Category: Reading

#REVIEW: The Caretaker, by Marcus Kliewer

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This is one of those books that you finish, put down, and then mutter “Fuuuuuck…” under your breath.

Marcus Kliewer has, I believe, written two books. I read his debut, We Used to Live Here, and reviewed it here. My review was a little on the mixed side; WUtLH features a really unreliable narrator, a literary trick I generally don’t get along with very well, and its genre is mindfuck. One thing that I’m noticing as I’m rereading the review, though, is that I finished the book in one sitting.

I also finished The Caretaker in one sitting, and I did not have “read an entire book cover to cover” on my to-do list for today. Now, granted, this isn’t a terribly long book, coming in under 300 pages and with a largish font on top of that, but I genuinely did not put it down once while I was reading it. This means that Marcus Kliewer has written two books, I have read them both, and I didn’t put either of them down while I was reading them.

That’s … really impressive.

The Caretaker is also a mindfuck, although not as intensely so as WUtLH. The main character, Macy Mullins, is a twenty-something and a bit of a fuck-up, with a doozy of an anxiety issue on top of that. She’s the parental figure for her younger sister Jenna, a seventeen-year-old with a penchant for casual shoplifting. Macy is broke and jobless, and the sisters are about to be evicted from their apartment when Macy happens to spot a want ad for a temporary caretaker position. She interviews and discovers that she’s being offered nine thousand dollars, a life-changing amount of money, for the simple task of three days of house-sitting. The house is old and isolated, buried deep in the wilderness off the coast of Oregon, but despite her sister’s reservations she jumps at it.

Oh, and there are some minor things you need to do while you’re house-sitting. No big deal. The former owner had some, uh, quirks, and maybe some OCD, and maybe a lot of OCD, and his wife promised him that as long as she lived in the house she’d keep up his little rituals that he thought literally kept the world safe. A promise is a promise, though, right? Here’s the list. Again, no big deal. Simple stuff.

You might not be surprised to learn that things don’t go well. Otherwise this isn’t that much of a book, right? Macy babysits the house and makes sure none of the lights turn on in the middle of the night. She makes a ton of money, buys a used car, and gets her and her sister back on track now that she can get to work. The end!

Nah.

Full disclosure: I got sucked directly into this book and it dragged me along at a breakneck pace until I was done with it, and it might be the kind of book I wake up tomorrow and find a dozen huge plot holes in. The three major book services I use for ratings– Amazon, Goodreads and Storygraph– all have it at under 4 stars, which isn’t alarming, necessarily, but it means the book isn’t exactly garnering universal acclaim. But oh, man, the ride it takes you on is great. It’s creepy as hell and the main character makes nothing but bad decisions from start to finish and if I could have found a way to cover my eyes and read the whole book through the cracks in my fingers I might have, except I haven’t found a way to turn pages or hold a book while I’m doing that. But I’m keeping a close eye on this Kliewer fellow from now on; I actually picked this one up from Aardvark without immediately realizing it was the We Used to Live Here guy. I will not be forgetting his name again.

Give it a read. Just make sure you have a few hours set aside before you do.

Read these four books

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The thought of writing full reviews of all of these makes me tired, and it’s been a long day and my wife is out of town for the next eight days for work so I’m kinda crabby and tired already, and I’ve tried to write these for a week and not gotten anywhere. So we’re going to do this! I’m going to post four book covers! You should read those four books. If you want to know more about them, ask me in comments, and I’ll either respond in comments or write a full review of them this weekend sometime when I’m feeling more like a human being who can be engaged with in society.

At any rate, Canticle woke up my Religious Studies Brain, and after finishing it I immediately texted my friend with a doctorate in theology and insisted that she read it as soon as possible. This is historical fiction and is the only book on the list with no real genre elements, and God, it was so good. So so good.

I could have done without the romance angle in Weavingshaw, but everything else about it is so good that I can overlook it.

This was awesome, and one of the rare books that I wish was longer, especially for those of us who don’t really know anything about Moroccan culture. I wanted more story after The Thing happens, but The Thing doesn’t happen until very late in the book.

