Welcome back to Get Rec’d! This is where I do a little round up of book recommendations that have piqued my interest or books that I’ve recommended to others. They’re often not romance, but I still throw one in from time to time.
Like now! There’s a romance rec here, plus horror, non-fiction, and some speculative science fiction.
Have you received any great recommendations lately? Drop them in the comments!
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The Actual Star
This is a speculative sci-fi novel with several different timelines, great world building, and Mayan traditions.
David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas meets Octavia Butler’s Earthseed series, as acclaimed author Monica Byrne (The Girl in the Road) crafts an unforgettable piece of speculative fiction about where humanity came from, where we are now, and where we’re going—and how, in every age, the same forces that drive us apart also bind us together.
“A stone-cold masterpiece.”— New Scientist
The Actual Star takes readers on a journey over two millennia and six continents—telling three powerful tales a thousand years apart, all of them converging in the same cave in the Belizean jungle.
Braided together are the stories of a pair of teenage twins who ascend the throne of a Maya kingdom; a young American woman on a trip of self-discovery in Belize; and two dangerous charismatics vying for the leadership of a new religion, racing toward a confrontation that will determine the fate of the few humans left on Earth after massive climate change.
In each era, a reincarnated trinity of souls navigates the entanglements of tradition and progress, sister and stranger, and love and hate—until all of their age-old questions about the nature of existence converge deep underground, where only in complete darkness can they truly see.
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All That Remains
If you like Caitlin Doughty’s books on death, you’ll enjoy this one! I’d say this is more science meets true crime rather than examining death as part of cultural traditions or debunking myths.
Book of the Year, 2018 Saltire Literary Awards
A CrimeReads Best True Crime Book of the Month
For fans of Caitlin Doughty, Mary Roach, Kathy Reichs, and CSI shows, a renowned forensic scientist on death and mortality.
Dame Sue Black is an internationally renowned forensic anthropologist and human anatomist. She has lived her life eye to eye with the Grim Reaper, and she writes vividly about it in this book, which is part primer on the basics of identifying human remains, part frank memoir of a woman whose first paying job as a schoolgirl was to apprentice in a butcher shop, and part no-nonsense but deeply humane introduction to the reality of death in our lives. It is a treat for CSI junkies, murder mystery and thriller readers, and anyone seeking a clear-eyed guide to a subject that touches us all.
Cutting through hype, romanticism, and cliché, she recounts her first dissection; her own first acquaintance with a loved one’s death; the mortal remains in her lab and at burial sites as well as scenes of violence, murder, and criminal dismemberment; and about investigating mass fatalities due to war, accident, or natural disaster, such as the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami. She uses key cases to reveal how forensic science has developed and what her work has taught her about human nature.
Acclaimed by bestselling crime writers and fellow scientists alike, All That Remains is neither sad nor macabre. While Professor Black tells of tragedy, she also infuses her stories with a wicked sense of humor and much common sense.
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Coven of Ill Repute
This one got my attention on Instagram, as it was described as a “supernatural Sherlock meets a witchy Mary Poppins,” with both characters being on the grumpier side.
Trapped in a haunted castle with my immortal enemy.
The Duke of the Damned is dead. When my coven is blamed for his murder, I’m desperate to clear their name before my sisters are arrested and I lose the only family I’ve ever known. But I only have one week to find the culprit, and the new heir to the duchy is none other than Detective Liam Rorick, my enigmatic ex-partner and archenemy.
It doesn’t matter if Rorick is a competent investigator. He’s the most cantankerous vampire I’ve ever had the displeasure of knowing. There’s a reason I swore I’d never work with him again. And yet that’s exactly what I have to do.
Now we’re trapped together in the malevolent castle he’s just inherited, trading insults and fighting magical monsters to survive. I want nothing more than to go back to pretending he doesn’t exist . . . but Rorick protects me like I’m precious and keeps looking at me like he regrets our past.
With each close call and each revealed clue, it becomes harder to fight our undeniable connection. But even the castle’s hungriest creatures aren’t as frightening as opening my heart to the one man capable of devouring it whole.
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youthjuice
I’d say this one is pretty niche and admittedly, is a first novel with pacing issues, but if you like feminist body horror…this one may be worth a borrow at the library.
American Psycho meets The Devil Wears Prada: outrageous body horror for the goop generation.
A 29-year-old copywriter realizes that beauty is possible—at a terrible cost—in this surreal, satirical send-up of NYC It-girl culture.
