Review of "The Only One Left" by Riley Sager

 

Title: The Only One Left
Author: Riley Sager
Release date: June 20, 2023
Rating: 3.5/5
Publisher: Dutton
Book Summary: 

Now reduced to a schoolyard chant, the Hope family murders shocked the Maine coast one bloody night in 1929. While most people assume seventeen-year-old Lenora was responsible, the police were never able to prove it. Other than her denial after the killings, she has never spoken publicly about that night, nor has she set foot outside Hope’s End, the cliffside mansion where the massacre occurred.

Stabbed her father with a knife

Took her mother’s happy life

It’s now 1983, and home-health aide Kit McDeere arrives at a decaying Hope’s End to care for Lenora after her previous nurse fled in the middle of the night. In her seventies and confined to a wheelchair, Lenora was rendered mute by a series of strokes and can only communicate with Kit by tapping out sentences on an old typewriter. One night, Lenora uses it to make a tantalizing offer—I want to tell you everything.

“It wasn’t me,” Lenora said

But she’s the only one not dead

As Kit helps Lenora write about the events leading to the Hope family massacre, it becomes clear there’s more to the tale than people know. But when new details about her predecessor’s departure come to light, Kit starts to suspect Lenora might not be telling the complete truth—and that the seemingly harmless woman in her care could be far more dangerous than she first thought.

Review:

The Only One Left takes place in a small town in the 80s where our main character, Kit, has had her left completely up-ended by the accusation that she killed her mother. While she was acquitted of all charges, the lingering accusation weighs on her shoulders. In order to get her job back, she is given a proposition she can't refuse: taking care of the notorious Lenora Hope. 

I read this book with a book club, and it is one of the best book recommendations I've had. It was a difficult read to put down with every page revealing juicier information than the last.

Riley Sager has an incredible way of delivering information using interludes typed by Lenora to deliver the information. It creates a dynamic experience: we're reading the book from Kit's perspective, but also from Lenora's. As Kit helps Lenora type each page, we get more and more information on what happened before and during that fateful night. 

Hope's End felt like another world--like it existed outside of the already existing town. It felt all-encompassing. With every twist, the world felt smaller and smaller. More intertwined and more convoluted.

The only reason why I wouldn't score this above a 3.5 or a 4 is the loose ends that I felt were left toward the end. There was a character whose story didn't feel as complete as the others, while another character was heavily involved but not mentioned again past a certain point.

 

Still, I think it was an incredible read, with an unreliable narrator and an even more unreliable group of characters surrounding her. 

 

Review of "The Ninth Choir" by C. Pascual

 

Title: The Ninth Choir
Author: C. Pascual 
Release date: June 6, 2026
Rating: DNF
Publisher: None listed
Book Summary:

Miriam is a five-hundred-year-old elemental witch who appears to be twenty-six. She has a foul temper, a hardened heart, a dark soul, and 500 years’ worth of secrets stashed away. She believes in angels because she sees them every day going about their jobs. She may also be the most powerful thing walking the Earth. She just doesn’t know it yet.

She has spent much of her existence in service to a creature who could be the devil, if the devil exists. She has feared him since the day he saved her from burning on a pyre.

Only recently has Miriam begun to understand what she actually is.
When Miriam saves Anna, a young woman who believes she is an angel, her world changes.

And someone is trying to kill all the angels on this world.
In a small white cottage on A Street in Saint Augustine Beach, a defrocked priest, a teenage Archangel, Miriam and her sister witches, and a Creator who has managed 101,403 worlds are about to do something that has never been done before. Save the angels.

Some will tell you that there are no such things as angels.
And that might be.

But if there were, they would be exactly like the ones in this story.

The Ninth Choir. Book One of a series.

Review:  
I had a difficult time getting into the story. 

In the first few pages there was a lot of assumption that I, the reader, would understand the character's vocabulary and the governing bodies in her world.

While the world and characters seem like an interesting concept, it's hard to follow the narrative. The author frequently jumps in and out of time periods and character points of view. The writing feels detached, and does a lot of "telling" instead of showing. I'm not sure if this is due to the nature of the overall main character, Ena, being a detached being, but as a reader it was hard to feel attached to any portion of the story of the plight of the character.  

Thank you NetGalley for the opportunity to review the story.

Review of "The Forest of Hands and Teeth" by Carrie Ryan

Title: The Forest of Hands and Teeth

Author: Carrie Ryan
Release date: July 1, 2009
Rating:2.5/5
Publisher: Gollancz
Book Summary: 

In Mary's world there are simple truths. The Sisterhood always knows best. The Guardians will protect and serve. The Unconsecrated will never relent. And you must always mind the fence that surrounds the village; the fence that protects the town from the Forest of Hands and Teeth. But, slowly, Mary’s truths are failing her. She’s learning things she never wanted to know about the Sisterhood and its secrets, and the Guardians and their power, and about the Unconsecrated and their relentlessness. When the fence is breached and her world is thrown into chaos, she must choose between her village and her future—between the one she loves and the one who loves her. And she must face the truth about the Forest of Hands and Teeth. Could there be life outside a world surrounded by so much death?

