever known — and we wanted nothing more than to stay in it forever.”

But the real genius comes from his decision to write the book from the perspective narrator that refers to everyone in the office as a collective “we.” Not only is it fitting because often in a corporate setting you are made to work on a team, it also includes the reader in on the group. You hear the inside jokes. You hear the rumors sweep the office. You are as much of a participant in the book as the characters are. The entire book is structured as if you are hearing a story being relayed from person to person through the office.

The payoff is the final chapter, which I hope is why the title of the book refers to an end. After spending nearly 400 pages with these characters we are forced to say goodbye. Some we have to let go of because of tragedy. Some we have to let go of because contact was lost. However, what remained the same in these goodbyes was the fact that as each character departed, I felt a pang of sadness. I feel like I knew the character like he or she was a real person and I was never going to see them again.

Not everyone is going to love Then We Came to the End (just look at its Goodreads rating) because it’s not a book that’s written for everyone. It’s a book written for the subset of society that has alarms set for 7:30am and has to be at work at 9am. It’s for the people that can’t wait to hear a piece of office gossip. It’s for the people look forward to noon when they get one hour of freedom. For those people, this book will be a hilarious and poignant look at 8 hours of their day. But more than that it begs the question: “is this really the meaning of life?” For others, the humor will be hit or miss and the characters could be annoying or not relatable. For us, these characters are you and me.

10/10

Then We Came to the End is available in paperback, hardcover, and e-book on Amazon!

Bellweather Rhapsody is a coming-of-age drama and whodunit mystery wrapped into a quirky dark comedy

Agatha Christie, The Shining, and Stephen King are all directly referenced in Kate Racculia’s sophomore effort. However, they are more than just reference because they shape the book itself. Bellweather Rhapsody is simultaneously a “whodunit” mystery, teenage coming-of-age dramedy, shifting character study, and even more. But Racculia balances the genres so deftly with her off-kilter characters that in the end, this odd comedic tragedy becomes something profound in the end.

Though Bellweather Rhapsody follows six main characters with countless minor characters, the main focus is a set of twins: the Hatmakers. Alice Hatmaker is a star on the rise. At least she thinks so. She even keeps a journal that she wants to eventually become her biography when her star has finally faded. For her, the world, the sun, and universe revolve around her. She doesn’t hope she will be a star, she knows she’s going to be. Her brother on the hand is a much more down-to-Earth teen who simply wants to get through life without embarrassing himself.




However, let me bring it back to the beginning. 1982 in the Bellweather hotel in upstate New York to be exact where a gruesome murder-suicide rocks the world of Minnie Graves. Not only does it leave a permanent scar on her delicate young psyche, it also shoves her head deep into the world of horror movies, which Racculia pulls heavily from. Fast forward to 1997 when the Hatmaker twins, stars of the school’s chorus and orchestra, are selected to join the Statewide music festival, the pinnacle of high school music in the state, at the Bellweather.

Alice, the more rambunctious and ambitious of the two, is looking forward to cementing her place as a star on the rise. Rabbit (Bertram), on the other hand, just wants to figure out a way to come out to his sister. Neither of them, along with their chaperone Natalie Wilson, quite know what the old beast of a hotel has in store for them.

The twins’ dynamic drives so much of the emotional heft of the book. Despite the world seemingly crashing down around them (or the hotel for that matter at least), what’s more devastating is the prospect of the Hatmaker twins not being together as the shadow of college approaches them. This triggers two entirely different responses from them, which leads to two distinct coming-of-age stories.

While the complex whodunit mystery is the main plot that connects the characters, it’s the study of them that makes the book so compelling. There’s Natalie who has to come to terms with her guilt. Rabbit who is trying to find the right time to come out to his sister and come out of her shadow. Alice comes to terms with her imminent stardom possibly not being so imminent. The hotel is simply an incubator for these people to grow up and grow past their hardships in life.

