This took awhile to get through but got a lot more interesting once one of them, a 4th gen nepo baby (I think?), managed to become pope, and then how the Medici was trying to maintain their seat in the papacy in the years to come but facing obstacles like lack of sons or disease. I especially enjoyed the last bit where we get to hear about how much Marguerite-Louise hated her mummy's boy of a husband and her constant rebellion through twelve years of forced marriage. It's honestly so messy that I can't help but be impressed by this book keeping everything in order. I was also thinking how true this was to the Chinese saying about old families going down the 做牛做马 to 骑牛骑马 to 卖牛卖马 pipeline. I thought it was just once or twice but it was almost every time that the next successor ended up being not so great, not popular, wasting money like crazy, before eventually dying of anything but old age. That's another thing, the pattern of deaths. I was reading this book in the vicinity of my partner so I announced it whenever yet another person dies of gout. It's so many of them. And there's dropsy (new to me), tuberculosis, malaria (like ???), or a random illness. It's not even surprising because there were so many plagues, which was something I didn't realise the actual scale of. Overall a very dense book that gives the reader a clear idea of the 5W1Hs of the 500 years between the 1200s and the 1700s in Florence; if you're very kaypoh like me and just want to know their business, you will get it here, but that's like maybe 15% of the content and the rest are records of reckless spending and political grappling.

As someone who read all her other books and loved them, no matter the similar treatment of theme or reuse of 'formula,' (we can psychoanalyse my enjoyment another time), this novel is a fine specimen of the kind of story I've come to expect, even anticipate, from the author. I love the pathetic protagonists, the moment reality tilts very suddenly into the realm of the darkly magical, the forgiving endings. I even love the way her books affirm female relationships (which is always core to her protagonists' eventual maturity) while being cheekily 'un-feminist' (our protagonist is always surrounded by malevolent catty bitches we're meant to hate, while the men characters are a bit simple). I saw echoes of 'Bunny' and 'Rouge.' I like it when someone is preoccupied with one idea and you can see its permutations across different works across the years. We see that a lot with artists (who do you think of when you see polka dots and pumpkins?) and I see this the same way. If this era never ends and she makes the same kinds of books forever, I'll be glad, but even if she makes something different, I'll read it.

The story goes that an Assistant Professor of a dying Theatre Studies department (that got subsumed into the larger English Department) is suffering from chronic pain resulting from a bad fall and bad recovery. The pain is debilitating and not a single treatment has helped. I wondered if this was about disability because a good 30% of this book is for making it clear how much suffering she's going through, how under-supported by her peers and institutions. She's basically alone and disrespected because she can't meet KPIs. She's obsessed with her glory days, back when she was a hot young promising stage actor, so desirable and still capable of desiring. One day, she meets three creepy men (it's giving the witches from 'Macbeth') who grant her the power to transfer her pain to others. She does this to people who were assholes to her and gets her life back, but like a doomed character hurtling towards danger, alluded to through the multiple Shakespearean references, she goes too far.

This is a slow-paced horror novel and I really don't want to spoil anything past the 50% mark so I'll just say that it's kind of like if the film 'Midsommar' was a ten-episode season, to give you an idea of the length and pacing. If you like stories about cults and delusional people, you'll like this book. The POV jumps around and so does the timeline so it can feel quite dense and require more focus.

Celia is a woman on the brink. She failed at MLM marketing, at forming lasting or meaningful relationships, and more recently, at carrying a pregnancy to term. Her loneliness is quite literally making her insane, so much so that she latches onto the idea of a closed-off community being her salvation. She heard about it only because of a friend she made, Adelaide, who returned home to Kindred Cove while pregnant and was then never heard of again. Celia has always glorified the place that Adelaide told her about. To me, it sounds like a dangerous cult, but to Celia, who yearns for family, belonging, and purpose, of course it would sound like paradise.

On the pretence of being there for a visitor programme, Celia arrives at Kindred Cove for a 5D4N stay, while hoping fervently that she can become a permanent resident. Her hunger blinds her to all the very sus things that are going on. I don't think it is just the leader being charismatic that makes the gaslighting so effective; on many levels, Celia also engages in self-gaslighting so that she can maintain the fantasy that the place is wonderful. There's also a creepy/ sentient reef that can perform 'miracles,' the possibility of the water being heavily contaminated, and women taking a one year holiday abroad with the purpose of getting pregnant to dilute the population's bloodline. A lot going on.

"There could be too little food, too little water, too little money, too little kindness, too little sense; there were never too many people."

This latest instalment of this ongoing non-chronological series talks about immigration, refugees, the role of charitable organisations, xenophobia, folk tales and their unexpected similarities across different cultures, and the problem of being 'neutral' when there are lives at stake. Cleric Chih is younger here, still recalling their training and modelling themself after older clerics, still making mistakes and faux pas in the heat of the moment. I found it funny how they strain against their vegetarian vows no matter how experienced they get, which is understandable when you see the kind of food they encounter on their travels.

