The Stranger's Obituary - Jessica L. Randall (Obituary Society #2)

The Stranger's Obituary is the second book in Jessica L. Randall's Obituary Society series, which may or may not be the last book in the series--so far #2 is as far as it goes.  It takes place in a town called Auburn, Nebraska where weird things happen.  There's a little girl named Juniper who can find lost things, some very spooky happenings that affected the heroine of the first book, Lila, and now we get to see some more weirdness.  Mina Fairchild is linked to music; when she hears a song associated with a person, she can see what happened to that person when they listened to it.  And her mother had strange abilities of her own.  Oh, and there's a ghost plaguing Mina's starlet sister, Bernie, who has returned to Auburn after a bad breakup with her Hollywood boyfriend, who is a real piece of work.

Mina and Bernie have other problems, too.  Mina is a shut-in; she writes a travel blog, but she has never actually been to any of the places she writes about.  In fact, she hasn't left Auburn since her mother brought her and Bernie there ages ago.  Bernie might be a starlet, but she left in a bit of a rush after stealing from her brand-new fiance for reasons that she's never been able to really explain to anyone.  Now that she's back, she wants to try to make amends, but things are, of course, a little more complicated than that.  Meanwhile, a body has turned up in quiet Auburn, which has also been swamped by tourists and journalists trying to get a glimpse of Bernie living a small-town life.

My thoughts on this book are similar to my thoughts on the first book.  It needs another light round of line edits; I saw a few words that I think were supposed to be other ones, and then there were a couple of instances where it seemed like Randall got confused with or forgot who was supposed to talking, which made some of the dialog not really make sense.  I would point to the specific instances of these, but I can't, because I think that, much like Auburn, this book is haunted.  It possessed  my Kindle and, once I opened it, literally wouldn't let me read another book.  It took away all the functionality of the Kindle except turning the pages.  I couldn't go to the menu, or even change how my progress was displayed on the bottom of the screen.  If I wanted to get out of the book, I had to hard restart the Kindle to get back to the home screen.  I thought this might have just been a problem with the download, so I deleted the book and re-downloaded it, but it kept happening, so I think it's something up with the actual file on Amazon.  This isn't Randall's fault at all (I presume something went wrong with the file conversion on Amazon) but it certainly made me reluctant to re-open the book after finishing it in order to pull specific examples.

The other thing that I also didn't love was the romance.  Bernie's romantic plot is great, with the revival of something with her former fiance, even though she's not ultimately sure what she wants from it.  Their interactions were wonderful, and you can tell that there's definitely chemistry between them even if they still might want different things.  Mina's romantic plot, on the other hand, seems to have been added just for the sake of it.  Her interactions with her romantic interest are few, and he does come off as stalker-y.  Again, I think this could have been remedied with the book being just a tad longer so their interactions could have been both more numerous and more nuanced.  The few prolonged scenes they did have were sweet, but overall I didn't think it worked.

Unlike the first book, I think the supernatural element fit in well here.  It was more fully woven into the story, and the feel of Auburn was better flushed out with it.  The things that happen in Auburn aren't big, grand supernatural things; they're small, cute ones that can still manage to be a little creepy, but they really fit in perfectly with Auburn's small-town, slightly-outdated vibe.  The Obituary Society itself makes a reappearance, too, and gives us a tiny bit of insight into how the events of the first book are still resolving themselves, and the members help Mina start to re-integrate herself into society.  She's not really an agoraphobe, as is suggested by one character; she's more like an extreme introvert, but with some motivation behind it which comes out later.  She's not actually afraid of going outside, and she does; she goes out, and talks to people, she just...doesn't like to.  I think Mina and Bernie both grew a lot as characters in this book, and Auburn was, again, very well-developed.

Like The Obituary Society, this was a very solid book.  4 stars out of 5, and I hope she writes more in this wonderful town.

Goldenhood - Jessica L. Randall

When I saw that Jessica L. Randall had a fairytale adaptation to her name, I was super excited.  I liked the charm of her Obituary Society book (I have the second one and just need to get around to using it) and was thrilled to see her turn her pen to a fairytale.  Granted, it was Red Riding Hood, which isn't the most exciting to me, but still.  So, how did it hold up?

It was okay.  The story is about Elise, who comes from a family where the women are said to be witches.  Her grandmother supposedly set wolves on her grandfather, killing him; her mother walked off into the woods and was never seen again; and her aunt serves as the village wisewoman, trying to put aside any witchy tendencies, but the townspeople won't really let her.  Elise herself is inexplicably drawn to the woods, and only the golden cloak she wears--a cloak that was once her mother's--keeps her tethered enough to resist the forest's call.  But as she begins having dreams that hint that something is hiding in the woods, waiting for her, farm animals begin showing up dead and a massive wolf is spotted around the town, Elise might not be able to resist the woods after all--not if she wants to survive with her family intact.

