On My Shelf: February 2025

I’m pretty sure I haven’t read this many books in a single month since I was a teenager. Between sicks days and holidays and snow days and the interminable cold in Nova Scotia this winter, I’ve been squeezing books into every nook and cranny of my days. Also, I will admit that thrillers hold my attention for longer than non-fiction which has been my traditional go-to.

I read a total of sixteen books in February.

THE SHORT VERSION

• The Woman on the Ledge – Ruth Mancini ★★★☆☆
• The House Across the Lake – Riley Sager ★★★☆☆
• Nightwatching – Tracy Sierra ★★★★☆
• The Good Life – Robert Waldinger ★★★☆☆
• Has Anyone Seen Charlotte Salter – Nicci French ★★★★★
• 56 Days – Catherine Ryan Howard ★★★★☆
• The Silent Patient – Alex Michaelides ★★★☆☆
• Poverty, by America – Matthew Desmond ★★★★☆
• The PLAN – Kendra Adachi ★★★☆☆
• No One Knows – J.T. Ellison ★★★☆☆
• Then She Was Gone – Lisa Jewell ★★★★★
• The Girl Who Lived – Christopher Greyson ★★★☆☆
• The Blue Castle – Lucy Maud Montgomery ★★★★★
• The Most – Jessica Anthony *not rated
• The Secret Book of Flora Lee – Patti Callahan Henry ★★★★★
• Vera Wong’s Unsolicited Advice for Murderers – Jesse Q. Sutanto ★★★★☆

NOTE: Every single thriller involves murder and contains at least some profanity (though none had shockingly pervasive language). I’ve noted more specific trigger warnings below.

THE LONG VERSION

The Woman on the Ledge – Ruth Mancini (fiction; thriller) ★★★☆☆ (3.5 stars rounded down to 3.)

I’m not sure what I think about this book. There were some good plot twists, but it was also often unnecessarily hard to follow and I never felt like I connected with any of the characters (except the story’s murder victim).

• Summary: A woman you’ve just met – and prevented from committing suicide – is found dead. You’re the prime suspect. She also happens to be the wife of your boss. Something’s not adding up. Who’s telling the truth, and why are so many people lying?
• Trigger warnings: Upsetting (non-descriptive) discussions of rape and grooming. Suicide.

The House Across the Lake – Riley Sager (fiction; thriller; supernatural) ★★★☆☆

What do I rate this? 3.5 rounded up or down? I’m going down because the last few chapters of this book just did not do it for me. The majority of the book was compelling and I was getting fairly invested (4/5 stars!), but then it went batpoop crazy for the last five or so chapters (1/5 stars).
I will say that I was pretty certain of how everything was going to turn out at various points in the book and I was so wrong it’s laughable.

• Summary: Casey’s husband drowned while they were living on a lake her family has been retreating to for decades. Now she’s back to grieve and fit the pieces of her life together. She’s also sitting on her deck with binoculars watching the young, wealthy couple across the lake. When she saves the wife from drowning and senses the near-death experience wasn’t an accident, Casey stumbles upon unsettling and dangerous revelations.
• Trigger warnings: alcoholism.

Nightwatching – Tracy Sierra (fiction; thriller) ★★★★☆

First up – this book was creepy. Especially as a mother (it’s about a mom who discovers an intruder in her house and has to hide in a tiny secret room with her two young children.) Especially as a mother with two kids (older girl, younger boy – just like in the book) reading this while home alone!
I’m pretty sure this would have been 5/5 for me…if it wasn’t 60 pages too long. I felt like some of the dialogue – internal and otherwise – was unnecessary to move the plot along and it got tiresome. More generally, this wasn’t a book with a ton of plot twists, but I wasn’t sure what was true and what was not.
A solid read that kept me up past my bedtime.

