In honor of Women’s History Month, I thought I’d post reviews of two recently read books by women authors. These were books from my own TBR, not galleys/ARCs from publishers or NetGalley. Spoiler: I enjoyed them both!
The Reformatory: A Novel
by Tananarive Due
S&S/Saga Press, 573 pages
DESCRIPTION: Twelve-year-old Robbie Stephens, Jr., is sentenced to six months at the Gracetown School for Boys, a reformatory, for kicking the son of the largest landowner in town in defense of his older sister, Gloria. So begins Robbie’s journey further into the terrors of the Jim Crow South and the very real horror of the school they call The Reformatory.
REVIEW: Tananarive Due’s The Reformatory has a definite Stephen King vibe, so I’m not surprised Mr. King was a fan of the book and provides a solid cover blurb. Due mixes two kinds of horror with dramatic effect. The story begins with the terrifying racism of Jim Crow Florida in 1950 where a small offense sends twelve-year-old Robbie Stephens, Jr. to a meat-grinder of a reform school run by a sadistic pedophile warden. Children under his ‘care’ are treated worse than hardened criminals in a maximum security prison, whipped mercilessly for the slightest reason, worked as virtual slaves, and subject to unspeakable abuses by the psychotic warden.
Even those who die by fire, torture or failed attempts to escape, continue to suffer after death. And this is where the supernatural horrors kick in, because the reformatory is haunted by these ghosts, called ‘haints’ by the locals. Children are more likely to see them or feel their presence than adults, though the warden is keenly aware of them and wants them banished — or, more accurately, extinguished and captured. These haints function as a sort of external conscience for the warden who has no internal moral compass. Robbie often sees the haints and is particularly fine-tuned to their presence, even experiencing echoes of their pain and endless suffering. When the warden learns that Robbie can track and find the haints, which will allow him to effectively neuter and bottle them, he places the young man in an untenable situation: inflict further harm on the dead or suffer additional punishment himself. Robbie navigates a delicate balancing act, trying to appease the warden without betraying the haints while awaiting the dangerous opportunity to finally gain his own freedom.
Despite its supernatural aspects, The Reformatory is a powerful reminder that humans are all to capable of inflicting horrors on those they view as “other” or “less than” out of hate or their own unbridled depravity.
Worst Case Scenario: A Novel
by T.J. Newman
Little, Brown and Company, 321 pages
DESCRIPTION: When a pilot suffers a heart attack at 35,000 feet, a commercial airliner filled with passengers crashes into a nuclear power plant in the small town of Waketa, Minnesota, which becomes ground zero for a catastrophic national crisis with global implications. The International Nuclear Event Scale tracks nuclear disasters. It has seven levels. Level 7 is a Major Accident, with only two on record: Fukushima and Chernobyl. There has never been a Level 8. Until now.
REVIEW: I’ve read all three of T.J. Newman’s exciting airline thrillers (Falling, Drowning, and now Worst Case Scenario) and Worst Case Scenario was a definite change of pace in that the plane in question, along with the crew and passengers, is a lost cause right from the beginning, which almost qualifies as a ‘twist’ beginning. From that point, the thriller aspect takes place on the ground with the fallout, in the form of the physical wreckage of the plane and in the potential and escalating radioactive fallout from the damage done during the crash to a nuclear reactor scheduled for decommissioning. First responders race to save the lives of locals trapped and injured throughout the town and, more importantly, fight a ticking clock to stop a nuclear event with the potential to be an extinction level event.
Worst Case Scenario pulls no punches. Nobody is safe. Really. I was surprised and impressed by Newman’s commitment to the consequences of dealing with such a high-level threat. Newman raises the stakes with this one and delivers a brutal nail-biter of a novel.
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