scarletsbookthoughts

[scarletsbookthoughts]

The Trick of The Treasure

Format: Ebook (Advanced Copy) Rating: 2.75

Disclaimer: I was provided an advanced copy of this book through Dragonblade Publishing via Netgalley. Some of the things in the official published edition may end up changed. The opinion provided is entirely my own; I was simply provided advanced access in exchange for an honest review. I would also like to make it very clear that I have not read the other books in this series.

Short Review: The Trick of The Treasure reminds me a lot of Nancy Drew or the Hardy Boys in that, while it definitely has an overarching plot and developments, I didn't have any trouble hopping in here instead of at the beginning. The book is succinct in a very well done way, providing just enough details for you to fully understand the character's opinions/perspective but nothing more, and the characters themselves are well done. Unfortunately, the bread and butter of the book, the mystery of the missing treasure, is executed in an incredibly boring manner. Our main character's primary and seemingly only method of gathering information is to go and interview somebody, who gives them a name, so they go interview that person, rinse repeat. I think that there's a lot of potential with the series, but the repetition of the interview process, and the almost complete lack of any other kind of investigative measures, makes it a dull read.

Related Song: I Know You Better Than That by Johnny Manchild and the Poor Bastards is the song I chose for this book. I think that it works very well for Constance and Solomon's relationship with each other, seeing the parts society wants to judge and limit but acknowledging that it makes the other person stronger. There are also parts of the song that fit the Lloyd family and their relationships with each other very well.

Longer review under the readmore! Will contain spoilers.

Constance Silver and Solomon Grey are very newly engaged, but that does not stop them from needing to go to work at Silver and Grey where they work as private investigators. They are approached by a new client, Barnabas Lloyd, an adventure who has recently returned from an overseas adventure with a large bounty of treasure in tow. Only, it has mysteriously vanished in the middle of the night from his secret locked strong hold in his own home, without any sign of a struggle.

Constance and Solomon take the case, promising to return the stolen treasure, all while dealing with the struggles their engagement will bring, and Solomon's own hunt for his missing twin brother.

The Good: Like I said before, The Trick of the Treasure reads very similarly to Nancy Drew books I remember reading as a child, and I had absolutely no trouble jumping into the books at this point in the story. All of the returning characters are reintroduced with just enough information that I knew who they were and why they were relevant, but not so much that I would imagine a return reader would be frustrated by exposition of things they already know. The events and overarching plot points are given the same luxury, being introduced with just enough detail that a new reader wouldn't be confused, but not enough that it would be anything but a refreshing reminder for a returning fan.

I think that succinctness is carried throughout the entire book in the writing style. We aren't given a lot of superfluous detail, and everything seems to serve a point. That isn't to say that we don't spend time in characters thoughts; we frequently dip into the minds and perspectives of characters, and I always felt like I had a good grasp on not just their perspective in the moment, but their perspective overall. Lancaster also has a good understanding of when the scene calls for actions or emotions, and this comes through very clearly during the romance scenes.

When the story is focusing on Solomon and Constance's romance and interactions, we are given lots of room to explore how they feel about one another, how their love has grown and changed, the anxieties that their upcoming marriage is going to bring, and it doesn't feel rushed or stilted. We dwell there just long enough to get the point across, and then move on. Even though I missed the majority of the slow burn between these characters, I did find myself caring about them as a couple, and I think that striking a balance between the emotions required to make me care, and the ability to make sure that it never dragged the rest of the story down is something that this book did very well.

The Bad: Unfortunately, pretty much everything about the mystery, which is the main reason I was interested in the book in the first place, fell flat. On paper, its incredibly interesting. A locked door mystery with nobody even in the room? It sounds like it would be a really fun puzzle to solve. But when almost every bit of solving that puzzle is talking to someone, or traveling to talk to someone, or talking to someone so you can figure out where the someone you need to talk to is... well, it got boring very, very quickly. I'd hoped that maybe it would pick up somewhere along the way, but the only bit of other investigative work that I'd say was done in this book was relatively early on, and it was looking at pictures. Maybe the interview method is the most realistic, but its just not fun to read.

