abookishtype's reviews
2484 reviews

How to Share an Egg: A True Story of Hunger, Love, and Plenty by Bonny Reichert

Go to review page

challenging emotional informative reflective medium-paced

3.0

Bonny Reichert’s father, Solomon (né Szlama Rajchbart), survived the Holocaust before emigrating to Canada in the late 1940s. In How to Share an Egg, Reichert recounts her years-long struggle to understand his relentless desire for everyone to be happy no matter what else is going on—and the ways that his trauma has affected her own life...

Read the rest of my review at A Bookish Type. I received a free copy of this book from the publisher via NetGalley, for review consideration. 
Isola by Allegra Goodman

Go to review page

adventurous challenging dark emotional reflective sad tense fast-paced
  • Plot- or character-driven? A mix
  • Strong character development? Yes
  • Loveable characters? It's complicated
  • Diverse cast of characters? No
  • Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated

3.0

In the afterword to Isola, Allegra Goodman’s new book, she writes that she found inspiration in a story written by the French queen, Marguerite of Navarre, in an incomplete story collection called the Heptaméron (1558 CE). To flesh out the scant facts in the queen’s story, Goodman adds what she gleaned from research about the colonization of New France (later Canada) and the conditions faced by French colonists who showed up there with no clue how to survive in the Canadian wilderness. The result is an impossible story of hardship, love, sorrow, and truth...

Read the rest of my review at A Bookish Type. I received a free copy of this book from the publisher via NetGalley, for review consideration. 
Oathbreakers: The War of Brothers That Shattered an Empire and Made Medieval Europe by Matthew Gabriele, David M. Perry

Go to review page

adventurous informative medium-paced

5.0

As I listened to Paul Bellantoni narrate Matthew Gabriele and David M. Perry’s new book, Oathbreakers, I kept having to pause at the thought that the history the authors recount happened nearly 1,200 years ago. 1,200 years ago. That we can know as much as we do about the personalities and actions of the people discussed in this book is a small miracle to me...

Read the rest of my review at A Bookish Type. 
We Do Not Part by Han Kang

Go to review page

challenging dark emotional mysterious reflective sad fast-paced
  • Plot- or character-driven? Character
  • Strong character development? Yes
  • Loveable characters? It's complicated
  • Diverse cast of characters? Yes
  • Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated

5.0

It takes a special kind of courage and resilience to study the blackest corners of our history. It makes sense to never want to speak of the worst things humans have done to each other. And yet, if we never speak of the Holocaust, chattel slavery, genocide, etc., or only learn a distorted version of these events, how can we truly learn to be better, just people? As I read We Do Not Part, the brilliant and shattering new novel by Han Kang, I kept thinking of the mental toll Iris Chang paid after researching and writing her book about the Rape of Nanking. The protagonists of this book also find themselves haunted by what they learned when they researched the Jeju Uprising and the mass killings that followed in the late 1940s and early 1950s. This book is beautifully translated by E. Yaewon and Paige Aniyah Morris...

Read the rest of my review at A Bookish Type. I received a free copy of this book from the publisher via NetGalley, for review consideration. 
Penitence by Kristin M.E. Koval

Go to review page

challenging dark emotional mysterious sad slow-paced
  • Plot- or character-driven? A mix
  • Strong character development? No
  • Loveable characters? No
  • Diverse cast of characters? No
  • Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated

2.0

How do we punish the guilty? If we’re guilty, how do we atone? For some crimes, it feels like no sentence is adequate. Nothing we do to the guilty will restore what was lost. The US justice system is a punitive one, to the point where AI has been used to create “risk assessments” and sentencing guidelines for people convicted of crimes. Kristin Koval’s novel, Penitence, wrestles with the unfairness of a system that wields a sledgehammer in every violent case, regardless of mental health, drug use, and other mitigating factors...

