The Merry Dredgers

3.5 stars This is a quirky and whimsical bizarro mystery. I was hooked into this at the beginning by the main character, the writing style and the unique details. I also really liked the relationship between the sisters and the family history. I did find that partway through the plot seemed to take a......more

Our brains process information, it seems to me, in two distinct ways. One way is A-B-C-D. The other is A-M-E-P. One is a straightforward intake and processing, the other is a scrambled mess of stimuli that gets stacked into an ordered piece of data within their heads. This is how I feel when I read......more

What did I just read?! I don’t know, but what I do know is I loved it! Seraphina’s sister, Eff, mysteriously ends up in a coma. Seraphina was already concerned about her sister once discovering she was in a cult, and now those concerns have turned into a mission to track down the individual responsib......more

I thoroughly enjoyed my stay in Goblintropolis, a place of pure but disintegrating whimsy. This is a unique read because, while there is an atmosphere of potential disaster it is also a book with an exceedingly fine heart and limitless imaginings. It’s the small details that make for the captivating......more

An intriguing collision of murder mystery and cult horror, The Merry Dredgers is almost whimsical, but the ever-present sense of threat and the precariousness of its stories-within-stories complexity keeps the light at bay and the dark close by. As with the excellent The Atrocities, Shipp presents u......more