shelfreflectionofficial's reviews
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“If we disqualify legitimate discussion, we compromise our ability to know the truth, and error can thrive without restraint.”

This is an excellent and very practical book that I think every Christ follower should read because this book is about finding out the truth in any discussion. Even some people who claim Christ may not be able to say why they do so this book is not only for how to talk to others but helps us ask questions about our own beliefs to determine if what we believe is based on good reasons and sound rationale.

Some have expressed dislike for this book because of the cover making it seem like talking about our beliefs is a game to win. Some have felt like this book is just manipulation and replaces compassion for other people.

After reading this book, I disagree with those assessments. Koukl makes it very clear that the way we communicate with people is really important because people are image bearers of God. Our goal is not to make people look bad or disrespect them. We talk to them about truth because what they believe about God matters and we do it in a respectful way because who they are is significant.

“Tactics are not manipulative tricks or slick ruses. They are not clever ploys to embarrass other people and force them to submit to your point of view. They are not meant to belittle or humiliate those who disagree so you can gain notches in your spiritual belt.”

He even says at the outset that his goal in talking with people is not to convert them to Christianity. He simply wants to “put a stone in their shoe” and give them something to think about.


There is nothing unbiblical or unloving about having discussions about truth. Paul lays out his arguments for his convictions throughout his letters. He provides reasons and logic for readers to follow to understand his points.

“Rationality is one of the tools God has given us to acquire knowledge.”

Koukl has written this book because we are not all Paul. We don’t always know how to explain our beliefs or how to talk about them with people. We get flustered and don’t know what to say. Perhaps the other person becomes hostile or denigrates our character and we don’t know how to respond. Maybe they completely change the subject and don’t acknowledge the points we are making and we don’t know how to get the conversation back to the facts.

We worry about not knowing what to do or say so we just decide not to talk about our convictions. After all, we don’t want to force our beliefs on other people. Let’s just keep the peace and keep it to ourselves.

But that’s not obeying God’s commandment to make disciples of all people. That’s not working in the fields of the Lord’s harvest.

If we should be talking about Christ with others, we might as well know how to do it well!



What I love about this book is how practical and helpful it is.

Even though I’ve grown up in the church and read a lot of apologetics books, I don’t feel confident about talking with people about them a lot of times. Or I start to think that every conversation about God has to end in sharing the ‘Romans Road’ or having them ‘pray the prayer.’ And that doesn’t feel natural so I chicken out about even saying anything.

What Koukl describes in this book is doable. It’s real. And for the most part, it’s natural. Of course, we can tweak wording and things to fit how we communicate; it’s not a script we have to memorize. But it’s all things that makes sense to me.

Reading it was a bit of an ‘aha’ moment of— ‘Oh! That’s a great way to answer that’ or “That’s an easy way to respond to that objection’ or ‘That’s how I can handle that difficult type of conversation!’

I like this distinction Koukl makes:

“Cleverness without truth is manipulation.”

Knowing how to navigate a conversation is not manipulation if the point of the conversation is to determine truth. And if others try to turn the tables and use these tactics on us, it’s okay; we should have reasons for the things we believe and we shouldn’t be attacking or name-calling. If someone is truly manipulating, they wouldn’t want anyone else to use their own tactics against them, but here that isn’t the case.

We should be ready to give reasons for the hope that we have. (1 Pt 3:15)



I won’t go through all the tactics because it makes more sense as he explains them in his book then a book review really can, but the main gist of his tactics revolves around listening and asking questions.

He tells us to be a student of their beliefs.

“The person who makes a claim has the burden of proof.”

If someone makes a claim, it’s not on us to prove them wrong. We ask them questions to understand why they believe what they believe. They have to defend their beliefs. And a lot of times they can’t.

“An opinion is just a point of view. An argument, by contrast, is a point of view supported by reasons. Skeptics often give the first but not the second.”

I think this is very true. There have been numerous times where someone says something that sounds like a canned headline. Something everyone says but doesn’t really know what it means or where the logic of their statement actually takes them.

“We trot out our pet slogans whether secular ones or Christian ones— letting our catchphrases do the work that careful, thoughtful conversation should be doing instead.”

So most of his tactics involves asking ‘What do you mean by that?’ or ‘How did you come to that conclusion?’

This isn’t an exhaustive apologetics book that will give you all the answers— he assumes you already know why you believe in Christ and his teachings— but he does lay out some of the conversations he has on specific and common objections.


Here’s a few of the things he brings up- (it affirmed to me that he knows what he’s talking about because I think I’ve heard every single one of these multiple times but never with any actual argument for them)

- God used evolution to design the world.
- God can’t exist if there’s all this evil in the world.
- There’s no way to know anything about religion.
- You’re intolerant if you tell other people what to believe.
- The Bible was written by flawed human beings so it must be flawed.
- Science disproves miracles.
- You shouldn’t force your beliefs on other people.
- There is no objective morality. (He gives a series of questions to ask that really reveals that even if people make this claim they don’t actually live or think like it)
- I’m personally against abortion but I don’t believe in forcing my pro-life belief on other people.
- That’s just your interpretation.
- Religion is the source of evil in the world and more wars have been fought in the name of God than any other. (He provides a lot of facts to disprove this widely believed myth)
- The Council of Nicea determined which books should be in the Bible
- The Bible has been changed and translated differently for political reasons.
- Jesus never said anything about homosexuality.


As Koukl encourages, you don’t have to go out there and change everyone’s minds. You just have to be willing and ready to ask some questions and get to the heart of the claims people make and find out if they’ve really thought about what is true.

“It is always a step in the right direction when we help others to think more carefully. If nothing else, it gives them tools to assess the bigger questions that eventually come up.”

It doesn’t matter how fervently we believe it or how many other people believe the same things that we do. What matters is: what is true? what is reality?

I may not believe my house is on fire, but if it is in reality, that’s a big problem. So help people find out where the fire is.

Reality has a way of revealing itself. Faulty logic and arguments will fall like a roof with no posts. Sound arguments will stand under its own merits.



I liked when Koukl explained how faith in Christ is not an unreasonable faith, or as some would say ‘Faith is believing things we cannot know.’

Faith is not wishful thinking. We all live with faith in something— that our chair will hold us up, that a bus route will go according to the map, etc. There are good reasons for believing these things.

Faith in Christ is reasonable. There are many many reasons to believe what the Bible says is true and that what Jesus claimed was true.

“Faith and knowledge are not opposites in Scripture. The opposite of faith is not fact, but unbelief. The opposite of knowledge is not faith but ignorance.”

If having reasons for what we believe made our faith less, then our faith would be the strongest when there are absolutely no good reasons for believing it. That’s not how faith works. That wouldn’t make any sense.

There are many people out there putting out TikToks and YouTube videos with snappy lines that make it sound like they’re ‘taking down’ Christianity, and many people are ill-equipped to spot the lie or see the inconsistencies or poke holes in the theories.

They begin to feel defeated and wonder if what they’ve believed really is unreasonable. I actually saw that firsthand at a Christian college— people encountering questions they’d never had to answer before and then giving up on all of it instead of doing the work of finding the answers— because there are answers.

Koukl’s tactics help us understand our own faith but also how to identify when other rhetoric is falling short.



One of the sections towards the end of the book talks about changing our lingo and I thought that was helpful. There definitely is a Christian lingo and I can tell that people are turned off by certain terminology or just stop listening to you because they think they've heard it all before.

Koukl's suggestions for words to change make sense to me and I'll probably try to do it. Some of them are using 'my spiritual convictions' instead of 'my faith'. Instead of saying 'the Bible says' to try to quote from Jesus of Nazareth when you can or from the ancient Hebrew prophets (OT) or from the people Jesus trained to follow after him (NT) or from primary source documents (Gospels). Instead of saying 'sin' he calls it 'moral crimes' against God. Instead of 'unbelievers' he refers to 'those who believe differently.'



