reneedecoskey's reviews
318 reviews

The Last Thing He Told Me by Laura Dave is a relatively short book -- just over 300 pages -- and I read it in two sittings. I wouldn't say it's the most literary or nuanced book I've ever read, but it was a page-turner and highly readable. The mystery kept pulling you along with new info, so I didn't feel bored at all while reading. It kept me engaged without having to think too hard, which is exactly the kind of book I wanted.

Right before Hannah's husband Owen goes missing, he sends her a message. A piece of yellow legal pad paper that just says "Protect her." She knows it's in reference to his daughter (and her step-daughter), Bailey, but she has to figure out what it means. In the process, she learns that Owen wasn't who she thought he was (that's not a spoiler; it's revealed pretty early). So she needs to figure out who he was in order to find out how she's supposed to protect Bailey.

The takeaway for me was that other people are exhausting and if you just keep yourself to yourself, you don't end up in the middle of all of their bullshit, but that's just my take 😄. This book didn't change my life, but it was a fun read and I would definitely recommend it, especially if you're looking for something engaging that won't hurt your brain too much as the year winds down. 3.5/5.

This finale made me want to stab things, so it was a good one to listen to on audio as I was knitting. As Good As Dead by Holly Jackson is the final book in the Good Girl’s Guide to Murder trilogy. You can’t read this as a stand-alone; you need to read the first two in order for it to make sense. 

This was my least favorite of the three. I loved the first one. I enjoyed the second one. I liked this one for the first half, and then, without giving anything major away, something really big and out of character happens for our protagonist, Pippa, and I probably appear on traffic cameras in the tri-county area, gesturing wildly in my car and yelling at the narrator that it makes NO SENSE. It didn’t fit with Pip’s character and the PTSD she was experiencing from an event in the second book. And it just got worse from there.

I hated Pip and her whole navel-gazing, “poor me; I did a bad thing and now I’m going to once again forego a rational response in favor of being a hero because I love my friends” bit. And when the more rational people in her life are like “stop being like this,” she sobs and comes up with reasons why she can’t do the thing that makes the most sense because ONE cop never believes her. And he’s a detective. She wouldn’t even be talking to him first (the author is British — more on that in a second — and may not understand how the American police system works. Although I have no idea if detectives are even the first line of contact in the UK so… ).

The series takes place in Connecticut, but like I said, the author is British. I’m not sure why she chose CT, but there are chiefly British names (Pippa, for example) and expressions (“I’ll come round to yours”) throughout. Not sure why the author/editor didn’t look into that a little more. It didn’t bother me until I became annoyed with everything in the last 5 hours of this book (it’s long).

If you read the series, you have to read this one to finish it and get a resolution and see how it all, weirdly, ties together. And maybe you will disagree with me that the events in this one make no sense. I hope you do because I’d love to discuss it. If this were a stand-alone I wouldn’t recommend it, but as a series finale, I think I have to. But for me… 2/5 stars.

This was a re-read but I hadn’t read it in a while. No matter. It’s a collection of 6 Christmas-themed essays and stories and you can read it in a day. Full of his trademark sardonic wit and satirical humor, the collection ranges from the SantaLand Diaries (his breakthrough essay chronicling his time working as an elf at Macy’s famed SantaLand in Herald Square) to the time his sister brought a prostitute home for Christmas. There are satirical pieces about the drama of family Christmas letters and Christmas morning guilt sermons. Always good for a chuckle and some levity (unless you are not a person who can read sarcasm/satire. I say that seriously because not everyone can and people who can’t really don’t like him). 

If you decide to read it, just a quick heads up that it came out in 1997 and there are some words and phrases that you could definitely not use today. 
4/5 stars.

I’m way late to the party on this one but every bit of hype this book received is well-deserved. It skyrocketed to the top of my TBR last week after I saw an Instagram post TJ Klune did about book banning and realized that he lives in Fredericksburg. So… fun fact, there. 

Linus Baker lives a fairly mundane life. He lives in a gray city where it always rains. His cat, Calliope, tolerates him (sort of). His neighbor, Mrs. Klapper, gives him a hard time. He spends most of his life working (and free time is for listening to records). Linus works for the Department in Charge of Magical Youth and does his job well. 

After being summoned by Extremely Upper Management, he is sent on an assignment to an island in the sea, hours from home, where a man named Arthur Parnassus is operating an orphanage housing what they’ve deemed some of the most dangerous magical youth. Linus is to go and observe for a month, report back, and see if the orphanage ought to remain open. 

The island is like nothing he’d ever seen before. The children (which include a sprite, a gnome, a wyvern, a shapeshifter, and the literal antichrist, among others) are like nothing he’d seen before. He is terrified of them — especially Lucy, the antichrist, until he gets to know them. He realizes that they’re all just sweet, sometimes mischievous kids who want to be loved and deserve to have a family that supports them, which is what they’ve created on the island — a home for a found family. But outsiders, including his employer, don’t see it that way. They want the children banished. They fear what they don’t understand and it manifests as hate and vitriol and discrimination.

Woven through that story is Linus maybe not so much accepting his sexuality as confronting it for the first time.

This book is an absolutely beautiful allegory for what’s gone on in our world in the past few years and explores themes that include diversity, lgbtq+, family, and seeing people for who they actually are rather than what your fears tell you they are. It’s charming, poignant, and often funny (especially Lucy). 10/10 would recommend. 5/5 stars.

I wanted to support an indie bookstore I visited when I was in Cape May in October, so I ended up with this book and I’m glad I did because it was delightful. 

It’s about a group of four people, all from different backgrounds, who find themselves living in the same senior living facility, Coopers Chase. They’re all interested in murder and figuring out cases that have already been solved, but when actual murders take place around them, the gang works to solve the mystery and figure out whodunnit. Along the way, they must work with others in their senior community, as well as the friends they make in the local police. 

