I didn't really connect with this book. I'm not sure why! It had all the elements I love in a story. I just didn't get sucked into the story and DNF. Thank you for the opportunity to read.

A compelling and intense novel. Pochoda caught my attention with her first novel and she continues her impressive and unflinching characterizations of women in this novel. Not to spoil too much, the novel deals with women in prison at the time of the COVID 19 pandemic and provides the reader with a window into a mostly unseen world. Gripping character studies and intense plotting make for a very satisfying read. I can't wait to read what Pochoda writes next. Her voice is wholly individual, intelligent, and unique. The audiobook was also beautifully and fittingly narrated.

Dark with remarkable women as leads. Too dark for me personally, though the writing is stunning and impeccable. The afterlife of prison time is something that many of us never have to experience personally,
But it’s crucial that we learn.

Ivy Pochoda's Sing Her Down is a riveting departure from conventional crime fiction by shifting the focus from a glamorized killer to those most directly impacted by violence. She takes readers on a gripping journey into the lives of two women recently released from prison, thrust into Los Angeles locked down by the pandemic.

In exploring themes like female rage, systemic injustices in the penal system, and class and race. Pochoda challenges traditional notions of women in crime fiction by overturning tropes. She introduces Florida, a well-to-do inmate from L.A., and Dios, a scholarship student from Queens. The character of Detective Lobos, grappling with her history of domestic violence while questioning the nature of women's violence, adds a complex layer to the narrative.

The tension rises as the story hurtles toward its heart-stopping showdown. The thrilling and surprising climax blurs the lines between crime and punishment, creating a gripping and profoundly moving pay-off that will linger long after that final page.

I received a digit and an audio copy from the publisher and enjoyed both formats. I enjoyed the multiple narrators, who all added excitement to the story.

I DNFed around 30%. It was most likely the wrong book at the wrong time but it simply did not capture my attention.

This book is pitched as No Country for Old Men meets Killing Eve. I was sold when I read that because i love both.

The book is told from multiple POVs. First we have Florida, we met her in an Arizona prison. Florida insists she is innocent and just happens to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. Her cellmate Dios doesn't believe her story.
The two women find themselves freed on the same day and Dios is fixated on Florida.and that's when things go haywire. Intermixed with these two women's stories is another inmate's POV and a detectives.

I loved the POVs and the tension woven throughout the book however I feel like it could have been grittier.

I still enjoyed this book and would recommend it. And if you can get your hands on the audiobook you will not be disappointed. The narrators have done a fatstic job.

Thanks to Netgalley and the publishers for sending a digital ALC in exchange for an honest review.

While I'm sure Sing Her Down is the right book for someone, that someone just was not me! The entirely too long cat and mouse game just didn't hit right for me. The narration on the audiobook was good, however!

I received a free ARC from NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.

This was an interesting story. It had several different voices telling the story. The writer’s words really drew a picture. Her imagery was beautiful. That being said, I felt like the story moved slowly and was often times confusing. Still worth the read.

3.5

Thank you to the publisher for the ALC. The western book of my dreams that filled the Killing Ever whole in my heart.

Happy Friday!! Coming at you with a review of SING HER DOWN by @ladymissivy. Thank you to the author, @netgalley and the publisher @macmillan.audio for the audio-ARC.

Ok this is my second Pochoda reading experience and I am a big fan. She has the ability to portray the lives of women from many different perspectives but is particularly adept at sharing a sneak peek into the lives of characters on the edge of society.

In this story, Florence aka Florida is serving a prison sentence in Arizona. When her sentence is commuted 6 months before it's end date during the pandemic, she thinks this will be her chance to set things right. But in the bus ride to her freedom she realizes another prisoner, Dios was also released at the same time and is on the same bus. Dios, who is the only prisoner that knows her secrets. When Dios catches up with Florida after she tries to escape her off the bus, Florida is dragged into a downward spiral that will leave her reeling, paranoid and in a while lot more trouble than she had planned.

