The publishing industry abhors originality these days, sticking instead to the safe and familiar tropes. One of those is quaint books about old people. Another one are amateur sleuths with some sort of cognitive impediment.
Accordingly, the protagonist of this novel is an old woman who begins to suspect that something might be going wrong in the care facility. Don't expect a Miss Marple sort of sleuthing though, for this lady has Alzheimer and therefore only a rather precarious grasp of all the words she knows.
Thus, she is limited in expressing her suspicions, which creates the entire driving force behind this novel.
It's an intriguing concept, but this is less of an odd detective novel and more of an old person journey, complete with trips down memory lane and navigating the changing modern world (insert a strategically placed trans person of color here to make a point).
It is difficult for people with intact memory to know what it must be like for someone who is losing theirs. The author did a pretty good job of imaging that, down to some clever world play. Interestingly, his protagonist remains remarkably upbeat through it all, wither because she's just that Australian or because it's just that kind of a novel.  
The book is too feel-good by design for a lot of poignancy but has a main character likable enough to override that at time.  It is a very quick, easily marketable and digestible read, so if you're into that sort of thing, go for it. Thanks Netgalley.

It's always frustrating to see the author whose work you really liked to begin with go awry. Yet, it seems like an apt way to describe Moreno=Garcia's trajectory, given her recent track record.
She started off so strong fresh out of the gate and then began to veer into romance and fantasy and all that popular garbage out there.

With this book, it seems that she has tried to go back to something like Mexican Gothic but failed somewhere along the way.  Between the writing so flat and twee that it makes me question if her earlier work was actually good or if I was a less demanding reader then, the uneven weaving of three timelines (where it should have likely been two), and the truly cringe romance aspects, including a potent current of incest (sexy uncle), this was a very long 368 pages.

Moreno-Garcia has been plying the same formula steadily for years now - female protagonists and Mexican angle. A rather extreme case of "write what you know" that has worked well, but it makes you question whether the author wants to or even can do anything else? One may also question how much of this recent underwhelming work has been pandering to the market inexplicably and tragically gung-ho for romance and fantasy and the abominable portmanteau of both. 
Either way, the result leaves much to be desired. This book is readable. She can do that much well enough by now.  I enjoyed how dark her take on witches is and the few nice surprises toward the end, so I'll rate it generously. Tis the season and all.  But I am disappointed. Thanks Netgalley.

It stands to preface this review by saying that fantasy isn't my thing. But there was a chance that an author whose work I have read and enjoyed for many years, might make it worth a shot.
And so, I've set off to read this strange dark fable of a creature that once was Willem, a twelve-year-old boy in a medieval English village but is no longer that.
Brought back to life by an evil wizard, he is shunned by his parents and the locals and therefore retreats into the woods. Meanwhile, the wizard mad with power and ambition, seeks to take over the regional seat of power, starting with once Willem's village, and the villagers has no option but to turn to those they have scorned and ostracized (or worse) before for protection.

Once Was Willem is a dark, beautifully written fairy tale of monsters and men, magic and second chances. Your enjoyment of read will likely directly depend on your enjoyment of fantasy genre. Thanks Netgalley.

I stay away from all these uber-popular female (authors and protagonists) thrillers as far as I can, until something really draws me in. In this case, it was the author's reputation - I've read and enjoyed her books before. And to be fair, this novel isn't a really a thriller. To me, it read very much like a character-driven drama and a coming-of-age story.

Many kudos to Brown for managing to write a novel with a teenage protagonist without making it YA. Instead, Jane/Esme is a smart, resourceful, interesting person, a survivor and a fighter.
At seventeen, on the brink of the digital revolution that will reshape the world all around. she is living off-grid in Montana woods with only her father, a radical and a Luddite for company. The man is clearly and curiously unhinged, one of those people whose brains have turned against them. In his flight from the world, he comes to fear and resent, he has made some hard choices for himself and in turn imposed them on his only child, who has grown up in isolation and solitude. 
When they two of them finally step out into the world together (and for all the wrong reasons), everything changes.

This was a very good read that held my attention completely. The characters are as interesting and compelling as you want to see in a character-driven novel. This is a story of people doing what they believe is right at terrible cost, of juxtaposing cleverness and kindness, of the importance of truly seeing the people around you as they are and not as you wish them to be.  There is a lot of thoughtful meditation on our place in the world and, especially, on the place of technology in our lives. 
In the end, it seems that the novel is saying that wielding the power has everything to do with who wields it, be it biological or artificial intelligence. Without a strong moral compass, behind it, things can go awry either way. And what kind of paradise is that?

I may have expected a bit more from the ending and perhaps a bit more for the novel's protagonist, but either way, it was very much worth a read. Recommended. Thanks Netgalley.

