Sarah O'Connor

Book Review: Daughter by Claudia Dey

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September 26, 2023

“To be loved by your father is to be loved by God,” (Dey 17).

Despite everything, Mona Dean can’t stay away from her famous writer father Paul Dean. Not when he left her mother and sister when she was eleven, not when he ignored the abuse his new wife, Cherry, dealt against her and her sister as children, and certainly not when he wants her in his confidence to tell Mona that he’s fallen in love with another woman. Mona loves being in her father’s orbit, until Paul goes back to Cherry and tells her that Mona has always disliked her. Turned into the scapegoat, her father’s second family vilify her and her half-sister has now cut off contact. When Mona experiences an unexpected loss, she may finally be able to learn what real love looks like. Continue reading

Book Review: The Only One Left by Riley Sager

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September 24, 2023

“At seventeen, Lenora Hope/ Hung her sister with a rope/ Stabbed her father with a knife/ Took her mother’s happy life/ ‘It wasn’t me,’ Lenora said/ But she’s the only one not dead,” (Sager 9-10).

Kit McDeere is familiar with the childhood chant of Lenora Hope, the young teenaged girl who all those years ago was accused of murdering her family. But she was never found guilty, and hasn’t been seen for fifty-four years. Until Kit is hired as Lenora’s caregiver and expected to move into Hope’s End, where the murders took place. Kit would rather do anything than take the job, but after Lenora’s previous nurse fled in the middle of the night, and with her own accusations against her, Kit really doesn’t have any other options. And after a series of strokes and a case of polio has left Lenora bed-ridden and partially paralyzed, she really isn’t a threat. But Lenora has taken a shine to Kit, and with the use of a typewriter she has decided to tell Kit everything that happened the night of the murders. Continue reading

Book Review: Rouge by Mona Awad

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September 22, 2023

“Of course that’s you, the jars seem to whisper. Who else would it be?” (Awad 230).

Mirabelle Nour’s mother is dead. Travelling from Montreal to Southern California, Mira needs to get her mother’s estate in order, find a way to pay off her mother’s astronomical debt, all while maintaining her skincare routine. But when she’s invited to the mysteries La Maison de Méduse, where her mother was a member, Mira finds herself transformed. People are calling her Belle again, which hasn’t happened since she was a child, and she finds herself glowing. Belle is thrilled to find she’s been identified as a Perfect Candidate by the red-haired woman at the spa, whatever that means. Aside from the fog blurring her thoughts and words becoming lost, Belle is excited to go on her journey to become her most beautiful self. Continue reading

Book Review: Ducks – Two Years in the Oil Sands by Kate Beaton

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September 20, 2023

Cartoonist Kate Beaton recounts her time working in the Oil Sands after graduating from university. Eager to pay off her student debt, Beaton knows the best way to do that is a job in Alberta. Many Maritimers have done the same, and if it will get her out of debt fast and onwards to the career she wants then it’s worth it. But Beaton doesn’t understand what she’s in for until she gets there. Continue reading

Book Review: Bad Cree by Jessica Johns

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September 5, 2023

“When some dies, you stop remembering them fully,” (Johns 23).

Mackenzie wakes up with a crow’s head in her hand, but moments later it disappears as if it was never there to begin with. It isn’t the first thing Mackenzie has brought back from her dreams, but it is the most troubling. Night after night Mackenzie returns to her dreams where she sees a horrifying vision of her sister Sabrina who died the year before and returns to a memory at her family’s lakefront campsite and something that may or may not have happened in the woods. When she wakes up coughing up water from almost drowning and a text message from Sabrina, Mackenzie knows it’s time to return to her family in High Prairie, Alberta. She’s welcomed back but grief still hangs heavy among them, and when the dreams continue and get more dangerous for herself and her family, Mackenzie can’t help wondering if she’s a bad Cree for bringing all of this to them.

Book Review: A Day of Fallen Night by Samantha Shannon

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September 3, 2023

“We will all be stories one day, and I’d want someone to believe we existed. Wouldn’t you?” (Shannon 582).