Another problem with the mystery comes from the provided summary of the book. The final line of the official summary goes:

And then their chief suspect is murdered, and everything becomes much more dangerous…

This adds a bit of intrigue, and I'm not mad at its presence in the summary per se, but the aforementioned murder doesn't take place until past the halfway point, and I am a hard believer that a summary shouldn't spoil anything past that point. An even more egregious issue I have is that at the time the "suspect" is murdered, he is not, in, in fact, the prime suspect! We read a section from said suspect's perspective, of him getting murdered, and then we get our protagonists realizing that the dead man was who they were looking for all along. It ruins a lot of the suspense that it could have built, especially since it was already spoiled by the summary.

I do feel like I should mention that there were a number of grammatical and spelling mistakes throughout the book. All of them were incredibly minor (then instead of they, cone instead of come, etc.), and they were spread out, but they were frequent enough that it was noticeable. Hopefully that's something that will be fixed in the final edition of the book, and is a problem unique to the advanced digital copy I read.

The In Between: The main thing I would like to discuss here is Rachel, the youngest child of the Lloyd family. I quite liked Rachel towards the beginning of the book; she was characterized as being a very observant, somewhat odd, energetic almost to the point of erratic child. I think that she was a very compelling source of information for the investigators, especially since she was just slightly too young to be as invested in the secrecy and decency of the household as the rest of the family.

As the story progressed, Rachel felt less and less like the child she was at the start; in fact, she felt less and less like a child at all. She started talking a lot more formally, lost the energetic charm I had really liked about her, and became a lot more of just a source of information than a character, and I was very disappointed in that.

I still think it was a good idea to make her the most responsible of the Lloyd family; I think it provides an interesting comparison to the rest of the family, when the youngest and most rambunctious child is of more value to the investigators than the people who should know more, but the way it was executed ended up making an otherwise interesting character fall flat.

The Trick of the Treasure, and I assume Silver and Grey as a series, has some very good bones in it, and I believe that Lancaster has the ability as an author to turn it into a great series as a whole, but the mystery in this one just wasn't it. The book felt like a way to pass the time, and I don't think I could recommend it any stronger than that.

[scarletsbookthoughts]

Half a Soul

Format: Paperback Rating: 4.5

Short Review: A tooth rottingly sweet regency romance with very well done fairies. A solidly enjoyable and well researched read.

Related Song: Rule #4 Fish in a Bird Cage - Fish in a Bird Cage I was on the fence between this one and Ophelia by the Lumineers. I ended up going with Fish in a Bird Cage because it felt more specific to Dora's story and struggles, while Ophelia would've been interpreted more from Elias's perspective and the romance between the two.

Longer review under the read more! Will contain spoilers.

Theodora Eloisa Charity Ettings, who preferred to be called Dora, lost half her soul to the Lord of Hollowvale when she was a child, rendering her emotions and reactions incredibly dulled. Because of this lack, she was not given the same luxuries that her cousin, Vanessa, was given to enter society for fear that she would embarrass the family, despite Vanessa's protests.

Under the guise of finding a husband, Vanessa convinces her mother, Dora's Aunt Frances, who has been caring for Dora since she was a small child, to take both of the girls to London. This isn't the actual reason for the journey, though; Vanessa hopes to proposition the Lord Sorcier, Elias Wilder, a magical man who is said to do three impossible things before breakfast to help break Dora's curse. While he turns down Vanessa, he is taken by Dora's condition, and the mystery it presents.

Navigating through the social politics of London (most pressingly the meddling of her Aunt Frances and Lady Hayworth, who graciously let the Ettings stay with her), the bounds of her curse, and the horrors she did not expect to encounter in English workhouses, Dora tries to do what she can to help break her own curse and the mysterious sleeping curse that has been affecting children in the workhouses. She doesn't expect to be able to fall in love at all, least of all with the Lord Sorcier himself, but that feeling has a long enough tail that even she can feel it deeply.

The Good: Half a Soul is inherently a regency romance with a bunch of fantasy elements, and I am admittedly a sucker for regency romances. Atwater does a wonderful job at balancing the wonder and splendor of the balls and feasts that are used for courting during that time and the horrible conditions that the normal people are subjected to.

