I feel like I’ve written posts before before about how I prefer my fiction with a bit of weird – a curious premise, a bit of magic, or even outright fantasy (although I still struggle with high-concept, high fantasy titles).
The three books I’m writing about today all have their own bits of weird – a mysterious illness, a plot that echos Quantum Leap, magic that works on the atomic level – but still rely on strong characters to create compelling stories. I loved all three in their own ways, and can’t wait to tell you more!
The Dreamers by Karen Thompson Walker
The Dreamers opens on a single floor in a college dorm in an isolated college town in southern California. After a night with friends, a first-year student falls asleep in her room… and just doesn’t wake up. The situation is perplexing, then worrying, then downright alarming as more and more people in the community just start falling asleep. Some don’t survive, while others exist in a kind of heightened sleep, dreaming more actively than doctors imagined possible. The book jumps between several families, biological and found, watching how they respond as the crisis with no simple explanation grows and evolves over time.
This book reminded me a bit of Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel, mostly in the way it made me feel while reading it. I read both books on long, slightly overcast afternoons, where it felt exactly right to just settle into a book of beautiful prose and see where it took me. I was moved by the point of view characters in this story, and intrigued by the small ways the story panned out to give some sense of how institutions might respond to an inexplicable crisis like this one. It felt like there were very few answers for all of the questions the book raised, but I loved reading it anyway.
The 7 1⁄2 Lives of Evelyn Hardcastle by Stuart Turton
I am not entirely sure how to describe the plot of this book, so I’m just going to give you the publisher’s summary and go from there.
There are three rules of Blackheath House:
- Evelyn Hardcastle will be murdered at 11:00 p.m.
- There are eight days, and eight witnesses for you to inhabit.
- We will only let you escape once you tell us the name of the killer.
Understood? Then let’s begin… Evelyn Hardcastle will die. She will die every day until Aiden Bishop can identify her killer and break the cycle. But every time the day begins again, Aiden wakes up in the body of a different guest. Some of his hosts are helpful, and others only operate on a need to know basis.
This book is such a doozy of a read, with more twists-per-chapter than should be legally allowed in a single story. It’s completely bananas, and yet somehow the whole thing holds together in a way I do not entirely understand. My mom and I listened to this one as an audiobook, but ended up having to buy the print version just so we could go back and see what we missed. There is one section that relies much to heavily on fat shaming to create character, but overall it was such a peculiar, weird and twisty delight of a book, I can’t wait to pick it up again.
King of Scars by Leigh Bardugo
I don’t even really want to bother writing a summary for this book, because it’s not a book I would recommend picking up if you’re new to Leigh Bardugo’s Grishaverse. King of Scars – a story about Nikolai Lantsov and his quest to save Ravka and himself – takes place after the events in both The Grisha Trilogy and The Six of Crows Duology. If you don’t mind spoilers, I think you could reasonably pick this one up and enjoy it, but the reading experience will be richer if you have the background of the five previous books.
That all said, if you’ve been in this world awhile, this book is such a great continuation. The plot expands the world we previously understood, and Bardugo’s grasp of her characters is just spot on. She writes the most charming, slow-burning love stories that just make my heart melt. It’s also been fun to watch characters evolve over the previous five books, and let characters who were in the background shine here. The conflicts continue to evolve too, leaning into some complicated issues that I’m excited to see tackled in the second half of this duology. If you’re looking for a great fantasy world to get into, start with Shadow and Bone and make your way here. It’s one of my favorites.
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Of the three you describe, the 7 1/2 Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle appeals to me the most.
I think you would like it, it’s definitely close to traditional mystery/thriller, just with this very weird magical element to the whole thing.
The Dreamers sounds like it would be short on action, but anything that reminds another reader of Station Eleven has to go on my list!
I’m not sure if it’s a totally fair comparison, but the two reminded me a lot of each other in feeling and mood. There is some action, but it feels pretty diluted and almost off screen for most of the book.
Ooooh, The 7 1/2 Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle sounds reeeeally cool. Thanks for pointing it out, going to take a look at it.
Other people have reacted a lot more strongly to the fat shaming part of it, and also pointed out that the female characters were pretty one dimensional, so you mileage may vary… but I really enjoyed the reading experience of it 🙂
I don’t know if Evelyn Hardcastle caught me on a cranky day or what, but man, I found the fat-shaming prohibitive. It made me want to kick the author directly in the shins, and I couldn’t get past it. 🙁 Which is sad because I LOVE a high-concept novel.
I think listening to it on audio helped me a bit with that part, it just sort of moves along and you can’t dwell on it because there are so many clues coming. But it was definitely a lot, and the book would have been better with less of it.