What I love most about the book is that it doesn’t play slave to its genre’s boundaries. Yes, it’s a mystery. Yes, it’s a dark comedy. Yes, it’s a coming-of-age drama. But the mystery isn’t filled with red herrings and it doesn’t try to throw you off its trail. The dark comedy doesn’t tread on desperation. The coming-of-age doesn’t feel melodramatic. Plus, it’s all tied together by Racculia’s ability to emote so beautifully through her words:

“This is why. This is why. This is why he plays, why he loves, why he listens. It isn’t even a high — a high is too low — it is synchronicity, with the universe. Physical proof of the three-part harmony between body and soul and song, all three living, dying, resonating.”




Sometimes her writing meanders through self-introspection instead of forwarding the plot, which sometimes slips out from under you, but the story and trajectory itself are so unpredictable that in the end, you feel satisfied. And it you are someone who loves twists, they are carried out so beautifully here. While she drifts when it comes to characters, she trusts her reader enough not to over explain the story and that’s something that is so sadly rare these days.

Bellweather Rhapsody is a crowd-pleaser like no other. It balances its genres in a way that it becomes something entirely different in itself. It’s compulsively entertaining, thrilling, and sometimes even downright hilarious. There are books that you can read in one sitting, then there the ones that you need to read in one sitting. Bellweather Rhapsody is the latter. You won’t be able to put it down.

8.5/10

Get Bellweather Rhapsody on paperback, hardcover, or e-book on Amazon!

A quick and efficient page turner, Dark Matter doesn’t bring anything too new to the genre, but it is certainly entertaining enough to keep you reading

If you read the premise of Dark Matter, you don’t immediately see anything terribly original or grout-breaking. A man doesn’t know it but the entire world he knows is about to be ripped away from him. It sounds like the premise for nearly any crime thriller made and the book starts that way. Jason Dessen has the perfect wife, the perfect son, and the perfect life. At least in his eyes. We meet Jason as he and his family are in the middle of family night. Who legitimately has a family night? However, when he mentions to his wife that he was invited out to a bar by a friend, she doesn’t hesitate to tell him to go. What significant other would say that without resistance? It’s too perfect and too polished.

As the book goes on, more and more of these typical scenarios play out. He meets up with an old college roommate who has become a prize-winning scientist in the field of astrophysics that Jason is no just an undergrad professor in. Naturally, Jason feels jealousy and regret since he made the decision 15 years ago to have his son Charlie with his wife Daniela, effectively killing his career in science.

You can pretty much call everything that happens in the first third of the book. You can even call what happens when a mysterious masked figure kidnaps Jason at gunpoint and leads him to an abandoned factory in a run-down part of Chicago. When Jason wakes up after being stuck with a needle he is surrounded by people in hazmat suits who seem to know him.

However, that’s where the predictability stops. From there, I had no idea where the book would go and when I thought I did it would quickly veer away. His keeps the plot tight and lean, which makes it a page-turner from start to end. However, there are places that I wish he would expand and made me want to pull my hair out wondering what will happen next. At a certain point I could be confident that in the next couple pages my questions will be answered.

And because of the leanness of the book, you’re left with shallow characters that you only care about because you’re told to. The only intriguing characters are ones that you get limited time with, which again makes you want to know more about them and their motivations. This book could easily have been twice as long and still be as entertaining and thrilling.

That being said, I thoroughly enjoyed my time reading this book. It’s smart, sometimes too much for its own good, and masterfully laid out. As Jason falls more deeply entangled in this deranged plot, he begins to have questions about his own sanity and meaning. I can’t talk more about it without spoiling the plot, but Dark Matter brings up some interesting questions about the decisions that we make and how they affect our lives and the world around us.

I don’t think Dark Matter brings anything terribly new to the table, but Blake Crouch knows how to tell an engrossing story. Despite a rocky start, he pulls the book together into a genuinely interesting and human thriller. Even if his characters feel contrived and the plot to some extent feel familiar, Crouch has written a page turner from beginning to end.

7/10

Get Dark Matter in paperback, hardcover, or e-book on Amazon!