Dora and Elias are incredibly cute together, with some wonderful banter that left me chuckling in my seat. Several times throughout the night I was left thinking of the two of them and smiling like and idiot because of their antics.

While subtle is definitely the wrong word, the way that magic is woven into the world is done masterfully and in such a way that it feels completely natural even when the rest of the characters are awestruck. It's a very soft magic system, but it definitely works best for this story.

The fairies! While this might be the first time I bring it up here, I can promise it will not be the last. I love stories of fae and fairies, and have since I was a small child. This love has made me... picky, to say the least on how fairies are portrayed in modern fiction. Too often I say fae are basically just elves with extra ornaments or magic. Half a Soul meets my qualification for Good Fairies, which is the simple law of They Can't Lie.

(There are, of course, other stipulations that make a Good Fairy portrayal a Great Fairy portrayal, but those are oftentimes inconvenient, and I understand that, so I will leave those out of this.)

The Bad: I have nothing that I would label as "bad" about this book. It is well written through and through.

The In-Between: I do have things for here, however, that get in the way of the perfect 5 stars. I feel like we didn't get a lot of time with most of the side characters; Dora and Alias and Albert got their time and development of course, but even characters we should've had an emotional connection to, such as Dora's other half, who has been stuck in Fairie for years, wasn't given enough time to actually form a connection with. While the sacrifice she made was still very concrete, in the sense that we know how it affects the Dora we know, it isn't as impactful as it could've been if we had spent more time with her.

Similarly, I would've liked to see more bonding between Dora and Vanessa. While its very clear that Vanessa is a very good cousin to Dora, and cares deeply about her, I think it would've been nice to see more reciprocation on Dora's side. If they had a couple scenes where Vanessa talked freely to Dora, something she isn't able to do in the bounds of Polite Society, it would have made her and her relationships feel so much more vibrant.

Finally, while everything between Dora and Elias was very cute and sweet, I would've liked a little bit more variety. The majority of times they met it was at a ball or a dinner, which is standard for the time period, but I would've liked a change of scenery for one of their more personal themes.

Overall, Half a Soul is worth the read if you enjoy regency romances. The small issues, which might just be a taste thing on my part, shouldn't set you back from reading the book at all.

[scarletsbookthoughts]

Remarkably Bright Creatures

Format: Audiobook Rating: 4 stars

Short Review: This book is an incredibly heartwarming story about family, grief for both things you've had and lost and never had at all, and what it means to find something to patch the holes those things can leave. It has just enough whimsy to be classified as magical realism, but no more than that, so if you're looking for something a little bit closer to the magical, it might not be for you. Similarly, if you read the summary of the book and wanted a mystery, I recommend maybe passing on this one for now. It isn't quite what's on the tin, for reasons I will go into detail about later.

Related Song: I'll admit, I struggled with this one, but I eventually chose Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea by Xylø. While it definitely feels like it was intended as a romantic song, which is not a focus of the book, it fits the themes of loss and family very well, while keeping the nautical theming that really completes the book.

Long review under the read more! Will contain spoilers.

Tova Sullivan is a 70 year old woman who works at the Sowell Bay Aquarium as a janitor. Not because she needs the money, but because if she sits still for too long her mind will wander back 30 years to the night that her only son, Eric, went missing in a mysterious boating accident. In the current day, Tova finds herself largely alone; her husband died of pancreatic cancer a few years ago, and while she has friends, such as the Knitwits, who she meets with every other week for brunch, and Ethan, a kind man who runs the only grocery store in Sowell Bay, she doesn't have any family left. Perhaps this is why she bonds so well with Marcellus, the giant pacific octopus at the aquarium.

As Tova is trying to figure out what her future is going to hold with no grandkids or children to take care of her in her old age, Cameron Cassmore is facing a similar dilemma, not brought on by old age, but yet another dead end. At 30 years old, he's already gone through more hardships then most people will in a lifetime, and he insists that none of them are his fault. With an addict mom that gave him up at 9 years old, a dad he hasn't heard a word of in his entire life, and his loving, if unprepared Aunt Jeanne, he was dealt a losing hand. He's been fired from yet another job, his girlfriend has broken up with him, and his best friends since grade school are married and having a baby to take his place as their third wheel. When Aunt Jeanne gives him a box of his old stuff to go through, he finds what might be the ticket out of the shit hole life has dug for himself - a picture of his mother in high school, her arms wrapped around a boy, and a class ring inscribe with the word EELS.

