When Kyle Straker volunteers to be hypnotized at the annual Millgrove talent show, he expected the usual amateur act – perhaps slight embarrassment from being made to act like a chicken, but nothing more than that. What he wakes up to, though, is a nightmare. Cars and televisions no longer work, townspeople communicate in a strange language, but worst of all, people simply pass by Kyle as if he does not exist.

In an attempt to discover what caused this monumental shift, Kyle teams up with the three other hapless volunteers in order to survive the strange new world they have found themselves in. However, the more they investigate, the more danger they find themselves in as they eventually realize that there is more than just their lives at stake, but also their way of life.

The novel is told through a series of cassette tapes that have subsequently become a historical artifact called the Straker Tapes. Mike Lancaster assumes the position of the historian with editor’s notes to explain parts of the story that would not make sense to the evolved human, which adds both humor and horror to the story. For example, he goes into great detail describing mouths, which, though amusing to the reader, inevitably implies that the future humans depicted in the novel do not have any and are therefore superior, emphasizing the oddness of the new world Kyle and his friends find themselves in.

Overall, I enjoyed Human.4 by Mike Lancaster because it was a unique premise I had never read or considered before. While it is not a conventional dystopian novel, I would recommend it to anyone who enjoys them for a new take on the genre.

– Mahak M.

Lily Bart: fashionable, socially-adept, and absolutely beautiful. Born and raised in the upper echelons of New York society, she seems the type of woman to immediately wed a wealthy man and secure her position as a rich socialite. However, due to her own warring nature between her material desires and her yearning for true love, Lily finds herself caught in a malicious web of jealousy and deceit that causes her fall from grace and social affluence to poverty and loneliness on the margins of society.

It is this unfortunate journey that Edith Wharton chronicles in her novel The House of Mirth. Although Lily is the protagonist of the novel, Wharton explores the events from other perspectives, notably Laurence Selden, Lily’s true love interest. The greatest irony of the novel is that although Selden openly despises the superficial and gossip-driven high society, when push comes to shove and Lily’s reputation is tarnished by forces outside of her control, Selden has the same prejudices against her, and it is these biases that keep Lily and Selden from their happy ending until it is too late to reach it.

Outside of Lily Bart herself, Wharton uses the novel to criticize the society of which she was a part. The most obvious of these is the disparity between what is expected out of men and women during this time. As Lily herself notes, while men could get away with shabbiness or not marrying, women were forced to always look beautiful and presentable, and had to marry in order to keep this up. Ultimately, Lily’s inability to cope with the demands her society made of her caused her decline into the fringes of society.

Overall, The House of Mirth is in no way a light or funny read as the title suggests. Instead, it represents the depressing struggle between what society has determined for people to be and what those people actually are through Lily Bart’s equally tragic story arc. In the end, The House of Mirth is an interesting read if only to understand the similarities between early twentieth century society and modern life.

– Mahak M.

The House of Mirth by Edith Wharton is available to checkout from the Mission Viejo Library. It is also available to download for free from Libby.

When the brilliant yet mean-spirited author Alan Conway is found to have jumped off of his tower, there is no evidence to suggest that it could have been anything more than suicide. In fact, no one cares to look into it too much, since there were more people who detested Alan Conway the person than who loved Alan Conway the mystery novelist. However, his editor, Susan Ryeland, has her suspicions.

After all, Conway had just submitted to her the manuscript of Magpie Murders, his latest and final novel in his world-famous Atticus Pünd series, but the last chapter is mysteriously missing from the pages. As Susan searches for the missing pages, she comes to the realization that, perhaps, the supposedly “fictional” novel is actually based on real events, and that maybe, just maybe, the murderer in reality caught wind of Conway’s tactics to expose them and took matters into their own hands…

Magpie Murders by Anthony Horowitz is an interesting read because of its story-within-a-story format. On the outside, there is Susan Ryeland’s investigation into Alan Conway’s life, the missing pages, and the murder the novel was based on. Within this framework, however, is the actual Magpie Murders, an Atticus Pünd detective novel written by Alan Conway (without the ending, of course). I enjoyed this format because it almost felt like a two-for-one read, where there were two well written mysteries in the span of one book. 

I would recommend this novel to any fans of Agatha Christie, since there are obviously a lot of similarities between her books and those of “Alan Conway” (compare Hercule Poirot to Atticus Pünd, for starters). However, any and all fans of mystery and adventure will enjoy this novel too.

– Mahak M.

Magpie Murders by Anthony Horowitz is available for checkout from the Mission Viejo Library. It is also available to download for free from Libby.

It was a clear, cold morning in an unnamed village in Colombia. Excited to see the bishop, who visited their town very rarely, the villagers were stunned when they learned, a few hours later, that the well-loved and respected Vicario twins had murdered a fellow villager, Santiago Nasar, in an attempt to restore her sister’s honor. The greatest irony of the situation, however, is that although the brothers tell anyone who will listen about their plans to murder Santiago, in the hopes that they will be stopped, the villagers either ignore the announcement, assume someone else has taken care of it, or, in some cases, actually encourage the twins to follow through.

This is the premise of Gabriel Garcia Márquez’s enduring literary work: Chronicle of a Death Foretold. Surprisingly, the actual novel is not a chronicle in any sense of the word; the narrator is shockingly unreliable and tells the sequence of events completely out of order. As for “death foretold,” where one might expect that to refer to the fact that the Vicario twins made their intentions perfectly clear to all, thus announcing the death, the truth is that the entire novel is steeped in dramatic irony, since the reader knows from the outset that Santiago Nasar is fated to die – it has been “foretold” by the narrator.

Aside from the murder itself, one of the more significant aspects of the novel is its representation of Colombian culture and society. Although traditional authorities are present, such as the bishop and the police, it quickly becomes clear that the ultimate authority in the town is the social construct of honor. The Vicario twins, who are established as good people, are pushed to commit a heinous crime because of honor, and people encourage them to do it because of the same. Even if the authorities previously mentioned attempt to stop them, the need to retain honor prevails. 

Ultimately, Chronicle of a Death Foretold is intriguing because it completely subverts the reader’s initial expectations for it while also shining a light on the influence of society on a murder. A departure from traditional “murder mysteries,” this novel manages to retain the aspects of a mystery while also being open about its true meaning, making it a fascinating read.

– Mahak M.

Chronicle of a Death Foretold by Gabriel Garcia Marquez is available to checkout from the Mission Viejo Library.