Someone Else’s Love Story by Joshilyn Jackson.

This book is: almost like a chick flick but too smart and well written to feel trite.
Other elements: Aspergers, Southern manners, virgin birth, robberies, death, chemicals, poetry, flowers.
Read it: if you like good stories about vivid, interesting characters.
Overall rating: 8.25/10

Someone Else’s Love Story begins with a gas station robbery and almost immediately asks the reader to believe in an incredible piece of information. I remember putting my Kindle down on the coffee table, turning to my boyfriend, and saying “This author just did something crazy. This book is going to be great if she can pull it off.”

And guess what? It was great.

Jackson manages to weave a love story around a plucky Southern single mom, a brilliant Autistic scientist, a badass lady lawyer, a precocious toddler, a lovesick poet, and a gas station robbery without being cheesy or excessively saccharine. This book also contains one of the most marvelous “you go, girl” moments I’ve ever witnessed. If I ever meet this heroine, the first thing I’m going to do is fist-bump her. I’m not 100% sure all of the science involved is legit, but I didn’t mind. Someone Else’s Love Story is on the fluffy side, but it’s excellent fluff.

This book is what I wish most chick lit would be like: a smart, funny, well-written novel that is primarily about love and relationships that features a strong female protagonist but is actually enjoyable to read.*

My thanks to Edelweiss and William Morrow for providing me with a copy of this book for review.

* Note: I have genre prejudice about chick lit. If you can think of a book that will change my mind, I’d love to hear about it.

Delia’s Shadow by Jaime Lee Moyer.

This book is: reminiscent of several other books that are better.
Other elements: ghosts, serial killers, Egyptian mythology.
Read it: if you like quiet books with overtones of crime and the supernatural.
Overall rating: 5/10

I read 10 other books between starting and finishing Delia’s Shadow. That should tell you something about this book’s ability to hold my attention. It’s certainly not terrible; I’ve read worse. But there isn’t much to recommend it, either.

Our heroine, Delia, sees ghosts. One in particular is haunting her and she doesn’t know why. At the urging of the ghost, she moves back to her hometown of San Fransisco and becomes involved in a murder investigation that the spirit trailing her seems to be particularly invested in. The serial killer plot is rather reminiscent of The Diviners: one unseen killer murdering in a dramatic way and leaving mysterious symbols behind.

This book is entirely lacking in urgency. Part of the death of tension is, I think, due to the fact that nothing is ever implied. When the characters have a thought or a feeling, they say so. They are also all prone to fully explaining what they mean at all times. Which is usually unnecessary, because they also all tend to be rather predictable. The pretty, reformed-flirt of a society girl ends up in danger because she does something silly for vain reasons. The mousey-but-smart best friend falls for the man she’s supposed to fall for, who succeeds at the thing he’s supposed to succeed at just in time. Along the way, we meet a sexually adventurous alcoholic medium who also assists the murder investigation (using powers similar to those Evie uses for the same reason in The Diviners) and see a lot of people be taken care of by the pretty society girl’s wise cookie-baking minority housekeeper-who-is-like-family. The emotional climax of the book is exactly what I would have expected it to be and it went how I would have expected it to go.

Every time the characters realized something, I had already figured it out – and always in a “well, obviously” way, rather than “aha, I wondered if that might be it!”. A crime novel/ghost story that never manages to be mysterious, surprising, shocking, original, or creepy isn’t succeeding at any genre.

My thanks to NetGalley and Macmillan-Tor/Forge for providing me with a copy of this book for review.

Thin Space by Jody Casella.

This book is: dark and heart wrenching with a pinch of magical realism.
Other elements: twins, sibling relationships, the death of a teenage, identity,
Read it: if you love strong, complicated characters.
Overall rating: 7.75/10

One of the reviews I saw online for Thin Space described reading the novel as similar to being “trapped in a dream” and I think that’s pretty accurate. I read this book all in one sitting – it pulled me in and I didn’t want to break away until I knew where it was going.

The hero of Thin Space is a young man named Marsh, a teenage boy still reeling from his twin’s recent death. Marsh is consumed with finding a way to get in touch with his recently deceased brother, but not just any way: he wants to find a “thin space,” one of the portals of Celtic legend that his elderly neighbor told him about shortly before her death.

I was drawn entirely into Marsh’s mind while reading this book. I saw his world as he did, felt the cold ground under my bare feet, could put my hands up against the barrier of grief that separated Marsh from other people. It’s truly remarkable, then, that the author managed to pull off  a huge end-of-novel reveal. I knew there was a piece of information that I was missing about Marsh’s past, but I never suspected the truth.

Through Marsh, you get a glimpse of a small community that’s reeling from the tragic death of a young boy and the entire town’s inability to know how to act around the surviving twin. Eventually, with the help of a new neighbor who never knew Marsh as one half of a pair, he’s able to come to an important decision about he wants to live his post-twin life.

If you’re going to read Thin Space, I recommend that you steer clear of other reviews to make sure that no one spoils the ending for you! It’s worth the effort.

My thanks to Edelweiss and Simon Pulse/Beyond Words for providing me with a copy of this book for review.