With a bit of digging, Cameron identifies that man as Simon Brinks, a successful real estate developer who owes Cameron 18 years of child support. All he has to do is get to Sowell Bay to track him down, and life will finally turn around for Cameron.

Cameron and Tova's fates interlock when Cameron runs out of cash, and needs to pick up a temporary job fast, and Tova slips and sprains her ankle. He takes her position working nights at the aquarium as a janitor, and she tags along, at first because she missed Marcellus, and then to make sure he was doing it right, and later just because she enjoys his company.

It is Marcellus who figures out that Cameron is Tova's grandson, long before the two ever even entertain the thought, and the octopus makes it his sworn duty to give those two the answers they're looking for as his dying wish.

The Good: Overall, this book was incredibly well written. The character voices were distinct without feeling like caricatures, the struggles that they went through were eloquently put and never felt heavy handed, and the overall writing style was very well done.

The characters in general are just across the board very, very well done, including their relationships with each other. All of the members of the Knitwits feel like old ladies in the way they interact with each other, but they aren't just reduced to being side character old ladies; Ethan from the grocery store has an absolutely adorable crush on Tova that, while isn't fully explored, is plot relevant enough to be developed in a very touching way. Cameron's relationship with Ethan, Tova, his friends back in California, his new girlfriend Avery and her son Marco, it all feels incredibly vibrant and fleshed out.

Marcellus as a whole needs to be given a moment to shine because he is such a dramatic character and I love him. He is still very much Just an Octopus, but he is constantly waxing poetics about the human condition, his imprisonment, his impending doom, and more. It's hilarious when it wants to be, and emotionally touching when it needs to be.

Similarly, Cameron is, and I do not feel bad saying this, kind of a pissy man baby. He's whiny, he's lazy, he's not a good partner, its all very clear from his actions, and yet when you're in his POV, you never feel like he's being purposefully obtuse, or that he's just a one note failure; you can really feel that he believes that he's doing the best he can, and that he does care about the people around him; he just doesn't know how to be any better, and isn't really making any motion to change. It's a very fine line to walk with characters like this, and Van Pelt does it well.

The emotions you will go through reading this are hard to put into words. Marcellus, for one, is dying; that's not something that can really be stopped, as he is just an Old Octopus, and you spend the entire book knowing that he's on a timer. Tova is also old, and while she still has a good number of years left, her struggles with what she's going to do without someone to help take care of her as her physical state declines are incredibly poignant and somewhat existential.

The Bad: To be blunt, I feel like I was lied to. The book is marked as magical realism, and while it technically is (Marcellus understand human language, after all, and needs and desires, which a normal octopus simply doesn't) I feel like its so subtle that I wouldn't have bat an eye if it was just labeled realistic fiction.

More important than that, though, is that the summary of the book misleads you about the plot. Below is the final two sentences from the blurb:

Ever the detective, Marcellus deduces what happened the night Tova's son disappeared. As his affection for Tova grows, Marcellus must use every trick his old invertebrate body can muster to unearth the truth for her before it's too late.

I feel like its fair to assume that someone picking up the book would expect at least some of the story to focus on solving that disappearance, but it just... doesn't. Towards the very end there's a moment where Tova is talking with Avery for the first time and Avery mentions having talked down a jumper, clearly tripping on something, who was talking about "that night" and a "boom." Tova assumes it was Cameron's mother, Daphne, and that the boom being referenced is the boom of a ship, but the woman is never even confirmed to be Daphne at all, let alone for any of those details to explain the accident. While I'm not upset about the story that was told, I think that advertising it as a murder mystery made it fall a little flat to me. It wasn't what I was told I was getting into. Hell, Cameron isn't even mentioned in the summary once, and he gets about as many chapters as Tova does.