Written in the beginning of the COVID pandemic this book was an edge of your seat gritty thriller that had me looking over my own shoulder. The inner thoughts of the two main characters along with the Detective searching for them revealed grave faults, secrets and vulnerabilities. It felt like Dios was literally and figuratively haunting Florida and weedling her way into her thoughts. I could feel the underlying sense of dread and the sweaty mix of fear and the Arizona sun.

Brilliant writing and another story by Pochoda that has me questioning my own judgements and stereotypes of those around me.

Definitely give this one a try if you like gritty thrillers, character studies and the HEAT! Just came out last month and is on shelves now!

I am headed up to the mountains this weekend to escape the heat a bit after begging for the sun for months. 🤣 How about you?

💚SMASHBOT💚

#bibliophile #booknerd #bookstagram #thriller #femaleexperience #ivypochoda #singherdown #netgalley #macmillanaudio

Violence is something that is stereotypically male, but what are females capable of? A whole hell of a lot, according to Sing Her Down.

We start in a women's prison in the height of Covid, with two women on a collision course of violence. Florence "Florida" Baum and Diosmary "Dios" Sandoval are both released early due to the risk of overcrowding spreading the virus. Dios is on a mission to prove that Florida is just as violent as all the other imprisoned women. After their release, a long distance cat and mouse game stretches from Arizona to Los Angeles leaving death and destruction in its wake.

I think my favorite part of the story was the parallel storyline of the female detective trying to track the duo down and sift through their trail of violence while trying to deal with violence in her own personal life.

This was a compelling story, very much Killing Eve meets No Country for Old Men (or any other violent western you want to substitute for it). The prose is beautiful, but very violent (that cafeteria scene may or may not have given me nightmares) - despite that, it is very well done.

Sing Her Down by Ivy Pochoda was original and spell-bounding. Great prose, well-developed characters, and intricately placed plot points. I enjoyed the project of this book as well as the slow burn of this literacy work. Pochoda is a master storyteller and an amazing writer. The flow of the prose was just beautiful. The audio was also very well done. With a full cast, the audio quality was great as were the narrators.

I received a review copy of this book from the author/publisher through NetGalley for my honest review. The opinions expressed in this review are entirely my own.

"We all have our own scars but they dont tell the future, they only remind us of the past."

"How dark is the darkness in you?"

Opens in a prison for women. Strong foreshadowing show us glimpses of what is to come. Is violence only done by males. This book calls out that assumption as this is pretty darn violent. Good yes, but violent. Two women are on a crash course to tragedy. We follow them as they are released from prison due to Covid and the danger of overcrowding spreading the virus. Dios is out to prove that Florida is as violent and dangerous as all the other violent imprisoned women. Their showdown, think shootout at the OK corral, will be long remembered.

This authors first book was the one that hooked me on her style of writing. Ive read all she writes ever since. While this was violent it was an important subject and one that is hard to forget. The violence is our society is scary and to assume that this violence is only contained in the male, is to fool oneself and could prove dangerous.

The narrator were terrific.

A thrilling game of cat-and-mouse between two women who won't put up with any of your s***, thank you very much!

Our main characters, Florence "Florida" Baum and Diosmary "Dios" Sandoval have been drawn to one another since their time as cellmates in an Arizona women's prison, but neither one knows why. When they are both released, Florida and Dios set out on a cross-country revenge trip with deadly consequences. My favorite part of this book was the parallel story of the female detective assigned to track them down. Ivy Pochoda masterfully writes from the perspective of women who have been beaten down time and time again but continue to rise and fight back. The phenomenal voice actors crank the emotions to the next level. (An early scene in the prison's cafeteria had my jaw fully dropped.)

If you loved the dueling femme fatales of Killing Eve or the raw, devastating origin stories of the side characters in Netflix's Orange is the New Black, boy, will Sing Her Down be a treat for you!

Thanks to NetGalley for the eARC in exchange for my honest review.

