Dark Matter

Dark Matter by Blake Crouch
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

A book about alternate realities...my favorite! Totally different spin on the idea of seeing where your life would go if you had made a different choice. Sweet love story...crazy plot twists...good enough ending. My main gripe is the one sentence paragraphs. Like a book written in serial on Twitter. Made it a fast read, I guess.

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The North Water

The North Water by Ian McGuire
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This book kept reminding me of The Terror by Dan Simmons. It has the same tone and both are about sea expeditions gone awry in the ice. Simmons was the better writer, but McGuire does a passable job. It’s also MUCH shorter and therefore much tighter. There is enough tension in the story to keep you turning the pages, and the ending is gratifying. Themes of redemption, fate, God, and morality against a backdrop of the crudeness and harshness of life on a whaling ship.

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The world we see with our eyes is not the whole truth. Dreams and visions are just as real as matter. What we can imagine or think exists as truly as anything we can touch or smell. Where do our thoughts come from, if not from God?” “They come from our experience,” Sumner says, “from what we’ve heard and seen and read, and what’s been told to us.” Otto shakes his head. “If that were true, then no growth or advancement would be possible. The world would be stagnant and unmoving. We would be doomed to live our lives facing backwards

The Lady of the Rivers

The Lady of the Rivers by Philippa Gregory
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This is a fine historical novel that follows Lady Rivers through her life. Lots of historical detail mixed in with a little mysticism. Lady Rivers and her husband always seem to be in favor of the “right” thing to do, or have a premonition of how things will work out. When history favors the queen, Lady Rivers and her husband support her, But when history shows that they lose, they seem to be the only people to have tried to talk the parties out of it. I don’t know enough about history to know how much is Gregory’s elaboration, but I didn’t like that only the Rivers’ seemed to see things from a larger view. Surely they were swept along just as much as the other characters? Still, English royalty is forever entertaining and this was no exception.

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