For the most part I tracked with everything he was saying, however, there were some dialogues he relayed that I wish I could have stepped in to play devil's advocate with him. Things I wanted to question him further on to see how he would respond or deal with certain objections that I thought of while reading.

I will say, that I can see what some reviewers are saying about the limit to these tactics.

For one, in an online forum, these tactics would be really hard to employ properly, but I think we can all agree that trying to talk about matters like this online is usually a dicey and non-advisable situation regardless; talking face-to-face is always best.

Two, I think a majority of his conversations are with strangers or acquaintances or in debates and formal arrangements. As readers we should use wisdom when applying these tactics and be aware of who we are talking to. If we are conversing with long-term relationships or people dealing with big life hardship, etc, the way we go about it will be different.

Some of the tactics are structured in ways that make sense in short one-off conversations and some should be applied differently if we’re talking about these things throughout a whole series of conversations.

I don’t think either of these things take away from the book. I think for the scope and purpose in what he was writing he accomplished something really good and helpful. As with all books and advice we take it in and apply it with wisdom.

The principles of this book are sound and even if you don’t like the title ‘Tactics’ it is what he was providing. Just because tactics can have a bad connotation doesn’t make the word or the book bad. Tactics are simply strategies.


We employ tactics all the time in other areas of life, why not be prepared when it comes to talking about the most important thing in our lives? I’d love a strategy for that. Speaking about truth with excellence seems like a God-honoring endeavor.



Recommendation

I would definitely recommend this book. Even if you don’t plan to go out and start a million conversations, it’s a great way to train your brain to understand belief systems and those who hold them. It will strengthen your own faith. It will give you confidence about a lot of buzzword claims that get thrown around a lot.

I do think it’s not the only book to be read about this. Especially if you don’t feel like you can give arguments for the things you believe, I would encourage you to read some other apologetics books that go through all the arguments in depth. Click the link below to get you started.

I would also recommend visiting www.str.org (Stand to Reason) which is a website Koukl is on that is full of articles and videos talking about all the things in the book. Or look up some of Koukl’s debates to see these tactics in action. He practices what he preaches and writes this book from a lot of experience. I think the website will be a nice resource to visit when a question comes up that I’m not sure how to respond to. I also think I will revisit this book often. 

Discussion about truth is always important and this book will help you do it!

“Know your exits, pick the best one. That was my thing, wasn’t it? Always knowing the best way out.”

“I was stealing my own future back.”


This was a fun read! It was Ocean’s Eleven— the youths version— mixed with… I don’t know, like Big Brother or something. I was going to have a better comparison than that but then I decided to stop thinking about it.

It’s a competition between a bunch of high school thieves that are part of big family thieving conglomerates. Winner gets one wish.

I’m always a fan of heist/competition type of stories. I like the planning, the gadgets, the tricks, the suspense. This had all of those components. You have to suspend some belief, but that comes with the territory. I had to just pretend all seventeen-year-olds are as competent and skilled as they were, which is fine.

I could definitely see this as a movie because it was action from start to finish. And it takes us all over the world from the Bahamas to Cannes, France, to Cairo, Egypt to the British Virgin Islands.

I wouldn’t say I was ever truly shocked. At 12% I had some suspicions that mostly turned out to come to fruition but I wasn’t mad about it. I think it needed to play out that way or I would have been disappointed.


Brief Synopsis

Our main character is Rosalyn Quest. She lives in the Bahamas with her mom and aunt. The Quest family has a monopoly on thieving in North America. From the time she was young Ross has been training to be part of the family business.

But the nature of their work requires isolation and anonymity and Ross is wanting a little more freedom and perhaps a friend or two. As she attempts to escape to a summer sports camp in the middle of one of their jobs, her mom is discovered and captured. The ransom? One billion dollars.

The only way to get that sum in such a short time is to accept her invitation into the Thieves’ Gambit and win her wish. Looks like she’s not quite done with the family business just yet.

The competition is in three parts, all of which require some sort of heist to steal something. The competition pool begins with 12 youths— including her archnemesis Noelia— and each phase narrows the pool further and further.

Ross’s biggest challenge is figuring out how to win if her number one rule in life is ‘Trust no one.’ Especially other thieves. She is forced to work with Devroe, and, of course, because this is a YA novel, sparks start flying. But is he for real? They all have a reason to win this gambit— what’s his?

“People will play you like a violin to get whatever they need from you. People you think are your friends, people you think you can trust, they’ll snap your heart in half and leave you to die.”



I thought the author did a good job of making all the characters different. They all came from different countries and had their own ‘thing’ and their own ‘look’. It helped keep them straight and be able to picture them.

This book had a little bit of Hunger Games in it in that Rosalyn had Katniss’s courage to not play the game the Game master— or in this case the Count— wants them to play. I’m not convinced true thieves would care the way she does, but then we wouldn’t like her, so it still works.

There is some violence but it’s not a dystopian book so it’s not dark and violent. Just, ya know, friendly shooting and punching and stuff.

Some have compared this to The Inheritance Games series. I have not read that yet so I can’t say either way. Part of me wonders if it would end up being too similar or if there is enough divergence to enjoy both. Feel free to let me know. From reading the Goodreads summary it seems like they both deal in the world of wealthy and privileged, but that series (well at least the first book) might have more puzzles and riddles and that type of stuff whereas this one was more about elaborate heists for valuable objects.



Recommendation

I would recommend this book. It’s fun, light, suspenseful in the sense of action and competition, and the characters are likeable. It is a YA novel and you can tell, but I still thought it was a compelling plot and we didn’t get too much in the weeds of teenage love which I was glad for since it’s not marketed as a romance and that’s not what I was looking for.

The second book in this series released this last November. I have it on my to-read list so we’ll see if it continues to be a series I recommend. It looks like it takes up 6 months after this book and will be a similar globe-trotting thieving competition.

For what I expect when I read YA novels, this was a great read!



[Content Advisory: 21 d-words and a use of BS; no sexual content]


**Received an ARC via NetGalley**

“The Great Rewiring devastated the social lives of Gen Z by connecting them to everyone in the world and disconnecting them from the people around them.”

“It is very difficult to construct a meaningful life on one’s own, drifting through multiple disembodied networks.”


It was really interesting to read this book right after Abigail Shrier’s  Bad Therapy book. They have slightly different premises.

Jonathan Haidt’s thesis is that parents have become too protective in the real world with not enough adventure and unsupervised play and not protective enough in the virtual world of social media, porn, and video games; the result being an increase in anxiety and mental illness in our children.

Shrier sees the increase in reported mental illness and recognizes the dangers of phone-based childhoods, but she speculates that perhaps, like transgenderism (in her book Irreversible Damage), it is now a trend to claim to have anxiety and mental health problems.

I wouldn’t say these two books are in cahoots or diametrically opposed. But both shed new light on the similar concern: mental health problems in our children. I believe both to be valuable reads, but do caution readers to use their own wisdom and common sense in processing what they read.

[I will also add that if my review is preaching to the choir for you, it’s possible that you may not want to spend the time reading the entire book unless you like to know all the data. It does get a little long and slightly repetitive where I can see where people who already know the harms of social media and phone usage and have actively created boundaries with their children/teens around it may not find the book as useful.]

I really loved Jonathan Haidt’s coauthored (Greg Lukianoff) book The Coddling of the American Mind. Definitely read that one if you haven’t yet.

I don’t think I loved The Anxious Generation as much as that one. I don’t know if it was because Lukianoff’s lawyer-side tempered Haidt’s psychological-side to balance the interpretation and explanataion of data or what, but this book felt a little too steeped in evolutionary descriptions of why we are where we are and why we need or want different things.

I’m not all about that and I’ll explain more later in my review.

Nonetheless, Haidt’s presentation of the data is compelling and it’s truly hard to argue that a cell-phone based childhood rather than a play-based childhood doesn’t have negative effects on our kids.

Another book that I would highly recommend is Tony Reinke’s 12 Ways Your Phone is Changing You. Reinke is fascinated by technology and writes to answer: “What is the best use of my smartphone in the flourishing of my life?”


