Wow, I’ve been reading some bangerz this year! Why did I put off reading this for so long when this was every bit as good as everyone has been saying Wow, I’ve been reading some bangerz this year! Why did I put off reading this for so long when this was every bit as good as everyone has been saying it is?!?
You know the kind of book that is so good, that after you read it you rush to Goodreads to add every single other book that author has written to your TBR? That was definitely this. I read his new release “I Was A Teenage Slasher” earlier this year and I really, really liked it, but it’s this one that cemented Stephen Graham Jones as an automatic buy author.
I loved everything about this, from the very first page till the last. I’ve read a decent amount of literature featuring native Americans, but not till “Only The Good Indians,” did I feel that it was a true slice of life. I am of native american descent myself, but have not been able to narrow it down to any definitive tribe or clan beyond knowing I was Apache, plus I grew up in Orange County so while I am very interested in the topic, I’m not particularly knowledgable about it & I have been just absolutely hungry for something exactly like this. I feel like it opened my eyes to a community and way of living that I was mostly in the dark about, & this element was by far one of the best if not THEE best part about this book.
The actual horror parts were every bit as good tho, and being a huge animal lover I felt like there was something particularly compelling for me, as I felt complicated feelings towards each person, AND the actual villain. (There are certain aspects to the supernatural elements of the story that have to do with an animal, & where normally a villain is clearly so, in this situation I found it difficult not to understand & empathize with both sides.)
So basically a group of friends make the choice to drive to a popular hunting spot where it is illegal to do so. They are young native American boys living on a reservation, & there are very specific rules about hunting, one of them being that only the elders in the community can drive to the popular hunting spot, the others must walk, or “hoof it” as they put it. But on the last day of the hunting season, late in the afternoon when they assume all other hunters will have already left as most wake up early to do their hunting, none of them have managed to take down any Elk, which for most families is essential food to get them through the winter, so they make the fateful decision to take the risk and drive to the spot and take one last shot at it. They end up somehow stumbling across an entire herd, & make a fateful decision, the consequences of which will reverberate through their lives until the time that the price is finally paid for their mistakes.
It was just SO GOOOOD!! It’s also worth noting that I think this is the sort of supernatural horror book that can be read by readers who don’t often pick up this genre. It had a realistic feel to it.
Sidenote: I’ve started to realize that Horror is creeping up into my list of loved genres. In the past it’s mostly been a genre I dabbled in, most often around Halloween, but in this last year some of my best reads have been horror & I’m finding myself more and more inclined to pick them up! Authors like Stephen King and Tananarive Due are paving the way in a sub genre of horror all of their own, something more like literary horror, which until recently those two words would have never been used to describe the same book in a million years, but the genre has evolved so much. In “The Only Good Indians” the writing was just superb & the premise was somehow fresh & wildly original, which is not a thing that can be said of many books these days, in an artistic climate where A.I. submissions are to be our competition, & nearly everything is derivative!!...more
**spoiler alert** This was quite the surprise!! Don’t ask me why but I mistakenly was under the impression that this book was a plague story. I was li**spoiler alert** This was quite the surprise!! Don’t ask me why but I mistakenly was under the impression that this book was a plague story. I was literally expecting their grand, beautiful, castle house to turn into like a plague hospital with dying people in cots everywhere! I envisioned Maeve as some selfless plague nurse, standing beside a doctor in the creepy bird mask!
BUT. Naturally I quickly began to realize that the goings on were not exactly 14th century shenanigans. But I still nonsensically clung to this idea of a pandemic… maybe Cholera? Maybe some type of influenza? Who knows, but it wasn’t until the book’s final pages that I finally fully accepted that there was no epidemic storyline. What got me on this very specific line of thought you ask? I couldn’t tell ya. I have no idea, but somewhere along the way there HAD to have been something, whatever it was tho, it led me astray bc this book could not have possibly been any further from a “plague book.” ...more
Another delightful Maggie O, man is she consistent!!
She's such a beautiful writer, for me it just really hits the sweet spot. Eloquent & lyrical withoAnother delightful Maggie O, man is she consistent!!
She's such a beautiful writer, for me it just really hits the sweet spot. Eloquent & lyrical without being purple, expressive and descriptive without being loquacious, I never feel like she's overwriting, nor do I feel like I'm left needing more. She just does it for me, and I eat up every morsel and am grateful. All hail the wonderful Maggie O!