Another thing I had a problem with is that the mystery we are given (ie. Cameron's relation to Tova) is incredibly easy to figure out. I was almost certain how the book would end from the moment that Cameron found the ring, which was very early on. Even if a reader doesn't put those pieces together, Marcellus says it verbatim about halfway through the book, long before the other characters know anything about it. If we're not following through on the promised murder mystery, the least we could get is an actual mystery in the story we did get.

I'd like to be clear that I am not trying to say that the plot we were given is bad. It was, as I said before, a very enjoyable read. I just think that if you lean so hard on that in the blurb, there should be at least elements of that in the main text.

The In-Between: My biggest gray flag is the character development Cameron goes through. He very much develops as a person in a very reasonable manner, and I like those changes. I just feel like we never actually get to be there while those changes happen; one chapter he's doing some bad behavior, and the next chapter, he's picking up new habits, or changing his mind about a bad decision he made. I would've liked to have actually interacted with his inner turmoil, at least a little, while those changes are happening.

For example, at the end of the book when he learns that Brinks is not his father, but before he learns Erik was, Cameron decides to burn all the bridges he'd made in Sowell Bay and drive back to California. We get a couple of chapters in Tova and Marcellus's POV, and the next time we see Cameron, he's complaining internally about the conditions of the drive. The last sentences of that chapter are something along the lines of "And he got off at the north bound exit, because that's where he was driving. Back up north, to do things right this time."

We never actually get to see the thought process of what made him turn around. We never get to see that inner turmoil of admitting his own failures, something he's struggled with the entire book. One chapter he's made a bad decision, and the next he's going back to try and atone.

I have this in the in between because I think that the character development itself is actually very well done and realistic; I just wish we had more of a window into it with Cameron.

Overall, Remarkably Bright Creatures is a very fun, cozy, and touching read, with just enough whimsy to warm the heart, but isn't what you'd expect on the tin. If you've made it this far I think that its very much worth the read.

[scarletsbookthoughts]

Someone You Can Build A Nest In

Format: Audiobook Rating: 4 stars

Short Review: This is simultaneously a very sweet, very tense, and very funny read, with some incredibly visceral descriptions of gore. It's a very interesting portrayal of people raised and steeped in violence, the different ways it can shape someone, and the struggles of trying to grow beyond that.

Related Song: Skeleton by Set It Off. With the body horror aspects for Shesheshen, and the more metaphorical emotional aspects for Homily, I think Skeleton balances the two main characters and their relationship with each other very well.

Longer review under the cut! Will contain spoilers.

Someone You Can Build a Nest In is a horror romance fantasy (an incredible combination of genres, if you ask me) following Shesheshen, a shapeshifting monster who makes her home in the bowels of an old, abandoned ancestral home of the barons of the land. When the son of the current baroness disturbs her hibernation with two monster hunters in tow, she realizes that she needs to gather her strength before they send more monster hunters to get her. She, reasonably, eats the Wulfyre that woke her, and using his bones to give her a convincing human guise, makes her way to town. Shesheshen's plan was to lure someone into a dark alley and eat them, but that plan gets thrown out the window when the monster hunters she had not been able to kill reveal her disguise, and she is tossed over a cliff.

Yet another wrench gets thrown in her plan when a very kind woman named Homily rescues her, and Shesheshen can't convince herself to eat her. Not when Homily has been so kind, and giving. The perfect parent to lay her eggs in. When Homily reveals that she is also a Wulfyre, who came here to defeat the Wyrm who cursed her family and hunts this land. Only, Shesheshen is the only monster in these lands, and she doesn't know anything about this curse.

Shesheshen decides that she must not only save Homily from whatever curse might be placed on her but also from her horrible family, all while trying to keep the secret of her inhumanness from everyone.

The Good: As stated in the short review, the gore description in this book is outstanding. Because so much of it is something that Shesheshen is regularly able and intended to do (such as shifting her body and bones into different shapes, the digestion of humans and animals alike, the expulsion of excess meat and flesh) the normal sort of horror descriptions don't have the same effect that they normally would. Instead, it walks a fine line between disgusting and almost comforting or homely? That could just be me and my penchant for gore, but regardless of whether the average reader will be disgusted or enthralled (or both!) it is very, very well done.