No Country for Old Men meets Killing Eve is a blurb for this book. I can’t recall the former very well, but I would agree that it is very much in the vein of Killing Eve. I did not feel that it was much of a cat and mouse game as described. It was more of a psychological journey. The end of the main story felt like two gunslingers at a shoot out on Main Street. Just read a review from the Wall Street Journal about this book which was raves. Me, not so much.
Thanks to NetGalley for a complimentary copy of the book in exchange for my honest review. I received both print and audio version of this book. My review is based on the audio which provides excellent narration.

Dark, violent and another pandemic novel. I wasn’t expecting a slow burn, but I enjoyed the built-up and twists throughout. The perspective switch occasionally got a little confusing, but overall, this book was fine. Found the narrator to be engaging.

I was excited to listen to this book, particularly with comparisons to great stories like No Country For Old Men. Unfortunately, the book just didn't work for me. You spend a lot of time inside the minds of these characters and I just didn't connect with them. Florida is in jail for being the getaway driver in a robbery that ended up in a murder and doesn't feel like she belongs. Dios, a former cellmate and resident badass feels like Florida needs to be taken down a peg. They both end up on early release during the pandemic and both wind up fleeing to California for reasons I don't entirely buy. They end up being chased by a detective following the trail of their bad decisions.

A mural that seems to speak to their fate frames the story in an allegorical way. The success of this story, I believe, depends on how well you connect with the characters, and for me, I didn't connect.

The book was narrated by Victoria Villarreal. She did a good job with the pacing and inflections in the story. The individual character voices weren't terribly distinct which made it difficult for me to figure out who was talking until I was able to figure it out through context.

Not a bad book, but one that didn't work for me.

A feminist western and a noir thriller - a story moving towards highnoon and a showdown right from the getgo. There's no escaping this fate and we as readers are mere spectators to this unfolding drama along with Kace, a female prisoner who talks to ghosts and is also a spectator to the drama unfolding between two fellow prisoners Florence (Florida)
Baum, a rich girl who seemingly had every privilege until things fell apart and Dios (Diosmary) Sandoval, a girl who was clawing her way out of the projects in Queens to a scholarship at a fancy New England college until an assault charge put her back or even below square one. This book has a pandemic setting
- both women Dios and Florida are released early from prison in Arizone in an effort to reduce prison populations and sent to a motel. Dios is obsessed with showing Florida who was convicted on an accomplice after the fact charge that she is no better than anyone else and that there is no home she can go back to. This obsession leads to a string of violent acts. The detective on their trail is also a woman - Lobos a lone wolf? and a survivor of domestic violence. All the women in this story grapple with women in relation to violence. Is it right that Lobos male colleagues are surprised a woman could even be the perpetrator of a violent crime ? Can women be inherently violent or is violent behavior the result of violence done to them? Is violence an empowering? Is violence at times justified ? Do violent acts change you committed against you and by you change you ?
Dark but definitely engaging and captivating! I listened to the audio and I couldn't stop.
Thank you to @netgalley, @mcdbooks and @macmillan.audio for providing me with an advance copy in exchange for an honest review.

In a Nutshell: A gritty cat-and-mouse chase thriller focussing on one woman’s obsession with another, the differentiator being that both women are just-released prisoners. A bit too grisly for my taste. But the author *can* write, no doubt!

Story Synopsis:
Florence Baum, known to her prison mates as “Florida”, portrays herself as an innocent prisoner caught as an unlucky bystander. However, her ex cellmate, Diosmary Sandoval aka Dios, is convinced that Florida is lying and not at all innocent.
When both women are released much before their sentence is over due to covid restrictions warranting clearance of space in prisons, Dios is determined to show Florida how similar they both are. This turns into an unhealthy obsession, leading to dangerous repercussions.
The story comes to us mostly in the third person perspective of Florida and Detective Lobos, who is investigating a crime connected with the two women.