Carry On by Rainbow Rowell is a sharp and hilarious satire of Harry Potter featuring the worst chosen one ever

Simon Snow is the worst “chosen one” that has ever existed. That’s pretty much the line that drew me to Carry On. Rainbow Rowell is known more for her books like Eleanor & Park and Fangirl — pretty standard YA “outcast” fiction. But her first journey into fantasy was done so well that I wouldn’t be surprised if her next few novels are in the genre.

Carry On takes place in a magical world where magicians attend a school called Watford to hone their skills. Watford is run by a headmaster known as “The Mage” who takes an orphan boy under his wing because he believes that he is “the chosen one.” If you’re not catching a clear comparison here, then this should clear it up:

• Non-magical beings are completely unaware of the magical world and are called “Normals”
• Students are paired with their roommates through a crucibleMagicians use wands — along with rings, staffs, and other objects — to direct their spells
• Spells are phrases like “up, up, and away” and “some like it hot”
• There is a coven that is a board that handles all things political in the magical world
• There is a powerful being threatening the very fabric of the world called “The Insidious Humdrum”

Did you get it yet? Carry On is for all intensive purposes a satire (rip-off?) of the Harry Potter series. I didn’t learn until after I read the book that it was actually based on fan fiction written in Rowell’s previous novel, Fangirl. Which is why the book feels so familiar. In Fangirl, the series is meant to be a parody of Harry Potter. But as it’s own novel, it becomes a really well-made and unique satire that has strong enough roots to stand on its own as a unique novel.

Starting en media res, we are first introduced to Simon Snow in his last year at Watford. After surviving a goblin attack — the goblins decided that whoever kills him becomes their King — he returns to Watford. Throughout the beginning of his book he is obsessed with the whereabouts of his roommate, Tyrannus Basilton Grimm-Pitch or Baz, as he’s known. Baz is Simon’s sworn enemy and Simon is sure that he is up to now good. Throughout the book the two take swipes at each other and keep track of the other’s movements. However as the book switches perspectives, which it does every couple pages or so, we learn that there could be more than meets the eye.

But what made Carry On so fun and charming was that Rowell didn’t take the story and the world too seriously. There are silly YA romance moments that would make you roll your eyes in any other book. But Rowell embraces the silliness. She was not out to create high-art. She created a hilariously fun world filled with magicians and vampire and merewolves (mermaid-werewolves for you uncultured swine).

Not only that, she embraces the book’s roots in Harry Potter and turns them on their head. Rowell is able to create a plot and characters that are so distinct that any comparisons fade away by the end of the book. It is truly one-of-a-kind.

In the end, the most refreshing thing about Carry On is that it didn’t concern itself with making a series. I feel as if every single YA author thinks they need to churn out a trilogy no matter what. So, they write their first novel with a trilogy planned and that chip on their shoulder is always noticeable. Carry On doesn’t have that chip. Instead, Rowell starts and ends the story in the perfect places. If the book came as a series it would be the last one, and I’m happy about that. I’d like to think that Rowell did it on purpose to poke fun at the seemingly never ending series that has plagued the genre recently. 

7.5/10

Get Carry On on paperback, hardcover, or e-book on Amazon!

Wonders of the Invisible World is a refreshing adventure into the space of fantasy young adult genre that feels completely original

I think one of the most interesting and successful parts of the young adult genre is the “weird” factor. You have to admit, a lot of YA is weird with weird characters in weird situations. But no YA book is quite like Wonders of the Invisible World by Christopher Barzak. Aiden Lockwood is your typical outcast in your typical small town high school. However, when Aiden’s former best friend Jarrod comes back to town he surfaces an entire hidden story in Aiden’s past.

Not only is the story hidden, but Aiden has simply lost large swaths of his memory. As he and Jarrod slowly uncover his past, they realize that the story is a lot more complicated than they initially thought. It transcends generations, time, and even worlds.