So I really liked "The Vanishing of Esme Lennox," particularly the ending, but it wasn't quite up to par with her more recent work (Hamnet, Marriage Proposal, I am, I am, I am) and so I worried that that might be the case again with "This Must Be the Place," but I am happy to say that that was not the case. Ok so I may not have loved TMBTP quiiiiite as much as I loved the others, but it was close!
I was actually expecting something different than what it turned out to be, which normally would not work out favorably for the book, but in this case bc it was Maggie O, I was merely pleasantly surprised. What I expected was more of a mystery/thriller about the disappearance of a famous actress, and what it wound up being was more along the lines of a series of vignettes that together told a story about the life of a famous actress, and not really in a mysterious way.
I loved it. I read some reviews that commented on not enjoying the jumping around, that it felt disjointed, which I understood a teeny bit, there were a few times where I was confused by the chronology of what was happening & who was who, but overall I thought the multiple POVs formed a pretty cohesive storyline, I really enjoyed the layers and the way the history unfolded through the various POVs, piece by piece, like a puzzle.
4.75 stars rounded UP of course. Maggie O has done it again!!...more
Woohoo. Maggie O has officially catapulted herself to the top of my favorite authors list.
Ok, maybe not the tippy top but like in the top 10-20 range.Woohoo. Maggie O has officially catapulted herself to the top of my favorite authors list.
Ok, maybe not the tippy top but like in the top 10-20 range. And this is only my 4th book by her & she has a pretty substantial backlog of books that I plan to make my way through, so maybe by the end she will have chiseled out a spot in the top 10!
(Altho I’m just gonna note that I do think her newer books are of a higher quality & caliber than her older works. The older stuff seems to fall more in the “women’s fiction” genre whereas her new stuff is much more “literary fiction &/or historical fiction, which is much more up my alley. So who knows, I could wind up having the opposite reaction & removing her from my list all together. Pfff, just kidding no that won’t happen, but I might end up just sticking to her new releases. Please Maggie churn out another one soon!)
All I know is that her writing is muah, chef’s kiss, just an absolute joy to read. It’s lyrical & eloquent & sharp & cutting all at once. She has the gift. The sorta writing that makes you cry with joy just bc there are people in the world that are capable of articulating the things that rest of us can only feel. I just loved it. It might be my favorite of hers that I’ve read, altho “Hamnet” is hard to beat.
And this was her “memoir” too! Non fiction. It’s even rarer to find a piece of Non Fiction that is both informative, & beautiful. But Maggie O pulled it off effortlessly in her sorta-memoir.
So, it’s is a book about her SEVENTEEN brushes with death. (Actually, it’s more like sixteen considering the last one is about her daughter’s brush with anaphylactic shock) and I just have to say that sixteen seems like a ridiculous amount of times to almost die! Like is this normal?! Because I can literally only remember one, a near drowning incident in kauai that required the assistance of a sexy lifeguard & even that one I know deep down I wasn’t truly knocking on death’s door quite yet. So sixteen seems borderline INSANE. Very final destination. Granted some of these are more extreme than others, but GOD DAMN GIRL! You’ve had one crazy ass life!! Better watch out for those hostile bleacher seats, murderous computer glass, various killer metal pieces shooting around, run away billboards, &/or any log-carrying semi trucks. (IYKYK)
But it made for such an explorative, wide ranging, utterly gorgeous story. I LOVED this book. A very strong, well deserved 5 stars!...more
This wasn’t my favorite King, that’s for sure. It felt less…eventful if you will, than everything else that I’ve A little girl gets lost in the woods.
This wasn’t my favorite King, that’s for sure. It felt less…eventful if you will, than everything else that I’ve read from him. And where he often dabbles in the supernatural, if not full on swims in it, in “TGTLTG” there was barely a hint of it—a suggestion—a mere whiff. Never any definitive confirmations of anything supernatural goin on.
Nevertheless, “TGWLTG” is creepy & suspenseful, from the master of creep and suspense. We’re following a little girl trying to survive in the woods & remember the few survival details she learned along the way. King somehow manages to perfectly encapsulate that childhood imagination that while mostly grounded in reality, can easily slip into the monstrous when we’re alone and surrounded by nothing but darkness (& in her case strewn about entrails from whatever predator roams the night) & the oh so ominous feeling of being watched, whether real or imagined.