• Summary: A mother is home alone with her two young children in the middle of a blizzard when she realizes she’s not actually alone. Someone else is in the house and he’s not a good guy. Relying on gut maternal instinct, she hides with her children in a concealed crawl space. They can’t move or make any noise. How will they survive in the cold, confined space? And why does her daughter seem to recognize this terrifying man hunting them down?
• Trigger warnings: non-descriptive discussions of grooming.

The Good Life: Lessons from the World’s Longest Scientific Study of Happiness – Robert Waldinger (non-fiction; research compilation) ★★★☆☆

This book was 3.5 stars. It could easily have been a 4 (or 5!) if it had just been shorter. There was so much unnecessary filler in this book and it drove me to distraction. I can save you a lot of reading:

• Relationships matter. Marital. Friend. Family. People with strong relational ties are likely to live longer and have higher life satisfaction. That is basically the end.
  I’m a sucker for big-data projects and I did enjoy the case vignette’s (this study followed two generations of individuals from the same families) but the superfluous fluff really took away from the reading experience for me.

Has Anyone Seen Charlotte Salter – Nicci French (fiction; thriller) ★★★★★ (4.5 stars rounded up to 5)

I liked this book. It was a slow-burn thriller with nothing too startling from beginning to end. None of the characters were particularly likeable, but that fit the situation – two families that are mourning one dead (murdered) – parent.

• Summary: Thirty years ago Charlotte Slater didn’t show up at her husband’s 50th birthday party. Where did she go? Is she still alive? And why was the body of her friend – Duncan Ackerley – found in a river a few days later? The death (wait…is Charlotte dead or did she abandon her loved ones?) of two parents tears both families apart, but when the Ackerley brothers decide to revisit the mystery in podcast form, old hurts and secrets start to resurface.
• Trigger warnings: Immolation.

56 Days – Catherine Ryan Howard (fiction; thriller) ★★★★☆

This was a solid 4.5-star book (rounded down to 4) for me. My only real gripe was profanity, though it wasn’t constant. The story was compelling. I don’t typically love alternating timelines and perspectives, but in this book I thought it worked. I was pretty sure I had figured out the punchline. Nope. Then I thought I actually had it sorted out. Wrong again. Third time? Still wrong. The ending was melancholy, but satisfying.
(For what it’s worth, I liked another of Howard’s book – The Nothing Man – even more!)

• Summary: 56 days ago Ciara and Oliver met at a supermarket. 36 days ago they moved in together as the world shut down in the middle of a global pandemic. Today, the police have discovered a badly decomposed body in Oliver’s apartment. Was their meeting random or part of a sinister plan? Why does Oliver take such care to avoid interacting with strangers, and why is Ciara estranged from her family?
• Trigger warnings: COVID-19 pandemic; murder of a child.

The Silent Patient – Alex Michaelides (fiction; thriller) ★★★☆☆

I know this book has won high acclaim, but I’d give it 3.5 stars which, after much debate I’m rounding down, not up. (Goodreads, where are my 1/2 stars – I need them for occasions such as this.)

I can’t quite put my finger on why I didn’t love this book. It was grittier and had quite a bit of profanity, which always sours the experience for me. I felt like I never got to really know any of the characters, which I suspect was part of the author’s intention.

It was a solid thriller, but not my favourite.

• Summary: Alicia is a famous painter married to a famous photographer. They appear to be living in matrimonial harmony. One day, she brutally murders him – five bullets to the head. She never talks again. She becomes the silent patient. Theo is a psychotherapist who is obsessed with helping Alicia. But why is he so consumed with getting her to talk? And why does Alicia seem to have a special connection with Theo?
• Trigger warnings: mental health issues including descriptions of drugging institutionalized criminal offenders, domestic violence, murder.

Poverty, by America – Matthew Desmond (non-fiction; social critique) ★★★★☆

Critical topic, thoughtful insights, not always compelling writing. I think this could have been a 5/5 book, but I found it drier than necessary. But maybe that’s just me being picky.