Like a lot of young adult novels, at the center of whatever conflict is a romance. However, what I really appreciated about the romance is that avoided almost all the cliches of a YA romance. First of all, Barzak doesn’t hit us over the head with “adorable” scenes that manipulate us into wanting the central couple to get together. The build up is very organic. He also doesn’t try to make the love interest sarcastically charming or a misunderstood rebel or bad boy with a heart of gold. We want the couple to be together because they’re right for each other. He doesn’t need grand romantic gestures to prove that.

And that is what is really refreshing about Wonders of the Invisible World is that Barzak doesn’t force Aiden’s personal storyline or the fantasy storyline into melodrama. In fact, for all the fantastical elements or potential for a soaring high school outcast story he keeps the story pretty lean. You’ll thank him for that in the end because it would pay a disservice to Aiden. His entire story is that he leads a non-fantastical life. The magic and curses and visions speak for themselves.




I will also say that this is a very weird book. It deals with things in a wholly original way that will catch you off guard throughout. But between family curses, disembodied voices, and a personification of death, it’s not exactly your typical book. It’s easy to forget that the fantastic elements are all that fantastic, though. Barzak’s nonchalant style when it comes to writing about the fantasy elements really refreshing. The lack of hyperbole makes the clearly magical parts of the story seem realistic.

Wonders of the Invisible World doesn’t try to reinvent the wheel of the young adult genre. However, it does spin it on a different rhythm. The tropes we have come to know and love and love to hate are twisted to make an entertaining and satisfying adventure into the mystical. 7.5/10

Sylvain Neuvel’s Debut Novel, Sleeping Giants, Deftly Avoids Becoming a Sci-fi Cliche

A dissociated birthday party, a new bike, and a 23-foot-long metal hand. And so begins Sylvain’s Neuvel’s debut novel Sleeping Giants. Sleeping Giants follows Doctor Rose Franklin, a gifted physicist working at the University of Chicago, who, after falling down a perfectly square hole onto the metal hand as a child, is now tasked with the responsibility of discovering the origin, composition, and function of the hand.

As more and more giant metal appendages are unearthed, Franklin begins to discover that this would-be statue is less than ceremonial. An unnamed man begins to develop an elite covert research facility comprised of Franklin, Kara Resnik (military pilot), Ryan Mitchell (co-pilot to Resnik), Victor Couture (linguist), and Alyssa Papadatou (geneticist). As Franklin and her team erect the colossal statue, its true function as a war machine becomes abundantly clear, and so does the fact that its origins are undeniably from another species.

I have to just start out this review plain and simple: I loved Sleeping Giants. In my opinion, it is a very entertaining story, and I flew through 300 pages. Granted, the majority of the novel is in an interview format, which certainly makes the book a bit of a quicker read; nonetheless, it was an engaging book that gave you just enough storyline without divulging its complete truth.




Personally, I need a book that doesn’t quite answer everything. That is the magic of the story is in and of itself: mystery. We are all fascinated and awestruck by what we do not understand, and by our own crass human nature we immediately lose any interest in something we completely understand. We always want what we do not have. Sleeping Giants plays perfectly on this communal personality trait that humanity shares by being cryptic, vague, and enigmatic but steadfastly dropping breadcrumbs for us to follow.

If you are a reader who needs definitive answers or explicitly rationalizations as to what is happening with a book, then, in the words of Randy Jackson from American Idol: “It’s a no from me, dog.” On the other hand, if you are intrigued by a fantasy novel delving into morality, mythology, and that unanswerable questions of, “are we alone in this universe,” then this is the book for you.

I also have to admit that, perhaps I lacked the foresight, but I genuinely did not see the twists of this book coming. I did not really ever know what to expect, and if I had to chart my prediction of the story prior to reading this novel, then I would have been way off. Like Christopher Columbus off.

Sleeping Giants also gave me an excuse to visualize Reznik as Jessica Chastain in Zero Dark Thirty, and if you didn’t know, she is one of my all-time favorite actors. While it was hard to visualize characters due to the formality of the interviews and documents, I did get to develop what I thought the characters of Sleeping Giants looked like through their actions and personality. Even though Neuvel described Reznik as having black hair, I am just going to conveniently ignore that fact and pretend he said red to better fit my Chastain visualization.




