Bayou Bytes Blog

Oh, did you want to hear about a mermaid story? No, not the delayed live-action Disney movie remake... I'm talking about the horrifying Jackson Pierce retelling of the Little Mermaid by Hans Christian Anderson. Half of this book is so, so good. And the other half is just...okay.  That's actually a great way to describe the main character Lo. Lo is a water nymph-- not explicitly a mermaid-- who dwells with her sisters beneath the ocean waves.  Lo and her sisters used to be mortal human girls before the ocean swallowed them whole-- but their mortal lives, memories, and identities have slowly eroded in the wake of their eternal hedonistic lives that the nymphs enjoy under the sea.  The water nymphs will shed their humanity underwater for as long as it will take. Once a water nymph has shed the last of her humanity, she'll ascend the waves and become part of the ocean. But after Lo rescues a mortal boy from drowning, she begins to realize she's curious about the person she...

The Grace Year by Kim Liggett Though this is a dystopian YA story, there are no big revolutions happening in The Grace Year by Kim Liggett. Revolutions realistically begin as small acts over the span of many rebellions, and in puritanical Garner County, the rebellions are happening in girls like 15 year old Tierney Jones.  Raised as a cynical tomboy in a society that believes women are harborers of harmful magic, Tierney is disdainful of the repressive roles women play in their society and dismissive of women and girls in general.  "I'm not like the other girls" is something Tierney never says outright, but it's something that tracks with her thought process. The Grace Year deconstructs this line of thinking, but it's a messy process. She's got to build relationships with other girls that test her preconceptions, but ultimately, Tierney relies mostly on herself. She's a strong heroine who doesn't sway with the wind-- she trusts what she can see-- and a...

Leviathan Wakes  is the first book in The Expanse series. It is also the source material for the TV show, The Expanse . A joint effort between Daniel Abraham and Ty Franck (who have adopted the pen name James S. A. Corey), The Expanse books currently have eight installations. The ninth and final volume is set to come out within the next year. This is the perfect time to jump on board if you haven't read them yet.  Leviathan Wakes  is set in the near future. Humans have colonized portions of the solar system, with bases on the moon, Mars, and in the Asteroid Belt. But after generations in different environments, physiological and cultural differences have become a prominent source of tension. Martians in their harsh environment are a military-based society, relying on strict order to survive on the rough planet. Belters live entirely on atmosphere-less rocks, valuing teamwork and resource rationing. Both see Earthers as spoiled and selfish people who never have to wonder w...

Your Fathers, Where are They?  And the Prophets, Do They Live Forever?  by Dave Eggers Stop me if you've heard this before: a man wakes up in a room he can't leave. How'd he get there? Why is he there? And who put him there? This man is a Kev, a NASA engineer, and he wakes up to find himself chained to a post. Thomas is his captor, but Thomas never wanted to be his captor. Thomas just wants to talk. They share some history, and although Kev doesn't really recall Thomas, Thomas needs Kev to remember. You and I read the same books and hear the same sermons and we come away with different messages. That has to be evidence of some serious problem, right? Dave Eggers's little-known novel (somehow at 225 pages) strips away everything but dialogue: this is a story about communication, and the desperate lengths one man will go in order to understand his place in the world. It's about a breakdown, and it's about breaking down barriers... -so c...

The book that started it all... Very rarely do I pick up books with covers that feature a fetching young woman in 1920's garb, looking resolute, worried, or scared. These always end up being campy, poorly written, and redundant. However, in 2013, I picked up The Haunting of Maddy Clare (2012) by Simone St. James and thought, "What the heck? Let's go for it." I read it in one day. It was full of intrigue, historical accuracy, clever women, fighting the patriarchy, sexual tension (St. James can paint a steamy picture!), and, possibly best of all, ghosts. I made my mother read it, I did an entire display around it at my library job, and then unfortunately for me, forgot about it. Fast forward five years later, when I check out Lost Among the Living (2016). I read the other five St. James novels in a month. And am still obsessing over them. Simone St. James Simone St. James is a Canadian author who worked in television before becoming an author. She has made ...

The Ruth Galloway series, books 1 (2009)- 9 (2017). The Crossing Places by Elly Griffiths, the first book in the Ruth Galloway series, sat on my to-read shelf for a long time. The murder mystery description had caught my eye, but at the same time, the story line described seemed mystical and almost stereotypical in it's 'British woman with bad ass job saves the day' angle. After letting it sit there for a long while, I finally dove into this one.  I regret that I didn't do it sooner. We are first introduced to British archaeologist, Ruth Galloway, through the discovery and exhumation of the body of a little girl, found in a salt marsh near Norfolk, England.  She is met by surly Detective Chief Inspector, Harry Nelson, who expects Ruth to date the body in hopes that is the solution to a long time cold case.  This brief bit of archaeological dating in tandem with the cold case intrigues Ruth, and she dives into a case that is much more complicated and much more deadl...

There are times in our lives where the latest Pulitzer Prize winner is staring at you, the New York Times bestseller in nonfiction is whispering to you, and that awesome 2017 reading challenge that you have yet to start is making you feel guilty... and all you want is a fun, quick read that isn't romance. If this is you right now, never fear, Jenn McKinlay is here. McKinlay is an American author who specializes in cozy mysteries, which are mysteries that are short, fun, filled with quirky characters, usually a quaint town with lots of secrets, and a dead body. McKinlay has five series, three under her name and two under different pen names: Library Lover's Mysteries; Cupcake Bakery Mysteries; London Hat Shop Mysteries; Good Buy Girls Mysteries (writing as Josie Belle); Decoupage Mysteries (writing as Lucy Lawrence.)   Although her pen name series are fun, they were short-lived.  It is the three series under her own name which are McKinlay's draw.  McKinlay uses...