Haidt organizes this book in four parts. He covers mental health trends since 2010, the nature of childhood and how we messed it up, a closer look at a phone-based childhood (including the differences between girls and boys), and wraps up with how to reverse the damage.

There is a lot of data and graphs in this book and I can’t cover it all in this review but I will just mention some things that stuck out to me.


 “Impending threats to a nation or generation (as opposed to an individual) do not historically cause rates of mental illness to rise… People don’t get depressed when they face threats collectively; they get depressed when they feel isolated, lonely, or useless.”

I think this is a really important piece of information for a lot of reasons. We are meant to live in community. Face-to-face community. Social media connects us in some ways, but especially for adolescents who are still learning how to engage with others, community via social media will not teach them much of anything that translates to real life. The evidence just confirms what we already know Scripture teaches, though Haidt would prefer to list millions of years of evolution to explain it: it is not good for man to be alone; we are to carry one another’s burdens; be in fellowship with one another; we are all members of one body—the body of Christ—unified and working together; Hebrews 3:12-13.

In an article about the dangers of isolation, Segal says, “The more isolated we become, the more we cut ourselves off from the fountains of His grace, mercy, and guidance.” We miss out on “the foundation of a full and happy life.”

If we allow our kids (or ourselves) to isolate into a virtual world, the sacrifices to our mental, emotional, and spiritual health are much too many.

I also think it’s worth noting that those who decide not to have children because they don’t want to ‘bring them into a world like this’ are missing all the important parts of life. People have been having kids for generations during all kinds of turmoil, but just bringing kids into this world is not going to damage them. You’re giving them life and they will thrive in a community. You’re actually depriving yourself of the joys of children and a love you never thought possible. And to one of Haidt’s later points, you’re depriving yourself of a ‘wind’ that will strengthen and grow you as a person.


He talks a lot about play-based childhood. This is what he means by that:

 “A play-based childhood is one in which kids spend the majority of their free time playing with friends in the real world as I defined it in the introduction: embodied, synchronous, one-to-one or one-to-several, and in groups or communities where there is some cost to join or leave so people invest in relationships.”

He fleshes each of those points out in the book, but I like how he points out that there is value to relationships and groups that come with a cost to join or leave. It does create an investment and a long-term mindset that the virtual world takes away. That’s why it’s so easy to dehumanize people online. When we’re not embodied or likely to see them again, we don’t see them as people. Real life relationships require nurturing because they are (hopefully) ongoing.

“Even for kids who never post anything, spending time on social media sites can still be harmful because of the chronic social comparison, the unachievable beauty standards, and the enormous amount of time taken away from everything else in life.”

“Social media platforms are therefore the most efficient conformity engines ever invented. They can shape an adolescent’s mental models of acceptable behavior in a matter of hours…”

How do kids learn? They mimic. He explains two forms of bias that signals what to copy: conformist (what is most common) and prestige (what is most accomplished/prestigious). The thing is, though, is that just because something is common or an influencer has a big following doesn’t mean that those things are good and should be followed. But if that’s what kids see in hours of scrolling, they can’t help but mimic it or be influenced by it.

They find ‘role models’ whose only credentials are that a million people happened to follow them. Some of these ‘role models’ are part of how the transgender craze took over teenage girls as Shrier describes in her book Irreversible Damage. That’s just one facet of influence, but you can be sure there are hundreds of others!

“On social media, the way to gain followers and likes is to be more extreme, so those who present with more extreme symptoms are likely to rise fastest, making them the models that everyone else locks onto for social learning… people get trained by their audiences to become more extreme versions of whatever it is the audience wants to see.”

I am an adult who knows all this information and yet I can tell when I spend too much time on certain platforms or websites I start to feel worse about myself even though I understand what’s happening in my brain. How much more susceptible are our kids?



 I thought his illustration of growing trees in a biosphere was really compelling. The trees that scientists were trying to grow in these biospheres were collapsing under their own weight. Why? Because there was no wind in the biosphere. As the tree grows and the wind pushes against them their roots know to grow deeper to hold it up. When the wind variable was eliminated, the roots weren’t strong enough to hold up the weight of the full grown tree.

It’s the same way with our kids. If we protect them from all of life’s challenges, they don’t have opportunities to grow their ‘roots’ deeper so they can withstand greater challenges in their future. We want resilient kids. That means allowing them to experience discomfort and unfairness and pain.

Actually he uses the term ‘antifragile’ kids rather than resilient. Plastic cups don’t get better by constantly being knocked over, they just don’t get worse. It’s more like an immune system that gets stronger after being exposed to germs and fighting them off.

He quotes from the Stoics: “happiness comes from learning to deprive external events of the power to trigger negative emotions in you.”

We’re being overprotective if we don’t allow our kids to grow strong roots: “They may be blocking the development of competence, self-control, frustration tolerance, and emotional self-management.”



 “the political divisiveness in the country can largely be attributed to social media and indoctrinating ourselves in a vacuum with the same rhetoric. I can usually tell the people who have thought through political issues for themselves from a variety of sources and those that only reiterate the commentary they say on their social media feeds”

This is perhaps less applicable to youths than adults, but the principle stands. The algorithms online are ridiculous and I would love if there could be legislation to prevent them from using them the way they do. I remember when my news feed used to be actual news from my actual friends. Now all I see are stupid ads that the platform thinks I’m interested in just because I stopped scrolling for two seconds to help my child and now they think I love hats made from cat fur.

It’s the same with political views. They have ADMITTED that they just show you more of what you like. The only thing missing from the vacuum is the actual cleaning up of dirt. I’ve experienced the same thing in real world discussions. A lot of people just repeat the slogans and the headlines; they haven’t actually thought for themselves.

Social media connects us to millions but it also divides us in big ways.


 “Girls and boys are not identical psychologically. There are a number of reasons why girls’ core developmental needs are more easily exploited and subverted by social media than is the case for boys (whose needs are more easily exploited by video game companies.)”

For some reason we’re still having to explain to people that boys and girls are biologically different. Here’s yet another way. These chapters were really interesting to read.

For girls he talks about their visual social comparison and perfectionism, their aggression in relationships, how they share emotions and disorders, and are more susceptible to harassment.

For boys it’s less clear evidence-wise, but they point out the way girls are surpassing boys in school and how the workplace is more geared toward women now that physical labor jobs are decreasing.

I found this quote particularly enlightening considering the push towards female empowerment and society’s way of pushing down men in order to elevate women.

"A world of floundering men is unlikely to be a world of flourishing women.”

Another good book for boys specifically that I would recommend is The War Against Boys which affirms a lot of Haidt’s findings about why they aren’t succeeding as much in school.

I will also say here that social media sites like Instagram are targeting males with porn. My husband ended up just deleting Instagram after creating a profile for his trickshot videos. He showed me the ‘browse’ tab of his app and it’s all pornographic when he never searched, clicked, or engaged with anything of the story. But the app knows he’s a male. This kind of thing is an abuse and should be illegal. How hard it must be to resist these things when they’re constantly being paraded in our boys’ faces!


Which leads me to one of my biggest beefs with this book (other than his far from compelling evolutionary explanations): Haidt’s view of porn.

“I’m not saying that all pornography is harmful; I’m saying that immersing boys in an infinite playlist of hardcore porn video during the sensitive period in which the sexual centers of their brains are being rewired is maybe not so good for their sexual and romantic development, or for their future partners.”

I read this and thought- Wow! Could we take a softer stance on porn?! It’s not ALL harmful just MAYBE, CERTAIN types of porn at CERTAIN times of life MIGHT not be so good.

Sorry Haidt, I know you’re an intelligent human being, but I can’t think of a single positive thing that porn does for any person, ever. The industry itself is corrupt and is the catalyst for human trafficking all over the world. The number of relationships and marriages that porn ruins is staggering.

He says “10% of adolescent boys said they found pornography addicting” I don’t know if he believed this stat, but it’s clear that boys are not answering that question honestly. Was the other part of this that 80% found pornography VERY addicting?