All in all, Sleeping Giants was a refreshing, exciting novel that, for me, got the whole alien thing perfect. Some novels just degrade into a silly story that just feels cheap and far-fetched about aliens. I’m not saying that this novel isn’t far-fetched, but it approaches the subject matter intelligently. The characters perfectly mirror our predictable reaction to alien life (unless you are the guy from The History Channel): ample scoffing and sarcasm that immediately devalues any claim on alien life. Sleeping Giants manages to perfectly nail what I want out of this genre: excitement, intrigue, that unsettling sense of never fully understanding the situation, and a modicum of restraint that separates this book from other novels in the genre that delve into the wow-this-is-cheesy territory. I am just going to sit around staring at my copy of Sleeping Giants until April 2017, when the sequel Waking Gods is released. 7.3/10

Before the Fall is a thrilling mystery that takes the time to dive both into its characters and our society. It’s a haven of a book for book nerds.

“For Emma, what made it so hard to return to the tiny apartment in the West Village she shared with two other girls was the sudden realization that for all those weeks of traveling she had been a stowaway in someone else’s life, an actor on a stage playing a part. She was a royal escort, the chaste concubine, immersed in servitude for weeks at a time, until the rules and boundaries she set to navigate her professional life became the backbone of her personal life as well. She found herself growing increasingly lonely, an object to be looked at, but never touched.”

Before the Fall soars in its ability to create a character, then completely subverting your expectations of them. It is something so beautifully demonstrated in this passage. Noah Hawley’s prose is something to marvel at in terms of language. However, when you take into account the emotional intelligence it takes to write about a character at this depth, it becomes one of the most incredible examples of storytelling in recent memory.

In an era of “fake news,” the resurgence of conservatism, and the reality television mindset of our society, Before the Fall is a lot more timely than I think was intended. It tells the story of a private charter flight that mysteriously plummets into the ocean sixteen minutes into its flight. Onboard were twelve people — a media mogul, a wall street titan, a security guard — however, only two people escape alive. This simple fact sets off a media firestorm and begins a story about what happens after you’re the one that survives.

Check Out: “Sleeping Giants” Book Review: A Unique, Engaging Sci-fi Thriller

The book centers on Scott Burroughs, a down-on-his-luck painter, who by chance meets Maggie, the wife of media mogul David Bateman on Martha’s Vineyard. She offers him a ride on their plane since they’re both heading to New York. This offer changes Scott’s life forever. After waking up in the middle of the dark ocean, he miraculously saves a four-year-old boy who was on the plane by swimming miles to shore. Improbably, yes? It is so improbable that some people think he may have been involved in the crash.

The mystery of how the plane crashed is what bookends the book. However, the real story is the lives of the passengers before and after the crash. How did Scott muster up the strength to save himself a four-year-old boy? How did a man go from a suicide apocalypse cult to flying a private plane? While the stories may seem ridiculous, their effect on the characters and event as a whole are fulfilling.

Bill Cunningham, a Bill O’Reilly type on ALC, is immediately suspicious of Scott and his place on board. Of course, as a conservative, he immediately points to terrorism. Cunningham is doing everything in his power (legal and illegally) to find out how he was involved, while NTSB agent Gill Franklin is on Scott’s side. As we meet each character before the fateful flight, we have to piece together the clues like an Agatha Christie novel.

As I alluded to earlier, the genius of Before the Fall lies in the character. People like the trophy housewife and the sexy flight attendant take on new meaning with this book. Hawley paints a complex picture of each character and analyzes how their pasts steered them towards the inevitable place on that plane.

Check Out: “Dark Matter” Book Review: A tense, well-plotted thriller

Before the Fall might be a bit difficult to get into at first. It begins slowly. However, The middle section of the book is an enthralling character study and analysis of key actors at the center of a tragedy: the survivors, the victim’s family, and the media. It analyzes how these people interlock and interact. More importantly, Hawley has an understanding of how we react to tragedy. It’s the last two chapters, though, that make this an incredible triumph of a thriller. As the story finally pieces together, you are treated with a character study and thrilling finale that doesn’t disappoint.

