[REVIEW] Tender Is the Flesh

title: Tender Is the Flesh

author: Agustina Bazterrica, Sarah Moses (Translator)

genre: adult, horror
published: February 6th 2020 by Pushkin Press
my copy: kindle, 166 pages
purchase: Amazon | B&N | Book Depository
rating: 4.5 / 5 stars
goodreads

Everyone's eating human meat. Would you? A vivid, shocking dystopian novel from an Argentinian rising star 

'This book will pull you in, take hold, and not let go until you reach the final page – perhaps far longer than that. Without a doubt, my favourite read of this year' Christina Dalcher, author of VOX 

It all happened so quickly. First, animals became infected with the virus and their meat became poisonous. Then governments initiated the Transition. Now, 'special meat' – human meat – is legal. 

Marcos is in the business of slaughtering humans – only no one calls them that. He works with numbers, consignments, processing. One day, he's given a gift to seal a deal: a specimen of the finest quality. He leaves her in his barn, tied up, a problem to be disposed of later. 

But the specimen haunts Marcos. Her trembling body, her eyes that watch him, that seem to understand. And soon, he becomes tortured by what has been lost – and what might still be saved…

it's not for everyone but if you're intrigued and you think you can take it, I'd say go for it.

When this book came to my radar, it's easily a must read for me! 

[REVIEW] Midnight at the Bright Ideas Bookstore

title: Midnight at the Bright Ideas Bookstore
author: Matthew J. Sullivan
genre: adult fiction, mystery
published: January 9, 2018 by Scribner (first published June 13, 2017)
format: trade paperback, 352 pages
purchase: Amazon | B&N | Book Depository | Fully Booked
rating: 5 / 5 stars
goodreads

When a bookshop patron commits suicide, his favorite store clerk must unravel the puzzle he left behind in this “intriguingly dark, twisty” (Kirkus Reviews) debut novel from an award-winning short story writer. 

Lydia Smith lives her life hiding in plain sight. A clerk at the Bright Ideas bookstore, she keeps a meticulously crafted existence among her beloved books, eccentric colleagues, and the BookFrogs—the lost and lonely regulars who spend every day marauding the store’s overwhelmed shelves. 

But when Joey Molina, a young, beguiling BookFrog, kills himself in the bookstore’s upper room, Lydia’s life comes unglued. Always Joey’s favorite bookseller, Lydia has been bequeathed his meager worldly possessions. Trinkets and books; the detritus of a lonely, uncared for man. But when Lydia flips through his books she finds them defaced in ways both disturbing and inexplicable. They reveal the psyche of a young man on the verge of an emotional reckoning. And they seem to contain a hidden message. What did Joey know? And what does it have to do with Lydia? 

As Lydia untangles the mystery of Joey’s suicide, she unearths a long buried memory from her own violent childhood. Details from that one bloody night begin to circle back. Her distant father returns to the fold, along with an obsessive local cop, and the Hammerman, a murderer who came into Lydia’s life long ago and, as she soon discovers, never completely left. 

mystery and books. what a perfect combination!

I love 'books about books' - books that involves bookstores, book readers, and being around books in general. It's an easy sell for me. And I bought this one because of that. I didn't read the synopsis, just that  title - the 'Bookstore' in the title and I'm sold.

[MINI REVIEWS] Literary/Historical Fiction Edition #1

title: Lost in the Beehive
author: Michele Young-Stone
genre: literary fiction, historical
published: April 10, 2018 by Simon & Schuster
format: paperback, 320 pages
purchase: Amazon | B&N | Book Depository
rating: 4 / 5 stars
goodreads

From the author of Above Us Only Sky and The Handbook for Lightning Strike Survivors, a touching new novel set in the 1960s about the power of friendship, love, and accepting your past in order to find a future. 

For nearly her entire life, Gloria Ricci has been followed by bees.  

They’re there when her mother loses twin children; when she first meets a neighborhood girl named Isabel, who brings out feelings in her that she knows she shouldn’t have; and when her parents, desperate to “help” her, bring her to the Belmont Institute, whose glossy brochures promise healing and peace. She tells no one, but their hum follows her as she struggles to survive against the Institute’s cold and damaging methods, as she meets an outspoken and unapologetic fellow patient named Sheffield Schoeffler, and as they run away, toward the freewheeling and accepting glow of 1960s Greenwich Village, where they create their own kind of family among the artists and wanderers who frequent the jazz bars and side streets.  

As Gloria tries to outrun her past, experiencing profound love—and loss—and encountering a host of unlikely characters, including her Uncle Eddie, a hard-drinking former boyfriend of her mother’s, to Madame Zelda, a Coney Island fortune teller, and Jacob, the man she eventually marries but whose dark side threatens to bring disaster, the bees remain. It’s only when she needs them most that Gloria discovers why they’re there.  

Moving from the suburbs of New Jersey to the streets of New York to the swamps of North Carolina and back again, Lost in the Beehive is a poignant novel about the moments that teach us, the places that shape us, and the people who change us.