Until we take a firmer stance on pornography there will be no positive progress. It’s just something that consumes you. Period. You can’t just dip your toes in the water. It pulls you in and it drowns you.

I would recommend reading this very short but very good book called The Porn Problem if you are believing the lie that porn is okay.

“I should point out that I am an atheist, but I find that I sometimes need words and concepts from religion to understand the experience of life as a human being.”

I thought it was very interesting that Haidt also admits that he believes everyone has a God-sized hole in their life. I am glad that Haidt appears to have some Christian friends in his life because honestly it felt like his constant reference to evolution was him trying to convince himself as much as the reader.

The principles Haidt explains in this book I thought, Oh that makes sense because God is this way or he created us this way, etc. And then Haidt would say something along the lines of ‘millions of years of evolution made our brains grow bigger so we could do such and such’ or ‘groups decided to be the most cohesive by creating religion’ etc. It feels like it takes a lot more faith to believe something as absurd and unproven as evolution when I see evidence of God every day. The Bible is the closest thing to explain what I see in the world today just like Haidt said— to understand the experience of life as a human being. God’s Word helps us understand our world better than anything else that has ever attempted to.

If you haven’t read it for yourself, I would encourage you to engage with the Bible and let it speak for itself. I think you’ll find a lot more truth and hope there than Haidt’s evolutionary theories.


 And finally, Haidt devotes a few chapters explaining how governments, tech companies, schools, and parents can take action steps moving forward.

It’s possible that his suggested action steps may not make sense for everyone, but I appreciate that he took the time to set up a game plan. A lot of times books like this are just authors dropping knowledge and blasting walls and then peacing out- ‘So good luck with that!’

And that’s not helpful. We don’t always know what to do with the information. Haidt summarizes his points into four steps:
1. No smartphones before high school
2. No social media before 16
3. Phone-free schools
4. Far more unsupervised play and childhood independence

My kids’ school recently took a survey of parents and students regarding their cell phone policy and are looking at how to change it. I’d like schools to curb the use and presence of phones more.

My kids are young so a lot can change by the time they’re teenagers, but at this point I think I’m on board with No. 1 & 2. We already do quite a bit of the fourth one. They get limited TV time and they get some independence and a lot of play with other kids from a variety of ages.

I also liked his list of ages and things kids can do to gain more responsibility and independence— lots of good options in that list that I will try to implement.

It will be interesting to see how things go the more and more we learn the effects of our ever-changing technology.

Haidt reminds us that the tech world of today is far different from what it was 20-25 years ago. We have to be committed to understanding what we are exposing our kids to and be willing to make different choices for them and for their future.


Recommendation

There are a few books I’ve linked throughout my review that I may recommend more than this one, especially if you feel like you will already agree with most of what Haidt talks about in The Anxious Generation.

If you haven’t really given any of this much thought and you’re here because you feel like there’s something off with your children and their phone/social media usage, then I would definitely read the book because I think it will give you a lot to think about.

When I read his book The Coddling of the American Mind I was recommending it left and right. I think I feel a little more hesitant to recommend this one in the same way. I think it’s important but the execution of the book wasn’t my favorite, especially as a Christ follower. Although, I’ll reiterate that aside from his stance on evolution and porn, I didn’t really disagree with much of what he said.

If you’re not sure you want to tackle the whole book, I think it would still be beneficial to just pick a chapter or few that look most interesting to you. At the end of each chapter Haidt has an ‘In Sum’ section that covers in short all of what was discussed for that chapter. You may find it easier to just read those to help you determine which parts you want to read more in-depth.

If you want to continue to follow along my original post has links to his research. 

“I feel duty bound to inform you that this is not a whodunit… If anything, it’s a whydunit— a character study, an examination of who we are; and why we do the things we do.”

“This is a tale of murder. Or maybe that’s not quite true. At its heart, it’s a love story, isn’t it? The saddest kind of love story— about the end of love; the death of love. So I guess I was right the first time.”


When I started this and read about Greece, Leo, a movie star, and a murder, I had to do a double take, but no, this was not me accidentally re-reading Moonflower Murders.


The Fury is pretty in line with Michaelides’ other two books- The Silent Patient and The Maidens. Both of those had some polarizing reviews and this one did as well. I think it must just be Michaelides’ way of writing and story concepts that has people frustrated for some reason.

I mean I wouldn’t call all of his books five star, must-reads, but I feel like I enjoy them when I read them. It’s only after I see other people’s comments that it taints my view a little bit. So since it’s been like that for all three books, I think it’s just a matter of- is this the author for you or not? And so I’ve decided I enjoy his books even though others might find them slow, or messy, or unrealistic. I don’t necessarily feel those things.


This book is a little different than the other two in that we are being told this story by a narrator— Elliot— who is also one of the characters in the story. He addresses us, readers, directly as he gives us his account, divided into a five-act-play. We are essentially at the mercy of what he decides to tell us, how he tells it to us, and when. We are not given all the information all the time.

He tells us at the beginning: “We are all the unreliable narrators of our own lives.”

And so, we are already on guard, wondering where Elliot is going in his storytelling and what we are to make of it.



The main plot of the book is that this group of friends is on an isolated Greek island when one of them turns up dead.

The narration is not strictly chronological. Elliot takes liberties to backtrack to days or years prior to give us more background and context. He also takes some artistic liberties in some parts because he doesn’t know exactly how it happens. In other cases we are left to assume he was told information from other characters in the story.

In short, I would describe this story as theatrical and layered.


Cast of Characters

Lana-recently retired movie actress

“Lana and I weren’t just friends— we were soulmates.”

Leo- Lana’s son

 “A gentle soul, like his mother.”

Nikos-island caretaker

“Nikos lived a solitary existence on Aura… He spent too much time alone. Sometimes he wondered if he was going mad.”

Jason-Lana’s husband

“Jason wasn’t a man. he was just a kid, playing make-believe. And kids shouldn’t play with guns.”

Kate-Lana’s best friend, also an actress

“There’s something you should know about Kate—she had quite a temper.”

Agathi-Lana’s personal assistant/housekeeper

“She didn’t care where she went, as long as she was with Lana. She was so completely under Lana’s spell, in those days.”

Elliot-our narrator; friend to Lana; victim of abuse in his childhood

“I believed I had to change everything about me: my name, my appearance, how I carried myself, how I spoke, what I talked about, thought about. To be part of this brave new world, I needed to become a different person— a better one. And eventually, one day, I succeeded.”


Just like Michaelides’ other books, this isn’t really one you read because the characters are lovable— they’re not. And Elliot does get to be annoying at times. But you read it for the plot because you you have to know who dies, who killed them, and why.

I think I had a good chunk of it figured out by chapter six, but I still enjoyed reading it and there were a few things at the end that were unexpected which was nice!


There is a fun cameo of Marianna from The Maidens— she is Elliot’s therapist. There is also a cameo of Theo from The Silent Patient but I won’t tell you in what capacity because of spoilers.



If you do this book for a book club, I thought a good discussion question would be centered around some of Elliot’s comments about his inner child and his Wizard of Oz theory:

“I have a pet theory that everyone in life corresponds to one of the characters in The Wizard of Oz. There’s Dorothy Gale, a lost child, looking for a place to belong; an insecure, neurotic Scarecrow, seeking intellectual validation; and a bullying Lion, really a coward, more afraid than everyone else. And the Tin Man, minus a heart.”

If you had to put yourself into one of these categories, which would you choose and why?

Do you agree with his assessment?

Sometimes I think we over psychoanalyze ourselves and our childhood trauma, or go looking for some where there isn’t any. Obviously there is a lot of real trauma for a lot of people, but if we ruminate on it and always look for ways to connect it to our lives and our relationships, I wonder if we can ever really heal from it or if we’re allowing it too much power in our lives. At some point, we have to move beyond our trauma. What that exactly looks like will be different for every person, but it’s something I’ve been thinking about recently, especially after reading Bad Therapy.