Absolutely brilliant, although I’m uncertain why Kay used his fictional Sarantium and didn’t just use Constantinople. I mean, there’s bits of magic and the supernatural here and there, so maybe that in and of itself is why, but I could have accepted a Byzantine Empire with that stuff. I have the sequel to this on my shelf already, though, and this is my first book by Guy Gavriel Kay, but I suspect I’m going to read a lot by him this year.

#REVIEW: Girl Dinner, by Olivie Blake

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This week I’m going to try to catch up on book reviews I should have already written, so naturally I’m going to start with the book I just finished yesterday. I’m not completely sure what caused me to pick this up beyond amusement at the title and the lovely pink stained edges; I feel like there was something else but it was a while ago.

Girl Dinner is a flawed book in a lot of ways; the middle is kinda flabby, the end comes out of nowhere unless I seriously missed something, and a lot of the time the characters, either being academics or literal sophomores, have their heads firmly implanted in their asses. There is a lot of navel-gazing in this book, to mix metaphors, and it gets tedious sometimes.

But despite that, fundamentally the book works, and I need somebody else to read it and talk about it with me. The book is a satire– mostly, at least– and explores the intersection of academic feminism, modern femininity, social media and Greek (specifically sorority) culture, with just the tiniest little squirt of the supernatural over it all for, y’know, flavor. The two main characters are the aforementioned sophomore girl who is rushing one of the most exclusive sororities on campus, and an exhausted adjunct professor with an eighteen-month-old and a husband who isn’t worth much. The characters’ stories start off entirely separate other than that they share the same university, but by the end of the book everything knits itself together really nicely, at least up until the wait, what? that happens on the last page.

I handed this four stars; I wouldn’t be too pressed if you gave it three, and if the middle hadn’t been a little much I might have given it five, if only because I know enough academics to know (and I say this with love) that navel-gazing is kinda y’all’s thing. I need someone who thinks it sounds interesting to read it and then be my friend, because I want to talk about it with someone.

Monthly Reads: May 2026

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What I’m learning, looking at this, is that I should have written more book reviews this month. Because Canticle, We Burned So Bright and Sailing to Sarantium could all be Book of the Month and I only reviewed one of them.

Unread Shelf: May 31, 2026

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Yeah, yeah, yeah, shelves, whatever. The good news is I’ve cleared out everything I bought in 2025! Let’s pretend that’s an achievement.

#REVIEW: From the Depths, by Emily Renk Hawthorne

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I don’t like writing this kind of review.

I was sent this book by Emily Renk Hawthorne’s publicist for a review– not only was I sent this book, but also the first book in the series, in a nice hardcover edition, and when I cracked this open to read it I discovered she’d actually sent me a copy with a signed bookplate in it, which genuinely makes me feel bad about how I’m going to review the book. I’m going to keep this brief: I liked Book One, Of Mountains and Seas, well enough, but it had some problems; my review was mixed but ultimately I liked the book enough to request and read the sequel.

Unfortunately, having completed From the Depths, I feel that it has all of the same problems as the first book, and introduces a few new ones besides, while simultaneously not showing some of the strengths of the first book. Mountains and Seas jumped back and forth among several different periods in time, for example, and rewarded paying attention. This may be the first time I’ve ever complained about a straightforward narrative, but it’s a much simpler text. Mountains and Seas had a clear villain. This book’s bad guy is a nonsentient puddle of silver goo. That’s not a joke.

The author’s habit of choosing the wrong word continues to be an issue as well, and starts off on the very first page, where the word “sinkhole” is repeatedly used to describe the first appearance of the goo. I’m not going to get into the details, but the phenomenon being described in that first chapter is simply not a sinkhole. Sinkholes do not happen indoors.

I gave this two stars on Goodreads and Storygraph; one less than Mountains and Seas. I cannot recommend that you read it. I’ll leave it at that.

From the Depths releases on June 9.

Wheel of Time fans can’t be real

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Come on, guys. It’s okay. It’s your old pal Luther, here. You can admit it. This is all one giant, decades-long piss-take, right?

