What It Is: Ultra-concentrated blend of 11 peptides Serum.
What It Does: Hydrates, soothes, and resurfaces skin.
Active Ingredients: Snow Mushroom Extract, Sodium Hyaluronate, Sodium PCA, and 11 peptides.
Verdict: This serum helps hydrate and restore glow to your skin. If you have enlarged pores (as I do because of oily skin), it helps minimize them, along with fine lines, and sun damage. This serum is a miracle worker and really leaves your skin feeling well-hydrated and fully restored. I used it for a week and already saw results. I use it right after toner, on my face and neck area, and I’ve noticed quite a difference! I’ve always been a fan of Drunk Elephant skincare items but hadn’t had a chance to try this out, till it was in one of my Ipsy Glam Bag X items. Your skin will no longer be uneven or dull, and since I hate wearing foundation, this serum really helps with having your skin look glowy without makeup. I also loved the packaging, because it has a twist top that really helps with not having bacteria get into your product nor do you have to worry about product spillage if you’re traveling!
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Everybody lies. Even the ones you think you know best of all . . .
Olivia Bender designs exquisite home interiors that satisfy the most demanding clients. But her own deepest desire can’t be fulfilled by marble counters or the perfect rug. She desperately wants to be a mother. Fertility treatments and IVF keep failing. And just when she feels she’s at her lowest point, the police deliver shocking news to Olivia and her husband, Park.
DNA results show that the prime suspect in a murder investigation is Park’s son. Olivia is relieved, knowing this is a mistake. Despite their desire, the Benders don’t have any children. Then comes the confession. Many years ago, Park donated sperm to a clinic. He has no idea how many times it was sold—or how many children he has sired.
As the murder investigation goes deeper, more terrible truths come to light. With every revelation, Olivia must face the unthinkable. The man she married has fathered a killer. But can she hold that against him when she keeps such dark secrets of her own?
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I’m usually NOT a fan of found footage horror movies, but I was curious to check this one out when I discovered that it was made on a $15,000 budget and needed to see how writer-director Robbie Banfitch managed to pull this off. Also, the movie takes place in the Mojave Desert, which quite frankly, as much as I find it a very alluring place, it can also emote creepiness as so many people go missing there every year. In fact, it was the premise of one of my short stories, Comets Tear the Skies.
The simple plot is that a group of friends go to the desert to record a music video, and it doesn’t take long before things get really crazy and deadly. For the majority of the film, the viewer is as disorientated and terrified as Robbie wanders the desert in both total darkness and glaring sunlight. What we do see is a gory bloodfest and strange, tremors-like worms crawling around (are they aliens?). We’re never sure what exactly is going on, but what we do know is that our protagonist is in danger, and there’s no escaping the violent onslaught.
This is a strange, bloody cosmic horror in which there’s no moment of levity or respite for any of the people involved. In fact, the horror only continues to progress to the bloody finale that will finally show us what happened to Robbie’s friends, and ultimately what happens to him. Check this out if you love found footage, as this movie really does wonders with its limited budget and the writer/director’s experience, but still manages to create a very chilling movie.
*Thank you so much to Emma Griffiths & Cinedigm for an early screening of the movie.
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The thing that has been growing inside me that is not rage and is not spite and is not fear or pain.
PLOT SUMMARY
By day, Maeve Fly works at the happiest place in the world as every child’s favorite ice princess.
By the neon night glow of the Sunset Strip, Maeve haunts the dive bars with a drink in one hand and a book in the other, imitating her misanthropic literary heroes.
But when Gideon Green – her best friend’s brother – moves to town, he awakens something dangerous within her, and the world she knows suddenly shifts beneath her feet.
Untethered, Maeve ditches her discontented act and tries on a new persona. A bolder, bloodier one, inspired by the pages of American Psycho. Step aside Patrick Bateman, it’s Maeve’s turn with the knife.
GRADE: A
REVIEW:
This book aches to be a female lead American Psycho type of novel, with protagonist Maeve Fly at the wheel. Maeve is obsessed with Halloween music, doxxing terrible people online, and her job at DisneyLand where she impersonates Elsa from Frozen. Maeve is indifferent to most people except for her best friend Kate and dying grandmother, a former Hollywood silent movie star, Tallulah Fly. I enjoyed Maeve’s journey although sometimes Maeve’s obsessions and edginess seemed forced. Most of the brutal scenes weren’t described in detail – we were only hinted at what would happen and it’d cut to black. For a book promising an edgy, dark character it kind of annoyed me (but I’m probably in the minority here) that we didn’t get to see more gore.
I read Story of the Eye in my early 20’s and have recced this book to many people (is this why they think I’m twisted?), and Maeve is obsessed with this book too. I must say, that I was supremely HAPPY that a certain scene came to fruition after the promise of the book’s cover. I would’ve been annoyed otherwise.
However, I did LOVE this book – so don’t take my little gripes at heart. I just love girl villains so want people to push the envelope when it comes to that. The final line of this novel though is PURE PERFECTION and I absolutely love it. In other words, I will definitely look forward to this author’s next novel!