I remember being 9 years old myself in Hanalei Bay, Kauai, where murder & kidnapping are things you only hear about on the news & that happen in other places far away, the worst crime you hear about in Hanalei is locals breaking into open rental cars & stealing wallets and ipods & sunglasses from tourists. Usually more of a fuck you for not following local island protocol & being an annoying tourist than any truly malicious thievery. But in the utter darkness of an island night, where we could hear the the waves of a famous hawaiian north shore ocean raging not more than 20 feet away, & where my grandmother & my friend & I stayed in a guest house not even 30 feet from the main house, I remember my lil friend and I grabbing knives from the kitchen for safety purposes & making a run for it, trying to outrun all the imagined kidnappers & murderers & nonexistent sea predators that were waiting in the darkness to pounce and drag us off into the night. We’d burst thru the front door, out of breath, heart pounding, knives gripped tightly every step of the way, till the moment we were enveloped in the safeness of the light, monsters cast back into the shadows. I remember so clearly the blood pounding in my ears, the visceral fear I felt for things that did not exist.
Most of us have a memory like this, or several, & it’s not so difficult to recall the terrifying unreality of childhood, the sort of pee-your-pants fear that can only come from the young minds of children for whom monsters & death loom so large, where reality is not yet the definitive line it will become and evil creatures & demons & bad men can lurk around any dark corner. And that is the genius of Stephen King, that unnerving ability to tap into the subconscious fear center of our brains, to dig into our innards with a death grip like a vice around your heart, to make us adults that have many decades between us & our childhoods, remember what it feels like to be that kind of scared.
And of course bc it’s King, we can never be quite sure if the monsters are real or not, so that made it all the more suspenseful. And where in most cases I need there to be a very distinct answer & resolution, in this case the quiet implication that it may have in fact been real was the perfect way to end this type of story. This is not King’s usual M.O., but there’s still genius here, or maybe I’m just so in love with King by this point that I’d declare his grocery lists brilliant! Either way, it worked for me, kept me turning the pages like he always does, a strong 4.25 stars. Still very much worth the read for all the Stephen King stans or first time readers alike....more
Eeeek. This will undoubtedly be one of my most disappointing reads of '24! I am baffled by all the 5 star ratings that it's getting.
After "The NightinEeeek. This will undoubtedly be one of my most disappointing reads of '24! I am baffled by all the 5 star ratings that it's getting.
After "The Nightingale" and "Four Winds," both of which were 5 star reads for me, I was really looking forward to "The Women." I started it immediately the day it was released. I was excited, to say the least.
But ugh.
The premise: Frankie McGrath is not your traditional girl, wanting more out of life than the traditional domestic roles. When the U.S. goes to war in Vietnam, her brother Finley, who is also her best friend, enlists and her parents are brimming with pride. Her father came from a "Navy house" and has a "hero wall" in their home where he puts up pictures of "heroes." His father was a veteran, and his own generation of men all went to war during WWII, but he was not able to go and overcompensated for his subsequent feelings of inadequacy by going overboard on the patriotism. His children are raised believing that serving your country is the highest honor. So when her brother Finley enlists & is deployed, it occurs to Frankie that as an R.N., she should follow in his footsteps. She winds up joining the army bc it's the only military branch that will accept her fresh out of college with no experience, she envisions proud parents, meeting up with her brother in 'Nam, coming home to accolades and a heroes welcome. Reality is nothing even close to that.
So it started off alright. I am not particularly knowledgable about the Vietnam War so I figured I'd learn a thing or two. Things escalate quickly. Before Frankie's plane even lands in Vietnam, she's getting shot at by "Charlie" & cowering in fear bc of all the loud, terrifying gunshots & explosions happening in the vicinity. She's quickly thrust into wartime nursing, exposed to death, missing limbs, & other horrific injuries within minutes of reporting for duty. There is no learning curve, there is no training, she's forced to sac up & buckle down & WORK.
