☀️ Sunday Sharies: April 2024

Sephora Sale Finds, a Five-Star Dystopian Movie, and a Solar Eclipse.

It’s the last Sunday of the month, and you know what that means. There’s a lot of stuff we’d like to share that won’t fit in our usual Thursday TV newsletter. Some of that stuff is here. Read on for a special monthly peek into what your trusty Double Take duo has been watching, reading, listening to, and more.

— Jenni Cullen and Jess Spoll

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Jenni:
Knowing I’m a fantasy and sci-fi enthusiast, so many people have recommended The Fifth Season by N.K. Jemisin to me in the last year. When I finally came off the holds list for the title, I found myself immersed in one of the most creative worlds and magic systems I’ve experienced in a long time. I’m talking near Brandon Sanderson levels of world-building. There were definitely things about this book that left me frustrated and felt slightly unfinished or rushed, but as part of a trilogy, I suppose that’s to be expected. I still tore through it, though, and am anxiously waiting for book two to become available on Libby. (4/5 Stars)

Back in March, I was able to attend a book launch and signing event for the new novel Women of Good Fortune by Sophie Wan, and was excited when I finally had a chance to pick it up this month. It's a heist story set against the backdrop of a high-society Shanghai wedding that flits between themes of female friendship, class criticism, and self-discovery. It’s a little like an Ocean’s 8 and Crazy Rich Asians crossover episode — though I didn’t always love the execution, it was easy and fun. (3/5 Stars)

Then, Ready or Not by Cara Bastone really caught my eye because of it’s strong When Harry Met Sally-rom-com-vibes cover. The book was sweet as a slow-burn friends-to-lovers romance, but didn’t wow me, and its surprise pregnancy plot (that is central to the story and happens on the first page, so I’m not spoiling anything!) did ratchet up my anxiety a bit. (3/5 Stars)

Finally, while traveling to visit my fiancé’s family in Pittsburgh, I bit the bullet and read Crescent City: House of Flame and Shadow, the third book in Sarah J. Maas’s urban fantasy series. I needed a car read, and I guess it did the job, but it was sooo long (951 pages!!) and overstuffed with plot and too many POVs. I found myself skimming a lot just to see how it would all wrap up, and the crazy thing is that even after almost 1,000 pages, there are plenty of loose ends left over. I don’t think I can bring myself to keep up with this series going forward…a wikipedia synopsis will have to do. (2.5/5 Stars)

Jess:
After a torturously unproductive reading month in March, I felt pressure — entirely self-directed and without purpose — to ramp up my intake in April. I finished Beartown by Fredrik Backman, and while it seems like mine is a very unpopular opinion, I found it repetitive and contrived. The writer starts and ends many of the short passages with the most inane and trite aphorisms, like: “We devote ourselves to sports because they remind us of how small we are just as much as they make us bigger.” (2/5)

After having it on my TBR for quite a while, I finally picked up Severance by Ling Ma, widely known for being a book about a worldwide pandemic that was released just a year before our actual worldwide pandemic. It (mostly) succeeds as a satirical allegory, and I appreciate the ambiguity in the tale, but it was underwhelming to me as a novel. Perhaps it would’ve worked better as a short story. (3/5)

When I’m not listening to audiobooks, I’ve been working on (read: struggling through) Midnight is the Darkest Hour by Ashley Winstead, a thriller set in a small town in the Bible Belt. I’d easily sped through Winstead’s previous murder-mystery, In My Dreams I Hold a Knife, but this one hasn’t developed any interesting plot points or characters, and I’m at the 65% mark. So far, it just feels like a bland rip-off of Where the Crawdads Sing.

I’ve been doing much better with my audiobook listening, thankfully. The Leftover Woman by Jean Kwok is a family drama with an intriguing central mystery that unfolds without an over-reliance on twists (4/5). What Have We Done by Alex Finlay is a thriller about a group of adults whose dark past catches up with them; it’s ridiculous and outlandish but I love Finlay’s twists, and it kept me engaged throughout (3.5/5). What Lies in the Woods by Kate Alice Marshall is another thriller (shocking, I know) about a woman who was attacked as a child and has to confront her memories of what really happened in those woods long ago. This one plods along pretty slowly, just to shove a bunch of twists into the last ten percent, which is not a format that I enjoy, but I can see people liking it more than I did (3/5). And finally, I got my hands on Jessica Knoll’s newest novel, Bright Young Women, a fictional account of the Ted Bundy killings from the perspective of two of his victims. This flips the usual true crime script in a way that I appreciate — highlighting the victims and moving the perpetrator to a footnote — but I’m confused by the decision to base the story on real crimes but not the real victims, and the fictionalized characters were dull and flat (2.5/5).

Jess: I got to see an early screening of The Bikeriders, the upcoming Austin Butler movie about a motorcycle club in the American Midwest in the 60s.