Bookish Yays:
🔥 Excellent prose! I’m not that fond of literary flourishes in the thriller genre as they feel quite artificial, but still, I can’t deny that the author is brilliant at stringing words together. I would have highlighted quite a few lines had I been reading the physical or digital version.
🔥 The depiction of the pandemic and its impact on the homeless and the marginalised. Most covid-related fiction so far has focussed on those with means, so this was a welcome and exceptional portrayal. Seeing characters afraid of a cough brought back some guilty yet funny memories.
🔥 The characters, with the possible exception of Dios, are carved quite intricately. They come across as realistic despite their unusual circumstances. Though we see them only in third person, there is still enough to help us understand their nature.
🔥 Wonderful use of the locations to create an atmosphere of nail-biting tension. Beginning in Arizona and ending in Los Angeles, the writing captures the raw side of both the places.
🔥 The narration comes to us from multiple third-person points of view. Florida’s is the most impactful track, as her backstory and her current insecurities come out clearly.
🔥 Another good track is that of Kase, a fellow prisoner who acts as a sort of Greek chorus, providing us with information to fill in the blanks left by Florida’s track. Her voice is muddling and clarifying at the same time.

Bookish Nays:
💢 Though Dios is a key element of the plot, she barely gets any direct role in the narrative. The book would have worked better for me if I had got a direct glimpse of the machinations of her devious mind.
💢 While I did like Detective Lobos’s track as it offered plenty of elements to ponder upon, I didn’t understand why she needed to be given a voice in what was essentially a Florida-Dios story. It took away from the core plot.
💢 This is a woman-oriented plot all the way. And the strong women characters carry the story well enough. As such, there are limited male characters but even then, all of them are portrayed as stereotypical jerks. This becomes monotonous. Even feminist fiction can have a couple of good male characters.
💢 Dios’ obsession with Florida didn’t feel convincing to me. This lack of connect is heightened as we don’t get to hear from Dios. So the entire cat-and-mouse pursuit felt baseless.
💢 Put this one down to personal preferences, but the level of violent and gruesome scenes was way beyond my comfort level. I just hated some of the grisly descriptions.


The Audiobook Experience:
The audiobook, clocking at 8 hrs 33 min, is narrated by four narrators: Frankie Corzo, Kimberly M. Wetherell, Sophie Amoss, and Victoria Villarreal. All the narrators are excellent, and do their best to flesh out their characters with emotions. There was just one minor issues. Dios’s dialogues come to us from the third person perspectives of Florida and Kase, and there are a couple of chapters with the first person voice of Dios herself. However, the emotional tone and voice pitch of the narrator in the first person pov were absolutely different from the two narrators voicing Dios in the third person. The former sounded quite delicately feminine while the latter two made her sound rough and tough. This was a jarring difference. Nevertheless, the audiobook is still a good way of trying out this book.
Do note that there are plenty of cuss words in the plot. While these might be justified as acceptable lingo for prisoners, they still make the audiobook a test of your patience as the f-bombs keep exploding in your ear.

All in all, this story made me read from start to end despite my misgivings. However, though I wanted to know what happened to the characters, I wasn’t emotionally invested in any of them, and this disconnect created a hurdle I couldn’t surpass.

That said, I am impressed by the writing prowess of this author, and will keep an eye out for her future works.
Recommended to those who would enjoy chase stories with feisty characters and don’t mind brutal scenes. I don’t think this qualifies as a Western thriller as marketed, despite a street fight and gritty characters. It’s more of literary crime drama.

3.5 stars, rounding up for the audio version.

My thanks to Macmillan Audio and NetGalley for the ALC of “Sing Her Down”. This review is voluntary and contains my honest opinion about the audiobook.

In this novel, author Ivy Pochoda explores violence in women, and through the lives and actions of her characters, speculates about what made them vicious. Is violence an innate characteristic? Or does it stem from poverty, harassment, molestation, injustice, brutality, and the like.

Warning: There's graphic violence in the novel, which might be disturbing to sensitive readers

*****

The story opens in a women's prison in Arizona, where Florence Baum (Florida), Diana Diosmary Sandoval (Dios), and Kace are housed in the same cell block. Florida is incarcerated for felony accessory to murder; she drove the getaway car from a fire that left two victims burning in the desert. Dios was convicted of aggravated assault; she defended herself against an attacker and broke his eye socket with her cell phone. And Kace killed a woman named Marta, who Kace suspected was going with her man.

