Audely Bensen Writes

I've been on a Nora Roberts kick for the last few weeks, which has slowed my fantasy and sci-fi reading considerably. For some unknown reason, I found The Bone Orchard  (2022) by Sara A. Mueller shelved in with the Nora books. I took it as the sign it was.  I enjoyed a lot about this book: The smart women and the way they distributed their anger. The world building that felt familiar and yet completely different from anything else I'd read. The reveals all landed perfectly well--Mueller dripped information along the reader's path so I could guess the answer a handful of pages before the characters, which is always so satisfying.  At the beginning of the book I was worried that this would be like Gideon all over again, in the sense that there was a lot happening and I felt like I had to keep re-reading things to catch the meaning, only to see that I'd read it right the first time. As a reader it made me question whether I was smart enough to follow along. I had a hard ti...

Last month I read Leigh Bardugo's Ninth House  (2019) while sprawled on a stolen picnic blanket in a public park in Limerick. Between pages I wandered the city alone, and after I went to Dublin, where among other things I toured Dublin College, and felt some of the chill of the book sink between steps.  It took me a long time to settle in to the story. The early flashbacks threw me off and confused me. This might just be my pandemic brain, that's for some reason still flickering to the news and to twitter even when I'm trying to relax; or it might have been lingering effects of covid. Either way, this early foreshadowing didn't quite work for me. Starting off with confusion gave me a lack of confidence in myself for the next 200 pages. I couldn't focus, and then couldn't be sure of what I'd read.  Once I was locked into the story, I loved it. The pacing moving along perfectly, which impressed me since I've only ever read Bardugo's YA books, and YA pa...