Book Review: Mexican Gothic by Silvia Moreno-Garcia

Mexican Gothic
by
Silvia Moreno-Garcia

⭐⭐⭐⭐

Rating: 4 out of 5.

I picked up Mexican Gothic because of its beautiful cover and because I liked the title, knowing little about the book. Wow, what a story and even more so when you know the back story!

Mexican Gothic is set in 1950 in the fictional ghost mining town of El Triunfo and is based on the actual town Real del Monte. Before the War of Independence in 1810, mines in Mexico were run by the Spanish who used cheap Indigenous people for labor. After the war, the British arrived and took over the mines. Mexican Gothic is about the English family, the Doyles, who have owned El Triunfo’s silver mine for generations and live in an English-styled mansion called High Place. The estate has fallen into decay, however, because the mine has been closed, due to floods and a recurring epidemic that killed most of the workers. From the get-go, readers know there is something strange about this reclusive family.

The story’s main character, Noemí Taboada, is a debutante from Mexico City, sent by her father to check on her cousin Catalina, who has recently married the handsome Virgil Doyle. Catalina had sent the Taboadas a strange letter, claiming she was being poisoned, yet Virgil replies that Catalina is fine and not to worry.

Noemí arrives at High Place and is struck by its eerie atmosphere and the condition of the house. A persistent fog engulfs the place and mold is everywhere: on the walls, in books and possibly in the air. In addition, there’s an air of secrecy about the family’s history. Her cousin Francis seems okay, but his mother, Florence tells her right away about the rules. No talking at meals, no hot showers, no leaving the place and no smoking. In addition, the place is mostly in darkness, lit by only a few bulbs. Virgil seems okay. Noemí had always thought him charming, but something is off…

More alarming is the ancient Howard Doyle, the family patriarch who on the first night tells Noemí all about his interest in eugenics. He’s in poor health due to an unnamed old injury and spends most of his time in his bedroom. Despite his physical absence, Howard’s influence is everywhere. What’s that buzzing sound in the walls and what is up with the scary Doyle crest that is everywhere, a snake eating its tail? Catalina looks mostly okay, but the things she says convince Noemí that something bad is going on.

Mexican Gothic is exactly what the title says, but it’s also a supernatural horror story and uses all the tropes from these genres. I raced through the early chapters because of how easily it began and later because, well you just need to know what’s going on! What made me really appreciate the story is the way the author used Mexico’s history and setting to frame the plot. Themes of race, misogyny, women’s rights and women’s mental health also figure prominently.

I recommend Mexican Gothic to readers who like gothic and horror and anyone who likes a good story.

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Are you a catch-up reader?

I don’t know about you, but something happens when I don’t get around to reading a popular book right away. As time passes, the chance that I will pick it up becomes slimmer and slimmer. Part of me thinks, well if I read it now after all this time, no one will want to talk about it with me. Because it’s fun to talk about something you liked that everyone is buzzing about too.

I like to think I’m a catch-up reader, but I don’t know if I truly qualify. Here are ten fiction books I’ve been meaning to read, but haven’t. I still want to read them, but too many other books have gotten in the way. Should they be on a priority list or should they stay lost in my big pile of TBRs? I don’t know.

American Dirt by Jeanine Cummins

Anxious People by Fredrik Backman

At the Edge of the Orchard by Tracy Chevalier

Before We Were Yours by Lisa Wingate

Cloud Cuckoo Land by Anthony Doerr

Eleanor Oliphant Is Completely Fine by Gail Honeyman

The Four Winds by Kristin Hannah

In Five Years by Rebecca Serle

Malibu Rising by Taylor Jenkins Reid

Olive, Again by Elizabeth Strout

Are you a catch-up reader? What’s your strategy? Have you read any of these? Leave a comment!

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Book Review: The Fall of Lisa Bellow by Susan Perabo

The Fall of Lisa Bellow
by
Susan Perabo

⭐⭐⭐⭐

Rating: 3.5 out of 5.

