what i’m reading

Categories: Books

What I’m Reading (3.6.23)

The Girl Who Smiled Beads: A Story of War and What Comes After by Clemantine Wamariya (★★★☆☆)

Audiobook • Libby • Nonfiction (Memoir) • 2018

Short synopsis: Clemantine was 6 years old in 1994 when the Rwandan Genocide caused her and her older sister to flee their home and spend the next 6 years wandering throughout Africa, living in and fleeing from different refugee camps along the way. When she was 12, she and her sister were granted asylum in the United States, and there, Clemantine was safe but had to learn a whole new way of life: a new language, new customs, new cities, new families. The Girl Who Smiled Beads discusses the true cost of war and its aftershocks.

I have very complicated feelings about this book. I always have a hard time rating memoirs because these are people’s real lives and they are inviting us into their deepest thoughts and feelings. For me, this book felt a bit chaotic and Clemantine was a very hard person to connect with. The book jumped back and forth in time, starting with Clemantine’s appearance on The Oprah Winfrey Show in 2006 and then immediately pulling us back into the earliest memories of the author’s life. I was never excited to listen to this audiobook, forcing myself to push through it because it’s such a beloved memoir and I thought I was missing something. In the end, it just didn’t work for me. I thought Clemantine was so, so angry throughout the whole book. And she is entitled to this anger! She has lived through a genocide. But what purpose is it serving her life to continue to be so angry? While I didn’t expect a neat and tidy ending, I still wanted a little introspection from the author on her anger (or hell, at least some mentions of going to therapy), but we never got that. We just got a rather unstructured, chaotic book about her journey to where she is today and why nobody else in the world can understand her (not even her sister or her mother). I also wish there had been more discussion of the Rwandan Genocide. While the author did a great job of expressing how this crisis affected her country (refugee camps, little to no food, constant terror), I think it would have been helpful to bring us into how the genocide happened and how Rwandans responded. But I guess I can just read Wikipedia for that info.

Our Missing Hearts by Celeste Ng (★★★☆☆)

Print • Library • Fiction • 2022

Short synopsis: For nearly all of Bird Gardner’s life, society has been ruled by PACT, the Preserving American Culture & Traditions Act. Anything anti-American, like books written by or about Asian-Americans, is destroyed. He lives in a one-bedroom apartment with his father and disavows his mother, who left them when Bird was nine. But a mysterious note will take Bird on a journey to find his mother again.

I really, really enjoyed the first 1/3 of this novel, which follows Bird’s perspective. I found this world Ng created to be both interesting and slightly terrifying because this near-future dystopian novel felt too much like our world right now. Empty school bookshelves, getting rid of any books that discuss a certain race, highly monitoring what people are doing and saying. When the story jumps to Bird’s mom’s perspective, the book started to fall apart for me. It felt like Ng was spending too much time trying to be literary and the book suffered because of it. For one, she decided to not use quotation marks when characters were speaking. (WHY?!) She wrote in sentence fragments and poetic prose that just didn’t work for me, and made me roll my eyes more than a few times. The ending was… fine. I was hoping it would tie things together in a more interesting way, but the book really just ended and that was that. All in all, my least favorite book by her. I appreciate what she tried to do with this novel, but I think her strength lies in character studies, not societal analyses.

After Hours on Milagro Street by Angelina M. Lopez (★★☆☆☆)

E-Book • Libby • Contemporary Romance • 2022

Short synopsis: Alex is back home after 12 years away and this time, she’s on a mission to save her grandma’s bar that has been bleeding money for months. Standing in her way? Jeremiah, the local professor who is interested in buying the bar to turn it into a historical museum. But when a property developer might steal the bar out from under them, Alex and Jeremiah must join forces to stop them.