Before the Fall is the first book that I completed in 2017, and I couldn’t pick a more satisfying start. With mystery, compelling characters, and writing that is poetic and vivid, it’s a haven of a book. However, it’s commentary on society is one of the most interesting things about it. The amount of commentary is astonishing. From the media to fake news to masculinity, Before the Fall is a book in and of its time. And that’s something to marvel at. 9/10

Get Before the Fall in paperback, hardcover, or e-book on Amazon!

Covering nearly a century, The Tsar of Love and Techno tells the story of Russia through interconnected short stories that culminate into one of the best books in years.

There are some books that demand to be read, but The Tsar of Love and Techno demands to be dissected, devoured, and appreciated. To put it bluntly, Anthony Marra’s short story collection may be one of the best books I’ve read in my entire reading life. Short story collections are often hit or miss for me. While there were strong stories in Kelly Link’s Get In Trouble, their underlying connection wasn’t as satisfying. On the other hand, Jennifer Egan’s A Visit From the Goon Squad floored me with its grasp of time and place. Anthony Marra masters that concept and more. Not only does he have a grasp of time and place, but how the characters exist in those two dimensions.

Each story can be read individually and be effective, but when read as a whole it is completely satisfying. The Tsar of Love and Techno tells the story of Russia from 1937 until now. And while it’s very based on character, Russia itself is the most dynamic and interesting part. I’ve never been attuned to the history of Russia nor its society outside of the present day. However, Marra paints a vivid portrait of its history by following these characters within it. From poisonous lakes to its oppressive government to state propaganda, these things are just a fact of life. They fade into the background to give way to the characters and their interactions and lives with these staples.




The opening story “The Leopard” is an incredible exercise in the power of a talented writer. Anthony Marra gently paints a picture of a time, a place, and a person that feels complex and deep in a slight fifty pages. Not only that, he takes the main character through a satisfying emotional journey that feels neither rushed or incomplete. At the center of the story is a retoucher for the Department of Party Propaganda and Agitation, Roman Markin. His job is to erase people from history both literally and figuratively by removing them from photographs.

While “The Leopard” on its own is a phenomenal short story, The Tsar of Love and Techno comes to life as a collection when the subtle connections between the stories are revealed. The connection between the first story and the second, “Granddaughters,” is a blink-and-you-miss-it-line. When you realize it, though, its significance carries incredible weight. These connection continue throughout the story often unexpectedly. Some are more significant than others. But all of them carry the same emotional baggage.

“The Grozny Tourist Bureau” is a witty story about the former director of the Grozny art museum becoming the head of the nonexistent tourist bureau. It’s easily the funniest story of the collection. Though turning a war-torn city into “the Dubai of Chechnya” doesn’t seem the ripest for comedy, Marra has a handle of black humor that permeates through the entire collection. Of course, the story comes with a surprising profoundness and yet another piece of the puzzle revealed.




The title story, “The Tsar of Love and a Techno” is the only story told in the first person. And while it is not as satisfying as the others, it is certainly the most entertaining. More importantly, it represents a turning point in the story. Not only does it bring several storylines crashing together, it gives us a point of view we’ve never seen before: a person that lived as they wished.

But what is it about? That’s the question you always ask when it comes to a short story collection. What makes it more than a random grouping of interconnected stories? Well, for The Tsar of Love and Techno, it’s the idea of retaining the past. What happens when we are gone? Who is left? What is left? Who will remember us? How are we remembered? Are we figures in a painting or a frame with no canvas? Are we the center of a cautionary tale or the hero? No, we are remembered by the people who cared about us. The people who loved us.

In the final few pages of the book, we take a journey that all of us will take, but none will be able to describe. However, Marra articulates his take on it in beautiful prose that acts as the perfect cap to a near perfect book. He understands what he was trying to say. And in a few pages, he says perfectly. He reminds us that someone will remember you.

The Tsar of Love and Techno is available in paperback, hardcover, and e-book on Amazon!