In a psychological drama that begins with a robbery and an abduction, eighth-grader Meredith Oliver is the girl who was left behind on the floor of the convenience store, when an armed man in an oversized hoodie and ski mask takes Meredith’s nemesis, the popular and pretty Lisa Bellow. This story is about how Meredith, her family and Lisa’s mother, Colleen cope with the tragedy during an investigation that leads nowhere. Meredith may have been the lucky one, but she descends into unknown territory as she imagines where Lisa may be.

Dynamics change at school when Lisa’s friends invite her to sit with them at lunch. At home, Meredith’s father, Mark tries to cheer her up and her mother, Claire irritates her. Her older brother, Evan, despite a recent debilitating eye injury that has wrecked his promising baseball career, may be the only one who can reach her.

Perabo tells the story through both Meredith’s and Claire’s perspectives and shows the disconnect between them. One question that haunts Meredith is why she remained frozen on the floor of the store and didn’t look up to see what kind of car the man drove. And while Meredith enters a post-traumatic state, Claire turns the situation into something about herself. Readers also get a look at Claire’s faulty marriage and her disturbing and ego-centric thoughts.

This was an interesting book, although not what I expected. Despite opening scenes that suggest suspense or mystery, it’s a slow-moving drama about adolescence, families and marriage. Most of the characters are unknowable, as readers only get a look at their actions, like Colleen’s strange insistence on having Meredith and Lisa’s other friends hang out in Lisa’s room. Apart from a couple scenes in which Mark calls Claire out (possible game changers in their marriage), the author portrays Meredith’s dad as the cheerful and likable parent. Evan may be the only side character we get an inner glimpse of, as he struggles to overcome his physical injury and his efforts offer a nice parallel to Meredith’s trauma.

A few things bothered me a little about this story. The first was that I didn’t like Claire at all and that can be a problem in a book in which not much happens, which is the second thing that bothered me. While you can see how Meredith and her family progress and imagine how their next year may be, the improvement is slow. That’s probably intentional, because who can bounce back from a situation like that? But the book ends without much of a conclusion and I found that a little unsatisfying. And although the cover is very pretty, it gives the misleading impression of two friends falling into water.

That said, the writing is very good and I did fly through the pages, always a positive part of a book.

So if you like psychological studies and don’t mind a couple unlikable or frustrating characters, you would probably like The Fall of Lisa Bellow. I picked this book at random in the first of my Read, React, Decide YouTube videos in which I read a short passage from a book and decide if I want to read it.

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On YouTube today: reacting to spam comments (some of them insulting!) on my blog

Hi Everyone,

I’m over on YouTube today, reacting to recent spam comments on my blog. Check it out!

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Book Review: Something She’s Not Telling Us by Darcey Bell

Something She’s Not Telling Us
by
Darcey Bell

⭐⭐⭐

Rating: 3 out of 5.

Here’s a domestic thriller about a woman who kidnaps her boyfriend’s niece and the family’s mad race to rescue the girl before something bad happens.

Charlotte, her husband, Eli and their six-year-old daughter, Daisy have just returned from a trip to Mexico. The family, including Charlotte’s younger brother, Rocco and his new girlfriend, Ruth, had flown from New York to celebrate Charlotte and Rocco’s mother’s sixtieth birthday.

The next morning, Charlotte, Eli and Daisy scramble to get ready for work and school. At the end of the day, Charlotte rushes from an important meeting to pick up Daisy at school. When she arrives, the teachers tell her that Daisy’s Aunt Ruth has already picked her up.

The story then flashes back six months earlier when Ruth first meets the family.

To Ruth and the reader, Charlotte and Eli seem to have it all. A swank co-op in the East Village, great careers, plenty of money and an adorable daughter. They’re the balanced ones, but Rocco, a recovering alcoholic, can’t find the right partner. Now, Charlotte and Eli are hopeful, but cautious when he introduces them to Ruth. She’s young, hip and friendly, but something seems off, especially the way she latches on to Daisy. While Eli is laid-back, Charlotte, a helicopter mom with anxiety, thinks Ruth is just a little too aggressive.

