Annette Marie has been on my TBR list for well over a year. I was so thankful to finally get my hands on one of her books after being taunted by rave reviews all of the place. The hype isn't wrong, Taming Demons for Beginners was everything I'd hoped for and more.

I love the flow of the book, Robins anxiety & frustrations are easy to relate to. It was so easy to be engulfed into her story while we follower journey in navigating a world she never thought she'd be apart of. I love her weak, unknowing start. There is no instant badass in this story, thank goodness. I look forward to watching her character arc grow over the coming books. The relationship between her and the demon is quirky yet terrifying.

This is a typical urban fantasy, where there are some aspects of the story that are kind of hand waved or set so the plot can move forward to keep things simple. I.E. Easy, fun read.

Two things that bothered me but I'm thinking probably shouldn't have were 1. how did her parents die. She is only 20, and her commentary made it feel like it was normal car accident death but the lack of reason makes me wonder if there was foul play, especially if her uncle knew they had what he wanted. I went back thinking I missed it, but idk, if someone knows this help me out ha. 2. Why was her uncle the executor over the will? I realize this is a must for the whole story to happen, but her parents knew what they had, and it is noted they are smart people, so wouldn't they have put fail safes for something like this? Maybe this will be answered in future books, but I kept circling back to why they weren't answered while I read. ( )

Tell Me My Name by Erin Ruddy is a first novel for this author. However, Ruddy has nailed the thriller genre and I was hooked from the first sentence. Ellie and Neil Patterson have been married for ten years and have taken some together time at their new cottage. Before long both have been kidnapped by someone who claims to be from Ellie’s past and he threatens to torture Neil if she does not remember his name. She nervously goes back into her past to identify this stranger and save her husband. What ensues is a desperate search for Ellie who is taken away by the kidnapper after leaving her husband for dead. There is so much tension throughout, leading to an ending that most will not come close to guessing. This is a mesmerizing thriller that hits the ground running and does not relent. It is hoped that Erin Ruddy will be writing more thrillers in the future. Highly recommended. Thank you to Dundurn Press, NetGalley and the author for the e-ARC in exchange for an honest review. ( )

A vacation that was long overdue and needed for Neil and Ellie turned into a nightmare.

They were on their second honeymoon in their newly bought home when their neighbor Clive appeared, tied up Ellie, tortured Neil, and then kidnapped Ellie.

Clive had thought about Ellie since he had seen her twenty-five years ago, and now that he was out of prison he wanted to play a game to see if she would remember him. It wasn’t a child’s game, though, but a deadly game.

TELL ME MY NAME continues with a police search for Clive and gruesome, upsetting and sometimes crude scenes and comments.

The brutal things the criminal did as the book continued were hard to imagine and difficult to read.

Because of the gruesome scenes I almost stopped reading, but I’m glad I didn’t.

This book for me is classified as a psychological thriller.

All in all despite the squeamish scenes, it is a good read with a surprise ending. 4/5

This book was given to me by the publisher via Netgalley in exchange for an. honest review. ( )

Tell Me My Name by Erin Ruddy

Told in three parts this is a story that drew me in, kept me guessing and had me scratching my head from time to time. The first part introduced Neil and Ellie Paterson in their new summer cottage for the first time without children there and time to reconnect. Then suddenly that idyllic time was turned into a nightmare. Part II brings the end of the time in the new cottage neighborhood with a chase to catch up with an unhinged kidnapper and his kidnappee. Part three has the kidnapper still on the loose and people trying to get back to normal only to have another nightmare to deal with before the book can conclude. The backstories of the three main characters: kidnapper, Neil and Ellie are revealed throughout the story and there are twists and turns aplenty.

At times I felt the story seemed a bit more TV drama than a book or perhaps an illustrated book, in some ways, than a serious thriller. Why? I am not sure…perhaps it was the way the characters were presented or the way the scenes unfolded. Or it might have been the ineptness of the policewoman in charge of the case. It could have been the almost cozy mystery feel of the person trying to beat the police to finding the kidnapper. There were a few other instances where I wondered about how easily a child was influenced or a relationship turned upside down. The ending left me scratching my head.