As more of the mystery unwinds, you see different characters having to navigate the space between the law and their own personal moral code, and how that impacts their worldview. It also plays a big part in the skill set and background that each of the members brings to the table to help solve the mystery. 

It’s cozy, quintessentially British, and funny. The second book in the series is also out now, so I’ll be checking that one out at some point when I get a little further through my TBR pile! 

4.5/5 — taking half a point because I went back and reread key passages a few times and there still seems to be part of the central mystery that isn’t explained fully. We get what happens and why, as well as to whom, but not where and how. I had more questions for that specific part.

Good Girl, Bad Blood is the second book in a trilogy and a followup to A Good Girl’s Guide to Murder, which I listened to a few months ago (you’ll find it if you scroll back through my photos). In the first book, Pip starts a podcast to investigate a hometown murder with an outcome she believed was incorrect. In this book, she launches season 2 of her podcast, which investigates the disappearance of her friend Connor’s brother, Jamie. I wouldn’t recommend reading this one without reading the first one first. 

It took me a little longer to get into this one but I did end up enjoying it. I like these as audiobooks because they’re read by a cast instead of only a single person. The end of this book was really well done, largely because, after two books, I’m really emotionally invested in Pip and her well-being. For that reason, the denouement here was much more impactful for me and I was still mentally stuck inside the end of the book hours after I finished it. 

If you’re looking for highbrow literature, this isn’t it. There are plenty of things that don’t make sense if you scratch the surface (could you really launch a podcast about an ongoing investigation and reveal potential evidence, for example?). But if you can suspend some belief and you’re looking for a mystery with some twists and turns, these are good for that — especially if you love true crime podcasts. 3.5/5.

David Sedaris is probably my favorite author. Carnival of Snackery is the followup to 2017’s Theft By Finding, which included entries from his diaries from 1977-2002. The new book covers diary entries from 2003-2020.

“Why would you want to read a 560 page tome of someone’s diary entries?” Fair question. First, you need to know that David Sedaris is a humor essayist and satirist. He’s also kind of a snarky asshole, but he uses that as a humor technique and it (mostly) works. I laugh out loud when I read his books (except for Squirrel Seeks Chipmunk. I didn’t like that one much). His writing process has long been to carry a notebook with him everywhere, write down his weird observations, and then include them in his daily diary entries. The diary entries end up being the fodder for his essays. 

The two diary books aren’t for everyone but they do give a lot of insight into his life, his humor, and most importantly, his writing process. It’s fun to read about the backstories to some of my favorite essays. But then there’s something else in the shared human experiences of what we’ve all been through in the past few years. His edges have softened a bit in recent years, with his diary and subsequent essays often turning inward and reflecting on aging, the loss of his family members and unit, and missing the days when he and his 5 siblings were young. You may know his sister, the actor Amy Sedaris. Anyway, if you’re a writer, you will probably appreciate this book most (but read part 1). If you expect this to be his essays in polished form, you won’t find that here. 4/5 stars.

If you are going to read Dave Grohl’s book, listen to the audio. He does voices and imitations. It plays demos. There’s a bonus chapter. 

Some people internalize useful things like … math. My brain is a sponge for music trivia. I attribute this to hours of listening to music with my dad and playing Name That Tune when I was little, as well as a steady diet of Behind the Music when it was good. I’m a sucker for a celebrity memoir. 

There wasn’t a lot of direct “behind the music” sorts of tidbits here in the way of stories behind the songs. I was specifically hoping for something more about Louise Post from Veruca Salt being the inspiration for Everlong. I think he was very careful not to mention those kinds of things. And there is thankfully no mention of Courtney Love. But there are loads of wonderful stories about his coming of age and entrance to the music world with his first band, Scream. There were stories of Nirvana and the Foo Fighters and so many “how did I get here?” moments for him. It was a lot of fun to listen to. Granted, you probably need to have an appreciation for Dave Grohl and/or his music to enjoy this book the most, but I loved it. As rockstar memoirs go, 5/5.

#41 was The Reading List by Sara Nisha Adams, which I finished last night. This is a hug for book lovers everywhere and demonstrates how books bring us together, strengthen communities, and help us heal. 

Mukesh is a lonely widower who finds himself visiting an underfunded library to feel closer to his wife, Naina, who used to go there all the time before she passed. He asks the young librarian, Aleisha, for help and a book rec, but she’s dealing with her own issues and snaps at him. Later she finds a mysterious book list and begins reading her way through it, though she’s never been a reader. That’s more her brother’s thing. She feels bad for snapping at Mukesh so she reads and then recommends to him. The two form a friendship as they read through the list, which ultimately helps them to serve others and the community while both enduring their own struggles and losses. If you like cozy socks and warm beverages under a snuggly blanket on a cold day, that is what reading this book feels like. 5/5 stars.

A Good Girl’s Guide to Murder by Holly Jackson was #40 for me. It’s a trilogy and the audiobook is read by a full cast. This is a good one if you like true crime podcasts.

The story is about a high school senior named Pippa who decides to solve a local murder mystery as her senior capstone project. She’s never believed the public mythology of Andi Bell’s death five years ago, when she herself was a high school senior. Andi’s body was never found and her boyfriend was blamed for the murder. Shortly after, he was found dead of a presumed suicide, a text sent to his father taking the blame. But Pippa doesn’t think he did it, so she sets off with his brother Ravi to solve the case. I’m interested to see where the next 2 books in the series go. Not sure when I’ll read/listen to them, though. The new David Sedaris comes out Tuesday, as well as Dave Grohl’s book. Both of which I’m really looking forward to. But I digress. This is great if you like murder mysteries, true crime, etc. 4/5 stars (it was a little long at times).