“In an unnamed town in the Ecuadorian Andes, a small wooden icon—La Virgen Pipona (the Potbellied Virgin)—conceals the documents that define the town’s social history. That history recently has been dominated by the women of the Benavides family, a conservative clan and, not coincidentally, the caretakers of the Virgin. Their rivals are the Pandos, a family led by four old men who spend their days smoking in the park across from the Virgin’s cathedral and offering revisionist versions of local and national events. When a military skirmish threatens the Virgin (and the secret in her famous belly), the Benavides women must scramble to preserve their place as local matriarchs—without alerting the old Pandos to the opportunity that might enable them to finally supplant their rivals.” – Description from Amazon.

This short little book might be small, but there is a very large cast of characters and we are introduced to them rather quickly. I had a hard time keeping track of who is who, especially with this being about two feuding groups of people who share the same last names. They got to be a bit interchangeable. The sisterhood and the Benavides family, I really wanted to explore more of their relationship dynamics with one another, but that is not prevalent in this book. Doña Carmen is the only distinguishable character and I did enjoy her as a character. She’s one of my favorite kinds of people if she sees something that needs to be done. She’s going to go off there and do it.

 The atmosphere is quite different from a lot of popular books. This is taking place in the Andes in Ecuador. The tone is very fairytale-esque with folktale vibes. There is nothing magical about this story but by the way it is told it feels like it could be one of those two things. At the start, there is a lot of world building and info dumping with that. I read the introduction of the book and that told me a lot about Ecuadorian history and culture, but then we would get basically the same thing told to us in the book and that made it overbearing, and I don’t think it was necessary for the story.

The writing style is long-winded with paragraphs that go on for pages. I had a really hard time following the story. It isn’t dialogue heavy. We would get maybe two lines of dialogue every couple of pages.

The author is very creative with how she handled this plot. This is a story of the impact that colonization and colonialism have on the modern world. She takes two families and personifies European colonizers and indigenous peoples of Latin America. There’s a fight between who gets to tell history; those are some great themes. I really wish I connected with the book more. The author even dives into what it was like for an isolated community in the last century, seeing all the rapid changes of our modern day and age and how the smaller rural communities evolve, even if it is slow.

I was confused for a lot of this book, but I also want to have a disclaimer that I did start this book while having a migraine and I wouldn’t recommend doing that. It was a disservice to the author and the work of fiction. I do plan to reread this book at a later date and hopefully it will work out better for me then as it didn’t do a whole lot for me this time around.

2.25 out of 5 stars.

“The Details is a novel built around four portraits; the small details that, pieced together, comprise a life. Can a loved one really disappear? Who is the real subject of the portrait, the person being painted or the one holding the brush? Do we fully become ourselves through our connections to others? This exhilarating, provocative tale raises profound questions about the nature of relationships, and how we tell our stories. The result is an intimate and illuminating study of what it means to be human.” Description coming to us from Amazon.

The character building of ‘The Details’ is seeing a character through the significant relationships in her life. I think our main theme even falls back on that. That being relationships shape us into the person that we become. I do feel like I know our nameless narrator and know the people that she shared her relationships with. Yet, I don’t feel a strong connection whatsoever to the character.

I am actually shocked as I sit here and come up with my rating for this book that the atmosphere really did stand out to me, especially in the Alejandro chapter. It was magical at times, immersive, nostalgic are words that I would use to describe it. It’s not what you would typically get out of a fever dream story. Fever dream-esque books often leave me feeling confused and dazed, but this one had clarity as we look at the character’s life. I do appreciate that as this is a new take at that trope.

 The writing is where this does get a little bit tricky. There were beautiful sentences about the human experience, a love of literature and going through the mundane events that make up life. In the English translation, and apparently in the original Swedish as well, it’s very much a stream of consciousness, long run on sentences .For me personally that convolutes the story and makes it lose its meaning as I get lost in all the words without a break.

It is hard to say that there is a plot. It falls back on being a character study on the relationships that we make in our lives. This is definitely a character driven book even though I didn’t feel a connection to the characters. There may even be slight themes and ideas about relationships and how they impact the human experience. I didn’t feel much while reading this book, but there were some things that I liked, relatability and as I said, the immersive atmosphere with the occasional bit of beautiful writing, this was a fine book.

2.75 out of 5 stars.

