LibraryAware January 2025

Please enjoy the last issue of Staff Goodreads Reviews – thank you all for your contributions, and for reading.

This issue is dedicated to Kristina Giovanni; best wishes to her!

Find book reviews from other readers at the BPL Goodreads page here.

Fiction

Things don't break on their own
by Sarah Easter Collins

Soon Har's review: Soon after Willa's little sister disappears on her 13th birthday, she switches school and meets Robyn, whose warm family could not be more different than her own. They grow close, then apart, and their lives diverge. Willa continues to search for her sister and a restlessness fills her life while Robyn, now in her own stable relationship, tries to stay a supportive friend. At a dinner party one night that Robyn and her wife host for family and friends, including Willa, two of the guests intrigue -- and lives are changed, again.

Collins's book defies genre; it is part-Mystery, part-Thriller, and part-Love Story, all of it very readable. With just the right amount of suspense and a lot of good story-telling, it is one of the more compelling novels I have read this year, with characters whose heads you can get into and one who sends a chill up your spine. Recommended for both readers of Literary and Genre fiction.

The reservoir
by David Duchovny

Kristina's review: I love a good celebrity memoir, but when it comes to writing actual literary novels, there's no celebrity/actor who is a better writer than David Duchovny.

In this novella, set in a quiet New York City during the height of the Covid 19 pandemic, a lonely man goes on an epic journey of self-discovery. He sleeps during the day and ventures out into the cold wintery night, fueled by an increasingly paranoid delusion that someone in an apartment across Central Park is sending him messages via Morse Code. It's hard to tell if he's losing his mind, either due to loneliness or the virus itself, or if these delusions are actually real. But wherever they come from, they reveal something to him about himself and the meaning of life.

Highly recommended for readers who enjoy thought-provoking, mind-bending literature, with a dash of magical realism.

Non-Fiction

The God equation
by Michio Kaku

Kristina's review: Michio Kaku, like Neil deGrasse Tyson, is an excellent science communicator and in this book he really makes a difficult subject easy to digest.

Right now, physicists are in a tangle over String Theory because it may be the final solution to unifying all of physics into a single equation; Einstein's theory of General Relativity, which explains the movements of massive planets and stars, and Quantum physics, which explains the movements of very small particles. Kaku was an early supporter of String Theory but he does admit that even this theory has holes and some people are a little freaked out by the theory's implication that there are multiple extra universes we can't see.

If you've ever wanted to know more about how String Theory became a hot button issue within physics and don't have the patience to wade through all the difficult terminology, this book is a short and concise summary of the whole debate.