Music Monday (297): Aurora, K. Michelle

Rules:

• Music Monday is a weekly meme hosted by Lauren Stoolfire at Always Me that asks you to share one or two songs that you've recently enjoyed. For the rules, visit the page HERE 

Breana: This week I wanted to mention another one of my favorite songs from Aurora's What Happened to the Heart? This one is called The Blade.

Andrea: Hi all! This week I'm listening to A Mother's Prayer by K. Michelle. Have an amazing week!

What are you listening to this week?

Devil is Fine by John Vercher

Title: Devil is Fine
Author: John Vercher
Source/Format: Celadon Books; Paperback ARC

More Details: Literary Fiction; Contemporary Fantasy
Publisher/Publication Date: Celadon Books; June 18 2024

Goodreads     Celadon (Book Page) 

Synopsis From Celadon:

Reeling from the sudden death of his teenage son, our narrator receives a letter from an attorney: he has just inherited a plot of land from his estranged grandfather. He travels to a beach town several hours south of his home with the intention of immediately selling the land. But upon inspection, what lies beneath the dirt is much more than he can process in the throes of grief. As a biracial Black man struggling with the many facets of his identity, he’s now the owner of a former plantation passed down by the men on his white mother’s side of the family.

Vercher deftly blurs the lines between real and imagined, past and present, tragedy and humor, and fathers and sons in this story of discovery—and a fight for reclamation—of a painful past. With the wit of Paul Beatty’s The Sellout and the nuance of Zadie Smith’s On Beauty, Devil Is Fine is a darkly funny and brilliantly crafted dissection of the legacies we leave behind and those we inherit.

When I finished reading Devil is Fine by John Vercher, I had so many initial thoughts that it made it difficult to summarize what I felt about it. And I didn't even know where to start.

So I guess I'll start with the story. It revolves around the unnamed narrator's identity and the throes of that. While it mostly seemed to pertain to his professional life and having to deal with owning a plantation, it was also carefully woven into a story about a man dealing with grief and somehow coming to terms with where he is in life. Of course it was not a smooth road since there were odd and disconcerting experiences along the way. He was aided by the occasional words of wisdom from the more frequent characters, Freddy and Clarence. A bar owner and frequent bar customer respectively, their own life and experiences tended to add a different angle to what the narrator was going through. On the flip side, there were a lot of times where I wondered just why he was doing what he was, but some of that was answered much later on.

Another thing I noticed was the writing. It's in first person and begins shortly before the burial of the narrator's son, Malcolm. From the beginning to the end, the main character often thinks of and addresses him while chronicling his ongoing life. Sometimes he would wonder what Malcolm would say if he was there during a conversation, for example. Along with the main character's musings, it is mainly through occasional chapters in between that showed who Malcolm was growing up. I honestly wasn't sure how I felt about these chapters at first. But, about half way through, I felt it both added to and left breathing room from the tension that was building throughout the book. Some of that was also probably from the general back and forth of the current time and various past memories from the narrator's own life and experiences.

Speaking of that tension, I was constantly on the edge of my seat wondering what was going to happen next. Some of the story was predictable for me. But there were parts that weren't at all. The conclusion and ending are an examples of both of these feelings. Based on a few pages of conversations beforehand, I had thought that a particular scene was going to go a certain way. But I was wrong. Instead it was rather mundane (for the lack of more spoiler-y but probably better words I could use). It is at this point the character growth is fully realized with many truths coming to light. Even being a little sad and grim, overall it definitely felt more in line and satisfactory with the way the bulk of the story was written. So I was somewhat happy to be wrong. As for the last pages, the end? Well, it was a tear jerker.

As a whole, I truly liked Devil is Fine. The surreal nature of it, dialogue, complicated relationships, and even the tougher, more serious tones mixed with some lighter ones. All that to say, it became a page turner and I really enjoyed reading it.

Thanks for reading!

Disclaimer: I received an ARC copy of this book from Celadon Books for this review. Thank you!

Note: this review was originally posted on Toile, Think, Go (HERE)

Music Monday (296): Remi Wolf

Rules:

• Music Monday is a weekly meme hosted by Lauren Stoolfire at Always Me that asks you to share one or two songs that you've recently enjoyed. For the rules, visit the page HERE 

Breana: I'm currently listening to Remi Wolf's latest album, Big Ideas. One of my favorite songs is Soup.

What are you listening to this week?

I Listened to What Happened to the Heart? by Aurora

For the past few years I’ve been following Aurora’s music. Her last one, The Gods We Can Touch, was one of my favorite releases of 2022, so I was more than excited for what would come next. Aurora’s fifth studio album was released on June 7, 2024. Titled What Happened to the Heart?, it’s prefaced with a remark about a letter the artist read, which influenced the direction of this latest body of work, and it was to great effect. And with that, welcome back to the music minded corner of Our Thoughts Precisely!

