Ethan Frome

Goodreads Summary:
Ethan Frome works his unproductive farm and struggles to maintain a bearable existence with his difficult, suspicious, and hypochondriac wife, Zeenie. But when Zeenie's vivacious cousin enters their household as a "hired girl", Ethan finds himself obsessed with her and with the possibilities for happiness she comes to represent.

In one of American fiction's finest and most intense narratives, Edith Wharton moves this ill-starred trio toward their tragic destinies. Different in both tone and theme from Wharton's other works, Ethan Frome has become perhaps her most enduring and most widely read novel.(l

My Review:
This is an excellent novella. It being so short, by it's nature, I think it's a book everyone should read. It implicitly asks the questions: What does it mean to be married? To be in love? and What obligations do we really have to our spouse? Sometimes a person has to live with the choices that he/she has made and oftentimes we must put the feelings and needs of another in front of our own.

It is about Ethan Frome, a man who came to great hardship while chasing after a fantasy of another life, a happy life. It is about his relationship with his wife and the complications that her cousin brings to their household.
4/5 stars

Dexter is Delicious

Goodreads Summary:
Dexter Morgan's happy homicidal life is undergoing some major changes. He's always live by a single golden rule - he kills only people who deserve it. But the Miami blood-spatter analyst has recently become a daddy - to an eight-pound curiosity named Lily Anne - and strangely, Dex's dark urges seem to have left him. Is he ready to become an overprotective father? To pick up soft teddy bears instead of his trusty knife, duct tape, and fishing wire? What's a serial killer to do?

Then Dexter is summoned to investigate the disappearance of an eighteen-year-old girl who seems to have been abducted by a bizarre group...who just may be vampires...and - possibly - cannibals. Nothing like the familiar hum of his day job to get Dexter's creative dark juices flowing again. Assisting his bull-in-a-china-shop detective sister, Deborah, Dex wades into an investigation that gets more disturbing by the moment. And to compound the complication of Dexter's ever-more-complicated life, a person from his past suddenly reappears...moving dangerously close to his home turf and threatening to destroy the one thing tat has maintained Dexter's pretend human cover and kept him out of the electric chair: his new family.

From an uncharacteristically racy encounter in the Florida Everglades to the most bizarre fringe nightclub in the anything-goes Miami scene, Dexter Is Delicious is an ingenious journey through the dark recesses of Dexter's lovably cold soul. Jeff Lindsay is once again at the top of his game, with this new novel that will thrill fans of his bestselling series.

My Review:
Wow, this is probably the one I liked the least in the series. Dexter's character changed a lot and he was mostly about being a good person, which is a drastic change from his feelingless self. I would still read it as it's still a good story, just not nearly as good as the others.

It is gruesome at points, but unfortunately, not at his hand. It's about vampires and cannibals and a mad dash to save a young girl's life before it's too late and she's taken by both.
3/5 stars