May 2021 Reads

• American Dirt, Jeanine Cummins: Really loved how Cummins slowly built the tension in this, layer by layer.
• The Echo Wife, Sarah Gailey: Weird and unputdownable domestic thriller with a sci-fi bent.
• The Effort, Claire Holroyd: Really intersteing but suffered a bit for one too many side plots.
• A People’s Future of the United States: This was full of great stories, I had a long list of ones that I particularly liked.
• She Come by It Natural, Sarah Smarsh: A great bio of Dolly Parton, but I wanted a little more depth. (That said, this was an essay series that she got published, so it’s naturally going to be a bit shorter.)
• The New Jim Crow, Michelle Alexander: You’ll leave this with a much clearer understanding of the scope and scale of the War on Drugs and resultant mass incarceration of Black men.
• Fugitive Telemetry, Martha Wells: Murderbot and the Locked Room Mystery. Fun stuff, as usual!
• To Sleep in a Sea of Stars, Christopher Paolini: My occasional reminder to see how long the print version is when I’m reading the ebook and am not super into it. This was not good enough for how long it was.
• Quiet in her Bones, Nalini Singh: Murder mystery featuring some pretty intense paranoia at times.
• Foul is Fair, Hannah Capin: This was intense and I was HERE for the absolute ruthlessness of the teenage girls at the centor of it. (Recommend a quick re-read or re-watch of Macbeth first.)
• The Psychology of Time Travel, Kate Mascarenhas: Good but a little thin on the main concept.
• Milk Blood Heat, Dantiel W. Moniz: A series of stories that are dark, melancholy, and end without a resolution.
• A Beginning at the End, Mike Chen: Really enjoyed the focus of this and the characters, though I think it would have been even better if it was tightned up a bit. (FYI it is a post-pandemic universe, with some authoritarian undertones to the new government structures.)
• The Thursday Murder Club, Richard Osman: Folks at a British retirement home investigate a murder. Delightful.
• A Thousand Ships, Natalie Haynes: Another look at the Trojan War, through the eyes of the women.

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