In alternating chapters between past and present, the author provides readers with a closer look at Charlotte, her marriage, her anxiety and a strained relationship with her mother. Other chapters are about Ruth and her point of view. Later chapters include Rocco’s take on the situation.

It’s clear that there’s something up with Ruth, but readers soon learn that Charlotte also has a secret. The question then becomes who is the “she” in Something She’s Not Telling Us? I thought that was a clever twist of the title.

I enjoyed this very fast read which kept me wondering what was up with Ruth and what was Charlotte’s secret. I prefer not to guess too much about what’s happening when I read, and several late big reveals make it the kind of story that allows you to do that.

That said, the finish was pretty flat, with many unresolved questions. Without revealing details, I was left wondering how Ruth managed many of the details of her life. In addition, although Charlotte’s secret is a game-changer, it seemed that when she would have to reveal it, that everything would be okay.

This one falls into the category of books that are fast, entertaining and somewhat mindless reads, a nice distraction from everyday life, great for the beach or for traveling, but nothing that will stay with you too long. I picked it as part of the first segment of my Read, React, Decide videos on YouTube in which I read random sentences from books I’ve grabbed at the library and decide which to read. You can watch it here.

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Books Set During Springtime-a mishmash of a list with some good ones in there!

I really have no business adding books to my reading list, but a few more won’t me, right? This week at work, I put together of books set during springtime for my book chat group. We talked about the ones we’d read and others we’d like to read. I kept my own list of books I’d like to read to five and here they are (all descriptions are from Goodreads):

Absent in the Spring by Mary Westmacott (AKA Agatha Christie)
Returning from a visit to her daughter in Iraq, Joan Scudamore finds herself unexpectedly alone and stranded in an isolated rest house by flooding of the railway tracks. This sudden solitude compels Joan to assess her life for the first time ever and face up to many of the truths about herself. Looking back over the years, Joan painfully re-examines her attitudes, relationships and actions and becomes increasingly uneasy about the person who is revealed to her.

Major Pettigrew’s Last Stand by Helen Simonson
You are about to travel to Edgecombe St. Mary, a small village in the English countryside filled with rolling hills, thatched cottages, and a cast of characters both hilariously original and as familiar as the members of your own family. Among them is Major Ernest Pettigrew (retired), the unlikely hero of Helen Simonson’s wondrous debut. Wry, courtly, opinionated, and completely endearing, Major Pettigrew is one of the most indelible characters in contemporary fiction, and from the very first page of this remarkable novel he will steal your heart.

Middlemarch by George Eliot
Taking place in the years leading up to the First Reform Bill of 1832, Middlemarch explores nearly every subject of concern to modern life: art, religion, science, politics, self, society, human relationships. Among her characters are some of the most remarkable portraits in English literature: Dorothea Brooke, the heroine, idealistic but naive; Rosamond Vincy, beautiful and egoistic: Edward Casaubon, the dry-as-dust scholar: Tertius Lydgate, the brilliant but morally-flawed physician: the passionate artist Will Ladislaw: and Fred Vincey and Mary Garth, childhood sweethearts whose charming courtship is one of the many humorous elements in the novel’s rich comic vein.

The Roman Spring of Mrs. Stone by Tennessee Williams
The story of a wealthy, fiftyish American widow, recently a famous stage beauty, but now “drifting.” The novel opens soon after her husband’s death and her retirement from the theatre, as Mrs. Stone tries to adjust to her aimless new life in Rome. She is adjusting, too, to aging (“The knowledge that her beauty was lost had come upon her recently and it was still occasionally forgotten.”) With poignant wit and his own particular brand of relish, Williams charts her drift into an affair with a cruel young gigolo: “As compelling, as fascinating, and as technically skilled as his plays.”

A Room with a View by E.M. Forster
Lucy has her rigid, middle-class life mapped out for her, until she visits Florence with her uptight cousin Charlotte, and finds her neatly ordered existence thrown off balance. Her eyes are opened by the unconventional characters she meets at the Pension Bertolini: flamboyant romantic novelist Eleanor Lavish, the Cockney Signora, curious Mr Emerson and, most of all, his passionate son George. Lucy finds herself torn between the intensity of life in Italy and the repressed morals of Edwardian England, personified in her terminally dull fiancé Cecil Vyse. Will she ever learn to follow her own heart?