Recommendation

If you were not a fan of Alex Michaelides’ other books, I can’t imagine this will be that much different for you.

If you liked his other books, I think you should give this one a shot.

If you haven’t read any of his books yet, I would read them in order because the cameos could give away a spoiler or two.

I do find his books worth a read even if other reviewers do not. At least at this point I still do. I’ll never say never.


[Content Advisory: 41 f- words, 8 s-words; mention of an affair but no sexual content]

Horowitz maintains his ‘book within a book’ theme from Magpie Murders in this murder mystery written like an Agatha Christie, Golden Age detective novel. It makes the book over 600 pages which feels a little bit insane to read, but in reality somehow doesn’t take that long.

I like the Golden Age of detective thrillers and if you aren’t sure what that means, you can get all the details in Everyone in My Family Has Killed Someone because he lays it out on the first few pages. Another series written in the same way is Charles Finch’s Charles Lennox series.


I had a hard time solving the Moonflower Murders case. And I think the double book situation is partly why. That and just the sheer complexity of a dual mystery plot.

You kinda need to know the gist of the book before that makes sense.


Here’s the sitch.

Moonflower Murders takes place years after Magpie Murders. Susan Ryeland, our main character, is living in Greece with her boyfriend, Andreas, running a hotel. She gets some visitors from England requesting her help in finding their adult daughter, Cecily, who has disappeared.

Why ask Susan?

Well these visitors also run a hotel. And a man was beaten to death in one of their rooms 8 years ago. They arrested the man who did it and he’s been in prison ever since. Shortly after the crime, Alan Conway (author of the Atticus Pund series), comes to the hotel and ends up writing a book inspired by the crime.

When Cecily reads this book (8 years later) she realizes that they arrested the wrong man. And she knows who really murdered Frank Parris almost a decade prior.

And then she goes missing.

Clearly Susan should be able to figure this out because she figured out Magpie Murders and she knows the twisted mind of Alan Conway, having been his editor for so long.

She’s itching to leave and takes on the job, going back to London to solve essentially two mysteries: who really murdered Frank Parris and what happened to Cecily.

The book within the book is the aforementioned Atticus Pund novel that solved the mystery for Cecily. It’s called ‘Atticus Pund Takes the Case’. The people surrounding the present-day murder are in this book but under different names. The crime in the book, however, is strangulation and the discovery of the murderer also feels very dissimilar. What could Cecily have noticed that made it so clear to her?



Well, the almost-detective that I am, I thought for sure I could put the clues together and nail this thing down. I actually did get a good chunk of it right by like page 60. And then I started reading the Pund book and decided I better just enjoy the ride. There were already a lot of characters, but then to try to keep straight who was who in the Pund novel and what that meant for the original crime felt like a lot to keep track of and I wasn’t about to get out a notebook and spend extra time on anagramming every little thing. Ain’t nobody got time for that.

[However, I did notice that the list of Atticus Pund books at the beginning of the ‘interior’ books if you just look at the first letter of each book spells ‘anagram’! I felt proud of my discovery except it really doesn’t do a whole lot to help solve the mystery…]

I had good suspicions about things that did lead to the truth, but there were quite a few things I missed. I think a lot of the clues are pretty subtle. There were also a lot of references to things or proper nouns that meant nothing to me. I don’t know if it’s a generational thing, an English thing, or something else, but I did not get it.

I honestly don’t remember a whole lot from Magpie Murders since I read it 6 years ago, but this one had some other content in it that I don’t really remember from the first one. It’s not overt or descriptive but Frank Parris (this murder victim) and Alan Conway (previous murder victim) had some sexual escapades and kinky tastes that are interwoven into the mystery. Let’s just say that I learned what a ‘rent boy’ was.

Anyway, the book is still fairly clean, it just makes some of the characters unlikeable and reminds me (except not really because I don’t need to be reminded, I already am very aware) why ‘sex work’ is not a good or legitimate job for society as a whole or people personally.

There are some reviewers who have taken offense to the way Horowitz portrays gay characters in his novels and I can see how they might be. It’s not described very positively. I personally do not agree with the LGBTQ lifestyle and think it goes against God’s design for us, but if I were going to write a novel, I think I would just leave it out altogether rather than make it such a central part of so many characters and the mystery. It did seem a bit much to me as well.



There is a third book in this series set to come out in 2025. Although it’s a bit anti-climactic to read that book summary and find out that Susan has left Andreas and returned to England. The high at the end of this book must have been short lived for those two. Oh sorry, now you know Susan isn’t murdered, but you already know that right?


I also saw that they put this and Magpie Murders to the screen in limited series. I haven’t watched them yet but I think I’ll give them a shot. My husband won’t read a 600 page book, but I think he would like the mystery of it and a movie version is just the ticket!



And now, the part of the show where I talk about all the British words I learned while reading this book!

- ha-ha: a sunken fence/wall thing that makes it look like one big lawn to the viewer but keeps the cows from comin’ up to the door (this is not a joke)

- figeen: (this is not British-specific, but nonetheless a word I had not known) a silver brooch worn by a king; not a more speedily way of saying figurine

- paddling pool: a kiddie pool that’s not big enough for paddles

- camp: (i.e. “he was quite camp”) someone acting exaggerated, theatrical, or flamboyant and is often associated with homosexuals; also how did this happen? who gets to take a word, remove all the tents and hiking and change it to something completely different?

- skanky hair: dirty and unkempt hair; I don’t think I’ll use this descriptor in America because people will think I’m a Mean Girl.

- kitchen roll: paper towels; they don’t get confused when you ask for the kitchen roll because a bread roll is a bun so there’s not two rolls, Royce.

There was another one, but when I looked it up it said it was vulgar so I thought it best not to get myself in trouble here. I probably already have with camp, but what’s done is done.

It’s funny and interesting to me how two countries with the same language can have such different language!


Recommendation

If you liked Magpie Murders, you’ll like this one. If you didn’t like Magpie Murders, I don’t think this one will be much different for you.

If you’ve not read Magpie Murders but you enjoy detective novels like Agatha Christie, I think you’ll like it.

I wouldn’t write this one off just because of its length. I really almost didn’t read it when I got it at the library because I was like— that’s a big book. Can I commit to that thing? But truly, it reads faster than you’d think.

I’m planning to read the third book, but I think it will be good to have a break between this one and that one. Book-ception has to be sporadic for me!



[Content Advisory: some f- words; references to male prostitution and other sexual exploits; several homosexual relationships]

“Life often hurts, and we need to know how to pray when it does.”

“Prayer isn’t about saying what we think the Lord wants to hear from us. Prayer is an honest, intimate, and intentional reaching for the Lord in truth, in reality, in the actuality of our lives as they are.”


This is a video-based, seven-session Bible Study about prayer.

I completed this study with other women from my church and I thought it was a great study.

I loved that there were 6 different teachers, each taking a different prayer in the Bible and showing us how/when to pray like it.



Kelly Minter takes us through the Lord’s Prayer and shows us the elements of the prayer Jesus taught his disciples to pray. She also emphasizes how believing the goodness of God informs our prayers.

Jackie Hill Perry looks at prayers of petition and thanksgiving by looking at Hannah’s prayer. She reminds us that we can’t define God by our circumstances and that prayer is about going to Person who can give us anything we need, including joy if our circumstances bring sorrow.

Jen Wilkin takes us through prayers of adoration. The prayer she focused on was Psalm 139 and helped me see that well-known psalm in a new way. She pulls out the attributes of God that are on display and how easy it is to praise God for all the things he is. So much of our prayers depend on who God is, so we should know about him and trust his authority in our life.

Jennifer Rothschild walks us through prayers of lament. Looking at a variety of passages, including Psalm 13, she helps us identify the pattern of lament, how to recognize if we’re just complaining, and to remember that prayers of lament should lead us to the character of God and “gives us an opportunity to agree with God’s will.”