I finished Book Eight of this nonsense last night, nearly seven hundred pages in which absolutely nothing happens until the last twenty pages and then not much happens in the climax. I am going to finish this series this year, powered by pure spite and nothing else, and you should all be very proud of me for how little whining I have done about it here. Even if you feel like I’ve complained about these books a lot, you have no idea how much I have held back. Book Eight begins what even fans of the series call “The Slog.” Or maybe it’s Book Seven! They can’t agree.

I owe the publishers of the book I’m reading now a review, and I’m really wondering if I’m not being fair to the new book by putting it after a WoT book. Because oh man did I go straight to I Bet It Would Be Fun to Annotate This and Rip It to Shreds mode.

Anyway. For the record, I genuinely don’t care if you’ve enjoyed these books or not, and there are multiple people I really respect (such as, for example, my actual wife) who are fans of them, I just … I don’t get it, and I don’t think I ever will at this point. I’m still finishing the God damned things one way or another, though.

Had a weird moment during my prep/lunch period at work today, where a whole bunch of shit all piled up on me at once and I damn near had a meltdown over a bizarre assortment of objectively minor inconveniences. I’m still not used to the new glasses. I made bad lunch decisions, and on top of that I was given a Diet Coke instead of a Coke, or maybe it was just super low on syrup. I’ve bitten my lower lip in the exact same spot roughly seventy times in the last few days. My classroom hasn’t been vacuumed in several days, and the cruft that is still on the floor is resistant to my broom. And the anxiety over this summer school thing continues to ramp up; I looked a little bit more closely at what little information I have and I’m now definitively convinced they’ve handed me two grades at the same time.(*) And probably a few other things that I’m not remembering at the moment. And … man. I managed to work my way out of it before the kids showed up, which was good, especially since I had to double up my advisory again. Nobody wants Mr. Siler to lose his mind and go home early during the last week of school, especially since I just remembered another one of those little inconveniences and it was being handed yet another piece of essential paperwork that I needed to do about taking the last day of school off– which, remember, I told my boss about in January.

One good thing is I do think I’ve actually convinced myself that next year’s eighth graders should be fine. There’s still a billion ways that could go wrong, and my partner teacher continues to stubbornly refuse to admit that she’s jumping to the high school next year.

I would appreciate knowing something about anything involving the next few months within the next couple of days, thanks.

(*) Does this mean that both groups are tiny, and I’ll have a tiny group? Or are both groups normal sized, and I’ll have a huge group? What even is a huge group in this context, since they’ve told us nothing about the kids we have coming? Am I doing math and reading for both groups– so four preps in three hours? Is anyone ever going to respond to any of my emails?

A disappointing fact

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I finished the Tesla book last night, and the most interesting thing I learned about Nikola Tesla is that J.P. Morgan had rhinophyma and was apparently (and unsurprisingly) a colossal asshole about it. Unfortunately, that isn’t a fact about Nikola Tesla!

Anyway, I started Soraya Bouazzaoui’s Aicha last night, and based on the first chapter I suspect I’m going to like it quite a bit.

… and after staring at my screen for five minutes without writing a word, that might be the most interesting thing I have to say tonight. We had a field trip this morning; the 8th grade split up and went to three different colleges, and apparently everyone had very different experiences. We had a campus walking tour and that was basically it. Not bad, necessarily, but not worth the large amount of legwork and nonsense that a field trip requires. Tomorrow I have a study session after school for however many of my algebra kids want to stay after school to prepare for their final on Thursday. Thursday I have the last meeting of my weird little gay kids club. And after that, I’m basically done, except for the part where I have five more days of actual school to survive.

Well, I’ll survive it; I’m fairly confident of that, having done it many times before. The operative question is how many of them will survive it. Hopefully all of them, but I’m not making any promises. The words “If you two idiots don’t sit down I’m going to set the entire room on fire” came out of my mouth today, so I may be nearing the end of my patience.

I mean “idiots” in the most loving way possible, and “set the entire room on fire” as a metaphor for the power of my love, of course.