Read the rest of my review at A Bookish Type. I received a free copy of this book from the publisher via NetGalley, for review consideration. 
Old Soul by Susan Barker

Go to review page

challenging dark emotional mysterious sad tense fast-paced
  • Plot- or character-driven? A mix
  • Strong character development? It's complicated
  • Loveable characters? No
  • Diverse cast of characters? Yes
  • Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated

5.0

She leaves misery, destruction, and confusion in her wake. The friends and family of her victims are haunted by her, ruing the day she came into their lives. Susan Barker’s intense new novel, Old Soul, is a kaleidoscope of emotions. We follow a few of those friends and family as they piece together what happened to their loved ones years and decades earlier and, more importantly, who it was who took such passionate artists away from them...

Read the rest of my review at A Bookish Type. I received a free copy of this book from the publisher via NetGalley, for review consideration. 
The Naming of the Birds by Paraic O'Donnell

Go to review page

adventurous challenging dark mysterious tense fast-paced
  • Plot- or character-driven? Plot
  • Strong character development? It's complicated
  • Loveable characters? Yes
  • Diverse cast of characters? Yes
  • Flaws of characters a main focus? No

4.0

Someone is killing powerful men in London. These men are supposed to be untouchable and yet, someone is able to get close enough to murder them and vanish into the night. The only clues Inspector Henry Cutter and Sergeant Gideon Bliss have been able to turn up are clues the killer wanted them to find. Paraic O’Donnell’s chilling new novel, The Naming of the Birds, takes us deep into a secret that was supposed to be dead and buried. This book is the sequel to The House on Vesper Sands...

Read the rest of my review at A Bookish Type. I received a free copy of this book from the publisher via NetGalley, for review consideration. 
The God and the Gumiho by Sophie Kim

Go to review page

adventurous emotional funny fast-paced
  • Plot- or character-driven? Plot
  • Strong character development? Yes
  • Loveable characters? Yes
  • Diverse cast of characters? Yes
  • Flaws of characters a main focus? No

4.0

Seokga would give anything to be able to leave our messy world and return to his home in heaven. Kim Hani, on the other hand, relishes her life even after hundreds of years mixing with mortals and other beings from Korean folklore and mythology. He is dour. She is effervescent. They are almost perfect opposites. Which is why, from the very first chapter of Sophie Kim’s captivating novel, The God and the Gumiho, we know that they’re definitely going to fall in love with each other...

Read the rest of my review at A Bookish Type. 
The Weeds by Katy Simpson Smith

Go to review page

challenging informative mysterious medium-paced
  • Plot- or character-driven? Character
  • Strong character development? Yes
  • Loveable characters? It's complicated
  • Diverse cast of characters? Yes
  • Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

4.0

The way I was taught history, in discrete segments that usually had big gaps between eras and places, means that it’s only now that I’m an adult that I’ve started to wonder about what I’ve missed. A few years ago, I read an amazing article by Paul M. Cooper (the brilliant creator and narrator of the Fall of Civilizations podcast) in The Atlantic (paywalled, unfortunately, but Open Culture has a brief overview) about what happened to the Colosseum after the fall of the Western Roman Empire. Without the empire to continue to use it for its original purpose, it fell into disrepair. Romans took stones to build other things. Weather took care of a lot of the rest. Centuries later, natural philosophers, scientists, and botanists discovered that the ruin had become home to hundreds of species of plants, some of which weren’t native to the area and only managed to grow in Rome because of the Colosseum’s unique microclimates. Katy Simpson Smith’s virtuoso novel, The Weeds, brings us two botanists, in two different centuries, to the same place to explore questions about the nature of science, resilience, anger, and preservation...

Read the rest of my review at A Bookish Type. 
The Book Censor's Library by Bothayna Al-Essa

Go to review page

challenging dark mysterious reflective sad tense fast-paced
  • Plot- or character-driven? Character
  • Strong character development? Yes
  • Loveable characters? It's complicated
  • Diverse cast of characters? No
  • Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated

3.0

The men of the censorship department spend all of their working hours reading through newly published books, looking for anything that might bar them from the dwindling books throughout their dystopian country in Bothayna Al-Essa’s bleak novel, The Book Censor’s Library (translated by Sawad Hussein and Ranya Abdelrahman). Thankfully for us, the newest member of this department has discovered that reading is magically transformative after volunteering to take a look at a new edition of the very much banned Zorba the Greek, by Nikos Kazantzakis. Book censors are not supposed to fall in love with the books...

Read the rest of my review at A Bookish Type.