Howling Frog Books

 I'm Starting to Worry About This Black Box of Doom, by Jason Pargin I found the title and cover a bit irresistible, even though I haven't gotten around to reading more of the John Dies at t he End series .   Abbott, your basic failing-to-launch guy with a Twitch channel, hates driving for Lyft.  Arriving at a Circle K to pick up a client for a trip to the LA airport, she shows him an old roadie box covered in stickers and offers him $200,000 in cash if he will drive her and it to Washington, DC in four days.  He's not allowed to see inside the box, he can't tell anyone, he must leave all trackable devices behind, but she promises it's not heroin and he'll have enough money to live on his own!  And so they head off to the highway. Within a few hours, an ex-FBI officer, a biker thug, Abbott's dad, and the entirety of Reddit are on their tail and rumors are spreading faster than wildfire.  The box contains a dead body -- an alien -- a nuclear bomb -- a...

 Seeing Red, by Lina Meruane (Sangre in el ojo) I was quite interested in this Chilean novel, which I saw billed as "one of Chile's most exciting young writers" in her first work translated into English, which was about trauma and its effects.  I didn't quite expect what I got! Lina is a young Chilean grad student living in the US with her boyfriend, Ignacio, but she has to be extremely careful with her eyes, which have a bunch of extra veins growing in them, and they're brittle.  So the first thing that happens is that the veins burst and Lina becomes very nearly blind as one eye fills with blood and the other comes pretty close.* Immediately, her life becomes far more difficult, as she has to take a leave of absence and usually depends on Ignacio to get around.  The doctor wants to wait and see if the blood kind of goes away.  Her family back in Chile want her home immediately and for her to see a proper Chilean doctor; she and Ignacio do travel down, but Lina...

The Rosemary Tree , by Elizabeth Goudge I have all these books I want to post about, and really there are a couple of others that should come first, but I want to return Rosemary Tree to the library today, since it's an ILL.  So here we go. Some time ago, some blogger (who it was I no longer know) put The Rosemary Tree on a list of her own personal life-changing books.  I really like Elizabeth Goudge a lot, and I had not heard of this title, so I put it on my wishlist and eventually got around to ILLing it.  It reminds me very much of the Eliot chronicles, being a story with a lot of different people, all connected. We have John and Daphne, a married couple who need to connect better, their three daughters (each with her own story), the girls' school teachers, Daphne's former fiance (fresh out of prison), a great-aunt who lives on a small estate, and John's old nanny.  All of their stories intertwine to produce a really lovely novel about second chances that u...