First novel in the Chief Inspector Armand Gamache series Chief Inspector Armand Gamache of the Sûreté du Québec has a knack, not to mention a reputation, of falling into strange and dangerous murder investigations. He also has a knack and a reputation of solving them. The creation of award-winning Canadian author, Louise Penny, Gamache appeared on the mystery genre scene in 2005 in Still Life, winning Penny numerous awards and kicking off the start to a continuing series, with the 12th and latest book, A Great Reckoning, debuting this year. Based in the culturally tumultuous Quebec, Canada, in a village called Three Pines, Gamache faces down various cunning killers, motivated by greed, ambition, insanity, hate, jealousy, and sometimes, under the surface, racial tensions and stand-offs between the Francophone Quebecois and the Anglophone Quebecois. This last tension plays a running theme throughout Penny's series. True to real life , Penny weaves the ebb and flow of the tension...

What's there NOT to like in murder, intrigue, post-war British grandeur, and a bit of romance?  This is what you get with Amory and Milo Ames. Picture Downton Abbey meets Agatha Christie's Tommy and Tuppence series and you get the Amory Ames mystery series.  Written by Louisiana librarian, Ashley Weaver, the Amory Ames series follows Amory, a young British socialite who is navigating the turbulent waters of British high society, her tumultuous marriage, and the occasional murder thrown in. Weaver, a librarian from Allen Parish, Louisiana, sets her mysteries in the boisterous, extravagant background of post-WWI England, where parties, high society, and a devil-may-care attitude reign supreme in the lives of the Ameses and their social circles.  Despite being a 21st century American, Weaver does an excellent job in recreating what English high society was and how it could be fraught with secrets, intrigue, and back-stabbing, not to mention shallowness, vanity, and superfici...

Courtesy of goodreads.com There is something haunting about the American Southwest.  It has a landscape that is unrivaled in the world; vast rugged deserts, with mountains, sparse vegetation, and incredible skylines that are famous worldwide.  The landscape is only added to by the people that inhabit the area; the various Native American tribes that live there have been romanticized by history, thus giving their ancestral homelands an aura of mysticism and endurance that does not exactly apply to modern times.  It is this setting in which author CB McKenzie set his first novel, Bad Country.   Winner of the Tony Hillerman Award for best fiction set in the American Southwest,  Bad Country  combines several different types of mystery and suspense, weaving two different problems into each other.  Using elements of noir, action, western, and classic mystery genres, McKenzie manages to have two different mysteries going at once.  The mysteries the...

Quick! Name a book genre! Did you guess mystery?  If so, then you picked the second most popular genre of fiction books (it just cannot beat that steamy ol' romance genre).  Mysteries range from espionage mysteries to fantasy mysteries to themed mysteries to horror mysteries; the sub genres go on and on. However, in the end, there is no mystery like the classic mystery, with a plucky, eccentric sleuth coming upon a problem (almost always murder) and then proceeding to solve said problem with cunning and little outside help.  This is the tried and true method for writing a mystery and it has endured since the debut of the mystery genre. Courtesy of collinder.com However, no one has quite mastered the art of turning the simplistic formula into a complicated and articulate story like Dame Agatha Christie.  Born in 1890, the English author began her lengthy career during the "Golden Age of Detective Fiction" (1920's and 1930's).  However, where many, many ...

Courtesy of http://sffbookreview.files.wordpress.com /2012/09/flavia-puppet.jpg Flavia de Luce does not go looking for trouble; it just happens to find her.  She does not mean to  make the police look bad; she just cannot help that she knows more about chemistry and science than they do.  So, armed with her immense knowledge of self-taught chemistry and her dogged persistence, Flavia does what any 11 year old girl would do: she solves the crime. A creation of Canadian author Alan Bradley, Flavia and her family were first introduced in 2009's The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie , a delightful, twisted mystery involving boarding schools, dead birds, and stamps. Bradley continued with Flavia's genius chemistry-centered answers to crime in The Weed That Strings the Hangman's Bag (2010), A Red Herring Without Mustard (2011), I Am Half-Sick of Shadows (2011), Speaking from Among the Bones (2013), and most recently, The Dead in Their Vaulted Arches (2014). ...

Courtesy of  nydailynews.com For a while, it seemed that the king of psychological horror books had stepped down.  Stephen King's books in the last decade have tended to be off-the-wall, weird, difficult to follow, and were just overall disjointed, badly written, and uninteresting.  Fans everywhere continued to buy the books and slouch through them, out of respect for his past works.  And then, in 2013,  Doctor Sleep  happened. With Doctor Sleep , we saw the return of the Stephen King we grew to love (amazing stories!) and hate (sleepless nights!).  While still reeling from the revelations, thrills, and horrors seen in Doctor Sleep , fans were then hit in June 2014 with King's first hard-boiled crime novel, Mr. Mercedes ; it was a success not only with King fans, but also with crime/mystery fans. It appears that King has finally moved on from his brush with death in 1999, when a distracted driver ran him over with a van.  The accident clearl...