Jada Edwards teaches us prayers of intercession. Her week focuses on Ephesians 3 and encourages us to pray for those we find difficult to love because it changes our hearts. She also emphasizes maintaining our connection to our Source and staying rooted in Christ. Intercessory prayer is a way to stand in the gap for others and to partner with Christ and build unity with others.

Kristi McLelland’s prayers focused us on oneness and unity in the body of Christ. She covered John 13-17— the Upper Room discourse— and Jesus’s last prayer before the events of his death and resurrection. Tapping into her knowledge of the cultural context from her time spent in Israel, she helps us see why Jesus would want his last words to the his disciples to remind them to be one in Christ.



As we reflected on what stuck out to us the most with this study, one of my friends said that it was like taking a two-dimensional thing and making it 3D. I liked that analogy because they really did take something as simple as prayer and then showed us all the facets of it.

Prayer is simple yet complex. We don’t always know how to pray or what to pray for. These ladies do a great job of giving examples of how we can pray. It was also so good to just be reminded of the power of prayer.

Jackie Hill Perry when talking about Hannah’s problem of barrenness says how “she used the strongest weapon one has— prayer.” We often feel like prayer is useless or passive. We want to DO something about our problems or our desires, but in reality, prayer is truly an active and meaningful thing because it connects us to the all-powerful and all-wise God who can actually do something with our requests and with our hearts as we present them.

And not only that, but doing this study reminds us that prayer isn’t just about making requests and asking for things, though it’s clear God wants us to do that; it’s also just about connecting with our Creator.

If we make prayer a regular habit, we can’t help but be changed because we are communing with the One who made us. It changes our perspective on who we are and what our lives are about. It helps us see others the way God sees them. It’s about bringing glory and honor to Him who deserves all the praise.



To be honest, I was a little wary of leading this study because I don’t like to pray out loud. But I wanted to be challenged in that area because I believe in the importance of praying and praying with and for others. This study definitely helped me to find the courage to pray out loud.

It also made me think about how to teach my own kids about prayer. What is my prayer habits and prayer life teaching my kids about prayer? It is convicting!

So if you are like me and you don’t like praying out loud, I would encourage you to do this study with others and let God work on your heart and help you praise, lament, intercede, and petition the Lord in a deeper and more habitual way. Let prayer be a connecting point for you and your friends, family, or church community because it does bring a unity that nothing else can.



Study Formatting & Details

Each week there are five days of homework. Because each author/teacher approached their week differently, the homework varies in formatting and the amount of time you spend on it. Some weeks have a lot of cross-referencing or marking up the passage. Other weeks are more reflective and text-heavy with thoughtful questions.

As a group, we really appreciated the video teaching sessions that went along with the study. They usually covered everything we had been doing in our homework so those who were unable to finish the homework were still able to glean the information and participate in the discussion.

The book has a website link and code in the back so anyone with the book can access the videos. That was also nice because those who missed a week could still watch on their own. It also makes this study something you can do on your own or again with a different group of people.



Recommendation

I would definitely recommend this study. You can do it on your own, but I would recommend getting at least a couple other people to do it with you so you can also be praying for one another whenever you meet together.

These ladies will being a lot of encouragement to your life and your relationship with your Creator.

Some weeks may resonate more with you than others, but that’s why meeting with others will bring some variety and depth in how the Lord is speaking to different women through different verses.



A few other books on prayer that I would recommend:

Prayer by Timothy Keller

The Lord’s Prayer by Kevin DeYoung

The Songs of Jesus by Timothy Keller

Dark Clouds, Deep Mercy by Mark Vroegop (this book is all about lamenting)

“Monsters don’t hide in the woods; they aren’t shadows in the trees or invisible things lurking in darkened corners. No, the real monsters move in plain sight. They lived among us.”

“I had a taste of what it really felt like: control. Of not only having it, but taking it from someone else. And for one single moment, like a flicker in the dark, it felt good.”


I would recommend reading this book BEFORE you read reviews. I think my opinion of the book changed a bit once I read what other people thought and I might not have enjoyed it as much if I had their voice in my ear while reading.

My first Stacy Willingham book was Only If You’re Lucky and I was not impressed. But from what I saw, people said it deviated from her previous books so I wanted to give her another chance. A Flicker in the Dark, her debut, was nominated for best mystery/thriller on Goodreads so I went there next. Also because I’m not sure it’s wise for me to read All the Dangerous Things about child abduction.

I’m happy to report that I liked this book way better than Only If You’re Lucky.

This book was already better in that it wasn’t the college party scene, though alcohol and pill consumption was a trope involved to instill uncertainty in the reader of being able to trust the main character’s judgment (which I’m not really a fan of).



The Basic Premise

This book is told from the present with flashbacks.

Chloe was 12 when her father was arrested for being their small Louisiana town’s serial killer— 6 young girls in one summer. Chloe was the catalyst for his arrest when she found a box in his closet with the girls’ jewelry.

Chloe now, 20 years later, about to get married, has her own psychologist practice (why do authors always portray therapists and psychologists as pill-popping-mixed-with-alcohol-trauma-haunted-dysfunctional? I’d like my therapist to have at least most of their crap together) in Baton Rouge.

Her past comes back to haunt her when a local teenage girl goes missing. And then another. Everything is eerily similar to her father’s crimes. But he confessed and is in jail. Is this a copycat? Was her father actually innocent? Is she just paranoid? After all, something similar happened when she was in college and she was wrong; she doesn’t want to be wrong again.



Many reviewers thought it was easy to figure out and they knew from early on what the deal was, but I thought Willingham did a good job of making me second guess. Here was my stream of consciousness while reading:

It’s for sure her fiance. Or maybe it’s really her dad and we’re doing this all for nothing. Or it’s her brother. Actually I think it might really be her fiance. Oh, it’s one of those alcohol and pills don’t mix because paranoia things and either it’s all in her head or she does things without knowing it. Nope, it’s the reporter guy. Ah, it IS the fiance. No, it’s too obvious… etc, etc.

Every time we were introduced to a new character I was convinced but then I’d backtrack. And sure, maybe in the end, it wasn’t the biggest twist you’d ever seen, but the readers who downgrade a book because of that and it was a book like this, I just gotta think they’re impossible to please. What do you expect of writers?

I think we talk out of both sides of our mouth when we want a book that we can’t figure out but then we complain because we didn’t figure it out and there weren’t enough clues but then if we figure it out we think it’s a poorly written story because it wasn’t a surprise. Maybe we just read sooooo many thrillers that we’ve made ourselves boring and books predictable.

I don’t know. Some books could be more complex, but I would say that this book was good. I don’t think it was obvious. Some red herrings were maybe too red, but I’m not sure how someone could be utterly convinced of their theory the entire time they’re reading it. And I think that’s the mark of a good book. Something that makes you second guess.



Other Reviewers

Now when I first finished reading, I felt like I enjoyed the book and it would definitely be one I’d recommend. It was one that was hard to put down. But as I read some reviews of other readers, they made some good points. I’ll talk about those here.

This section will have major spoilers so scroll past to the recommendation section if you don’t want to know the answers.

One of the main reviews that influenced me was the first one on the Goodreads page for this book, her name is Alissa. Her review was funny and compelling. I’ll mention a few of her main thoughts and whether I agree.

First of all, the realisticness of her psychology career. I do not have my PhD in psychology (only a minor) and I don’t know how those things work. I don’t know how pills work. For some this was a big no-no. Her role, her knowledge, her methods, etc. For the average reader, I don’t know if there was anything glaringly false or unrealistic that made me give up on it.

Second, the relationship between Chloe and her fiance— I agree, very unhealthy and a little bizarre. I don’t think I would ever marry someone if there were certain things we just couldn’t talk about. Or being gone all the time like that.

Third, the realisticness of finding the Valium in the hair so quickly— I’m not sure why this got the reviewer so worked up. Police procedurals or crime novels do this all the time. Of course testing takes longer, but the book would be super boring if we had to wait weeks and months between evidence findings. I am totally okay with most procedural accommodations.