“Kathryn Scanlan’s Kick the Latch vividly captures the arc of one woman’s life at the racetrack—the flat land and ramshackle backstretch; the bad feelings and friction; the winner’s circle and the racetrack bar; the fancy suits and fancy boots; and the “particular language” of “grooms, jockeys, trainers, racing secretaries, stewards, pony people, hotwalkers, everybody”—with economy and integrity.”

To my understanding, ‘Kick the Latch’ is based off of a real woman named Sonia. Why is this book listed as contemporary fiction? I’m not sure. Maybe the author did embellish some of Sonia‘s story. I wish I could have gotten more out of this. This is very much the surface level of a woman telling the reader her memories. I’m asking myself: What is the point? I wish there would have been more in building as to why the story is being told rather than being thrown right in.

The atmosphere was not an overall big part of the story. The word I would use to describe it is rustic. It’s very Americana and we are seeing an example of the American dream at play. The writing style is very blunt and straightforward, therefore accessible and easy to read. It reads how people really do talk therefore making this a quick reading experience and I do think it would probably translate well on audiobook, but I did read this on my Kindle.

The plot is very unique and different. It was fascinating to see all the faucets that make up the horse world. Most Americans only think about this lifestyle on the day of the Kentucky Derby and forget about it for the rest of the year. This was an informative piece about the lifestyle of all the different people that it takes to train a horse and get it ready for a race. The pacing moved along well as I said before it was a very quick read. I read this in two days, but I never felt a major connection to the story. This did read very much like non-fiction where I did learn a lot, but I didn’t connect. However, the character arc does make perfect sense and shows that life isn’t perfect. It isn’t only going to wrap up with a bow on top. This was very much a go with the flow kind of story for me. Since it read so quickly I was never bored, but it didn’t do a whole lot for me either as I didn’t have a strong connection to the book and its character. It wasn’t a bad book.

3.25 out of five stars.

“A young woman has one minute to speak on a submission video to win a one-way trip to Mars, a location she views as the ultimate escape. As she barricades herself in a cottage by the sea and prepares to record, she examines her fixation on the colour red, shame, guilt, a dramatic breakup with her boyfriend, and the breakdown of her relationship with her best friend. There is another problem however, her jaw has been wired shut for a long time, and she’s having trouble speaking. A passionate story about queer love and loneliness and a dazzling debut from author Meghan Greeley..”

The main character, the second one who is a nameless narrator this month, is relatable but not a standout. She reads like any other character you see in this era of ‘weird girl lit’ books. She is a young woman who is trying to find herself and make sense of her friendships and love-life. Simply, she does not know what she wants.

 The atmosphere did not play a big part in the story. I am not even sure where this takes place. I pictured Toronto. I do think there was potential, with the setting of the cottage by the sea, at the very beginning of the story but that was quickly diminished.

 The writing has a comedic, dark sense of humor to it. Again, very popular with this era of literary fiction. A lot of the younger ( twenty-somethings) crowd will eat this style up. It is dark and vulgar in tone. The pacing is very fast and was one of those styles that made me feel like a pinball being shot around the machine. It took a little while to get used to but I eventually did. It was hard to follow at first. 

  This book did not bring anything new to the table. I thought this was going to be a piece of sci-fi speculative fiction, I believed this because of what is stated on the back of the book. The blurb I listed above if you are reading on my blog. However, this was really a piece of contemporary or literary fiction. It is about a young woman having to adjust to adulthood. She has to find out what relationships she wants in her life. It is a story that I have read plenty of times. 

I kept waiting for Mars and space travel to come up but it never did. There was potential for a great story here but that intrigue was never settled. I am even still confused about the ending and the title of the book. How did her jaw come to be like that? This book was fun to read but it most likely will not stick with me over time.

3 out of 5 stars.

“A young woman, imprisoned underground with thirty-nine other females and guarded by silent armed men, must navigate freedom after escaping her cage in a ravaged world.”

 One of my favorite questions that science fiction can ask us is what makes us human. Usually, I see this in stories with cyborgs and aliens but here there’s none of that, at least there doesn’t seem to be. In this book we see humanity stripped down to its core. A young girl who is a nameless narrator, has only known life in a windowless bunker with thirty-nine other women and a handful of male guards. She has no parents and she has never seen the sun. She’s had no schooling. She has no idea what planet earth is like. How can somebody in that situation be human other than biologically?

