Month: April 2021

This is a retelling of Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Casque of Amontillado,” and that’s just the beginning of the Poe Easter eggs in this thriller! Tress Montor lost her parents years earlier when they disappeared driving her best friend Felicity Turnado home. Now, Tress’s entire life is the butt of a joke and she’s miserable…so she decides that she’s going to get answers out of Felicity, who’s always maintained that she has no memory of the night Tress’s parents disappeared. Tress decides to do this by kidnapping Felicity during a party in an abandoned house, and bricking her up in a coal chute in order to get her to talk. This is a dual POV novel that moves throughout time, so the dual narrators work really well for this book and the constant back and forth has you reconsidering just how reliable either girl really is. This is a fantastic dark thriller (content warning for drug abuse and animal harm) with a cliffhanger ending that will have you counting down the days to the second book in this duology releases.

Ellie was just a child in a remote community in Norway when her mother dragged her out of bed one night and onto the frozen fjord, whistled at the northern lights, and disappeared. Now, Ellie is a teenager living on Cape Cod with her dad and missing her mom every day. When the northern lights dip low enough that she can see them, she whistles at them…and they return her mother, but she’s no longer the same. I thought Pressley did such a great job of capturing Ellie’s voice and the magical interludes where readers get the fairy tale background of how and why Ellie’s mom disappeared. This is a beautiful fabulist tale!

Daunis is a biracial eighteen-year-old young woman living in Sault Ste. Marie, MI where she feels torn between her life in town, where her mother’s white family has many connections, and life on the nearby Sugar Island, where her Ojibway father is from. When she witnesses a murder, she’s drawn into an investigation that will force her to confront hard truths about her community and herself. I remember seeing a casting call for a Native/Indigenous voice actor for this audiobook, and the publisher picked Isabella Star LaBland, Sisseton-Wahpeton Dakota stage and screen actor. This may be her first audiobook credit, but she did a wonderful job. The emotional depth she brought to this book is just beautiful, and I think this was one of the best audiobooks I’ve listened to all year.

Ada has just caught her boyfriend cheating on her (after they were about to have sex for the first time, no less!) when she’s whisked away on a family vacation to Hawaii. Only, things aren’t quite right. Her step-dad doesn’t come, and her workaholic mom seems more relaxed. Then, Ada walks in on her mom having sex with someone who definitely isn’t her step-dad, turning her vacation in paradise into a complicated mess of secrets, confusion, and misplaced feelings. Ada decides that if everyone else is having sex, she might as well find a fling, too…but things don’t always go perfectly to plan. I admit, when I first started listening my first reaction was that Osmanski sounded a touch too old to be a teen, but the further in I got I was completely hooked and convinced! This is an excellent book about family drama and the struggles that come with communicating with those you love.

When Hwani and her younger sister Maewol were children, they got lost in the woods. When they were found, it was just a stone’s throw away from the body of a murdered woman. Hwani remembers nothing about her time in the forest and shortly after she and Maewol are separated…but then years later, thirteen girls go missing in the same forest. The sisters’ father, a detective, goes to investigate but when he also goes missing, Hwani is forced to return to the place she can’t remember and reconcile with Maewol in order to discover the truth. I was totally immersed into this historical tale, and Kim’s narration definitely capture the unease and the high stakes of this mystery, but also the emotional tension between the two sisters! Bonus: Hur’s first novel The Silence of Bones is also great on audio!