The Devil and the Dark Water – The Bookish Mutant

Happy Friday, bibliophiles!

I just finished my first week back to school, but after this, chances are I’ll be somewhat radio silent until I can get fully settled into my routine. The only reason that this post is seeing the light of day is that I start working on my wrap-up posts about a week in advance, so here we are.

Let’s begin, shall we?

GENERAL THOUGHTS:

Summer’s officially over, but the weather sure doesn’t seem to think so. Hopefully I won’t have to endure much more of my (long) walk to class in this 90+ degree heat.

That aside, I’ve had a good August, for the most part. My initial “yay, I’m going back to college!” got partially replaced by “oh god, I’m going back to college” closer to move-in, but I’m feeling better now. (The fact that I’m in a much nicer dorm than I was last year certainly helps. It doesn’t constantly reek of weed in here! Huzzah!) I had the opportunity to soak up the last dregs of summer beforehand, at least. I finished up my summer job at the library, bought a catnip toy for my cat for his sweet 16, completed another trip around the sun, and blew part of my paycheck on books to celebrate said trip around the sun. Worth it.

My blogging’s been a tad slower since I’ve been trying to get everything together before I moved in, but I feel like I’ve still been able to be productive. I’ve enjoyed reviewing all of my books this month and putting together graphics and going off about music. And I got in one book tag that WordPress screwed up and I had to recreate from scratch, but it was fun in the end. Once my schedule figures itself out, I’ll get back on the writing train, but for now, I’m mapping out the best route to my class in That One Building on the other side of campus.

Other than that, I’ve just been drawing, watching Only Murders in the Building (for the love of god, can we just stop pairing Mabel with people who have zero chemistry with her 😭). Good Omens (pain, suffering, even), Heartstopper (Lucy Dacus and Wolf Alice paying in the same episode >>>>>>>), and Taskmaster (“you’ve got no chutzpah”), and reveling in the fact that my new dorm has air conditioning. It’s the (not so) small things.

READING AND BLOGGING:

I read 17 books this month! Other than the one stinker in the batch (sorry, The Surviving Sky), it’s been a great reading month in terms of quality and in terms of quantity. Expect some kind of mini-review post for all of the books I bought for my birthday and the books I got as gifts, because they’ve all been fantastic so far.

1 – 1.75 stars:

The Surviving Sky (Rages, #1) – Kritika H. Rao (⭐️.75)

3 – 3.75 stars:

Sea Change – Gina Chung (⭐️⭐️⭐️.5)
The Lost Dreamer – Lizz Huerta (⭐️⭐️⭐️.5)
Nightbirds (Nightbirds, #1) – Kate J. Armstrong (⭐️⭐️⭐️.5)
The Blighted Stars (The Devoured Worlds, #1) – Megan O’Keefe (⭐️⭐️⭐️.5)
Machinehood – S.B. Divya (⭐️⭐️⭐️.75)
Imogen, Obviously – Becky Albertalli (⭐️⭐️⭐️.75)
The World of Edena – Mœbius (⭐️⭐️⭐️.75)

4 – 4.75 stars:

Mean Baby: A Memoir of Growing Up – Selma Blair (⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️)
The Night Masquerade (Binti, #3) – Nnedi Okorafor (⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️)
The Devil and the Dark Water – Stuart Turton (⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️)
Warrior Girl Unearthed – Angeline Boulley (⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️)
The Book Eaters – Sunyi Dean (⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️)
Verse, Chorus, Monster! – Graham Coxon (⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️)
A Memory Called Empire (Teixcalaan, #1) – Arkady Martine (⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️)
A Half-Built Garden – Ruthanna Emrys (⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️.25)

5 stars:

This is How You Lose the Time War – Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone (⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️)

FAVORITE BOOK OF THE MONTH: This is How You Lose the Time War – 5 stars

POSTS I’M PROUD OF:

I had fun reviewing Magonia, Machinehood, Nightbirds, and Imogen, Obviously!
Music rambling! Here are my Sunday songs from 8/6, 8.13, 8/20. and 8/27.
I had fun with the Waffle Book Tag!