​What a fun cover. It doesn't quite prepare you for the darkness of this book, but it's enticing.
You should of course, be prepared for the darkness, if you're familiar with any of the author's work.
I read her debut novel when it came out. Wasn't as wowed by it as most, but it was interesting enough to check out Moulton's latest.
Same reaction - not a wow by any means but interesting. Compelling bleak and lean enough to get through in less than a day.

But seriously, how much mommy/baby horror can there be? I know it's all the rage, so everyone's doing it, but please, enough already.
Yes, Tantrum is a cleverer, metaphorical take on it than most, but come on ... Can we change the subject?

Must popular media be so beholden to cliches, revisited over and over again? Just think how many original stories are falling by the wayside while everyone's clamoring for more of the same.

Outside of the depressing commentary on the state of publishing and reading audiences, this was a decent, quick work of psychological horror and a strong entry into the dramatically overpopulated subgenre. Thanks Netgalley.

I'm mind boggled by all the great reviews this book is getting. And yes, I am that dissenting voice here, saying, "But the Emperor has no clothes."
I get it - women's voices are IT right now. Novel after novel is released dedicated to the female experience, preferably as viscerally rendered as possible. They don't have to be likable -they just have to be REAl.

Well, the protagonist in Creep isn't likable, which alone wouldn't have bene a dealbreaker. But she is also not interesting or compelling. And on top of it, the novel has next to nothing by way of plot. 
It's a story of obsession, a nasty and tedious to read story of obsession, focused narrowly on a single point of view of someone who just doesn't have that much to say.
She spends the entire time daydreaming about a perfect man, who, of course, wants nothing to do with her. And you can't blame him, because as a reader, you don't want anything to do with her either.
Obsession is a fascinating subject when done right. Caroline Kepnes' YOU (and its steadily declining in quality sequels) have managed it. This book did not.
The narrative is super dense, because apparently being literary these days includes doing away with paragraphs and most of the dialogue. The book is short, but it's a slog to get through. The ending is predictable. Funny thing is that the writing itself is decent, but it takes more than the ability to turn out a nice sentence to create a good book.
Overall, a complete waste of time. Thanks Netgalley.

​Everything you ever wanted to know (and a few things you didn't) about sex lives of the most popular superheroes, back by research and relayed humorously and engagingly.
Yeah, this book is all kinds of fun. You know who may not be having as much fun as you'd think someone with superbods and superpowers might have? The superheroes. Why? Well, it's complicated, But do read this book and find out.
Very entertaining and surprisingly educational. Recommended. Thanks Netgalley.

​I have such mixed feelings about this book. On one hand, it's very well written and engaging enough for me to read the entire thing pretty much in one afternoon. On the other thing, it left me mostly annoyed, because I kind of hated the characters. AND they weren't interesting enough (and much too predictable in their tragic pathos) to override the hatred either.
So I'm splitting the difference in my rating and trying to write down some of my thoughts about the book, all the while very aware that to say anything negative about a book that deals with such hot topics as race and #MeToo is to pretty much a crime or at the very least a misdemeanor, and yet ...

(Oh, yeah, reader beware, crucial plot points will be discussed below, so proceed accordingly.)

While the author uses race in a mostly cogent and relevant manner, her implications of abuse don't quite ring true. This may and likely will vary from reader to reader, but the book I read told a story of a presumably intelligent young woman who makes a series of misguided/stupid/reckless choices to orbit an unavailable and possibly not even a very nice man. 
The man is an author to whom she writes a fawning letter in college and proceeds to fangirl over him for the next decade to the detriment of her own personal development and life.
The author is never anything other than himself, which is insecure noncommittal mess, dining out for entirely too long on the same novel, because he has managed to tap into a rare Latin American market. 
Throughout the course of their relationship, despite the very rare sex, there aren't really any romantic undertones. It's more of a somewhat toxic codependency that the protagonist takes much too far. It is very obvious to everyone but her that he isn't the kind of man she can have a future with. 
Entirely unsuitable as a romantic partner, in the end, he isn't even a good friend.
But in the meanwhile, he does pay off 20K of the protagonist's college loans and flies her out routinely to interesting destinations, all of which she gladly accepts. So exactly how sorry are we supposed to feel for her when she decides to revisit their relationship some years later in light of recent abuse allegations from another woman and recast herself as a victim?

It's entirely too easy to rewrite history; one's own and others, much easier than to take responsibility for it. But which protagonist are we reading?  Someone with agency and character or a tagalong pushover? Which does she want to be? Because she can't really be both.

In the end, so much of her focus - of her life -revolves around this author that it rather seems that her being used as a character in his novel (as morally reprehensible as it is) may actually be the most interesting thing and the grandest accomplishment of her life. Which is, of course, its own tragedy.

Thanks Netgalley.