My takeaway is that the story well written and plotted, there was plenty of drama and intensity, and the author will grow as she continues to write. I would read another of her books in the future.

Thank you to NetGalley and Dundurn for the ARC – This is my honest review.

3 Stars ( )

Please note that I received this book via NetGalley. This did not affect my rating or review.

You were a terrible book, but made me laugh which I desperately needed right now. Lord. I am going to try to do a non-spoiler review on this. I should have known I was in for something I was not going to like after the author starts off with the following:

The idea for the novel came to me one summer day as I was pondering what it meant to be forty. As a mother, wife, and full-time employee at a small media company in Toronto, I came to the rather bleak conclusion that life after forty was all carved out -- the future, no longer that bright bountiful sea of possibility, but rather a dark, receding lake where rock bottom lurked menacingly close. Were all my opportunities drying up? If I wanted to change the course of my life at this age, was it even possible?

Yeah. I don't know either. Here we go.

So "Tell Me My Name" follows married couple Ellie and Neil Patterson. The couple drop off their two kids at summer camp and make their way to a cottage they just bought. Neil is hoping that they get the fire going again in their marriage. Ellie is hoping so too. She has been dissatisfied with the state of her marriage and upset since her publishing company went kaput. You will read a lot in this book about that though I don't imagine for a second that Ellie reads books. Anyway, Ellie and Neil get frisky and meet their new neighbor Jake who seems to be...unnerving at times. When Ellie lets him in one day she is chloroformed and wakes up to her husband tied to a bed and her tied to a chair. Ellie is being given three chances by Jake to tell him his name or he's going to take Neil's toe, finger, and then his life. The book then follows Ellie remembering men from her past.

I am laughing right now. Sorry.

Back to the book. Ellie is a mess. You find out about her family's backstory and it's worse than anything I saw on Lifetime. Ellie's sister Bethany who was a gifted dancer ends up in a vegetative coma after a car accident left her injured. Ellie and her other sister whose name I am blanking on are left to deal with the fall out in their family. Her sister is pretty nasty and self involved and Ellie is angry over the fact her parents keep letting her get away with things. Then Ellie starts acting out when she gets to her 20s until she meets her now husband Neil in a bar. She likes Neil, but has a preference for men who look like George Clooney. Okay, still laughing because the George Clooney thing becomes an element of this messed up plot. Anyway Ellie and Neil you have to wonder about since you don't get why they are together. Only married for 10 years I think, the two of them have definitely let the flames burn out. And we find out that Neil is hiding something from Ellie and then we have like two reveals about that and I went are you serious and kept reading. There's also multiple mentions of Ellie's dancing and I kept thinking she looked like this in my head:



The bad guy is a mess. And apparently has superpowers since he kept coming back like the Terminator. I won't get into him at all except nope. And then we get a final reveal about the guy at the end and I went how many twists is this? Six?

The lead detective on this case sucks and ends her calls and conversations by saying toodles-oo and I wanted to smother myself.

There's also the brother in law who should have told Neil to shove it through most of this story and the sister in law who...I don't even understand her purpose. There are so many side characters in this story which made my head hurt.

The writing was bad, laughably so at certain points and the linkage between things was not set up very well. I just started calling things coincide #1, #2, and so on. The author in the beginning talks about how this is a book about love, acceptance, forgiveness, and letting go and I went yeah that's where you went wrong. The whole book is very disjointed I found and throwing in the overall plot with the nonsense with Neil and everything else going on made for a messy book.

The flow doesn't work very well since we jump around in the third person to multiple people. I don't know if it would have been better to say with just Ellie or Neil. Honestly I don't know what could have saved this book.

The setting of this book takes place in Toronto. I am not familiar with the city and can't say much about it since the book jumps all over the place.

The ending was a whole mess. I really wanted to tell the author her trying to tie everything together showed she didn't really have a good grasp of writing. Honestly I felt at times I was reading different stories trying to force themselves into one coherent one. ( )