This book reinvented that typical science fiction question for me. I have never read anything like this. Womanhood is another huge piece of this character work. The main theme is what makes us human but also what goes into being a woman. There is also the question of what the world would be like without the patriarchy. This goes great with some of the other feminist literature that I have read in the last eight months.

With this story being set in a windowless, colorless bunker, you probably wonder how I found this beautiful. We go from there to a world that is gritty and rocky. It is all desolate and bleak. There is no civilization, it is a wasteland. I just had so many questions and had such an easy time imagining these scenes. I loved to see these women make their own society without the constraints that our world has on women. 

 The writing is where I very much questioned what I would rate this book. It is a stream of consciousness that isn’t for everyone and typically isn’t for me. I do highly recommend following along with the audiobook as that does break the story down in parts. Our main character is a young girl for the start of the story and has to be taught things like grammar and math. Those scenes were tedious and went in one ear and out the other. That can kind of go back to the mix of character work and plot, there are so many little things in our lives that we take for granted. Those lessons that we have learned. They have to be in detail for the narrator but for us, those are things that we already know. 

I cannot say this is a character driven story or a plot driven story. It is all so interconnected. The characters are exploring this world and they are even coming to terms with what it means to be a human and what it means to be a woman. We, the readers, are not the only ones who are on this realization journey. That just shows how much you can be immersed into this story. 

The intrigue was one of my favorite parts. When I would be away from the book, I was wanting to be back in its pages. I have had so much fun reading this with my book club and coming up with different theories of what the author was trying to do or what had happened to this world. Even questions of is this a human story? Are all of our characters humans or some other beings and what has happened to them. I am typically someone who does not like an open ended book. I am a logical person who likes to have answers and know why things work the way that they do. You are not going to get that here. Our characters are going through the same questions that we are. I think that is part of what makes this work for me. It is one of the points of the story. 

I loved the questions and thoughts that this book presented to me. It is one that I will be thinking about for a long time. I highly recommend that you give this book a go.

5 out of 5 stars.

This is a story where the side characters, the children, stand out more to me than the adult leads. We do get the points of views of all but it is obvious who our main characters are. Rowan, she is our star, the woman who washes ashore to a remote island. I did not understand why she did some of the things she did knowing the situation that she was in. It did not make sense to me. Also, the romance was unnecessary. I did not feel any chemistry and it was jolted upon. For a good chunk of the book we are going through cycles with the character arcs and I even believe after the events of the book the same thing will be happening. I did like the aspect of not knowing who was in the right and how that changed day in and day out or quarter to quarter while trying to unravel the mystery of the book. 

The atmosphere was my favorite part. Shearwater Island becomes a character itself rather than just the setting. I was so vividly immersed onto this Antarctic island in a world being ravaged by climate change, rising sea levels. All your senses are invoked, even your emotions are by how stunning the wildlife and scenery are that will come to your mind while reading. It’s such an ancient, eternal feeling. The island, the story, could be thousands of years ago when in reality it is in the near future.

Now let’s get to where it is confusing, the writing. I do vibe or gel well with McConaghy’s writing style itself. The words are so blunt and matter of fact but at the same time can read as lush as she builds this world around you. I do want to recommend reading this on ebook or having a dictionary nearby as some of these words are quite hefty and pretentious. There was a lack of consistency in the pacing. Rowan’s chapters could be up to thirty pages, while the others might only get one to five. It really dampened how I usually read a book. This book is short in page number but it took me a while to get through. Moving along with the pacing, the stakes would get really high and my adrenaline would be pumping and then we would wait another quarter for something to happen again. It was uneven. 

I always love when a thriller is more than just that. More than a basic plot but going into themes and ideas as well. This is a looking glass, at what could possibly be to come with the rising sea levels that we are seeing in our world. The mystery was good as you never knew who to trust. Tides are constantly changing. This is a story of grief, and how everyone’s experience with it is a different journey even if it all stems back to one event. Grief can fully take over a person. At the same time we see the lengths that love will go. Everyone’s experience is different. The feelings and emotions are different. Love can fully take over a life. Love and grief are so intertwined. 

 There are some smaller themes like where we are born and raised can shape our beliefs, our view on the world. How home is so much more than something physical. As I wrote before, this is a piece of climate fiction. This is a survival story. Surviving the battle with grief, with love, physically surviving climate change. ‘Wild Dark Shore’ has a lot going for it in these regards. I was on the edge of my seat for this one. Even if the author reused themes from ‘Migrations’, a woman with a shady past, man who also might not be as he seems, a climate ravaged world. It is similar. I thought this book was just alright as it did lack consistency.