The part that stuck with me the most was Chih's hosts, the restaurant owners who let them work for food and board. Like most of the town, the chef and his wife appear hostile towards the recent wave of refugees and the expected acts of desperation (like theft of food because they're all starving). Ironically but unsurprisingly, the employers' own ancestors were also immigrants and not indigenous, yet they seem unable to extend the empathy they would have appreciated themselves. Chih has different principles but they also owe it to their employers for treating them (personally) well, and the couple are also ultimately mostly good people. It's a grey area, so Chih does what they can for the refugees outside of work hours. I read it as a form of activism but one balanced uneasily against other social obligations.

As usual, although the book itself is short and technically a novella, it took me the same amount of time as a full-length novel to read because of how much was being said between the lines, which made me go very slowly so I could see what was being hinted at. I love this author's novels as well of course but this series really showcases her mastery. Can't wait for the next one!

Set in Glasgow, this dual-POV crime novel has unconventional detective figures in a young girl and her grandmother. Janey was out walking her dog one day when it leads her to a dead body, and the traumatic experience leads to memory loss of a very crucial hour. The deceased is the daughter of a powerful man so rumours abound that his enemies did her in, but there are lots of other suspects in the area. The police here are not only incompetent but also unethical bullies. Janey can't stop thinking about the dead woman and she wants to catch the culprit to do her justice.

The language takes a bit of time to get used to but this is very readable and manages to maintain the tension throughout. I found it interesting how nobody suspected a woman committed the murder, everybody was convinced it was a man. It was also interesting to see the case from a child's eye as Janey is in so many ways still very childish but you can witness how this encounter gradually forces her to mature enough to conduct her own investigations.

2009's a sort-of long time ago and while I was reading this book thinking that it was historical fiction for starting with the bombing of Nagasaki, it occured to me that there are people who would consider the portions set in 2001, post 9/11, as historical fiction too, although to me that feels contemporary and recent. I'm not going to try to summarise what happens because it is a lot, so expect a very immersive, sweeping, multigenerational family saga spanning the globe, taking you from Japan to Delhi, Karachi, New York, and Afghanistan.

I enjoyed this book for the most part because of the beauty. The writing is beautiful and the characters are beautiful and they think beautiful thoughts and have beautiful relationships with one another that transcend race, nationality, generations, oceans, and even politics. But something about all this did not sit well with me. The ending (which I have seen others describe as "powerful") I would describe as inevitable and disturbing and also a little difficult to swallow wholesale. I wondered if that was intentional, especially towards the end when we see how different Hiroko and Kim are in terms of why we should care about other people. I started out trusting Hiroko's perspective to guide my feelings about the other characters but that trust gradually dissipated.

The more I looked at it the more it felt like something Hegelian was being said here, like how no matter how much time has passed or how familial or benevolent these 'progressive' allies appear to be, at the end of the day one can only expect betrayal from those who believe deep down they are masters of the world. And this is in spite of their best efforts and in spite of them being generally good people (in Hiroko's generous estimation), almost like they physically cannot help it. I also liked that there was no clear stance on the issue of war or of using violence as a means to an end (e.g., retaliation), because the resultant discomfort can be productive for the reader.

When I opened the first page and saw a family tree my first thought was that there was going to be incest LOL that's what you get when it's Book 8 and you're already familiar with the storylines presented in the series. And the answer is yes, there is. Physical disability also features here in a way that I cannot definitively say is negative (you have to read to see what I mean). The high class women are all crazy gorgeous but also crazy horny. Honestly it's lowkey misogynistic but that's to be expected from something published eighty years ago about things that happened a hundred years ago. It wouldn't be a story about an old family line without the usual gothic elements after all.

The narrative is a memoir written by a third-rate mystery novelist who has a friend, a guy whose family has served the old family for generations, so now his dad is the de facto patriarch of the household and lover of the ex-patriarch's second wife. The second wife's daughter is a beauty who's being fought over by her LITERAL BROTHER (from the first wife and hunchbacked), a random hunchbacked artist from outside, and possibly also the novelist's friend, who may be her half-brother depending on who her true father is. It's very messy!! This novelist was invited to his friend's house, and the next day, a beheaded body was discovered and a 'cursed' sword that should have been locked up was found bloody. The local police are stumped (haha) so Detective Kindaichi appears to solve the mystery.

I love the original Miss Marple stories, because the idea of an old woman being an underestimated detective has always tickled me, so I was curious to see how this book would fare. I'm glad to say that old fans would find this both nostalgic and excitingly novel in terms of execution and treatment of the theme of justice. Narrated from multiple, potentially unreliable POVs, this whodunnit leads the reader through a maze of possibilities while cleverly concealing the truth. When I reached the finale, I immediately flipped back to reread the portions that contains clues I missed. Every time I thought I figured it out, I was wrong, and even when I nearly had it figured out, it wasn't exactly what I thought it'd be. It's great fun.

The setting is familiar: in a fancy hotel on the Swiss Alps, and in the aftermath of WW2, the guests find themselves confined to the premises for investigations after a body is discovered, presumably poisoned. In attendance is his wife, his mistress, his war buddy, his colleague, a French inspector, and Miss Marple and her friend. Could it be one of them? Could it be one of the staff? Could there be a political enemy lying in wait in the shadows, or is this vengeance for sins past? What looks like a nice holiday is revealed to be a cover for more nefarious plans, and the thing about murder is that once is almost never enough.

Thank you Times Reads for the ARC! All opinions are my own.