And here’s the rest of the list!

All Creatures Great and Small by James Herriot
Anne of Green Gables by L.M. Montgomery
The Beginning of Spring by Penelope Fitzgerald
Beltane: Springtime Rituals, Lore & Celebration by Raven Grimassi
The Cat Who Sang for the Birds by Lilian Jackson Braun
Catch as Cat Can by Rita Mae Brown
Come Spring by Tim LaHaye
Come the Spring by Julie Garwood
Devil in Spring by Lisa Kleypas
The First Day of Spring by Nancy F Tucker
I’ll Be Your Blue Sky by Marisa de los Santos
The Language of Flowers by Vanessa Diffenbaugh
Leaves of Grass by Walt Whitman
The Lost Salt Gift of Blood: New and Selected Stories by Alistair MacLeod
Onward and Upward in the Garden by Katherine S. White
Persuasion by Jane Austen
Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen
The Secret Garden by Frances Hodgson Burnett
See Jane Run by Joy Fielding
Snow in April by Rosamunde Pilcher
Spring by Ali Smith
Spring Collection by Judith Krantz
Spring Fancy by LaVyrleSpencer
Spring Fever by Mary Kay Andrews
Spring Forward by Catherine Anderson
The Spring Girls by Anna S Todd
The Spring at Moss Hill by Carla Neggers
Spring Remains by Mons Kallentoft
Spring Will Come by Ginny Dye
Spring’s Gentle Promise by Janette Oke
Springtime at Cherry Tree Cottage by Cathy Woodman

I’m sure this list could be miles longer. For my book chat, I only included books we have at the library. Do you have any you could add?

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Looking for indie, self-published and hybrid authors – is that you?

Are you an indie, self-published or hybrid author looking for a way to tell the world about your books? Who’s That Indie Author is a great way to introduce yourself to readers. It’s also an opportunity to connect with bloggers and expand your network through connections on WordPress and social media.

Take advantage of a chance to show your talents. Submit an author profile and see your name travel from blog to blog and tweet to tweet! Email Book Club Mom at bvitelli2009@gmail.com.

Check out these recent Who’s That Indie Author profiles:

Geoff Le Pard
Darlene Foster
Christina Consolino
Anne Goodwin
Thomas “Buddy” Bardenwerper
Sheila M. Cronin

If you’ve already been featured on Who’s That Indie Author and you have some news to share, consider submitting an Author Update. Here are some more recent posts:

JP McLean
Bruce W. Bishop
Margie Miklas
Pamela S. Wight
Tammie Painter
B. Lynn Goodwin

For more information, email bvitelli2009@gmail.com.

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Book Review: The Second Mrs. Astor: A Novel of the Titanic by Shana Abé

The Second Mrs. Astor: A Novel of the Titanic
by
Shana Abé

⭐⭐⭐⭐

Rating: 4 out of 5.

For fans of historical fiction, here’s an engaging story about Madeleine Talmadge Force and her brief marriage to Colonel John Jacob Astor IV, America’s (and maybe the world’s) richest man at the time, cut short when they boarded the British passenger liner Titanic. In just two years, Madeleine would become a young bride, a widow and mother to a baby boy.

In 1910, Madeleine Force was only seventeen when John Astor caught her performance as Ophelia in a Junior League summer production of Hamlet. The two were immediately smitten with each other and their courtship began, despite the twenty-nine-year age difference! The world knew all about Astor and the scandal surrounding his divorce from his first wife, Ava. The ever-present press didn’t seem to bother Astor, but Madeleine struggled being in the public eye and felt vulnerable to their gossip.

The couple married in 1911 and, to escape the press, embarked on an extended honeymoon to Europe and Egypt. On their return, they boarded the Titanic in France and braced themselves for the paparazzi in New York. When the ship struck an iceberg in the North Atlantic Ocean and began to sink, her husband helped Madeleine, now pregnant, climb into a lifeboat with her maid and nurse. Astor stayed back and died when the ship sank.