Quotes of note:

• At the end of the day, aren’t “systemic” problems – systemic racism, poverty, misogyny – made up of untold numbers of individual decisions motivated by real or imagined self-interest. “The system” doesn’t force us to stiff the waiter or vote against affordable housing in our neighbourhood, does it?
• We know if our vegetables are local and organic, but we don’t ask what the farmworkers made picking them. When we purchase a plane ticket, we are shown the carbon emissions for the flights, but we aren’t told if the flight attendants are unionized.
• Poverty isn’t simply the condition of not having enough money. It’s the condition of not having enough choice and being taken advantage of because of that.
• The biggest government subsidies are not directed at families trying to climb out of poverty but instead go to ensure that well-off families stay well. This leaves fewer resources for the poor. If this is our design, our social contract, then we should at least own up to it. We should at least stand up and profess, Yes, this is the kind of nation we want. What we cannot do is look the American poor in the face and say, We’d love to help you, but we just can’t afford to, because that is a lie.
• As people accumulate more money, they become less dependent on public goods and, in turn, less interested in supporting them.
• In many corners of America, a pricey mortgage doesn’t just buy a home; it also buys a good education, a well-run soccer league, and public safety so thick and expected it feels natural, instead of the product of social design.

The PLAN: Manage Your Time Like a Lazy Genius by Kendra Adachi (non-fiction; time management) ★★★☆☆

Okay, this one shocked me. It’s Kendra Adachi! The Lazy Genius! And I found this entire book to be such. a. slog.

It felt like simultaneously providing too much information and too little. I cannot remember a single thing from this book off the top of my head except a truly shocking number of references to the shedding of female uterine linings each month. I was determined to finish the book (again – it’s Kendra!), but dreaded sitting down to read it.

The Lazy Genius Way is an incredible resource – I’d recommend people start (and end) there.

No One Knows – J.T. Ellison ★★★☆☆

Meh. The storyline was compelling, but also confusing – switching between various perspectives and timelines. I felt like the ending was unsatisfying and rushed.
I would have been better off making this a DNF once I reached the half-way mark, but wasn’t able to skip and read the last few pages to get the “punchline” since I needed more context.

• Summary: Aubrey Hamilton’s husband – Josh – disappeared five years ago and hasn’t been heard from since. They were at a wedding together and then he was gone. No body, no note, no indication if he’s dead or alive. Then she meets a man who looks and behaves uncannily like her husband (yet most certainly is not her husband). How well did she know Josh? And, more importantly, how well does she know herself?
• Trigger warnings: Drug dealing, blackmail, murder.

Then She Was Gone – Lisa Jewell (fiction; thriller) ★★★★★ (4.5 rounded up to 5)

An unusual story, haunting, well-written. I did not put this book down (literally) and read it in a single sitting – no snacks or water breaks. I cared about the characters and felt the full scope of human emotion. I found the ending satisfying.

• Summary: Ten years ago Ellie – a teenager – went to study at the library and never came home. Her disappearance rips a family apart and Laurel, her mother, doesn’t think she’ll ever be able to heal from the trauma of losing her beloved daughter. Then one day she meets a man who sweeps her off her feet and introduces her to his precocious daughter, Poppy, who acts, talks, and looks like a miniature version of her daughter Ellie. Who is hiding secrets and who is telling the truth? Could Ellie still be alive? And could Poppy hold the key to solving the mystery of Ellie disappearance?
• Trigger warnings: abduction, abuse and neglect.

The Blue Castle – Lucy Maud Montgomery (fiction) ★★★★★

I know this has been on many bookshelves and bedside tables this month because The Blue Castle was our Cool Blogger’s Book Club book selection.

I loved everything about this book…except the ending. Somehow it all came together too quickly for me. But aside from that tiny quibble – what. a. delight. How had I never heard about this book before? It’s hilarious, scandalous, and downright heartwarming. Valancy holds her own in comparison with Anne of Green Gables. A very satisfying book.

