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.

I'm not sure where I first heard about this book, but it piqued my interest, and when the library obligingly got a copy, I was excited to check it out.
The Apparition Phase is a good, old-fashioned ghost story. Literally. It read like a direct inheritor of M.R. James and authors of that era, only less dense and soporific. In fact, it kept me up and entertained me for all of its considerable bulk. And if it didn't quite dazzle me ...well, it's partly because I'm a tough critic and partly because the good, old-fashioned stories like that seldom do. They are simply too sedate and muted by definition for a "dazzle."
Be that as it may, this was a very enjoyable and clever read. The butter-soft prose flowed beautifully, and there were some genuinely well rendered scenes of supernatural unease. 

As the title suggests, this is a ghost story. A good one. In the beginning, you meet a set of morbid twins and then follow one of them through a few years of being variously haunted. 
To maintain the "classic feel," the book eschews modernity and takes place in the early seventies. In England, where all the polite hauntings are.
This is one of those books that is written for adults but features teenage protagonists. I stay away from YA and firmly believe that all adults should, but this novel is done with enough skill to avoid that "stories for unformed brains" territory. 
The pacing is a bit leisurely at times, and the penultimate scene is quite drawn out, but it all still works.
And in the end, there's such a pitch-perfect melancholic epilogue that it wraps up the entire novel, its mood and tone, just so. 
All in all, a worthy read for genre fans who likes their scares subtle and literary. An elegiac, elegant, eloquent tale of being haunted. Recommended.

Interesting. A real chin stroker of a book. I read and enjoyed the author's Turbulence, so I thought I'd check out more of his work. This is a very different book. The thing is I'm not quite sure how much of that is on purpose.
Flesh is essentially a biographical book that follows its protagonist, Istvan, from age 15 to late middle age. It follows him very closely and yet feels strikingly distant. Mostly because Istvan is such a muted character. He barely speaks or expresses emotions. Most of his actions are reactions. Basically, he's the kind of person to whom life happens. 
This life is described in leaps and bounds, occasionally skipping years, as he goes from one experience to another, with very pronounced ups and downs. And yet seldom if ever do you feel like you know him or get him or care about him at all.
The author uses a very spare style of narrative, which makes for a quick read, but feels a bit like a conversation with one-word answers. Most of Istvans are "Okay." Not just him, either.
I'm surprised the author didn't just name the novel Okay for how often he uses the word. And it would have bene rather accurate, too, since as a reading experience it was just okay. Thanks Netgalley.