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Being someone who receives many ARCs (advanced reader’s copies) for review purposes for this blog, I read many of the 2023 releases last year. So, these are three books that I didn’t receive ARCs for, but still want to read all the same.
SHE IS A HAUNTING BY TRANG THANH TRAN
When Jade Nguyen arrives in Vietnam for a visit with her estranged father, she has one goal: survive five weeks pretending to be a happy family in the French colonial house Ba is restoring. She’s always lied to fit in, so if she’s straight enough, Vietnamese enough, American enough, she can get out with the college money he promised.
But the house has other plans. Night after night, Jade wakes up paralyzed. The walls exude a thrumming sound while bugs leave their legs and feelers in places they don’t belong. She finds curious traces of her ancestors in the gardens they once tended. And at night Jade can’t ignore the ghost of the beautiful bride who leaves cryptic warnings: Don’t eat.
Neither Ba nor her sweet sister Lily believe that there is anything strange happening. With help from a delinquent girl, Jade will prove this house–the home they have always wanted–will not rest until it destroys them. Maybe, this time, she can keep her family together. As she roots out the house’s rot, she must also face the truth of who she is and who she must become to save them all.
SILVER NITRATE BY SILVIA MORENO-GARCIA
Montserrat has always been overlooked. She’s a talented sound editor, but she’s left out of the boys’ club running the film industry in ’90s Mexico City. And she’s all but invisible to her best friend, Tristán, a charming if faded soap opera star, though she’s been in love with him since childhood.
Then Tristán discovers his new neighbor is the cult horror director Abel Urueta, and the legendary auteur claims he can change their lives—even if his tale of a Nazi occultist imbuing magic into highly volatile silver nitrate stock sounds like sheer fantasy. The magic film was never finished, which is why, Urueta swears, his career vanished overnight. He is cursed.
Now the director wants Montserrat and Tristán to help him shoot the missing scene and lift the curse . . . but Montserrat soon notices a dark presence following her, and Tristán begins seeing the ghost of his ex-girlfriend.
As they work together to unravel the mystery of the film and the obscure occultist who once roamed their city, Montserrat and Tristán may find that sorcerers and magic are not only the stuff of movies.
LOOKING GLASS SOUND BY CATRIONA WARD
In a cottage overlooking the windswept Maine coast, Wilder Harlow begins the last book he will ever write. It is the story of a sun-drenched summer of his youth and of the killer that stalked the small New England town. Of the terrible tragedy that forever bonded him with his friends Nat and Harper in unknowable ways. Of a horror that has followed them over the years.
Wilder has returned to the town decades later in an attempt to recount that summer’s events in his memoirs. But as he writes, Wilder begins to fear his grip on the truth is fading, and events in the manuscript start to chime eerily with the present. He’s even started seeing a dark-haired woman down in the icy waters below the cottage, but nobody else can.
No longer able to trust his own eyes, Wilder begins to fear that this will not only be his last book, but the last thing he ever does…
What are some of the reads you’re looking forward to this year?
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As kids, Emily and Chess were inseparable. But by their 30s, their bond has been strained by the demands of their adult lives. So when Chess suggests a girls trip to Italy, Emily jumps at the chance to reconnect with her best friend.
Villa Aestas in Orvieto is a high-end holiday home now, but in 1974, it was known as Villa Rosato, and rented for the summer by a notorious rock star, Noel Gordon. In an attempt to reignite his creative spark, Noel invites up-and-coming musician, Pierce Sheldon to join him, as well as Pierce’s girlfriend, Mari, and her stepsister, Lara. But he also sets in motion a chain of events that leads to Mari writing one of the greatest horror novels of all time, Lara composing a platinum album––and ends in Pierce’s brutal murder.
As Emily digs into the villa’s complicated history, she begins to think there might be more to the story of that fateful summer in 1974. That perhaps Pierce’s murder wasn’t just a tale of sex, drugs, and rock & roll gone wrong, but that something more sinister might have occurred––and that there might be clues hidden in the now-iconic works that Mari and Lara left behind.
Yet the closer that Emily gets to the truth, the more tension she feels developing between her and Chess. As secrets from the past come to light, equally dangerous betrayals from the present also emerge––and it begins to look like the villa will claim another victim before the summer ends.
Inspired by Fleetwood Mac, the Manson murders, and the infamous summer Percy and Mary Shelley spent with Lord Byron at a Lake Geneva castle––the birthplace of Frankenstein––The Villa welcomes you into its deadly legacy.
GRADE: B-
REVIEW:
I did enjoy this book however, the “mystery & thriller” part never quite showed up. The book is told in two timelines, the present where two best friends stay at a villa in Orvieto, Italy, each friend using their time there to pen their new books. The second timeline takes place in 1974 when four Brits stay at the villa during one summer and a murder occurs.