There was so much I disliked about this book. I should have abandoned it, but I didn’t. I don’t think I’ve ever hated a FMC as much as I hated Alex. She was rude and mean and incredibly judgmental. She didn’t give a single person in her life the benefit of the doubt, but expected those around her to do so for her. I couldn’t understand what Jeremiah saw in her. What drew him to her, other than her looks? She was so damn rude to him again and again and again! It made it so hard for me to believe in and root for their relationship. The secondary plot about Alex’s grandma’s bar and making sure it didn’t fall into nefarious hands was really, really boring. I just didn’t care about it at all! There were even some cool elements like secret passageways and bootleggers and 1920s-era whiskey and I. Just. Didn’t. Care. This book was overly long, Alex’s emotional arc didn’t endear me to her at all, and I just cannot in good conscience recommend this book.

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Categories: Books

What I’m Reading (2.22.23)

Ship Wrecked by Olivia Dade (★★☆☆☆)

I continue to be annoyed at 400+ page romance novels. A romance novel does not need to be that long! There is no reason for it. And there was no reason for this romance novel to be as long as it was. This slow-burn romance is about two actors, Maria and Peter, who have a one-night stand the day before they are both cast on the same television series together. Oops! The story takes place during the six years they filmed on location on a desolate island in Ireland, where they learn more about each other but promise to not make things awkward by dating or hooking up. It’s only afterward, when they have to do press about their final season, that they finally give in to their burning chemistry. What I liked about this novel is that it featured fat protagonists (both the female and male!) and it was fun to get some insights into what it’s like to act and produce on a television show. What I didn’t like about this novel is that it was so damn long! And the pacing just didn’t work for me – there was a point about 300ish pages in that seemed like a natural stopping point for the book and I was astonished to realize I had 100 pages left! What the hell? I think a tighter edit could have made this book so much better.

The Tobacco Wives by Adele Myers (★★★☆☆)

This historical novel is our February pick for book club, and I am really looking forward to discussing it with everyone because I had a weird experience reading it. This book is about Maddie, a 15-year-old girl who is spending the summer with her aunt and helping out with her aunt’s sewing business. Her aunt is the seamstress for the Tobacco Wives, a group of society women who are married to the men who run Bright Leaf Tobacco. It is 1946 so everyone smokes and doctors tell their patients that tobacco is good for them (even pregnant women). Through a series of events, Maddie becomes the main seamstress for the wives and is working on all the dresses these women will be wearing for a big party at the end of the summer. In the midst of all that, Maddie uncovers evidence about the real health risks of tobacco and how some Bright Leaf executives are trying to cover up the story. There’s a lot going on in this novel, and while some of it was really interesting to me (mainly about tobacco farming, the wives of these powerful executives, and how smoking was such a normal part of everyday life at this time), I just don’t feel as if the book was well-executed. There was so many other things happening in the periphery that it felt like the real story of the novel didn’t have enough time to shine. Would I recommend it? I think it could be interesting for people who enjoy historical fiction and want to learn more about the world of Big Tobacco. But it’s not a book I’m giving my stamp of approval. YMMV, though.

Code Name Helene by Ariel Lawhon (★★★★★)

This story was so amazing! It’s a fictional retelling of a real woman’s life, and I am just so in awe of this woman and everything she did for the Resistance during WWII. I know we’re all a little tired of reading books about WWII (I know I am, at least), but this novel definitely brought me into a part of the war that I haven’t read much about, which is resistance fighters and spies who were fighting against the Nazis. Helene is the code name for Nancy Wake, a woman who becomes one of the leaders of the French Resistance and who ends up commanding hundreds of men during her time. She is an incredible woman and this story was such a beautiful one. It drifts between two timelines: 1944 where Nancy is leading the French resistance and 1936 where Nancy is an intrepid freelance reporter and falling in love with Henri Fiocca. Both storylines were strong and impactful, which is not something I can often say in these historical novels and go back and forth in time. But it was so interesting to see how Nancy came to who she is today. This is a novel I wholeheartedly recommend, especially if you love a good WWII novel.