3.75 out of 5 stars.

“I Gave You Eyes and You Looked Toward Darkness by Irene Solà is a haunting, polyphonic novel set within a single day in a remote Catalonian farmhouse called Mas Clavell, where a dying matriarch named Bernadeta lies surrounded by the spectral voices of her female ancestors . Spanning centuries, the narrative weaves together folklore, witchcraft, devil’s bargains, wars, and curses linked to a pact struck by Joana, an ancestor who traded her soul for a husband—only to discover he was physically imperfect, dooming her descendants to bear birth defects the-tls.com+5kirkusreviews.com+5ft.com+5. Through surreal time shifts and vivid, earthy storytelling, the novel explores the resilience, suffering, and defiant humor of women who have survived brutal histories, as ghosts and living voices echo the landscape’s darker legacies goodreads.com+3ft.com+3theguardian.com+3.”

I really enjoyed these characters, with Joana being my favorite. They are campy and quirky, but not in a cringe-worthy way; they almost remind me of the witches in “Hocus Pocus.” However, I want to remind you that this is a horror novel. While these women might be comedic and the story may have humorous moments, at any moment, things could snap and become creepy. It was fun to see how different bits of history, as well as the present, are reacted to by different generations. 

We see these characters through all stages of life, and as I mentioned, they can be comedic or creepy, but they also have their flaws. They are all still people. These flaws can be mental or physical; they aren’t perfect characters. In fact, I would say they are quite imperfect, which makes them all the more enjoyable to read about because I never really knew what these women would do next.

The atmosphere was definitely my favorite part. This story feels so ancient; it seems like it could have been told around a fire pit hundreds of years ago, yet it could also be told in 2024 when it was published in English. It has that fairytale, folktale vibe, and I love that because there’s always something to be learned from that kind of story.

The writing is definitely unique. It’s somewhat confusing, and I found myself puzzled while reading at times. In some instances, this style is definitely an acquired taste. Normally, I’m not someone who enjoys descriptive, long, stream-of-consciousness writing; that’s typically not for me. However, when the book is less than 200 pages, I can manage it without issue. 

Something I did notice about the writing, which might be attributed to translation, is that there were a lot of big words I wasn’t familiar with, which caused some confusion for me as well. However, I loved the allegories and metaphors used, especially at the start of a chapter where a house is used to describe the human body and how our souls and lives are contained within that body, with the body being the house for our soul. I know that sounds confusing as I worded it now, but it’s truly incredible to think about.

There are a lot of themes in this book that are prevalent, such as motherhood, religion, and the powerful influence of religion itself. You really have to be careful about how you approach and handle these themes, as you could end up cursing your legacy and everyone who comes after you. However, I think the main theme here is that everything in life has blurred lines. Reality is a blurred line. Before I read the book, I didn’t check the back cover, but this sentence on it describes the story perfectly: “A novel in which the line between the dead and the living, past and present, story and history are blurred. In it, Irene Sola draws on oral tradition as well as art, literature, and fairytales to tell a completely new kind of story.” This description captures the essence of the book perfectly. Irene Sola hit the nail on the head with that.

If that was the kind of book she aimed to write, then it’s a perfect description. We would not be here in the present if it weren’t for history, and history wouldn’t be history if it weren’t for the present. This book felt like a fever dream, and while it can be a lot to take in at the moment, as I’ve done with her other work, the more I think about it, the more I realize how impactful and thought-provoking the author’s work can be.

Now, would I recommend this book? Yes, I would. I’d like to do some comparisons: if you like this book, then you might enjoy works by authors like Mona Awad or Otesha Moshfegh, as they often explore themes of “weird girl” literature. This book made me realize that if bodily fluids and bodily functions are a part of the narrative, it’s probably going to be a “weird girl” book. For other books that remind me of “Northwoods” by Daniel Mason, which explores how a plot of land holds so much history and influences the ambiance around it, I also think of the iconic classic “One Hundred Years of Solitude.” The village in that novel reminds me so much of the house in this book, with all the little mystical things happening to the family. 

Yes, I really did enjoy this book from one of my favorite authors.

3.75 out of 5 stars