From Sophia Bannion’s first day on the Storytelling team at HEBE (hee-bee), a luxury skincare/wellness company based in New York’s trendy SoHo neighborhood and named after the Greek goddess of youth, it’s clear something is deeply amiss. But Sophia, pushing thirty, has plenty of skeletons in her closet next to the designer knockoffs and doesn’t care. Though she leads an outwardly charmed life, she aches for a deeper meaning to her flat existence—and a cure for her brutal nail-biting habit. She finds it all and more at HEBE, and with Tree Whitestone, HEBE’s charismatic founder and CEO.
Soon, Sophia is addicted to her HEBE lifestyle—especially youthjuice, the fatty, soothing moisturizer Tree has asked Sophia to test. But when cracks in HEBE’s infrastructure start to worsen—and Sophia learns the gruesome secret ingredient at the heart of youthjuice—she has to decide how far she’s willing to go to stay beautiful forever.
Glittering with ominous flashes of Sophia’s coming-of-rage story, former beauty editor E.K. Sathue’s horror debut is as incisive as it is stomach-churning in its portrayal of all-consuming female friendship and the beauty industry’s short attention span. youthjuice does to skincare influencers what Bret Easton Ellis did to yuppies. You’ll never moisturize the same way again.
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Not at all my area of expertise, I wasn’t allowed to watch Disney movies or musicals growing up, but I am having a hard time conceptually with a grumpy Mary Poppins. Isn’t her thing an almost rigorously cheerful competence? Also, a Mary Poppins with an arch-enemy. That doesn’t seem like something she’d go in for? Witchy absolutely works, in fact, I thought she did have magical powers. But my pop cultural understanding is terrible!
@kkw, Oh uh, sorry you brushed against a special interest of mine. I’ll try to not go on forever and ever.
I think a lot of it may has to do with your cultural background/age etc, but I don’t think of movie Mary Poppins as grumpy so much as stern in her expectations for the children. After all in the movie, the children are little hellions. The mother is warm but absent-minded (Votes for Women!) and the maids and housekeeper are just worn out. Mary Poppins sweeps in and rescues everyone partially just by setting good boundaries and clear expectations for everyone (“I never explain”) She has her warm moments, but she won’t be bossed or bullied by anyone.
Cheerful competence is a good description but mostly I think of her as unflappable. It doesn’t matter if you’re walking on clouds or jumping in chalk paintings, she’s never that surprised and always knows how everyone should behave. And if you’re acting out, she’ll tell you to smarten up. She’s probably warm and sweet compared to a real Victorian nanny and grumpy compared to the (perhaps unfair) expectation that modern parents will always be sweet, loving, and patient with their children.
Book Mary Poppins *is* fairly strict and kind of vain in a way that they don’t get into fully in the movie. The books definitely hint at her as having a lot of magical power and being some sort of ancient being, but it’s never fully explained. She’s kind of like Doctor Who before Doctor Who.
@kkw- the original Mary Poppins from the PL Travers books was very different from the Disney version. She was a quintessential British nanny- kind but also a little stern and with an extremely no-nonsense sensibility… while also taking the children on magical adventures. The juxtaposition of the magic with the ordinary and practical was what made her so unique.
The Disney films made her more cheerful and pleasant and definitely younger and prettier with casting Julie Andrews. But she’s also firm and at one point denies they ever did anything magical. The author actually hated the casting of my beloved Julie because she was too pretty and sweet.
All this to say, while she was always highly competent and kind, I could see “grumpy” as not being a huge stretch for MP. Her most defining characteristic is that she’s a magical nanny, a caretaker, and I can’t quite get that from the book’s description.
Love the term “coming-of-rage”. We need more books like that.
@EC Spurlock: Every damn day.
A favorite quote from author Laura Ruby in THE SHADOW CYPHER:
“The therapist her parents brought her to see liked Tess to do a lot of drawings. . . . He said, “It’s interesting that you drew yourself with this little golden crown on your head. What does the crown mean to you?”
“That’s not a crown,” she’d told him. “That’s a nimbus of outrage.”
The Mary Poppins books creeped me out as a kid. I liked them and was fascinated by them, and I think they’re better than the movie, but they are weird and sort of dark around the edges in ways that hint at being much darker just out of sight, and something about that deeply unsettled me. The movie, though I like it, is classic Disney hyper-sanitization.
I tried the Sue Black a few years ago. I have enormous respect for her but the book is a very hard read – at least the couple of chapters I got through. Near the start is a discussion of a child sexual abuse case where, despite amazing forensic work by SB’s team, there was no justice for the child involved.
I watched the Mary Poppins musical and remember it being mostly like the Disney movie but having a few dark elements. The program mentioned that more elements of the book were included.