• Summary: Valancy endures a life of drudgery – every single day she faces the same monotony of living with an overbearing mother and insufferable aunt. They call her names, have her do their bidding, and generally make her days miserable. Her only escape is through reading a series of nature books by John Foster and daydreaming about her Blue Castle. One day, Valancy receives an unexpected diagnosis, and in an instant the trajectory of her life changes forever. Can she escape from her suffocating family life and forge her own path of independence?

The Girl Who Lived – Christopher Greyson (fiction; thriller) ★★★☆☆

A compelling story, but I disliked the ending enough that it took took away from the overall impact of the book.

• Summary. Ten years ago, Faith’s father, sister and two others were brutally murdered. Faith was the lone survivor. She’s sure she saw a rat-faced man in the woods but no one believed her. The police declared the case closed – Faith’s father was the murderer and then he took his own life. But things don’t add up. And now Faith is being followed and she’s sure she spotted the same rat-faced man around town. Can she get to the bottom of the mystery before it’s too late and will anyone believe her story as a deeply traumatized survivor?
• Trigger warnings: alcoholism, stalking, suicide.

The Most – Jessica Anthony (fiction) *not rated

I have very mixed feelings about this book so I didn’t give it any star rating.

I thought the writing was compelling and tight. Some people (on Goodreads) complained about plot holes, inconsistent writing techniques, and unreliable narration by the main characters but I thought it was creatively impactful.

My challenge with the book is the fact it ends up revolving around infidelity – something that is NOT at all clear from the synopsis. While nothing is graphic and the marital indiscretions are largely suggested, it’s a haunting, sad story about the emotional fallout of two people hurting each other (and, more sadly, their children) via years of continued deception.

Writing = 5/5 for me. Character development = 5/5. Premise = no stars, just…sadness.

• Summary: On an unseasonably warm November day, Virgil Beckett – a mediocre salesman – takes his two sons to church while his wife, Kathleen, opts to stay home. When they return for lunch, they discover she’s in the outdoor pool at their apartment complex and refuses to come out. Why?
• Trigger warnings: infidelity.

The Secret Book of Flora Lea – Patti Callahan Henry (historical fiction) ★★★★★

A book I struggled to put down with richly developed characters and a heartbreaking story with a redemptive – albeit unexpected – resolution. That resolution wasn’t wholly satisfying to me, but when I closed the final page I knew this will be a book I recommend many times.

• Summary: Two sisters are evacuated from London during the bombings of World War II. Living with strangers in the countryside, Hazel comforts her younger sister – Flora – with stories of a magical realm accessible only to them. She calls the spot Whisperwood and it is a treasured escape from reality they return to again and again. But one day the unthinkable happens: Flora disappears. Days turn into weeks turn into months turn into years. Hazel still struggles with guilt and fear and sadness over Flora’s disappearance, but then a book turns up at her workplace that describes Whisperwood – a fictional place she created and was known only to these two sisters – in detail. Who wrote the book (could it be Flora) and will this turn of events upend Hazel’s life?
• Trigger warnings: child disappearance, (relatively) non-graphic descriptions of bombing and war-related tragedy.

Vera Wong’s Unsolicited Advice for Murderers – Jesse Q. Sutanto (fiction; thriller) ★★★★☆

A slow-moving but engaging murder mystery very reminiscent of the Thursday Murder Club books by Richard Osman. Likeable characters with a satisfying story arc.

My biggest quibble is the language. It’s not horrible or pervasive, but it still feels jarring and unnecessary. I may be in the minority that is bothered by swearing in books, but that’s the one negative aspect to this book that stood out to me.

• Summary: Vera Wong is a widow whose son ignores her and who has a single customer that visits her dilapidated specialty tea shop. Despite her rigid schedule and no-nonsense approach to life, she knows her business is doomed. Until a man winds up dead on her tearoom floor. Vera decides to “help” the police investigate the murder and systematically befriends all of the prime suspects. Who killed this man and, more importantly, would they do it again?

And that’s a very long wrap on my reading for February. I expect to read…half that many books in March?

Your turn.

• What was the best book you read in February?
• Have you read any of the books listed above? If so, what did you think?!