Sarah O'Connor

Interview – Joan Schweighardt, Author of the Rivers Trilogy

NotSarahConnorWrites

November 18, 2021

Hello everyone, I’m very happy to welcome Joan Schweighardt to the blog today! Joan is the author of nine novels which include two children’s books, two memoirs, and various magazine articles and is a winner of the Barnes & Noble “Discover Great New Writers” award, ForeWord Magazine’s “Best Fiction of the Year,” and a Borders “Top Ten Read to Me.” Her most recent work is the Rivers Trilogy, a historical fiction series (that I am thoroughly enjoying I might add) that spans between 1908 to 1929 moving between the New York metro area and South America. The series follows two different groups of people, the first two books following Irish American brothers as they try to make their riches in South America by rubber tapping, the journey and adjustment home, and the third follows a young woman who travels from Brazil to New York in hopes of finding success in the opera world.

I am so lucky to have Joan on the blog today where she tells me what she found about the history or rubber tapping so interesting, how her travels helped her writing, what she’s working on next, and much more!

40102009 49393632._SX318_SY475_ 55742951._SY475_ Continue reading

Book Review: Before We Died by Joan Schweighardt (Rivers #1)

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November 10, 2021

I received this book from The Next Best Book Club in exchange for an honest review.

“Wild rubber trees don’t grow in groves; they are spread throughout forests thick with vegetation and fraught with danger. Nor can trees be tapped throughout the year.
Still, people rushed to the jungle to make their fortune in rubber,” (Schweighardt 1).

After their mother’s psychic gives her the message that her departed husband wants his sons to go on an adventure, Jack and Baxter Hopper jump at the chance. They aren’t one for psychics but they’ll take any excuse they can to leave their jobs in Hoboken, New Jersey and travel to the South American rainforest where they hope to make their fortune tapping rubber trees. But their adventure takes a sharp turn once they arrive in South America and begin to experience not only the extreme hunger, floods, and deadly wildlife that lurk outside their tent but the psychological challenges they have no way of preparing for. Continue reading

Book Review: Deadheading & Other Stories by Beth Gilstrap

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October 31, 2021

I received this book from The Next Best Book Club in exchange for an honest review.

I was first brought in to Beth Gilstrap’s Deadheading and Other Stories from it’s gorgeous cover, what kept me going was the heartachingly stories inside. As the back of the book tells, these stories are deeply entrenched in the South. The stories are hot with tension, slow with sadness, and ready to smack you into reality right as you’ve settled in. The characters are so incredibly real and it was so easy to love and care for them in such short passages. Gilstrap’s collection is short, to the point, and filled with unforgettable stories I know I’ll turn back too.

You can read my thoughts on each story below: Continue reading

Book Review: Those Fantastic Lives: and Other Strange Stories by Bradley Sides

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October 19, 2021

I received this book from The Next Best Book Club in exchange for an honest review.

When going into Those Fantastic Lives: and Other Strange Stories, it’s important to focus on the strange part of the title. I mean that in the best way possible, I’ve long been a lover of strange stories but have never read an anthology comprised of only strange stories. Fantasy and sci-fi, yes, horror sure but never strange. I ignored the “strange” when I began this collection, focusing instead on the “fantastic lives” bit, and while the characters in these stories definitely have some fantastic lives, I found myself thrown off my the strange. So know that this collection of stories is strange and heavily rooted in magical realism and you’ll be fine!

That being said, they’re beautiful stories. They’re quite short so I breezed through this collection much faster than I thought I would, if anything I enjoyed some of these stories so much that the brevity of them just made me want some of these plots to be a little more stretched out. The stories are all so unique and wonderful to get lost in, ranging from love to heartache, Sides knows how to get his reader’s emotional. The main theme of the collection seems to be love, it’s so powerfully felt in many of the stories, it’s easy to feel how deeply Sides cares for these stories and it was wonderful to feel as a reader. Those Fantastic Lives: and Other Strange Stories is a fantastic collection with stories that stick, that make the reader’s feel and really care for the characters even though their stories are small.

You can read my thoughts on each of the stories in the collection below: Continue reading

Book Review: Stalker Stalked by Lee Matthew Goldberg

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October 12, 2021

I received this book from The Next Best Book Club in exchange for an honest review.

“My stalker is smart, just like I would be. He or she finds the shadows. Shows up when I’m wasted or popped too many little blue pills. So I’ll be far enough away from reality to believe they are real…I know this because that is what I would do,” (Goldberg 7).