POSTS FROM OTHER WONDERFUL PEOPLE THAT I’VE BEEN ENJOYING:

SONGS/ALBUMS THAT I’VE BEEN ENJOYING:

UNDERRATED ALBUM ALERT

the catchiest

guess who blew through season 2 of Heartstopper in less than a week

too groovy to clean the bathroom to

good lord I love Lisa Germano

this song tickles my brain in the most pleasant way possible

man I need to listen to more P.J. Harvey

Today’s song:

deliciously 90’s earworm

That’s it for this month in blogging! Have a wonderful rest of your day, and take care of yourselves!

Happy Tuesday, bibliophiles!

I’ll admit to being not much of a mystery reader; I’m terrible at predicting who perpetrated (x) crime, so I just end up going along for the ride like a dog sticking its head out of a car window. But I thoroughly enjoyed Evelyn Hardcastle, from its consistent suspense to its creative takes on the genre.

Enjoy this week’s review!

The 7½ Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle by Stuart Turton

The 7 1/2 Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle – Stuart Turton

Aiden Bishop has no memory of who he is, or who he was before. All he knows is this: he is currently attending a masquerade ball at Blackheath Manor, and that at the end of the night, a famous socialite by the name of Evelyn Hardcastle will die. Every day, time starts over, and Bishop wakes up in the body of a different party guest. The only way for him to break out of Blackheath Manor is to answer this question: who killed Evelyn Hardcastle?

𝔧𝔲𝔰𝔱 𝔶𝔬𝔲 — chewbacca: KNIVES OUT dir. Rian Johnson — god, I need to watch this movie again

TW/CW: murder, suicide, gunshot wounds, near-death situations, forced marriage, poisoning, drinking

Listen. I don’t often read mysteries, but even with a limited body of work to base my thoughts off of, I can say with certainty that this is one of the most creative mysteries that I’ve ever read.

The 7 1/2 Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle has drawn comparisons to the likes of everything from Agatha Christie to Groundhog Day, and I can see the threads of both in this novel! It certainly had the feel of a classic mystery, and the cyclical, time-twisting element reminded me a lot of Groundhog Day with very different stakes. In fact, Turton’s playing with time is what made Evelyn Hardcastle such an enjoyable book; with each day that Aiden experiences, the stakes are raised even higher, building a very unique brand of suspense. I’m not usually one for back-and-forth time jumps, but Evelyn Hardcastle had a precise and clear reason for doing so, and the chapter layout worked just as well to increase the tension.

Going into Evelyn Hardcastle, the concept of switching between the bodies of guests was what intrigued me most. This aspect was easily the most well-executed element of them all, bringing in a twisty and creative factor to a mystery that would otherwise seem like any other period piece murder. The fact that all of the guests were, on some level, deplorable people made this facet of the book all the better; each one of them had any number of nasty skeletons in their closets, which made the question of Evelyn’s murder all the more intriguing—it could have been anyone.

I didn’t expect for the mystery to be an orchestrated test as well; the added element of multiple body-switching guests and the enigmatic Plague Doctor character created a new layer of suspense, which not only made the stakes higher, but also stranger. The idea that the key to Aiden’s freedom was solving Evelyn Hardcastle’s murder was all the more interesting given that this twisted “game” of sorts was orchestrated by any number of cryptic agents was such an inventive way of creating tension, so hats off to Turton for finding all sorts of ways to craft a suspenseful mystery!

Plus, the amount of red herrings that got thrown around…I’m notoriously bad at a) figuring out mysteries, and b) falling for false bait, so I tend to give up on trying to solve the mystery itself and just go along for the ride. That being so, I loved all the ways that Turton threw us off the trail as readers; in multiple instances, there were times that Evelyn Hardcastle’s murder seemed deceptively simple, but there were ruses on top of ruses (or: a donut hole in a donut’s hole) that slowly unfolded to uncover the real cause of her death. I’m sure that it’s just the kind of thing that mystery readers eat up—and I certainly ate it up, even as someone who rarely reads in the genre.

Also, without spoiling anything—the fact that Evelyn Hardcastle could technically count as sci-fi (according to the interview with Stuart Turton) makes it so much more fascination, not just because I love sci-fi so much, but because of the implications that has for the origin of Blackheath Manor in the first place. FASCINATING stuff.

All in all, a crafty mystery that employed all manner of creative twists to hook the reader in. 4 stars!

The 7 1/2 Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle is a standalone, and it was Stuart Turton’s debut novel. Turton is also the author of The Devil and the Dark Water, and contributed to the anthology You Are Not Alone.

Today’s song: