The Five Wounds Review

It’s Holy Week in the small town of Las Penas, New Mexico, and thirty-three-year-old unemployed Amadeo Padilla has been given the part of Jesus in the Good Friday procession. He is preparing feverishly for this role when his fifteen-year-old daughter Angel shows up pregnant on his doorstep and disrupts his plans for personal redemption. With weeks to go until her due date, tough, ebullient Angel has fled her mother’s house, setting her life on a startling new path.

Vivid, tender, funny, and beautifully rendered, The Five Wounds spans the baby’s first year as five generations of the Padilla family converge: Amadeo’s mother, Yolanda, reeling from a recent discovery; Angel’s mother, Marissa, whom Angel isn’t speaking to; and disapproving Tíve, Yolanda’s uncle and keeper of the family’s history. Each brings expectations that Amadeo, who often solves his problems with a beer in his hand, doesn’t think he can live up to.

The Five Wounds – which refer to the five wounds of Christ – takes place during Holy Week in New Mexico, where a religious brotherhood called the Hermanos Penitentes recreate the crucifixion. Amadeo Padilla is a most unlikely Jesus, who has experienced the five wounds of the soul, including rejection, betrayal, and humiliation. His young and immensely pregnant teenage daughter, Angel, whom he deserted as a child, arrives at his door as he prepares feverishly for the role.

The story is beautifully powerful and the author has really filled out her story with wonderful narrative and introduced us to characters so raw and real that they stayed with me long after I finished the book.

The theme is love both as a wonderful thing and an intense challenge and this is evident in the presentation on Angel’s baby who is both a happy baby who brings joy but also presents with a fair share of challenges in more ways than one.  

I adored this book, I adored the writing, I adored the characters and their gritty authenticity tried to slow down but I just could not stop reading. 5 stars

The Ophelia Girls Review

In the summer of 1973, Ruth and her four friends were obsessed with pre-Raphaelite paintings—and a little bit obsessed with each other. Drawn to the cold depths of the river by Ruth’s house, the girls pretend to be the drowning Ophelia, with increasingly elaborate tableaus. But by the end of that fateful summer, real tragedy finds them along the banks.

Twenty-four years later, Ruth returns to the suffocating, once grand house she grew up in, the mother of young twins and seventeen-year-old Maeve. Joining the family in the country is Stuart, Ruth’s childhood friend, who is quietly insinuating himself into their lives and gives Maeve the attention she longs for. She is recently in remission, unsure of her place in the world now that she is cancer-free. Her parents just want her to be an ordinary teenage girl. But what teenage girl is ordinary?

Alternating between the two fateful summers, The Ophelia Girls is a suspense-filled exploration of mothers and daughters, illicit desire, and the perils and power of being a young woman.

The novel is both atmospheric and moody and the beautiful imagery and dreamy prose left me blown away. Jane Healey’s writing absorbs you in both timelines, you can almost feel the heat of the sun and smell the flowers being wilted by it.

I loved the medium pace of the book, it flowed really nicely and kept me engrossed. There were no big twists, you know where the story is heading from the beginning but that didn’t take anything away from the story. The character interactions were so well written, the intensity between them was palpable and I would have liked there to have been a little more focus on the character of Camille and found out more of her back story.

This is an incredible story with so many layers which slowly unfold keeping the full details of Ruth’s secrets safe from being revealed right up until the end. It is also rather unsettling as it raises lots of questions over the relationship between Maeve and Stuart. This book is a rollercoaster of emotions as it battles, embraces and tests boundaries of an array of subject matter and once I was committed, it was difficult to put down. I wish I could give it more than 5 stars.

Ariadne Review

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I was provided Ariadne by Jennifer Saint an ARC through NetGalley in return for an honest review. All opinions are my own and thanks is extended to the author, publishers and NetGalley for allowing me to do so.

As Princesses of Crete and daughters of the fearsome King Minos, Ariadne and her sister Phaedra grow up hearing the hoofbeats and bellows of the Minotaur echo from the Labyrinth beneath the palace. The Minotaur – Minos’s greatest shame and Ariadne’s brother – demands blood every year.

When Theseus, Prince of Athens, arrives in Crete as a sacrifice to the beast, Ariadne falls in love with him. But helping Theseus kill the monster means betraying her family and country, and Ariadne knows only too well that in a world ruled by mercurial gods – drawing their attention can cost you everything.

In a world where women are nothing more than the pawns of powerful men, will Ariadne’s decision to betray Crete for Theseus ensure her happy ending? Or will she find herself sacrificed for her lover’s ambition?

I don’t even know where to begin with Ariadne!!! The narrative drew me in instantly and I felt an intensely deep response to it as if it was nestled inside my heart and I couldn’t let it go. I did not want it to end but I also couldn’t stop myself from reading on in a world where horror and terror reside in equal measure with beauty and wonder.

The narrative was beautifully written and the descriptions in the book were almost cinematic quality I was able to immerse myself into it so completely it was almost as if I was watching it on a big screen and that is something I have rarely experienced before.

I adored it and it is on my list of top 2021 reads. 5 stars just isn’t enough.

The Other Black Girl Review

I was provided The Other Black Girl by Zakiya Dalila Harris as an ARC through NetGalley in return for an honest review. All opinions are my own and thanks is extended to the author, publishers and NetGalley for allowing me to do so.

Twenty-six-year-old editorial assistant Nella Rogers is tired of being the only Black employee at Wagner Books. Fed up with the isolation and microaggressions, she’s thrilled when Harlem-born and bred Hazel starts working in the cubicle beside hers. They’ve only just started comparing natural hair care regimens, though, when a string of uncomfortable events elevates Hazel to Office Darling, and Nella is left in the dust.

Then the notes begin to appear on Nella’s desk: LEAVE WAGNER. NOW.

It’s hard to believe Hazel is behind these hostile messages. But as Nella starts to spiral and obsess over the sinister forces at play, she soon realizes that there’s a lot more at stake than just her career.

I loved this novel that was slow burning at the start before reaching its suspense filled climax at the end. It has been compared as The Stepford Wives meets Get out and I would say it had more Get Out vibes for sure and I was totally within the books grasp from the very start.

The story line itself is intriguing and interesting and the characters are so well written and captivating. I didn’t find a single page of this book boring if anything I felt genuine fear whilst reading it and an intense dislike for some of the acts that characters were carrying out.

My only criticism was that I found the ending frustrating and even more frustrating that I cannot go into why without giving spoilers … so spoiler alert without giving away anything to major I found it intensely frustrating that after receiving so much prejudice, discrimination and hate from a privileged group in society, to then have your own people turn on you also left me with a feeling of utter hopelessness and despair that left me with boiling blood and an intense rage. However, I appreciated the reasons why the author did this and so although it frustrated me, I appreciate the power of doing just that. I just felt that following such a build up and tension that I was left with lots of questions and needing more in terms of the backstory and generally just more information.

However, this didn’t take away from the experience and it is still a strong 4 star read for me.