Depressed, alcoholic, and self-medicating thirty-year-old Lexi Mazur doesn’t have a lot going for her, especially when her boyfriend Steve dumps her. But she manages to find happiness in her reality TV shows, especially Socialites, becoming obsessed with it’s star Magnolia Artois. Lexi follows her on social media and knows she and Magnolia would be friends and that she would be a good addition to the show. And Magnolia posts so often, it isn’t hard to figure out where she’s going to be and to just happen to be in the same spot. It’s how she won over Steve and her other ex Jeremy, manipulating things in her favour is easy for Lexi, stalking even easier. But now Lexi’s feeling watched, or is it just the pills making her paranoid? When notes and threatening phone calls are coming to Lexi’s apartment she wonders who her stalker is, could it be Magnolia afraid of losing the spotlight? Her only friend Pria who Lexi thinks has an unhealthy relationship with her? Lexi will have to use her own stalking skills to find out who her stalker is, but could her stalker be even better than she is? Continue reading

Book Review: Baby Teeth by Zoje Stage

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October 10, 2021

“He didn’t see what she did, and she could never really tell him what was really wrong – that it had all been a mistake: She didn’t know how to be a mother; why had that ever seemed like a good idea?” (Stage 4).

Seven-year-old Hanna loves her Daddy. He understands her better than anyone and he is her most special person. She imagines a life where just her and Daddy get to live happily each day, but Mommy stands in the way, and Hanna thinks it’s time for her to leave. Suzette loves her mute daughter, despite Hanna acting out only for her to see, despite homeschooling her for years after she is expelled from every school she and her husband try to enroll her in. But Suzette has noticed a surprisingly violent tone to Hanna’s mischief, and already battling an autoimmune disease, she wonders how much longer she can handle her daughter. Continue reading

Book Review: The Beast in Aisle 34 by Darrin Doyle

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October 7, 2021

I received this book from The Next Best Book Club in exchange for an honest review.

“Death was all around us, constantly. Why was it so easy to ignore? Why didn’t people go mad, everyone terrified and helpless, blind to when or how death would visit them, or what world stood beyond the threshold? Were we dust, or were we immortal? Expendable or sacred? Fertilizer, or divine?” (Doyle 212).

Life isn’t going to well for Sandy Kurtz. He’s in his thirties and working at Lowe’s, his wife doesn’t love him anymore and now they have a baby coming, oh and Sandy’s also a werewolf. Six months ago after leaving his apartment after an argument with his wife and getting into a strange accident, Sandy finds that every full moon he now turns into a fearsome, carnivorous wolfman. But he’s sure he can handle it, he keeps finding ways to get his wife out of the house during the full moon, and he tries to stick to the forested areas where there are lots of dear. But will it be enough? Can Sandy continue to keep the wolfman at bay, and what will happen when the baby’s born? Continue reading

Book Review: Dune by Frank Herbert

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October 1, 2021

“Fear is the mind-killer. Fear is the little death that brings total obliteration. I will face my fear. I will permit it to pass over me and through me. And when it has gone past me I will turn to see fear’s path. Where the dear has gone there will be nothing. Only I will remain,” (Herbert 283).

With the new movie coming out and the book itself just being a classic sci-fi novel, I’ve been curious to read Dune for awhile. I was luckily gifted a beautiful copy by my sister for Christmas last year with teal-sprayed pages and artwork on the inside of the dust jacket as well as on the front and back cover. Was I surprised to find that the book was 688 pages? Yes. Was I even more shocked to learn that Dune is only the first in a six book series? Double yes. I made it my challenge to finish the book by the end of September and somehow I did it. Continue reading

Book Review: Nightbitch by Rachel Yoder

NotSarahConnorWrites

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September 6, 2021

CW: Animal abuse.

“How many generations of women had delayed their greatness only to have time extinguish it completely? How many women had run out of time while the men didn’t know what to do with theirs? And what a mean trick to call such things holy or selfless. How evil to praise women for giving up each and every dream,” (Yoder 161).

One day a mother becomes convinced she is turning into a dog. Her teeth are sharper, there’s hair on the back of her neck, and what is that really just a cyst at the base of her spine? She watches over her two-year-old son full-time while her husband is away on business trip after business trip, finding herself alone and obsessing over her newfound canine qualities. Continue reading

Book Review: The Ones We’re Meant to Find by Joan He

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September 3, 2021

“But what use was logic? It ended where love began,” (He 360).

Cee has been trapped on an island for three years, slowly gaining her memory back. She doesn’t know how she arrived on the island, her own past, and it took her a bit to remember her name but she does remember that she has a sister named Kay somewhere across the ocean and Cee has to find her. Meanwhile sixteen-year-old Kasey Mizuhara lives in an eco-city, a floating city in the sky where she and it’s residents are protected from the natural disasters happening below. All eco-city residents are required to do is spend a third of their time in a stasis pod and attend meetings virtually to preserve their carbon footprint. Kasey enjoys life in the eco-city but her older sister Celia longs for a more human experience, the ones their ancestors had before climate change. But now three months later Celia is missing and while logic tells Kasey she’s dead she can’t stop herself from retracing her sister’s path, because Celia had secrets but so does Kasey.

I went from being a person who had never read any climate change books to reading two in one year. Still, I don’t think this is a genre I’ll be actively looking for. It’s privilege and selfishness on my part, being reminded about how much we’ve screwed the world and continue to do so is bleak and makes me existential, and I suffer from enough enough existential dread before reading books about climate change. Continue reading