and continued a streak of disappointing reads that started at the end of December.
First up: Bat Eater and Other Names For Cora Zeng by Kylie Lee Baker. It's 2020, in NYC, and COVID has just ramped up. Cora and her sister Delilah are waiting for a train--two of only a few willing to brave the subway while COVID ran rampant--when suddenly a man comes up from behind and shoves Delilah onto the track just as a train was coming by. Flash forward a few months: Cora, who was a ball of anxiety BEFORE her sister was brutally murdered, is now a crime scene cleaner. She and her two co-workers notice a pattern of Asian women getting murdered, and bats--live or dead--found at the scene. Meanwhile, Cora's becoming convinced that Delilah's now a "hungry ghost" and haunting her. I was hoping this would be a good mystery...it wasn't. It was part horror novel and part sledgehammering the readers with political messaging, which is what I usually try to avoid in a book (it's getting increasingly hard). Plus yet again, a Gen Z author thinks "anxious" is an entire personality. I wanted to like Cora but she mostly just frustrated me. I enjoyed parts of the book but disliked more...C.
I've already shared my thoughts on the other book I read in January--Queen Esther by John Irving under Pablo's post, so I won't say anything more on it <g>.
One other thing I've been reading: back issues of Midwestern Living, picked up at the "leave and take" event in my town last fall. What's interesting about the one I just read was it's the March/April 2020 issue and as such, it was written and published long before March 2020. There's a bunch of articles about planning a summer vacation and taking day trips and otherwise getting away from it all, which we all now know in hindsight didn't happen in late spring/early summer of 2020. Ah, what could've been...
ETA--the book I started reading at the beginning of February has been promising so far, so I hope my streak will be broken.