I enjoyed reading this highly researched story which is loaded with details about the fashions, social lives and opulent lifestyles of the rich, including the more subtle dynamics between these wealthy people. Although the press hounded the newly married couple, high society snubbed them, and they had few close friends. One friend was Margaret Brown, a former shop girl who had become rich from mining investments in Colorado. She was also a passenger on the ship and later known as “The Unsinkable Molly Brown,” a reference to her efforts to rescue other passengers. I also liked reading about Madeleine’s family, especially her sister, Katherine, and about Astor’s son, Vincent, who was just one year older than Madeleine. He hated her for marrying his father and blamed his death on Madeleine.

Of course the drama abord the ship was also interesting and now I want to rewatch the movie Titanic, as I know many of the characters in the movie are also in this book!

Although Madeleine and her son were well provided for after her husband’s death, Vincent inherited the bulk of his father’s estate. I enjoyed looking these people up and finding out what happened to them later. Madeleine remarried and divorced two times and had two more children with her second husband, William Karl Dick. She died at age forty-six of a heart condition. You can really go down the rabbit hole researching these people. I liked that the author included websites and other resources in the Acknowledgements section for readers who want to research more. That would be me!

I think the author did a great job describing these people and their relationships to each other. I enjoyed reading their dialogues and the author’s interpretations of their thoughts and emotions. I recommend The Second Mrs. Astor to readers who like historical fiction and stories about a seemingly distant period of time because of how different our world is now.

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LibriVox – download free audiobooks from the public domain…and you can volunteer to record them too!

A couple days ago my work friend and I were talking about doing voice recordings for podcasts and she told me about LibriVox. Established in 2005, it’s a non-commercial, non-profit and ad-free project run by volunteers and is dedicated to recording and providing audiobooks from the public domain. Anyone (including you!) who wants to record one of these books is welcome to do so. They currently have more than 12 thousand volunteer readers.

Here’s a brief description from their website explaining what they do and how they do it:

LibriVox volunteers record chapters of books in the public domain, and then we release the audio files back onto the net for free. All our audio is in the public domain, so you may use it for whatever purpose you wish. Please note: Our readers are free to choose the books they wish to record. LibriVox sees itself as a library of audiobooks. Because the books we read are in the public domain, our readers and listeners should be aware that many of them are very old, and may contain language or express notions that are antiquated at best, offending at worst.

Volunteering for LibriVox is easy and does not require any experience with recording or audio engineering or acting or public speaking. All you need is a computer, a microphone, some free recording software, and your own voice. We accept all volunteers in all languages, with all kinds of accents. You’re welcome to volunteer to read any language you speak, as long as you can make yourself understood in it. You don’t need to audition, but we do suggest a 1-Minute Test recording just to check your setup. We’ll accept you no matter what you sound like.

Doesn’t this sound fun? I hopped on their website to check it out and found these audiobooks ready for download. I listened to the beginnings of a couple and they sounded good!

The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald

In Our Time by Ernest Hemingway

Main Street by Sinclair Lewis

Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf

The Painted Veil by W. Somerset Maugham

So what do you think, would you listen to one of these audiobook versions? You can use a computer or download the app to your phone. Would you volunteer to record a book? Leave a comment!

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Book Club Mom’s audio reviews and random thoughts now on SoundCloud!

Hi Everyone,

Thank goodness I have young people around me (you know who you are 😊) to provide me with endless ideas for my blog! Last night my consultants helped me develop the idea of jumping on SoundCloud to record book book reviews. So I figured out how to do voice recordings on my laptop, made a SoundCloud account and this morning I recorded my first audio review (My Sister’s Grave by Robert Dugoni). It was so much fun I immediately did another recording – this one a random one, talking about blogging, the idea of making money on my blog, and taking breaks (stemming from my recent feeling that I was burning out a bit on on the blog). I hope you’ll take a listen!

You can check out my random ramblings here and you don’t need a SoundCloud account to listen:

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