So this was as far as I got while still thinking that I would enjoy this. At this point, things started to go awry. (view spoiler)[Although the first strange thing I took note of was the lack of response when Frankie finds out that her brother had been killed in action & there were no remains. This was supposed to be her best friend and only sibling, the reason why she enlisted, the closest person in the world to her, yet her reaction to his death felt bizarrely unreactive. Her family gets a letter, she's sad, takes a melancholy walk on the beach & that's basically it. For the way their relationship was depicted, the response felt disproportionately mild. I dismissed it as just a weird thing & would have been willing to overlook it had Hannah not proceeded to do the same thing over & over.
And from this point on it's just one cliche after another. Enormous things happen abruptly and in a matter of a few pages. Frankie's responses are meager & fleeting. The fact that she enlisted for her brother & then lost him before being deployed is rarely mentioned, & when it is it's secondary & superficial, nothing but a quick opportunity to reinforce the supposed narrative that losing her brother actually meant something to her & wasn’t just some inconsequential event like it seems. Frankie gets to Vietnam & initially is seemingly shellshocked, but by the end of the night she's thinking about the dreamy MARRIED doctor with the "sad eyes" that whispered cliched reassurances & sweet nothings in her ear like "Don't worry, I got you. You're safe." She falls in love in a matter of a couple pages after a few of the most cliched wartime interactions ever, & then oops, he dies too. We got a page or two full of shrieking "SAVE HIM!" followed by obligatory sad moment w/her friends, but a few pages later there's a new guy whispering similar cliched things in her ear that make her weak with lust. It's instalovey to the extreme.
The whole story moves along at breakneck speed, despite being mostly devoid of plot, with Frankie moving through experience after experience with banal, paltry one page responses, which ultimately just makes it all a bunch of stuff that happened to her that l didn’t really care about. Kristin Hannah just never gives us time to care.
None of the other characters in the book have any depth whatsoever, they're all cardboard cutouts, stereotypical renderings of best friends & wartime lovers. Even the most heartbreaking parts of the story were rendered unfeeling because of how quickly they were moved through. There are various deaths & descriptions of soldiers/villagers last moments, at one point a baby is brought in that's covered in head to toe burns, barely alive, having been found in the arms of her dead mother. She takes her last breath in Frankie’s arms, & not even a page later it's on to the next thing. Which to be fair, one might defend by saying that’s just the life of a military nurse, where days go by w/lightening speed & there’s no time for despair. Which might very well be the case, but then it’s essentially just someone saying, “a baby came in with burns all over its body & died." Yes, that’s very sad, but such quick descriptions hardly evoke strong emotional responses. A humanization needs to take place in order for me to extend any significant amount of empathy, most especially when what we’re reading is fiction.
The after the war half of the book was no better. Again Frankie moves through event after event, phase after phase with minimal depth. She comes home from war expecting elated parents & a revered veteran's welcome only to find that an entire country has changed it's outlook on the war—her own parents were so ashamed that they'd concealed the truth & claimed she was studying abroad.
Frankie tries to settle in. She moves thru the expected war responses one right after another, the behavior stereotypical & cursory, the healing process offensively unrealistic. (There's mention of bad dreams. At a party a firework goes off & she dives under a table & shrieks for everyone to take cover, etc etc) Eventually enter man #3 that more or less "saves her.” She gets pregnant & then is spontaneously (but temporarily) healed. More of the typical women’s-problems-can-be-cured-by-marriage-and-a-baby-mentality, wow it can even cure PTSD!! But wait, oh no, man #2 that she thought was dead makes a stunning reappearance & she loses the baby from the shock of it. At this point all her PTSD symptoms reemerge with a vengeance, bc of course things didn’t get really bad till there was a man involved. She realizes he’s married to someone else, which naturally causes her PTSD to escalate from something she had a solid grasp on to full blown PTSD with depression and suicidal ideation, and from there to an actual suicide attempt, which is proceeded by magically healing via get this...getting a place of her own in a location with wide open spaces. (Insert eyeroll here)