Review: 

To explain how disappointed I was about this novel is an understatement. 

This novel has been on my "To Read" shelf on Goodreads for YEARS. Now that I've finally had a chance to pick up rereading books, I decided to take this novel off the shelf and dive in. 

The summary of this book is captivating and was released during the height of the zombie-apocalypse craze in books and movies in the early 2000s. It's a shame that the summary of the novel was not done justice by the story itself. 

There may be some spoilers in this review. Please stop here if you'd like to read this book spoiler-free! 

The novel occurs in a post-apocalyptic future, where society is stuck behind fences, and the Unconsecrated roam the forests. This small slice of the world is run by The Sisters, who control all aspects of life, including where the villagers find clothing and shelter.

We follow the main character, Mary, from a first-person present point of view. Mary has experienced immense tragedy, losing her father in the forest and struggling to ensure her mother doesn't suffer the same fate. Unfortunately, she shares more tragedy when her mother gets bitten by one of the Unconsecrated at the fence and chooses to live in the Forest of Hands and Teeth instead of being killed once she turns. Her brother abandons her to the Sisters and tells her that no one has spoken for her, even though she had been previously asked to the courtship event held by the village by one of her childhood friends.

Up until this point, I understand the character's motivations, her sadness, and her grief. I understand her want for another life outside the small village she's always lived in. So much tragedy and trauma has been experienced in just a few days. 

I lose my sympathy for Mary when self-pity and selfishness don't disappear. Her constant need to see an ocean she had only ever heard about through stories from her mother, her insistent need to leave the village into the forest to find what's on the Outside. Nothing for Mary could ever satiate that. It would be one thing to start the exploration of the world outside of the fence--there wouldn't be a novel otherwise--but it's another thing to make that the only character facet for Mary. It endangers everyone immediately surrounding her, causing more death and destruction than was caused by the Unconsecrated and their breaching of the fences around her village.

Never once was the full gravity of the situation that she was in or the weight of the lives of the people around her was ever taken into account. The only thing on her mind was the ocean and the tall buildings. There were even multiple chapters where she was mourning the loss of the people she didn't know while simultaneously distancing herself from her brother and the people she did know -- the only people left alive after their village was plundered by Unconsecrated. 

The plotline was flat and one-dimensional. I read through it because I needed to see how it ended, and even the ending felt uneventful. 

I will not be continuing the series.

Review of "Mrs. Sherlock Holmes" by Brad Ricca

Title: Mrs. Sherlock Holmes

Author: Brad Ricca
Release date: January 3, 2017
Rating: 3.5/5
Publisher: St. Martin's Press
Book Summary: 

Mrs. Sherlock Holmes tells the incredible true life story of Mrs. Grace Humiston, the New York lawyer and detective who solved the famous cold case of Ruth Cruger, an 18-year-old girl who disappeared in 1917. Grace was an amazing lawyer and traveling detective during a time when no women were practicing these professions. She focused on solving cases no one else wanted and advocating for innocents. Grace became the first female U.S. District Attorney and made ground-breaking investigations into modern slavery.

One of Grace's greatest accomplishments was solving the Cruger case after following a trail of corruption that lead from New York to Italy. Her work changed how the country viewed the problem of missing girls. But the victory came with a price when she learned all too well what happens when one woman upstages the entire NYPD.

In the literary tradition of In Cold Blood and The Devil in the White City, Brad Ricca's Mrs. Sherlock Holmes is a true crime tale told in spine-tingling fashion. This story is about a woman whose work was so impressive that the papers gave her the nickname of fiction’s greatest sleuth. With important repercussions in the present about kidnapping, the role of the media, and the truth of crime stories, the great mystery of the book – and its haunting twist ending – is how one woman can become so famous only to disappear completely.

Summary pulled from Goodreads.com 

Review:

Mrs. Sherlock Holmes started off as a page-turner that eventually fizzled into a telling of history that didn't include the reason I picked up the book. I was hooked by how Ricca told this story as fiction, but something was lacking that kept me from finishing the book in its entirety. 

Ricca was meticulous in how he told Ms. Grace Humiston's story, and I appreciated how he structured the information. First, it set the scene of the most pivotal case: Ruth Cruger's disappearance in New York in 1917. It provided the early drama and backstory needed once we returned to the case later on.

It then set the stage for why we, the reader, are learning of Mrs. Sherlock Holmes herself, Mrs. Grace Humiston. He showed the reader her character through the types of cases she normally worked on prior to accepting the Ruth Cruger case. We learned that Grace was empathetic and cared for those that didn't have the means or the way to defend themselves. We also learned that she would go to great lengths to solve a case: including hiding in the trees to uncover the illegal work conditions of what was labeled a "white slave" operation. 

Finally, Grace herself on the case synthesizes all the information the reader has grown to know about her and the missing girl, Ruth, and the end to the cold case that had been captivating New York during this period.

