Penance by Eliza Clark
Penance is an interesting book. When I started it, I thought it’d be one of the best things I read this year: a clever dissection of true crime fandom. And by the end, I couldn’t wait to be done. Even the clever ending didn’t spruce it up for me. I appreciate what Eliza Clark is trying to do: expand on a crime to look at the broader story through the lens of a journalist who we know from the start is unreliable, which requires we approach […]
My Friend Dahmer: A Graphic Novel by Derk Backderf
On a whim I grabbed this graphic novel back in spooky season, aka October aka why yes I am behind on reviews but committed to finishing out reviwing all the books I read in 2024 before the year is up. BUCKLE UP FOR LOADS OF REVIEWS, COMING AT YA. But I digress onto this review! Sometimes I feel like an outlier as a 40ish woman who does not have an affinity for true crime podcasts. In my 20s and 30s I had a long relationship […]
American Caliph by Shahan Mufti
Simmering political, religious, and racial tensions combine and erupt in three sieges led by the same strange Muslim group around Washington, DC after a years-long lead-up. I’m new to Washington DC, and still learning my way around the place as a city where people actually work and live divorced from the role that it plays in the United States’s government and politics. Part of that process has been learning more about the city’s history. Like with many things about DC, I had never heard of […]
Unmask Alice: LSD, Satanic Panic, and the Imposter Behind the World's Most Notorious Diaries by Rick Emerson
Okay, the title of this book is just a hint of what the book is going to cover. And the title of the book is a lot, which make sense because this book is often a lot. Unmask Alice: LSD, Satanic Panic, and the Imposter Behind the World’s Most Notorious Diaries by Rick Emerson covers exactly what the title suggests. As a general note and content warning, this book contains extensive discussions of drug addiction and self-harm. One section, in particular, was especially disturbing, prompting […]
Bad Blood: Secrets and Lies in a Silicon Valley Startup by John Carreyrou
Nowhere Book Bingo: From a genre you’ve never read (true crime) CBR16 Bingo: Fiasco (Theranos was a massive fraud and a fiasco) I’ve owned this book since 2020 and am pretty sure I picked it up in an e-book sale because of the many Cannonball reviews I’ve read about it over the years. Not being particularly interested in the tech world or medical science, and certainly, not someone who reads a lot of business news, I didn’t really hear about this case as it was […]
Dinner for Vampires by Bethany Joy Lenz
CBR16 Bingo: Rings – A lot of people get married in this book – at least four couples, including the author Lenz to the cult leader’s son. Bethany Joy Lenz is famous for playing Haley James Scott in the cult TV show One Tree Hill, but her experience of this time is even stranger than one would expect – she was in an actual cult at the time. I never watched One Tree Hill, but with a premise like that, who cares? Besides, TV show […]