Fourth, Chloe sleeping with the reporter. That was ridiculous and didn’t make any sense. Agreed.

Fifth, Chloe going to her old house because she thinks that’s where the killer would take his victims now since it’s abandoned. I actually don’t think that’s so far-fetched. Sure, she should have told someone about it, and definitely brought her phone in, but again, I’ve forgotten my phone in the car enough times to know it’s not so far-fetched, especially under stress and danger. I don’t know— I’m not gonna hate on a book for that.

Sixth, the scene at the end showing up to the house with the ring and then not speaking to her former-fiance… weird. Yes. Seemed like an odd end scene.

Seventh, THIS is probably the main thing that makes me think a little bit less of the book. And this is the biggest spoiler so definitely don’t read this if you haven’t read the book yet.

I just can’t wrap my mind around the idea of her dad going to jail to protect her brother. Alissa says it well in her review: “If my kid was murdering people, you better believe I wouldn't take a murder rap for that little psycho!”

I don’t understand how going to jail instead of your teenage son who murdered, not just one girl, and not just one person on accident, but six girls on purpose, is the best thing for everyone. It’s the best thing for zero people. Your son needs help. He’s not going to get that if no one knows he needs it and the person who does sends himself to jail where he lets everyone think he’s a serial killer, leaving his wife and his daughter to live with his murderous son without his protection. To leave his wife to bear the burden and weight of keeping track of their son. To leave his daughter not knowing the truth about anything. To leave his son free to continue being a little psycho.

Just no. That’s the worst choice he could have possible made and I don’t know if a single parent would actually make that choice.

Since that’s the whole reason for this book, I can’t give it 5 stars. However, while you’re reading it, it’s still enjoyable, so I’m not going to hate on it as much as Alissa. Really, reading other people’s reviews can ruin a lot of books for you because nit-picking a book and pointing out every single consistency takes the fun out of a book.

Again, some books can deserve it, but I don’t think this book is one of them.

I would have preferred a better reason for the dad to go to jail and the son not to— like the dad didn’t know and he just couldn’t prove his innocence, and I think that would have been more reasonable, but that doesn’t negate the entire book for me.



Based on my initial feelings from reading the book, uninfluenced by others, this is still a book that I would recommend reading.

Some reviewers thought it was slow. I didn’t feel that. I read this book pretty fast, it was hard for me to put down. I would say that it is slightly more on the psychological thriller side of things.

Some reviewers thought the writing wasn’t very good. I’m not entirely sure I understood the details of that comment. I wouldn’t say I’m a book-snob, but I’m also not so easily entertained that I tolerate poorly written books— I’ve read several.

I didn’t find the writing annoying or distracting or even more repetitive than any other book.



Recommendation

I’m sure it’s tough to be an author of thrillers where the target audience wants more and more ‘twists’ that they NEVER saw coming and always new plots with no overlap from other types of thrillers. People are hard to please.

I guess I wasn’t hard to please with this book. I don’t know what that says about me, but that’s why I say- go for it. Don’t read reviews before you read it— I am aware of the irony of this statement— and expect a decent thriller.

And really, there are a lot of people who gave this book high ratings, so if you love the book, you are not alone. Let the haters hate.

But also, if you liked this one, I still wouldn’t recommend her book Only If You’re Lucky. Does not measure up to this one.



[Content Advisory: many f- and s-words]

This was a really fast-paced book that was extra fun for me to read because the setting of the story is in rural Iowa.

[I actually was trying to pinpoint where this fictional town would have been in relation to my hometown. She gave some clues: 30 minutes from Algona, 4 hrs from Omaha, 30 minutes from Spirit Lake, and somewhat close to Spencer. All of these towns are close to home. From a helpful radius calculator I found online I determined the whereabouts of Burden would be an hourish from my childhood home, just north of Emmetsburg— Heather feel free to correct me if I’m wrong!]

The setting definitely felt like home to me… well except for the murders and abductions. The gravel roads, the agricultural environment, the creepiness of cornfields— if you haven’t been dared to go into a cornfield in the middle of the night at a sleepover, are you really from Iowa? Gudenkauf also shows her knowledge that Casey’s gas station is the place to go for a slice of pizza and that the closest Lowe’s is in Sioux City. Can you imagine having to drive over an hour to get to a mall?! That was my life until now, though honestly, the small town life was a great way to grow up.

But I’ll move on from my Iowa nostalgia.

 

This story has three different threads:

 - August 2000: the night Josie’s parents are shot point blank in their home, Josie manages to escape but her brother, Ethan, a possible suspect, and best friend, Becky are missing (Nostalgia sidenote: they were about to go to the Iowa State Fair which is kinda a big deal around here but I’ve only been once or twice)

 - Present: Wylie, true crime writer, is staying in the house of the aforementioned murder as she wraps up the book she has written detailing the somewhat unsolved crime; it’s the middle of a blizzard and she discovers a little boy almost frozen to death on the property. The power is out, the landline isn’t working— no way to get help.

 - Unknown time period: told from a little girl’s perspective who is unaware (though the reader knows) that she and her mother are being held in a basement in an abusive situation.

If a story has three storylines, you know they will all have to eventually intersect in some fashion and that was the case here. I wouldn’t say the manner of that was overly shocking for me as I suspected some of what was revealed. But the ultimate ‘killer’ was not something that I knew for sure by the end of the book.


There were some parts of the book that were hard to read. Now that I’m a mother I have a harder time reading stories where something happens to children or a child loses a parent.

I read this book in like three sittings. The tension continues to build as you learn more about the shooting and the abduction and who the suspects are, as Wylie realizes the little boy and his mother are running from someone who will do anything to get them back and has followed them to the farmhouse, as the little girl and her mother eventually try to escape from the basement.

The timeline in two of the threads are very short, like one or two days, which adds to the suspense and increases the action.


Some readers commented that it had a slow start— I didn’t feel that, but even if that’s you, I would encourage you to continue reading because it definitely picks up in pace.

I didn’t want to read this book in the heat of summer so I was saving it for when the weather got cooler. It’s been colder and rainy this week and it was a good atmospheric read to usher in more winter weather.


My one critique of the book is that I don’t think we really got the ‘why’ behind the abduction or the ‘planned’ abduction. There are a few pieces of information that might give us a clue but nothing was ever spelled out and I’m not entirely sure why it happened other than the person had to be some sort of deranged human. I would have liked some more information and context for the why.



Recommendation

This is a book I would recommend for thriller readers, anyone who grew up in rural Iowa, or anyone looking for a snow-themed thriller. The suspense is good and though there are a few gruesome descriptions, it’s a pretty clean book in terms of swearing and sexual content.

Heather Gudenkauf is definitely an author I would look to read again!

If abuse, abduction, or loss of a parent at a young age is a trigger for you, then this may not be the book for you.


[Content Advisory: a handful of f-words and s-words; a couple references to sexual abuse; trigger warning for miscarriage]

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“It underscored just how hazardous a maid’s work can be. It’s not the backbreaking labor, the demanding guests, or the cleaning chemicals that present the greatest danger. It’s the assumption that maids are delinquents, murderers, and thieves: the maid is always to blame.”


When I first read The Maid by Nita Prose I was underwhelmed because the hype created expectations that weren’t necessarily met. I think I enjoyed this book better because I went into it knowing what it would be like.

It was still a mystery I didn’t have completely solved, though parts of it were predictable. This series is not one to read for hard-hitting thrills and chills. Its brand is ‘endearing and mysterious.’ Molly Gray is a person you just love. Her attention to obscure or random details makes her an excellent help while solving a crime in the middle of her domain.

The Mystery Guest is a continuation of Molly’s story, a few years after the first book. She has advanced to Head Maid and takes her job very seriously.

The Regency Grand Hotel unfortunately finds itself the center of another crime. If this series continues this hotel may not make it because they won’t have any guests due to its killer reputation. (Although Prose hints at a possible solution to that by the end of the book which is fun to think about happening.)

