My Year in Books 2024: February

Time for this month's list, but it's not a very long with this time. I read two novels for pleasure in February, but I guess that's better than none.

My reviews for this month are below, and if you're interested my other post from this year is here: January

The House in the Pines by Ana Reyes (2023)

This month began with a library book, and one with (surprise, surprise) an intriguing premise. Maya lives in Boston with her boyfriend, but one night she sees a video that brings back memories of a traumatic event from her past, so she travels back to her hometown to make sense of it all. That might sound a bit pedestrian, but there are some things you should probably know. The traumatic event was that Maya’s best friend Aubrey dropped down dead without explanation, after talking to Maya’s boyfriend Frank. And the video that she saw was of the same thing happening to another girl… and Maya recognized the man she was talking to as Frank. Another important thing to know is that Maya is going through benzodiazepine withdrawal at the start of the story, and she’s self-medicating with alcohol. Maya returns to her mother’s house to try and make sense of these events and her own unreliable memories, and to prove that Frank had something to do with Aubrey’s death. By doing this, Maya also reconnects with her family history and rediscovers the book that her Guatemalan father was writing at the time of his death (which happened before Maya was born). There’s quite a lot going on here, and some parts of the book are really compelling. I’m not sure the Frank storyline was really for me, though, as for all the intrigue, the explanation was a bit simplistic and far-fetched. Maya’s family relationships and background were much more engaging.

The Paris Apartment by Lucy Foley (2022)

I really enjoyed Foley’s previous novels The Hunting Party and The Guest List, so I was looking forward to this one. Sadly, I’m not sure it quite lived up to its promise. The book is (funnily enough) set in a weird old apartment building in Paris. Jess – a woman with a rather messy lifestyle – arrives at the building to stay with her half-brother Ben. But when she gets to Ben’s apartment, he’s nowhere to be seen. After a while, Jess starts to suspect that something bad has happened to Ben. The book is actually told through multiple perspectives, so we learn more about the other inhabitants of the apartment block, as well as their relationships with Ben. Unfortunately, the big reveals that are to come are quite obvious early on, so it becomes a case of waiting to see when Jess will catch up. I enjoyed the setting – which I expected to, given the author’s previous work – but the characters were quite difficult to deal with. It wasn’t so much that they were unlikeable, though they all were, but rather that I struggled to understand the motivations for their behaviours. The final explanation put some of the weird behaviour into perspective, but there were multiple minor weirdnesses that were never quite explained. It felt a bit like the characters had to behave oddly in order to keep the mystery going. If they’d all just tried to behave normally, Jess would have figured out what happened to Ben a lot sooner.