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Love in the Time of Serial Killers by Alicia Thompson

Source: Public Library
Paperback, 340 pgs.
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Love in the Time of Serial Killers by Alicia Thompson, the latest of my buddy reads on StoryGraph, tells the tale of true crime aficionado Phoebe Walsh who comes back to Florida to help her younger brother clear out their father’s house after he dies unexpectedly. She’s working on her dissertation while clearing out her father’s house, but her love of the true crime genre has warped her sense of the world and relationships. Her brother, Connor, is a foil to her darker, sarcastic, untrusting personality. He sees everything as rosy and loves just about everyone, even the mysterious neighbor, Sam, next door, despite his lack of video gaming knowledge.

Phoebe and Connor have several years between them and each lived with a different parent — Connor lived with the mercurial father and Phoebe lived with the practical and strict mother. They saw little of each other growing up, and Connor’s memories of their father are very different from Phoebe’s memories. Both are anxious in different ways, but together they are able to work together through the anxious stuff. Their relationship was a highlight of the book, as well as Phoebe’s forced reconnection with a childhood friend.

Phoebe is a character who puts up walls and while she’s analyzing everyone and everything around her through the lens of serial killers, it’s clear she’s yearning for connection and family. Her tentative interactions with the neighbor are telling, even as she’s pushing away with comments about serial killers and the dangers of the unknown.

“‘I’ve read The Phantom Prince,’ I said. ‘The updated version with the foreword where she completely disavows her relationship with Ted Bundy. If that doesn’t convince you that romance is dead, nothing will.’

Sam stepped down from the ladder, as if he needed to be more grounded to have this conversation. ‘You do that a lot. Bring up serial killer stuff when the topic turns more serious.'” (pg. 176)

Love in the Time of Serial Killers by Alicia Thompson was a fun read for the summer, not too creepy and not too cheesy. I really enjoyed the well developed characters and Phoebe’s journey back to her childhood and her ability to overcome her obsessions and anxiety to reconnect with her brother. The romance was steamy.

RATING: Quatrain

About the Author:

Alicia Thompson is a writer, reader, and Paramore superfan. As a teen, she appeared in an episode of 48 Hours in the audience of a local murder trial, where she broke the fourth wall by looking directly into the camera. She currently lives in Florida with her husband and two children

Mailbox Monday #733

Mailbox Monday has become a tradition in the blogging world, and many of us thank Marcia of The Printed Page for creating it.

It now has its own blog where book bloggers can link up their own mailbox posts and share which books they bought or which they received for review from publishers, authors, and more.

Emma, Martha, and I also will share our picks from everyone’s links in the new feature Books that Caught Our Eye. We hope you’ll join us.

Here’s what I received:

Crying in H Mart by Michelle Zauner from the library for my work’s May book club.

In this exquisite story of family, food, grief, and endurance, Michelle Zauner proves herself far more than a dazzling singer, songwriter, and guitarist. With humor and heart, she tells of growing up one of the few Asian American kids at her school in Eugene, Oregon; of struggling with her mother’s particular, high expectations of her; of a painful adolescence; of treasured months spent in her grandmother’s tiny apartment in Seoul, where she and her mother would bond, late at night, over heaping plates of food.

As she grew up, moving to the East Coast for college, finding work in the restaurant industry, and performing gigs with her fledgling band–and meeting the man who would become her husband–her Koreanness began to feel ever more distant, even as she found the life she wanted to live. It was her mother’s diagnosis of terminal cancer, when Michelle was twenty-five, that forced a reckoning with her identity and brought her to reclaim the gifts of taste, language, and history her mother had given her.

Love in the Time of Serial Killers by Alicia Thompson from the library for my buddy read with Anna of Diary of an Eccentric.

PhD candidate Phoebe Walsh has always been obsessed with true crime. She’s even analyzing the genre in her dissertation—if she can manage to finish writing it. It’s hard to find the time while she spends the summer in Florida, cleaning out her childhood home, dealing with her obnoxiously good-natured younger brother, and grappling with the complicated feelings of mourning a father she hadn’t had a relationship with for years.

It doesn’t help that she’s low-key convinced that her new neighbor, Sam Dennings, is a serial killer (he may dress business casual by day, but at night he’s clearly up to something). It’s not long before Phoebe realizes that Sam might be something much scarier—a genuinely nice guy who can pierce her armor to reach her vulnerable heart.

Vagabonds! by Eloghosa Osunde , which is for my work’s June book club, from the library.

As in Nigeria, vagabonds are those whose existence is literally outlawed: the queer, the poor, the displaced, the footloose and rogue spirits. They are those who inhabit transient spaces, who make their paths and move invisibly, who embrace apparitions, old vengeances and alternative realities. Eloghosa Osunde’s brave, fiercely inventive novel traces a wild array of characters for whom life itself is a form of resistance: a driver for a debauched politician with the power to command life and death; a legendary fashion designer who gives birth to a grown daughter; a lesbian couple whose tender relationship sheds unexpected light on their experience with underground sex work; a wife and mother who attends a secret spiritual gathering that shifts her world. As their lives intertwine—in bustling markets and underground clubs, churches and hotel rooms—vagabonds are seized and challenged by spirits who command the city’s dark energy. Whether running from danger, meeting with secret lovers, finding their identities, or vanquishing their shadowselves, Osunde’s characters confront and support one another, before converging for the once-in-a-lifetime gathering that gives the book its unexpectedly joyous conclusion.

Blending unvarnished realism with myth and fantasy, Vagabonds! is a vital work of imagination that takes us deep inside the hearts, minds, and bodies of a people in duress—and in triumph.

What did you receive?