Maybe if I had liked Frankie, like at all, I would have cared more about what happened to her but I just couldn't get there. A self proclaimed "good girl," Frankie pretty much immediately falls into an entanglement with a married man. Her pathetic attempt at resistance felt almost like she was being coy more than it felt like she was experiencing any moral quandary. I know, I know, they're at war! It's a tale as old as war itself, the idea of a wartime dalliance, when the normal rules don't apply & the lives & wives waiting thousand of miles away back at home are inconsequential in the midst of a war where any minute could be one's last. I understand the logic but it’s still hard for me to wrap my brain around, bc personally I can’t imagine wanting to spend my final moments on this earth being unfaithful to the man I love, but yeah ok, I can acknowledge that I don’t know what any of that truly feels like, but Frankie’s dithering protestations were just so pathetic & absurdly fake, I couldn’t even try to believe it. Especially considering she basically does the same thing not once, but TWICE. And we’re supposed to believe she’s struggling with attractions to unavailable men that are just so fierce that they are downright unconquerable?! Pffff. "But...But... I'm a good girl!!" No girlfriend, you are not, not when you're knowingly f'ing with married men. It's really not that hard to not, I've come across plenty of married men that I have found attractive, but their marriage status is like turning off a switch. I won't go there, so everything else is irrelevant. I do not indulge the attraction. It’s pretty simple. In Frankie's case, she had no real principles despite believing that she did. She was a selfish, self absorbed simp, a supposed feminist who wanted something different, or more than the traditional domestic life, yet all she did from beginning to end is was fall all over herself for sexy men. I'm sure there are a lot of Kristin Hannah devotees who enjoy and specifically seek her out for her personal brand of romance. Nightingale was romance heavy as well, but its steady pacing & other separate, unrelated plots made it all easier to get on board with bc it wasn't the only relevant storyline. And while in "The Women,' the romances didn’t exactly impel the nonexistent plot to it’s end, it was all still essentially a romance with a Vietnam War setting. (hide spoiler)]
The best bits IMO were the bits about the friendships Frankie made while nursing. Going through something as traumatizing as a war together has a way of solidifying relationships & bringing people much closer together than the average friendship. The way that Frankie relied on them & the way they showed up for her time & time again warmed my heart, but tbh even these parts highlighted how lacking the whole book was bc again, they lacked any substantial characterizations. We got no real backstories on either of the women, even the bits & pieces of their present lives were quickly glossed over. They were props, devices plugged in just to get Frankie out of whatever man-induced hole she was currently in. It also validated my opinion about Frankie being self absorbed & selfish, for all the support & love she’s given by these women, she gave almost none of it herself. For example, it takes her a very long time to be open minded about the cause her “best friend” has devoted her life to bc she’s too busy wallowing, & then when one of them gets engaged Frankie is jealous. Everything ties back to whatever is going on in her love life, it was annoying. For a book titled "The Women” which supposedly was intended to be something that gave distinction & a voice to a group that history has all but forgotten, a lot of this was about the men.
Historical fiction is not my favorite genre, but when written well (according to my preferences) they can still be some of my favorite books. But when I pick up a piece of historical fiction, I want to learn something about a time or a place or a people. Often after or while reading HF I find myself reading up on that topic, watching documentaries, searching out facts. Kate Quinn, John Boyne, Emma Donoghue are a few that come to mind that have consistently provided me with what I want in my historical fiction. What I don’t want is to read a romance within a historical setting. In “The Women,” reading about the experiences of a nurse in a time of war DID interest me, but it could have just as easily been any other place or time or war. Other than a few mentions of the heat & of “Charlie” one would hardly be able to differentiate between this & any other wars. It was ultimately a hollow construction of the war, a backdrop for the romantic exploits of our MC. I could have written this book with what little I knew about the Vietnam war. I got through just shy of 500 pages without learning a single thing. The title “Love In A Time Of War” would have mo
To be fair, I didn’t completely despise this book, it was readable, I was never bored. It was just that I had such high expectations & the result was disappointing. I have not read any of Kristin Hannah’s earlier works to know firsthand whether this is actually true or not, but I had gotten the sense that she had begun to deviate a bit from her previous chick-lit/romance with more literary work with "Nightingale," and "Four Winds," but it feels like she’s reverted back to her former M.O. with "The Women." (Which no shame to readers of chick-lit, some of it is great, but it’s just not what I was looking for in this instance.) Ordinarily I might have rated this 3 stars, but because my disappointment was so severe I had to go with 2. That doesn't mean that I'm giving up on Kristin Hannah, I still plan to one day read the "Great Alone," and I will likely continue to read whatever she comes out with.
It is also worth noting that so far the reaction to “The Women”has been so positive that it leaves me feeling like I might be alone in my feelings about it. I’m getting the typical “what did I miss?!” feeling. To each their own I guess ...more
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