Florida and Dios are central to the story, and Kace - an apparent schizophrenic that hears voices in her head - functions something like a Greek Chorus, commenting on the unfolding drama.

Florida, who grew up in a wealthy upper class family in Los Angeles, rails about being incarcerated. She says this is not her place, she can't breathe, can't feel, can't sense properly, isn't like the other inmates, etc. Dios, on the other hand, who's learned something about Florida's past, adamantly disagrees. Dios knows that Florida smuggled diamonds into Europe, secured bad loans for grifters, and was more than an 'accessory after the fact' in the desert murders.

For her part, Dios grew up poor in Queens, New York, where she and her friends stole from bodegas and the Rite Aid. However, Dios' innate smarts earned her a scholarship to a fancy New England college, where she was an outlier among the rich kids. Later, when Dios returned to her old Queens neighborhood, she didn't fit in there either. Dios' old homies acted like her 'rich New England stink' made them gag.

One evening Dios happened across a young tipsy girl in the park and 'something knocked loose inside her.' Dios battered the girl's face, kicked her in the ribs, and stomped on her skull. After this, Dios became increasingly vicious, with the justification that "once the violence cracks open inside you, you become YOU and there's no turning back.'

Dios thinks Florida is inherently violent just like Dios herself. Moreover, Dios believes Florida's 'poor innocent me' diatribe is just an act, perhaps a subconscious one. Thus Dios is determined to bring out the devil in Florida.

Because of the Covid pandemic the prison has to release some inmates, and Florida and Dios are sprung with conditions. They must quarantine themselves in an Arizona motel for two weeks, then move into a state-run group home.....and they have to stay in touch with a parole officer.

Florida wants to return to Los Angeles to retrieve her beloved Jaguar, which she started driving as an underage teen. To Florida, the car means freedom, and blissfully cruising California highways. Florida does not have permission to leave Arizona, but unanticipated events result in Florida illicitly boarding a bus for California.

Shortly afterwards, to Florida's dismay, Dios boards the same bus. Dios means to goad her former prison-mate until Florida reveals her true murderous self. This becomes a sort of cat and mouse game, with Florida trying to get away and Dios sticking to her like a stinging nettle.

When a crime occurs on the bus carrying Florida and Dios to California, Los Angeles Police Detective Lobos gets the case. Lobos quickly zeroes in on Florida and Dios as the suspects, and she means to track them down.

Flashbacks to the past help round out the characters. We learn that Florida grew up in a classy house with a pool and six-car-garage. But Florida's mother was indifferent and neglectful, and a certain older man couldn't keep his hands off young Florida. Besides that Florida and her best friend Ronna were wild teens who got involved with the wrong people, drank, used drugs, smoked, and so on.

Detective Lobos also has a secret history. For reasons she herself can't understand, Lobos stayed with an abusive husband, and only managed to leave after he tried to strangle her. This shames Lobos, and she sometimes gets the urge to beat up or kill wandering homeless men.

The climax of the story occurs in Los Angeles, which is a character in and of itself. The Covid pandemic has ravaged the city, where most stores are boarded up, trash blows through the streets, and homeless encampments occupy almost every nook and cranny (outside the ritzy areas).

Pochoda doesn't resolve the issue of why women become violent, leaving it to the readers to form their own opinions.

In my view, violent behavior is probably due to a confluence of circumstances - perhaps resulting from an inborn tendency exacerbated by a troubled life. (But I'm a scientist, not a psychologist or criminologist.)

In any case this novel is a compelling page turner. Highly recommended.

I had access to both digital and audio versions of the novel, which enhanced my reading experience. Thanks to Netgalley, Ivy Pochoda, and Macmillan Audio and Farrar, Straus and Giroux for copies of the book.