I enjoyed how Grace's story was almost presented like a fictional novel, but like others who read Mrs. Sherlock Holmes didn't find the "Holmes" connection to be anything more than an interesting title. Through the story, Grace proved just how great of a detective she was, but it was more through her grit, perseverance, and unwillingness to take "no" for an answer rather than the deduction skills that we know through the Sherlock Holmes stories. 

I admire Grace, not as a Sherlock Holmes-esque character, but as someone who followed her gut and intuition and allowed herself to stand out from the pack.

Review of "The War of Art" by Steven Pressfield

Title: The War of Art

Author: Steven Pressfield 
Release date: April 1, 2003
Rating: 4/5
Publisher: Warner Books
Book Summary:

Internationally bestselling author of Last of the Amazons, Gates of Fire, and Tides of War, Steven Pressfield delivers a guide to inspire and support those who struggle to express their creativity. Pressfield believes that “resistance” is the greatest enemy, and he offers many unique and helpful ways to overcome it.

Review:

Have you ever sat down with one of your best friends, and when you start your rant about your issues, they see right through you? 

I won't lie, that's exactly how I felt with Steven Pressfield's The War of Art: Break Through the Blocks and Win Your Inner Creative Battles. 

The foreword was written by Robert McKee, an author, and lecturer known for his Story Seminar. I remember resonating with the foreword and the candid nature that McKee wrote. In fact, after finishing the book, I returned to the foreword to reread it and found myself nodding with his analysis of Pressfield's work. McKee's synopsis and entry into the book were the perfect fit. 

Throughout The War of Art, I felt "seen" in more ways than one. Not only was Pressfield's description of Resistance the nail on the head, but it personified something that I had personally been experiencing for a long time. Not only had Resistance been whispering lies, but it had also successfully won, more than once, against the need to express my thoughts creatively in music and in writing. 

Through each chapter, I became more aware of the issues contributing to my writer's block. Was it the fact that I had no time, or was Resistance telling me there was no time to focus on my creative outlets? 

I would recommend this to any struggling creative who doesn't feel like there's a light at the end of the tunnel that is their creative block. 

Welcome Back to the Guide

Hello everyone!

It's been quite a long time since the last time I posted on this blog. 

Welcome! 

If you're new here, I am a book reviewer who writes under the penname M.A. Chase. I started this blog back in 2012 and left it behind in around 2014. I intend to bring this blog back to life; albeit, maybe not as active as it once was! 

I look forward to meeting everyone. It's truly been a long time, and I can't wait to have the opportunity to do this. 

If you've reached out to me in the past, and I haven't responded, please contact me! It's going to be a rough start getting everything up and running again, so let me know how you've been and what's changed with you! 

The blog will be under construction over these next few weeks to get everything up to date including links, book cover images, and other broken areas that didn't age well. 

Thank you for everyone's continued support!

M.A. Chase

The Parallax Groove Review

Title: The Parallax Groove
Author: Michael Loughrey 
Release date: May 13, 2014
Rating: 4/5
Publisher: FeedARead.com
Book Summary:

Slip inside The Parallax Groove and revel in fiction free from the straightjacket of realism. Previously published in noteworthy literary magazines, these fourteen short stories are a mesmerizing extravaganza of phantasmagorical fables in which the recognisably realistic is infused with the inexplicable and the unexpected, and deconstructivism subverts the familiar order of perception into exquiste disarray. Singular, surreal, intense, illuminating, incandescent, jocular, offbeat, risque and satirical The Parallax Groove is an exhilarating odyssey for freethinkers and nonconformists who eschew the Disneyfication of literature. 

Review:
 
The Parallax Groove is a collection of short stories written by Michael Loughrey. These stories had been published in other literary works previously, then joined together in an anthology all their own. As the book summary says, these short stories take a turns that you wouldn't expect. They bring reality and fantasy into a world all their own to create characters and plots that aren't normally seen in the writing world. 

My favorite out of the whole anthology had to be Off Road which was the second short story. Off Road was about a man whose car wasn't working properly. The short story takes the reader through fantastical situations like Billy, the main character of this short story, having to walk on his hands because he was losing parts of his brain every time he used a toilet. While Billy's adventures get a little dark and a little twisted by the end, it's one of the most easy to follow short stories. 

My only problem with The Parallax Groove is that there never seemed to be any point in the stories. While I understand the misdirection and crazy surrealism was what set these short stories apart, it was almost distracting. A lot of the language was difficult to grasp and hard to follow. I found myself looking up a lot of the vocabulary being used through the short stories to make sure I understood what was being conveyed and what was being said. 

Despite this, The Parallax Groove has short stories that are extremely well written and thought through. Each character has its own development no matter how crazy or twisted the situation seems. Descriptions, although at times a little superfluous, easily detailed exactly the landscape and the place in which these characters lived and battled. Each story had its own setting and its own rules in the way the physics of the world seem to run. It was truly creative, and I would recommend it with that statement at the forefront of the conversation.