This book was complex in how it portrayed grief and how it can affect family/friends/lovers. There were thoughts I read that someone I know has expressed feeling at that time in their life and made me reflect on if I did the right things during that time.

I had been told that this wasn't a great book but I persevered and actually rather enjoyed it. The story is of a Tuberculosis Sanitorium which has been closed for some time and re-opened as a luxury resort hotel. There are some pretty grisly murders but the author does not dwell on the that but rather on building suspense as the characters find themselves trapped in the hotel with the murderer due to some severe weather and avalanches. The story of the 'detective' who solves the murders is also running parallel to the main story and it makes for many surprising twists and turns. I would recommend it for an interesting read.

This is a beautifully written lyrical novel about the devastation of Reconstruction and the racism entrenched in society beyond emancipation. The characters are complex and the story tragic but also filled with hope- hope beyond what is to what could be. The author paints a beautiful landscape that is highly visual.

This isn't my usual type of book but I liked it a lot. Jiles did a great job of creating two unique and interesting characters, Captain Kidd, a tired and grizzled veteran of 71 who travels through Texas reading the news to groups who gather to hear him, and Johanna, a 10 year old white girl who was rescued after being held captive by Indians for four years. In the quest to return Johanna to her relatives, both of them grow and learn and show the reader what real family means.

I liked this book even though it was a little sad. It was sad when the girl's family died. It made me want to cry. I thought it was cool that the flea got his super strength from drinking a lion's blood. I would recommend this book to my friends and family.

I listened to this book on audio. I found it very hard to stay engaged in this. Perhaps already knowing the outcome diminished the story for me, the details provided went into the minutia. The author should not have done the audio - whew his accents were awful.

Nice book, action, not a lot of details though. Overall, I thought it was good but not great.

I liked the book, it was a quick read. But when I finished I felt like I had read it before. It has strong female characters, who learn about themselves and each other. They were not friends as children, who was to blame for that. Can they put the past behind them and come to be friends?

This is another one of those books where the journey is really fun, but then the author proves that writing endings is really challenging. You can have a great idea for an atmospheric mystery, but you also need to have a great idea for how you are going to close things out, which Sarah Pearse didn't seem to have. The book follows Detective Elin Warner, who isn't really a detective anymore after a case went wrong and she decided to take some extended leave. Elin and her boyfriend, Will, have arrived at a hotel in the Swiss Alps to celebrate her brother's engagement. The hotel just happens to also be a really creepy former sanatorium, because the designer thought that would be a super cool place to build a fancy hotel. To continue with wonderful decision making skills, Elin also decides that this would be a fitting trip to accuse her brother of possibly killing their younger sibling during a childhood vacation. Because, hey, nothing says "happy engagement!" like "did you kill our brother, though? You can totally tell me if you did." There are just a few problems with this plan - first, Elin doesn't really talk to her brother anymore, so finding time to accuse him of this is a challenge. Second, his fiancée just went missing, and it may or may not be in poor taste to accuse him of anything given those circumstances. Third, there is an avalanche approaching the hotel, so they really all need to leave. And, of course, fourth, some people are starting to get murdered. After staying behind and getting trapped from the avalanche, Elin has to really deal with all her personal issues at once because she is the only cop-like person on the mountain who can investigate anything. No one can come help until the weather clears, which probably won't be for a while. There were a few issues I had with the book, two of which I found to be major issues. The first is that this was a fun crime novel, but ultimately it seems like no one could ever be punished for the murders that happened here. Elin isn't a detective in this area, as she points out again and again, and she tends to disobey the orders she is given (or just hides what she is doing because if she doesn't ask permission, she isn't doing anything wrong?) so it seems like everything she has gathered would be utterly useless. She also has a weird tendency to tell everyone around her everything she has discovered. Like, maybe they don't all need to know every piece of evidence you have gathered? You know someone around here is killing people, maybe stop telling everyone everything and you'd have better luck. The second is that the ending was just really dumb. The culprit didn't really make any sense, and it seemed like a massive overreaction for that person to be the one responsible for everything. I think it's worth it for the fun atmosphere of being trapped in the mountains with a killer, as long as you keep your expectations in line for the ending.

I'm a big historical fiction fan, but this book did not hit the mark. I felt it was quite slow at points, but did at least attempt to re-live what actually happened in history. I did not feel strong connections to the characters, which was something I was looking for in this type of book.