What Happened to the Heart? was supported by a handful of singles—I mentioned a couple of them previously as my picks for different Music Monday posts. These include songs like Your Blood, Some Type of Skin, The Conflict of the Mind, To Be Alight, and Starvation. I already liked what I’d heard, and it built up a high expectation for the album, on my end.

And yet, in the end, I was still surprised, especially hearing the singles in the context of the album as a whole. It created a cohesive listening experience without being repetitive. Every song felt like its own self-contained chapter within the album. It was indie pop with some disco and techno influences, as well as dipping its toes into a folksy flare at times (for example A Soul With No King). It was grounded in the core theme surrounding the question posed by the title, delivered with Aurora’s distinctive vocals. As I mentioned above, everything was done to great effect.

I could go on and on all day about What Happened to the Heart?, but the best way to experience the album is by actually listening to it. This is one of Aurora's best. So, if you can’t tell, I highly recommend it.

Give Me Something Good To Eat by D.W. Gillespie

Title: Give Me Something Good to Eat

Series: n/a 
Author: D.W. Gillespie
Source/Format: NetGalley; eARC
More Details: Middle Grade; Horror
Publisher/Publication Date: Delacorte Press; August 13, 2024

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Synopsis from Goodreads...

Perfect for fans of Hocus Pocus and Stranger Things, this middle grade debut tells the story of a boy who travels into an alternate version of his Halloween-obsessed town to save his sister from an evil witch and free the town from the witch’s curse. 

Fear comes home.Welcome to Pearl, a town obsessed with the spooky decorations, the costumes, the candy. No one seems to notice that every October 31st, a kid goes missing. Mason Miller does, though. Somehow he’s the only one who has any memory the person existed at all.When Mason’s sister, Meg, vanishes while they’re trick-or-treating, Mason and his friends are pulled into an underworld where monsters roam the streets. They need to fight the evil taking over Pearl, but none of them know the true danger they're facing.Meg has been stolen by a witch who has no plans to let her go. Shadows of death curl around trees and behind doorways as Mason must use every ounce of bravery he has . . . or be haunted forever with the memory of a sister that only he remembers.

Living in a town like Pearl, which is obsessed with Halloween, seems like it should be fun, at least in theory anyway. Well, that gets put into frightening perspective in D.W. Gillespie’s new middle grade horror novel, Give Me Something Good to Eat. Billed as perfect for fans of Stranger Things and Hocus Pocus, the story is a magical and nightmarish foray into spells, monsters, and what is functionally a curse lurking under the veneer of what should be all fun and games.

Mason Miller has something better and more important to do than take his little sister, Meg, trick-or-treating. Kids are going missing, and he’s one of the few who remembers. So he enlists the help of his closest friend, Serge. And Meg just wants her brother to go back to how he used to be. Most of the character motivations were simple. Mason wants to be the hero of the story, but his drive to solve the mystery is also far more personal. Serge wants to help out his best friend, while juggling Halloween night and a crush. Meg just wants to have fun and is annoyed when the night isn’t turning out how she wanted. It set up a tense dynamic, which offered an opening to the villains of story. It was, effectively, all about cause and effect, despite the good intentions of the character’s involved—they were just kids, and mistakes were bound to happen.

The Stranger Things and Hocus Pocus comparison is apt. The story, very early on, felt like an echo to the start of the film, while the TV show’s comparison won’t make much sense until after the story takes off, and Meg winds up being the next kid to vanish on Halloween night. That in itself provided one of the more intense sequence of scenes in the novel, where the anxiety, fear, and frustration was almost palpable—but it was only the start. The pop culture references aren’t what make the story. Instead its Gillespine’s spin on the monster genre and creative usage of spells and magic—as well as how intrinsically it was linked to the underlying horror, tension, and stakes of Give Me Something Good to Eat—that does.

Give Me Something Good to Eat is another good foray into middle grade horror, and I would recommend it to those who have enjoyed books like It Came From the Trees by Ally Russell and Bumps in the Night by Amalie Howard.

 

About the author....

A long time fan of all things dark and spooky, D.W. Gillespie began writing monstrous stories while still in grade school. At one point, his mother asked the doctor if there was anything she should be concerned about, and he assured her that some kids just like stories about decapitations. He's been writing on and off for over a decade, quietly building a body of work that includes horror and dark sci-fi. His novels include Still Dark, The Toy Thief, and a short story collection titled Handmade Monsters. He lives in Tennessee with his wife and two kids, all three of which give him an endless supply of things to write about

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Disclaimer: this copy of the book was provided by the publisher (Delacorte Press) via NetGalley in exchange for an honest review, thank you!