For fifty years Tunuva Melim has been a sister of the Priory, trained to slay wyrms even though the younger generation has started to question the Priory’s purpose when no dragons have been seen for hundreds of years. In the North, Princess Glorian, daughter to Queen Sabran the Ambitious and the King of Hróth, prefers to live in the shadows of her parents since she fears she will never learn how to rule the Queendom of Inys as her mother does. In the East, Dumai has spent her life as a godsinger on Mount Ipyeda worshipping the dragons that have slept for centuries until a mysterious figure from her mother’s past finds her on the mountain. Wulfert Glenn, housecarl to the King of Hróth is dedicated to protecting Inys even though many around him see him as a heathen since he was discovered in the mysterious woods as a baby near his adopted home. When the Dreadmount erupts an age of terror, violence, and strange wyrms emerge that these characters will have to find the strength inside of themselves to save humanity. Continue reading

Book Review: Enter the Body by Joy McCullough

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August 26, 2023

“I won’t/ be used/ without consent./ You think me/ easy to ignore./ Perhaps I am./ But only notice me/ when you have use/ and I will scream/ so loud I’ll wake the dead,/ and they might have/ some words for you” (McCullough).

Cordelia, Ophelia, and Juliet gather beneath the trapdoor of the stage to retell their stories to the other women of Shakespeare’s plays who haunt the corners. All the while they ignore another teenage girl, Lavinia, horrifically maimed who silently takes their stories in. Continue reading

Book Review: Delicious Monsters by Liselle Sambury

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August 15, 2023

“You’re searching for something profound. Something to tug at your heartstrings…The house is an animal. And it wants to feed,” (Samsbury 234).

Daisy can see the dead. It’s an ability she’s had all her life which makes living in ghost-filled Toronto difficult. She usually has a handle on it, but when her boyfriend suddenly dumps her the dead come for her sadness. But when the uncle she’s never met dies and leaves Daisy and her mother his huge mansion in Timmins, Daisy sees it as the perfect opportunity to start again. This is the moment she and her mom have been waiting for, a chance for them out of their tiny apartment and to stop worrying about money and maybe, for Daisy, a chance at freedom. But her mom won’t let her in the mansion and she won’t tell her why, and the house turns out much different than it seems, Ten years later Brittney decides to investigate the “Miracle Mansion” that to the world reformed her abusive mother into the caring woman she markets herself as in her book, but Brittney knows better. She believes that if she can find out what happened to another young Black girl in the mansion a decade before she can expose her mother for the abusive woman she still is. But is Brittney seeing the story correctly or letting her own bias seep through? Continue reading

Book Review: The Executioner of Yrecep by Laura DiNovis Berry

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August 1, 2023

I received this book from the author in exchange for an honest review.

“The village hunters never even went close to that menacing forest, and if their prey happened to make its way through the treeline, they gave up the chase. There was nothing worth a trek into Yrecep Forest, or at least, there hadn’t been until today,” (Berry).

Taken in by the Coven as a young child, Pesdari hopes for a chance to escape one day. Though she has been taught in the ways of magic, she has also witnessed death and sacrifice and the terrifying closeness of their gods. When she witnesses her only friend Thade doing something horrifying, Pesdari finds an opportunity to leave with two unlikely companions. But will Pesdari be able to find freedom or become the gods ultimate sacrifice? Continue reading

Book Review: You’re Not Supposed To Die Tonight by Kalynn Bayron

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July 30, 2023

“‘I’m the final girl…Guaranteed to survive the night,” (Bayron 49).

Charity Curtis loves her summer job playing the “final girl” at Camp Mirror Lake, where a popular slasher horror movie, Curse of Camp Mirror Lake, was made. Guests come to Camp Mirror Lake and pay to be scared in recreated scenes from the movie in a full contact game where there are few survivors. But as Charity and her co-workers begin to close for the season they find some of their colleagues missing, another dead, and suddenly everything is becoming too real. Charity and her girlfriend are determined to survive the night, but they’ll need to find out more about Mirror Lake’s dark past first. Continue reading