Friday Friyay: 'Death in Her Hands' by Ottessa Moshfegh

We have had some absolutely epic weather here in the Netherlands! The heavens literally opened and it stormed for ages with beautiful lightening and ground-shaking thunder! and now it's beautifully windy with sunlight, my favourite weather. Our local park is also looking beautiful and lush, moss growing on trees and ferns looking positively indecent. I've been reading thrillers while the weather was suitable for it, but now I'm hoping to get onto my first book by Ottessa Moshfegh, Death in Her Hands.

While on her daily walk with her dog in the woods near her home, Vesta comes across a chilling handwritten note: 

Her name was Magda. Nobody will ever know who killed her. It wasn't me. Here is her dead body. 

Shaky even on her best days, Vesta is also alone and new to the area, having moved here after the death of her husband. Her brooding about the note grows quickly into a full-blown obsession: was was Magda and how did she meet her date?

Book Beginnings is at home on Rose City Reader, hosted by Gilion Dumas, and Friday 56 at Freda's Voice, hosted by Freda. I'll also be joining the Book Blog Hop, hosted by Billy over at Ramblings of a Coffee Addicted Writer.

BB:

'Here name was Magda. Nobody will ever know who killed her. It wasn't me. Here is her dead body.

But there was no body. No bloodstain. No tangle of hair caught on the coarse fallen branches, no red wool scarf damp with morning dew festooned across the bushes.' p.1

I thought I'd quote the opening a little longer since the first line already is in the blurb. I love how the rest of the opening does away with the usual set-up of a crime scene. I can imagine how this is confusing for Vesta. 

F56:

'It's very stressful to be plucked from one world and plunked down into another. One loses her roots, no matter how hard traditions are clung to.' p.56

I can recognize myself in this quote, since I have lived in a number of different countries, usually hundreds of kilometers (at least) away from family. It becomes hard to follow Christmas traditions, for example, if you're the only one there to enjoy them.

BBH:

This week's question was suggested by the lovely Elizabeth at Silver's Reviews:

Do you have an online calendar to keep track of your reviews and posts, or do you print out a calendar or list?

Great question! I don't really schedule any non-review posts, but I started about a year or two back with creating a monthly list/table of books that were coming out so that I could keep on top of it. While I'm very bad at staying on top of it, this does help me get a picture of what I should be reading. I create it in a Word doc and then print it out and paste it into my bullet journal. 

I have recently realized that occasionally I have read a book, mark it as read and then completely lose track of it. So I've added a 'Review Posted' column to the table as well so that I can remind myself that reading is only half the work.

How do you organize your review schedule?