“World-renowned, bestselling, and award-winning author J.D. Grimthorpe… was set to make a big important announcement in our recently restored Grand Tearoom.”

But as he stood to make his announcement he only got a few words out “I’ve been keeping a secret, one that will no doubt surprise you” before he dropped dead.

When the cause of death is discovered, the maids are again at the top of the suspect list. The same detective from the first book is back on the scene. She begins antagonistic towards Molly but soon they work together to figure out who Grimthorpe’s killer was.


What adds another layer to this story is that Grimthorpe is no stranger to Molly.

So we flip back and forth between present day and the past when Molly’s grandmother worked at Grimthorpe’s mansion, eventually bringing Molly there to work with her.

These flashbacks flesh out the character of Grimthorpe and who may want him dead, after all, he was “a bit of a troll, with a temperament that ranges from melancholic to diabolic.”

Molly’s gran had to be part of the story, so even though she has passed, this helps keep her as a prominent character, informing the reader on a variety of things as we learn more about her. It also brings more context to the character of Molly and her upbringing.

The end wraps up nicely with a delightful surprise and a new potential avenue of exploration for the character of Molly Gray.



The connection point of this book to another book I recently read is the infamous Fabrege egg. If you want to read another book with such an item, check out Colleen Coble’s book Fragile Designs where a real Fabrege egg entangles characters with the Russian mob.



Recommendation

I would recommend this book and this series. They are cozy and feel-good mysteries that create interesting plots with likeable characters and a bit of humor sprinkled in.

This book has significantly less reviews than the first book which is too bad. Sometimes books that get really popular inevitably come with inflated expectations and leave people let down, giving up without giving the author another chance with less pressure. But both books are worth reading. Just come into it with the right mindset and you’ll enjoy it!



[Content Advisory: 0 f-words; 5 s-words; no sexual content]


**Received an ARC via NetGalley**

“That’s the question you need to answer for yourself. Are you willing to break every rule?”


Brian Freeman is usually an auto-read for me. There have been a few here and there that have not been my favorite but I usually really enjoy his books.

Break Every Rule is a stand alone thriller about human trafficking and the lengths one husband and father would go to get his wife and daughter back. It immediately added a new item to my bucket list: never visit Miami.

This wasn’t one of my favorites by Freeman, and I would say that is largely due to the nature of the plot. Human trafficking just makes me sick and angry. At least the book doesn’t glorify it and we do see some form of justice which is good, but it’s just one of those books you don’t necessarily ‘enjoy.’

This book also had a lot more swearing than some of this other books so I wasn’t keen on that.

In some ways it reminded me of Freeman’s book Immoral which very appropriately named. This one felt better to read than that one. The immorality felt more clearly defined in Break Every Rule and the good guys and bad guys more differentiated.



Plot Basics

The main character of Break Every Rule is Tommy Miller— an ex-soldier/ex-cop jaded by a system that can’t get to the worst of the worst because of corruption or money or the murder of witnesses. They are “untouchable.”

He gets roped into a group that manipulated that anger to use him to do secret ops. To do what the system couldn’t do— bring justice and get the bad guys: The Outsiders.

Until a mission with The Outsiders went awry and Tommy (previously known as The Tiger) had to go into hiding.

His wife, Teresa, has secrets of her own. When she and their (baby) daughter get kidnapped, Tommy starts to realize that the people after her are not the same ones that are after him. But trying to rescue his wife will alert his own enemies to his location and complicate his plans.

Not only is he evading his enemies, but the detective working his wife’s disappearance, Lindy Jax, has made this case personal and is going out of her way to figure out what Tommy is up to and who he really is.

But if there is one thing Tommy knows, it’s that to get his wife and daughter back, he’s going to have to break some rules.

“We can’t change the law, so we break it when the law stands in the way.”



My Soap Box

Break Every Rule is ‘Taken’ meets Epstein’s horrific private island. Down to the very same principle of being ‘untouchable.’

That’s what makes this book hard to read. It’s not fiction. It’s happening today in the Caribbean and all over the world. And anyone who turns a blind eye to it is despicable.

“She was consumed with outrage that no one would help us. That the rich and famous would gather around Fell and not let the truth come out.”

That is what I feel. Outrage. Because there is no doubt in my mind that the rich and famous and influential are blocking the truth from coming out in our real world about so much injustice. To protect their own cash flow or their own reputations. It’s sick.

If only Tommy Miller was a real person who could infiltrate, expose, and bring justice. That’s the thing about this book and Taken. Yeah, these men have special skills that help them get their loved ones back, but that’s not normal. That’s not reality. The reality is most of these girls and women either don’t have anyone looking for them or anyone with the resources and capabilities to rescue them.


This is a soap box I’ll stand on all day: the pornography industry and the legitimizing of ‘sex work’ are both intimately connected to sexual abuse and increase and support the market for human trafficking. There is no doubt.

It’s shocking to me that people think ‘sexual freedom’ has no consequences. Either they are blind to the horrors of the very real trajectory of that line of thought or they are aware and they simply don’t care.

I hope that if you read this book and Martin Fell and his ‘use’ of women angers you, that you will think about the parallels to the real world and consider helping dry up the market on sex for sale. Check out Fight the New Drug and its facts and resources surrounding this topic and more information on what you can do to educate others and support a good cause.

One of the characters that’s part of Martin Fell’s ‘enterprise’ admits, “We’ve built our lives around stealing the innocence of little girls.”

Help protect innocence.



Other Comments

I thought it was weird that Tommy so quickly and easily started referring to Teresa as Alina after finding that out. Maybe Freeman did that for clarity for the reader but it seemed unnatural.

I like to make connections to other books I’ve read and there are two to be found here:

- Teresa and Tommy talk about classical music a bit which reminded me of the book Every Good Boy Does Fine: A Love Story in Music Lessons and I think they would have both appreciated that book.

- This book reminded me of The Spy Coast which details an ex-CIA agent pulled out of her quiet, hidden retired life when another agent disappears. They too have a local detective on their heels investigating them while they’re ‘breaking the rules’ to find those hunting them down. But at least Brian Freeman made his detective more legitimate and not the foolish, bumbling variety that Gerritsen did. Plus Freeman did what I was hoping Gerritsen would have: force the main character to work WITH the detective. Although that book is the first in the series so that will probably come eventually.

- A couple nonfiction books that relate: Taking Down Backpage or The Porn Problem

Speaking of the detective, Lindy Jax: “She was a Black woman recruited to the department right out of college, and the white men— hell, even some of the Black men— made it clear that they considered her nothing but a diversity hire. So she’d had to out-hustle all of them, and they didn’t like that.”

The interesting argument here isn’t even that DEI hires are unqualified people— Lindy was qualified and that would be a whole different conversation— but just the idea of that is making it hard for diverse people to feel belonging in their job because people can speculate that you were hired because of your gender, race, or sexuality rather than your merit. I’m not at all convinced DEI does what it claims to do for diversity but rather muddies the waters. I don’t doubt that Lindy is up against it working in the environment she does as a black woman! And I don’t think the DEI groups helped her out much just by their mere existence.

Last comment, the characters encounter Alina’s foster parents and I appreciate that they portrayed a good foster home. I know the system is broken but I also know of a lot of good people that take really good care of foster children and love them very much. We don’t recognize that enough so I’m glad they chose to show the positive side of that in a book that exposes a lot of corruption.



Recommendation

While, this book isn’t my favorite of his, I would still recommend it in general. The subject matter of the plot could be enough to hinder readers especially if that would be a trigger, but I can at least attest that there is some form of justice in the end. I think, for me, I would need to know that before reading a book like this, so I will share that ‘spoiler’ but I won’t tell you the specifics.

If this plot doesn’t appeal, I would still try some of Brian Freeman’s other books: stand alones like Thief River Falls, I Remember You, or Infinite, or his Frost Easton series or the latter part of his Jonathan Stride series.



[Content Advisory: 86 f-words; 28 s-words; 5 b-words; mentions of rape and human trafficking]

**Received and ARC via NetGalley**