The romance! Homily and Shesheshen make an incredibly sweet pairing, blending a classic dynamic (sunshine, too good for this world and the socially disconnected person who will do anything to protect them) with the significantly less orthodox asexual monster romance. It's a very funny dynamic, and I thoroughly enjoyed reading about them. I was very happy that we didn't get a third act break up situation when Shesheshen's identity was revealed, that was something I was worried about and I'm glad it didn't come up.

The plot! I wouldn't say that the plot was completely unique, but that didn't make it not enjoyable. Its a fairly classic misunderstood monster hunt, and if it wasn't told from Shesheshen's perspective, it would have been pretty cut and dry. With her being our main character, it adds a fun extra layer. The twist towards the end is very well done; Wiswell does a great job at making the rest of the Wulfyre's family so comically horrible in every capacity that I wasn't looking for another problem to add to their family problems, so I didn't see it coming. In retrospect, it makes perfect sense, which is exactly what a good twist should be.

The Bad: I can't concretely say if this was a problem specifically with the narration or with the text in general, but I oftentimes found myself somewhat bored with the writing style. It was never bad enough to get me to stop reading, but it did come up several times, normally around long periods of dialogue; there was frequent repetition of the same dialogue tag which didn't feel necessary, and while I got better at tuning it out as the book went on, I believe it did continue through the entire thing.

The In-Between: Shesheshen is routinely confused on human interaction and behavior, which makes complete sense; she is not a human, and has never been in human society for most of her life. Despite this, she has a lot to say about the problems with society, with the way things are ruled, and other criticisms and insights that don't feel like she should be able to fully comprehend. On one hand, its incredibly relatable for any autistic readers, and really mirrors the experiences that I and many other people have experienced in day to day life. On the other hand, Shesheshen is not autistic. She has been, as I previously said, completely isolated from humans except for the couple times she goes hunting in town. Her having this insight makes the themes a lot clearer, but I don't know if it makes sense for her to know those kinds of things.

The ending. The entirety of part eight is about Homily and Shesheshen adjusting to life with each other without the overarching threat of death. I did enjoy it, but it both a) gave me a heart attack (you know what 100 pages left when everything's going well normally means) and b) felt... off, for some reason. Homily is said to have to go back to where the Baroness had been living, but she never seems to. The Offspring (later named Epilogue, which is very cute) is an absolute menace to Homily, and it seems weird to me; it had previously saved her life on numerous occasions, even at danger to itself. I don't really understand why Epilogue would change its tune so much, even with the given explanation.

The "royal" family. With the exception of Homily, the entire royal family seems almost one-notedly evil. When you learn how they were raised, it does make sense, but it feels a lot like they were each given a crappy character trait and that was that. If you've ever read The Bone Orchard by Sara A. Mueller, they felt a lot like a less horrible version of the princes.

Final Thoughts: Overall, Someone You Can Build a Nest In is definitely worth a read. I thoroughly enjoyed it, and while I do think there were a handful of things that could've been improved, it in no way detracts from the overall reading experience.

[scarletsbookthoughts]

Howdy!

My name is Scarlet, and this is a place to collect thoughts on the books that I have read, review them, and overall just talk about the bookish things I enjoy. Feel free to recommend anything or ask me any questions you might like. You can also find me on Storygraph as @scarletschema feel free to add me!

My reviews will generally follow the following format: Format: Or the way that I read the book; whether that be audiobook, paperback, hardcover, or ebook.

Rating: The standard 1-5 stars. I generally try to stay in intervals of .5, but there will be the occasional shift in format.

Short review: A spoiler free mini review which will tell you the general themes of the book, some interesting details I liked or didn't like, and whether I think its worth the read.

Related Song: I have been assigning a song to every book that I read as a personal challenge of mine, and have really been enjoying it. I will be including what song I connect to the book, as well as my explanation for why, in this section

Finally, beneath a read more, I will include a Long Review separated into 4 sections: Summary (the overarching plot of the book, in my own words) The Good (Things that I thought the book did very well) The Bad (Things that the book fell flat at, or actively failed on) and The In-Between (Things that weren't bad per se, but could've been done better.) Anything under the read more will contain spoilers. Please keep that in mind.