Karen_P

The book is set in South Africa on a private nature preserve. A family journeys to the remote home of their recently deceased mother, who ran the foundation for the preserve. This journey is cloaked in palpable danger from the wildlife, the remoteness, and murderous humans. I could almost feel the dry heat and prickly flora. It is both a thriller and a whodunit where the true identity of the killer(s) are unknown and a network of betrayals revealed at the end..

Hard SF. first contact, weird physics, and ancient Native American lore. What's not to like! The plot propels the story forward and interesting characters tell it in alternating chapters. A welcome change from the romantasy that currently dominates genre fiction.

Play Nice is the story of a woman going back to her childhood home after the death of her mother. The house has been described as having a demon, but this distinction is left to reader to believe it true or not. There is a book within a book of the mother's description of the demon haunting and the house itself as a character. Is the demon literal or symbolic of a difficult family dynamic?

Fagin the Thief treads the now familiar trope of an alternate POV of a classic story. It does so without the Antisemitism of the original and makes Fagin out to be a sympathetic character dealing with the extreme poverty of 19th century London and early loss of parents. he is given a childhood thieving mentor which he in turn becomes to other boys over time. I'll not spoil the ending but it was satisfying.

This book rides on the coattails of "A Handmaids Tale" popularity. This is a tale of a current America where women have been largely denied the right to speak. Unlike "the Handmaids Tale", there has been no crisis or catastrophe, no civil war that precipitated the evil regime. I cannot believe that 300 million well-armed people would passively accept women being silenced without violent insurrection and civil war. I also cannot believe that the word counting bracelets women are required to wear cannot be hacked, tampered with, or cut off and replaced with fakes. The story would have been more believable if set in a fantasy world or an unnamed faraway land in the past. Another criticism is that it takes the easy route of insulting millions of Christians. No current rhetoric or historical precedent would lead an educated person to assume that Christians would want to silence women. However, it was a fast read and the prose was workmanlike.

This book used the storytelling device of the unreliable narrator to good effect. There were 3 different story lines that the reader initially assumes to be from one voice. The initiating event was an auto accident where a woman was rendered comatose, and the narratives branched off to the comatose woman, the events of the few days preceding the accident, and of a young girl in the 1990s. The assumption is that there was foul play, but the reader doesn't know for sure until nearly the end. Of the 3 narratives, I found the young girl's story of her rough upbringing with an alcoholic mother to be the most compelling, followed by the comatose woman's distorted perceptions and dreams next. The narrative describing the events leading up to the accident wasn't very interesting, rather prosaic, and failed to make me identify with the teller. If not for this, I would have rated the book higher, otherwise it is a good first try. The twist near the end was a real showstopper and turned my perceptions of the story around.