This wasn't a terribly twisty book; everything is laid out all nice and neat and there aren't any big surprises.  There were a few times when I went, "Really?  Oh, okay," but nothing that had my jaw dropping in shock or awe.  Elise is a nice girl but not, I think, a particularly intriguing one; her little sister, Rosie, might have actually been more interesting had she been a bit older.  (Rosie is Red Riding Hood, paired with Elise's Goldenhood.)  Most Riding Hood adaptations tend to have one thing in common, which is werewolves, because that's the obvious place to go with it, and this isn't really any different in that respect.  There's a light romance story line, but nothing too series; one sweet kiss is really as far as it goes.  I thought the end would tie up a bit more neatly with Elise wanting to embrace magic and the title of witch or showing the villagers how things could be, with care, but it didn't go that way; instead, everyone tells a bunch of conflicting stories that everyone believes anyway, and no one questions any of the weird stuff that happened, which was kind of strange.  Okay, really strange.  That was a bit of a plot hole, really.

This is a short book, at 129 pages, which was another reason I picked it up; it helped fill in my "A book under 150 pages" category for a reading challenge.  But I think Randall could have taken the time to add some more pages and flesh things out a little more, and the story would have benefited from it.  It also would have benefited from another round of line edits; there are multiple instances of quotation marks in random places and typos such as "ee'll" instead of "we'll".  It's nothing major, but enough to show that the book isn't really as polished as it could have been.  Overall, it's not my favorite short fairy tale adaptation.  That title still goes to Jill Myles' The Scarecrow King.  But this was good, and I'd be interested in seeing other adaptations from Randall now that she has a bit more experience under her belt to work with.

3 stars out of 5.

The Obituary Society - Jessica Randall (Obituary Society #1)

Don't let the cover fool you on this one--it's no sugar-sweet chick-lit novel about a group of ladies talking about obituaries.  A group of ladies talking about obituaries does appear, but they're not really the focus.  No, the focus is something completely different--a girl who just moved to her grandfather's home town to deal with his estate following his death, and who finds that her family history there is a little darker than she thought...and that it's haunting her to this day.

This was a great book.  The main character is Lila, who takes on the task of renovating her grandfather's long-abandoned home while staying with her great aunt Ada.  The longer she stays, the more involved she becomes with the town's other inhabitants including Gladys, one of Ada's best friends; Max, Gladys' grandson, and his quirky daughter Juniper; Asher, the handsome cinnamon-scented lawyer who offers to help Lila with her grandfather's house and estate; and a host of other minor characters who all lend Auburn its small-town charm.  But beneath all the sweet cakes and savory "Rocky Mountain oysters," there's a bit of menace about Lila's stay in Auburn, and when someone else turns up dead, it looks like Lila is in far more trouble than a few rusty pipes and bad wires might merit.

Randall did a great job with the town of Auburn, making it seem like a real, charming place--though it came across to me as more southern that midwestern.  Still, with church auctions and harvest festivals, Auburn was a cute place full of quirky residents, and felt very genuine.  The characters had their own quirks and personalities and while not all of them fulfilled vital plot functions, none of them felt outright superfluous, which can be a problem with minor characters.  As it was, Auburn felt very complete, and its presence went toward motivating Lila to stay, rather than just serving as a random place in the "stories have to take place somewhere, so this one will take place here" vein.

I don't want to say too much about the plot, because I don't want to spoil anything, but there were a few slight (SLIGHT!) issues I had with this one that I think I can touch on pretty easily:

-It needs a few more line edits.  There are a bunch of cases of missing quotation marks, line breaks that make things more confusing, etc. that could easily be done away with, but overall it's very well edited for a self-published title.

-I didn't really see a point in Erica's character.  I think tension with Max and Lila could have been built very easily without her coming back into the picture, and her involvement in the plot came across as a bit contrived.

-There's an element of supernatural here.  I didn't dislike it, but it did seem a bit out of place in the story because there's really never any explanation given for it.  I think this could have either been worked in better, or done away with entirely--the plot could have easily worked without a supernatural element if other bits had been tweaked just a tiny bit.

However, I would like to note that these are very minor complaints, and I really, really enjoyed this title.  Randall has a companion novel out, The Stranger's Obituary, that I will definitely pick up the next time I fall into a reading slump, because I have no doubts it will be just as good as this one.

A very solid 4 stars out of 5.