history – Samwise Reviews

Author: Lucy Foley
Publisher: William Morrow
Pages: 313
On Sale: July 2020
Genre: Mystery, Thriller, Fiction, Adult, Suspense
Stars: 5/5

From the Publisher:

It’s the wedding of the year. But someone won’t survive it.

On a remote island off the coast of Ireland, guests gather to celebrate the wedding of Jules Keegan and Will Slater. Will is a rising television star, handsome and charming. Jules is a smart, ambitious magazine publisher. Though the sea is a little choppy and the cell service spotty, their wedding is everything you’d expect of a young power couple: designer dress, four-tiered cake, boutique whiskey, vintage champagne. Every detail has been curated to perfection. All that’s left to orchestrate is the happiness.

But perfection is for plans, and people are all too human. It’s not long after the cake is cut and the champagne popped that resentments and petty jealousies come out. Worse yet, the latest barometer reading shows the weather has shifted from FAIR to CHANGEABLE, and dark clouds are looming overhead.

Everyone on the island has a secret. Everyone has a motive. And someone won’t leave this wedding alive…

From Me:

I could not put this book down, I started it on my lunch break and read all the way home and didn’t eat until it was finished. I was floored by how little I predicted and how many surprises there were at the end. I was expected one, and they just kept coming. Some of the “stags” or groomsmen blurred together a bit, but the rest of the characters were unique and easy to keep track of. Each chapter is from a different person’s perspective, and it was nice to have their names at the beginning of each one to keep them straight. This book started out on more of a gentle pace, but then it’s a riot right till the end.

Would fit The 52 Book Club’s 2021 prompts:

1 – Set In A School
19 – Book With A Deckled Edge
23 – An Ending That Surprises You
25 – A Book With Multiple Character POV
29 – Featuring The Environment
32 – A Selfish Character
34 – A Book You’d Rate 5 Stars
41 – An Endorsement By A Famous Author On The Cover

Author: Brad Ricca
Publisher: St. Martin’s Press
Pages: 400
On Sale: August 11, 2020
Genre: Non Fiction, History, Biography, Travel
Stars: 2/5

From the Publisher:

From the Edgar-nominated author of the bestselling Mrs. Sherlock Holmes comes the true story of a woman’s quest to Africa in the 1900s to find her missing fiancé, and the adventure that ensues.

In 1910, Olive MacLeod, a thirty-year-old, redheaded Scottish aristocrat, received word that her fiancé, the famous naturalist Boyd Alexander, was missing in Africa.

So she went to find him.

Olive the Lionheart is the thrilling true story of her astonishing journey. In jungles, swamps, cities, and deserts, Olive and her two companions, the Talbots, come face-to-face with cobras and crocodiles, wise native chiefs, a murderous leopard cult, a haunted forest, and even two adorable lion cubs that she adopts as her own. Making her way in a pair of ill-fitting boots, Olive awakens to the many forces around her, from shadowy colonial powers to an invisible Islamic warlord who may hold the key to Boyd’s disappearance. As these secrets begin to unravel, all of Olive’s assumptions prove wrong and she is forced to confront the darkest, most shocking secret of all: why she really came to Africa in the first place.

Drawing on Olive’s own letters and secret diaries, Olive the Lionheart is a love story that defies all boundaries, set against the backdrop of a beautiful, unconquerable Africa.

From Me:

This book had a lot of potential, but the pace really lost it for me. I found Olive to be kind of wishy-washy in the beginning with her feelings and decisions, but once she sets out for Africa she definitely had more of a spine. That sounded like quite a hard journey for an aristocrat. Regardless, the whole thing just kind of plodded along at a slow pace and even the exciting incidents didn’t spark a lot of interest. The history and geography was interesting, but this was not the exciting journey that I expected.