Now the thing about the 1974 time that kind of annoyed me is that it was an absolute rip-off of Mary Shelley’s life, as Mari stood for Mary, Pierce Sheldon for Percy Bysshe Shelley, the rock star Neil Gordon was obviously Lord Byron, and Mari’s stepsister Lara was ripped off from Mary’s stepsister Claire Clairmont. The author used details about Mary Shelley’s life to stand in for Mari’s life (how her father married a next-door neighbor, how her family disowned her when she ran away with the married Percy and even used the death of Mary’s child in Mari’s backstory too). This wasn’t just a little too on the nose, it was a complete sledgehammer. However, if you’re a writer, you might enjoy these tidbits of information.
The present timeline wasn’t as fascinating as the one in 1974, because I really couldn’t stand Em, the cozy-mystery writer who’s too hung up on her best friend Chess’s recent success as a motivational writer. In fact, I don’t even know why these two are friends when they seem to dislike one another.
This book was interesting, I won’t deny that, but at the same time, it didn’t deliver on the thriller aspect that was promised in the beginning. But since I did read the book in about two days, I will say that the author has a way of having you want to stay up to read until you’ve reached the end, so I’ll give her props for that.
All in all, this book is good if you’re looking for a cozy mystery – because it’s in no way a thriller or true mystery. The location is gorgeous and the 1974 timeline of groupies and rockstars was fascinating, despite the blatant rip-off of Shelley’s life.
*Thank you so much to NetGalley and St. Martin’s Press for the digital copy of this book in exchange for an honest review!
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Recently, I lent my poem, “This Is War” to the short film Mother by Brad Case. This is an arthouse film in support of women’s rights – and the poem describes the fallout of Roe Vs. Wade this summer.
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Outside a rural Pennsylvania motel, nine-year-old Lulu smokes a cigarette while sitting on the lap of a trucker. Recent art grad Quinn is passing through town and captures it. The photograph, later titled “Lulu & the Trucker,” launches Quinn’s career, escalating her from a starving artist to a renowned photographer. In a parallel life, Lulu fights to survive a volatile home, growing up too quickly in an environment wrought with drug abuse and her mother’s prostitution. Decades later, when Quinn has a retrospective at the Whitney Museum of Art and “Lulu & the Trucker” has sold at auction for a record-breaking amount, Lulu is surprised to find the troubling image of her young self in the newspaper. She attends an artist talk for the exhibition with one question in mind for Quinn: Why didn’t you help me all those years ago? Tell Me One Thing is a portrait of two Americas, examining power, privilege, and the sacrifices one is willing to make to succeed. Traveling through the 1980s to present day, it delves into New York City’s free-for-all grittiness while exposing a neglected slice of the struggling rust belt.
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“Alex drained her wineglass, then her water glass. The ocean looked calm, a black darker than the sky. A ripple of anxiety made her palms go damp. It seemed suddenly very tenuous to believe that anything would stay hidden, that she could successfully pass from one world to another.”
PLOT SUMMARY:
Summer is coming to a close on the East End of Long Island, and Alex is no longer welcome.
A misstep at a dinner party, and the older man she’s been staying with dismisses her with a ride to the train station and a ticket back to the city.
With few resources and a waterlogged phone, but gifted with an ability to navigate the desires of others, Alex stays on Long Island and drifts like a ghost through the hedged lanes, gated driveways, and sun-blasted dunes of a rarefied world that is, at first, closed to her. Propelled by desperation and a mutable sense of morality, she spends the week leading up to Labor Day moving from one place to the next, a cipher leaving destruction in her wake.
GRADE: C-
REVIEW:
First of all, this book was beautifully written and it’s no surprise since it’s from the author of The Girls, which I never read, cause I don’t like cults or Charles Manson – but I do know it was a bestselling novel. Now to talk about this book, The Guest centers around Alex – a young woman in her early 20’s who becomes a grifter for a week when her older boyfriend breaks up with her after a dinner date gone wrong.
I usually love unlikeable characters and I was invested in Alex’s plight and the ways she uses people for her benefit. But at the end of the day, I don’t get the point of this book. This book abruptly ends at its climax – so everything that has been building up to a certain moment ends up not being resolved and this truly irked me a lot. Especially since not much else happened in this book.
I meandered between boredom and secondhand embarrassment for Alex and yes, Emma Cline can write but does that necessarily make for an engaging plot? Sadly no. I’d forgive this book if it was all vibes and no plot, but it’s no vibes and no plot.
This is a pass for me.
*Thank you so much to NetGalley and Random House for the digital copy of this book in exchange for an honest review!
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What It Is: A hydrating and moisturizing face cream that helps plump up the skin.
Active Ingredients: Bakuchiol, Malachite, Ceramides, and Hyaluronic Acid
Verdict: This moisturizer is everything I love and look for in a moisturizer – it’s nourishing and thick without it being greasy. I use this at night and I tend to gravitate towards moisturizers that don’t quickly disappear after a few seconds. A little goes a long way and I recommend using this for the face and neck as it really helps plump up the skin without weighing it down. I have oily skin and this moisturizer was perfect – drier skin would definitely benefit from this one too.
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The Inkblotters 