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Categories: Books

What I’m Reading (2.14.23)

To the Edge by Cindy Gerard (★★★★☆)

E-Book • Owned (Amazon) • Romantic Suspense • 2005

This is my third time reading this romantic suspense novel, and I loved it just as much as all the other times. This novel was written in 2005, and the last time I read it was 2015, and things have changed a lot in those 8 years. For example, there were frequent mentions of Mar-A-Lago and I have to imagine most of the characters in the book skew Republican, so it tempered my enjoyment of the book a bit. But still, it was a good, suspenseful mystery with a brooding hero and sassy heroine. It’s about news anchor Jillian who starts to receive death threats, so her father hires Nolan as her bodyguard. And of course, you always fall in love with your bodyguard! Always! It was a decent romance. It won’t change your life, but you will get to enjoy a good love story.

The Measure by Nikki Erlick (★★★★☆)

Print • Library • Fiction • 2022

I really liked this novel, and it definitely made me think about my own mortality. (Which isn’t always a good thing, but in this case, it was!) The novel starts with people around the world over the age of 22 receiving a smaller wooden box right outside their doorstep. Inside the box is a string that measures how long your life will be. If it’s a short string, this means you’ll die earlier than expected. If it’s long, you have a long life ahead of you. This, of course, puts people into categories, i.e., short-stringers and long-stringers. The long-stringers begin to fear the short-stringers: What will they do after finding out they will die early? The novel follows a handful of people, both short- and long-stringers, and I thought the author did a great job of fleshing out each story and making me care for all of these people deeply. The ending was especially poignant. Overall, the book made me think about what I would do: Would I look in my box to see how long my life will be? Would I want my mom, my brother, my cousins, my friends to look in their boxes? Would it give me relief if my mom had a long string and I knew I didn’t have to spend so much time worrying about her? It’s an interesting conundrum, and I thought Erlick did a fantastic job showing how society would react to this kind of revelation, both the good and the bad.

The Roughest Draft by Emily Wibberley and Austin Siegemund-Broka (★★★★☆)

Audiobook • Libby • Contemporary Romance • 2022

I don’t normally listen to romances on audio (there’s just something about listening to an explicit sex scene that feels very awkward), but I decided to give this one a go because it was immediately available. And I enjoyed it a lot! This book is about Katrina and Nathan who wrote a bestseller together a few years ago, but something happened to cause a rift in their working relationship and they haven’t written together since. But they are contractually obligated to write one more book together, so they decide to spend a summer at the beach house in Florida where they wrote their first book to hammer it out. In the process of writing about a love story gone sour, they rediscover the love they have for one another. It’s a simple concept for a romance, but what I loved most about this book was getting a behind-the-scenes glimpse of not only writing a book, but of two people writing a book. What does that process look like? How do they work together (or not)? I also loved learning more about the marketing side of the publishing world. Did I have problems with this book? Yes, of course. Katrina could be a bit of a pushover at times (she was engaged throughout most of this book, and her fiance was such a goddamn jerk). I thought the reason for the rift was dumb (just communicate!) But those issues didn’t temper my enjoyment of the book too much. It was a fun romance, and I think these kids will make it work.

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Categories: Books

What I’m Reading (2.6.23)

When the Stars Go Dark by Paula McClain (★★★★☆)

The best way to go into this novel is to know it is not a thriller. It’s a literary mystery, which means it’s not going to be that fast-paced, page-turny, twisty story you may be expecting. Instead, it’s a slow-burn mystery that’s more about the main character’s struggles than it is about the mystery at the heart of this novel. This story is about Anna who has just gone through some sort of trauma in her personal life. Because of that, she and her husband are taking a break, and she is trying to find her way back to herself. She ends up in her old hometown of Mendocino, and the day she arrives is the day a local girl has gone missing. She immerses herself in the case (her work has entailed finding lost children, so she knows this process better than anyone) and in turn, may be losing herself in the process. I really liked this story. Anna is an easy character to root for, even when she’s making bad decisions. The author weaves in information about missing children, sexual assault, and kidnapping in a seamless way that made it feel like a part of the story. And while the book was a hard read at times, it was ultimately an impactful one for me. Trigger warnings abound in this book, so take care.

