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Book Review: Rabbits in the Garden (Gardening Guidebooks #1) by Jessica McHugh

Rabbits in the Garden (Gardening Guidebooks #1) by Jessica McHugh

Ghoulish Books, 2022

ISBN: 978-1943720736

Available: Paperback

Buy:  Bookshop.org | Amazon.com

 

After reading Jessica McHugh’s Rabbits in the Garden, readers will never look at rabbits or gardening tools in quite the same way again.

 

Avery’s mom has a creepy interest in her garden, as well as in keeping Avery and her sister on the straight and narrow when it comes to boys. She is a big believer in correcting people’s negative proclivities with her own brand of vigilante justice… as in, murdering them.

 

Unfortunately for Avery, her innocent friendship with Paul and her weird mother-assigned responsibility for the behavior of rabbits in the family garden lead her to discover the truth about her mother’s evil ways, and put her in danger of spending the rest of her life in a nightmarish insane asylum. Her fellow residents have some serious problems and believe that Avery is trying to hide hers. The staff employs brutal methods designed to punish rather than heal. 

 

Avery struggles throughout the book, fighting against the lies that have been told about her, defending herself against the horrible crimes she has been accused of by her own mother, and dealing with the survival friendships she makes with the mentally ill where she has been imprisoned. The odds of changing her situation seem impossible, and Avery suffers far more disappointments than successes along the way. 

 

Although the restrained language and minimal horrific and sexual detail might appropriately put this story of young love and family dynamics under the YA umbrella for some, an adult reading of Rabbits in the Garden as a coming-of-age horror novel also propels the book over the YA line to older readers who will appreciate McHugh’s excellent storytelling and dynamic style. Even after the worst acts in the book have already been committed, there are always still more to come. Even after the most intense human responses to betrayal, emotional/physical pain and loss occur, there are inevitably still more of those to come too, but in supernatural form. This leads to a fast and furious build up of tension, anxiety, and crushing fear that grow in the shadow of evil and finally explode in the last chapters. 

 

Is Avery a lesson in female empowerment in the fight against injustice or will she be an example of “like mother, like daughter”? This is the first book of The Gardening Guidebooks Trilogy, so we will find out.

 

Reviewed by Nova Hadley

 

Posted on June 28, 2023 by , Reply

Book Review: Jedi Summer by John Boden

Cover art for Jedi Summer by John Boden

Jedi Summer by John Boden

Cemetery Dance Publications, 2022

ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-1587678356

Available: Paperback, Kindle edition ( Bookshop.org | Amazon.com )

 

 

Jedi Summer is a fictionalized coming-of-age memoir by John Boden, taking place in 1983, the summer Return of the Jedi came out, when Boden was 12 and his brother Roscoe was 7. It meanders through a summer filled with the brothers playing, fighting, and just living through their days. Boden’s mother worked several jobs and he was both responsible for and unpleasant to Roscoe in the way siblings can be. Boden reflects on how his perspective has changed since then. Stylistically he uses italicized text in brackets for digressions. This would work in oral storytelling (it reminded me a bit of Donald Davis) but disrupts the flow on the page.

 

There are three additional stories. “Possessed by a Broken Window” is a powerful piece on grief and guilt.”Trick” is relatable to anyone who has meant to call someone important but never quite does. “The One Who Closes the Door”, a story about caretaking for the adults of your childhood, will stick with me for a long time.

 

The fictionalized darker and supernatural events that take place during the story range from gentle (Boden’s brother can see and interact with the ghosts of dead pets) to believable (a Ferris wheel that crashes to the ground) to the gruesome (a dead man hanging from a tree whose body has been turned into a birdhouse). Even without these, the story of these boys on summer vacation with plenty of time and imagination, and the pieces at the end, are worth reading.

 

Posted on March 18, 2023 by , Reply

Book Review: Saint Death’s Daughter by C.S.E. Cooney

Cover art fo Saint Death's Daughter by C.S.E. Cooney

Saint Death’s Daughter by C.S.E Cooney.

Solaris, 2022

ISBN-13: 978-1786184702

Available: Hardcover, paperback, Kindle edition, audiobook. ( Bookshop.org  |   Amazon.com )

 

 

Miscellaneous Stones, born into a family known for its violence in service to the crown of Liriat, is a teenage necromancer with an allergy to violence that opens “echo wounds” when violence is done or described. When her parents die, her family is left indebted to a banker’s family with connections to Liriat’s enemy, the Blackbird Bride.

 

Lanie’s sister Nita returns to renegotiate the debt, and does so by agreeing to work for the Queen of Liriat to kill all 24 of the Bride’s consorts. Nita has returned with an unwilling fiance, a gyrgard, who can shapeshift into a falcon and usually has a soul-bonded partner. The gyrgard, renamed Mak, attempts to poison himself rather than stay with Nita, but Lanie, unwilling to experience the echo wound that would be caused by his suicide, brings him back by calling on Saint Death, one of the 12 Lirian gods.

 

In order to prevent having his memories wiped, Mak swears loyalty to Nita, and they have a child, Datu, who is raised primarily by Lanie and Mak, while Nita assassinates the members of the Bride’s parliament. Finally, the Bride kills Nita, pronounces a death sentence on Datu, and tries to seduce Lanie into joining her court. Lanie, Mak, and Datu, along with the family revenant and the entrapped ghost of Lanie’s necromancer grandfather, flee to hide in the city of Liriat Proper to protect Datu.

 

In the city, Lanie, Mak, and Datu make truly good friends willing to help with their problems. Lanie also has a romance with Canon Lir, second son of the queen, and a priest to the many-gendered god of fire. Then Lanie has a serious echo wound in public that reveals their location to the Blackbird Bride, and Mak and Datu flee. Lanie has made a promise to her family’s revenant she must follow through, protect Datu, and bring down the Bride.

 

I know Harrow the Ninth is the big name in literary necromancers right now, and she’s a much more horror-tinged character, but Lanie is my favorite necromancer character ever. Compassionate and loving to the living, dead, and undead, sometimes unwise, she honors her goddess.The allergy to violence and refusal to enthrall others, and her relationship with Lir, make her unusual.

 

This is a long book, but with surprising twists, fascinating world building, great character development, and beautiful prose. Highly recommended.

 

Reviewed by Kirsten Kowalewski

 

Posted on February 25, 2023 by , Reply
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