The Fine Print by Lauren Asher (★★☆☆☆)

What a disappointment this book was! Maybe it’s because the trope of the boss falling in love with his employee is icky to me, or maybe it’s because I really despise the trope of the “wealthy man buys everything he wants for his down-on-her-luck lover.” There’s just something vaguely misogynistic with this trope, and also because it’s nearly always the man who is the wealthy one. This romance is about Rowan and Zahra. Rowan is the grandson of the man who founded a Disney-esque theme park called Dreamland. There are now hotels and production companies and more; it’s all very clear that this is just Disney World (it’s even located in Orlando, sigh). After Rowan’s grandfather dies, he’s given a task in order to be given his shares in the company. He has to spend 6 months as the director of the theme park and unveil a new plan to take Dreamland to the next level. On his first day as director, he meets Zahra who is a park employee and it’s basically insta-love for him. Rowan ends up promoting her to their Creator division (where new rides and other creative endeavors are engineered) and then can’t stop bothering her. The number of times they had conversations right outside her cubicle and none of her coworkers had anything to say about the big boss spending all of this one-on-one time with her? NONE OF THEM?!

Anyway, this book was such a let-down and I was basically hate-reading it at the end. Neither characters were people I particularly cared for, and Rowan was definitely towing the line of love-bombing with everything he did for Zahra. It was a bit much. This review, though, really sums up my feelings about the book in a perfect way:

source

All Boys Aren’t Blue by George M. Johnson (★★★★★)

I’ve always struggled with how to rate memoirs, but in the case of this book, my struggle was that I wanted to give this book more than 5 stars. It was sensational! George M. Johnson is nonbinary, queer, and Black. They graduated high school the year before me, which means we grew up in the same era. It was a time when being queer wasn’t always a safe thing to be, and getting outed was an incredibly scary concept. George always knew they were queer, always knew they didn’t fit into the typical gender boxes as their peers, and always knew that these identities must be hidden. Throughout the memoir, George speaks about their family that was filled with other queer people (including a cousin who was trans) and coming out to them. They speak about getting jumped at age 5, a horrifying sexual assault involving a family member, and coming to terms with their queerness and identity in college. It’s a beautiful memoir about family and identity and queerness and being true to yourself. While I am a cis-gendered queer person, I could relate to many of George’s struggles of coming out. I am so, so glad they were given the platform to write this book because I know it’s going to help so many other Black queer kids feel seen and validated.

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Categories: Books

What I’m Reading (1.25.23)

Now Is Not the Time to Panic by Kevin Wilson (★★☆☆☆)

Print • Library • Contemporary Fiction • 2022

I loved Kevin Wilson’s previous novel, Nothing to See Here, so I was excited to pick up his newest release. This story is about Frankie and Zeke who are trying to figure out how to fill the time in a long summer break. Both are artists in their own way, and on a whim, they put together a poster with an enigmatic phrase and start hanging up copies of this poster all around town. This causes a widespread panic and everyone wants to know who is behind these posters. For me, this story didn’t have the same magic as Nothing to See Here. The characters weren’t as well-developed as I would have liked (and read way younger than they actually were). The story wasn’t very thrilling, but more meandering and pointless at times. It just didn’t really work for me, which makes me sad!

Unmasked by the Marquess by Cat Sebastian (★★★★☆)

E-Book • Owned (Amazon) • Historical Romance • 2018

There was a lot to love about this book, most especially the introduction of a nonbinary character in historical romance! It’s rare to read about nonbinary characters anywhere, most of all in historical romance, and the addition was truly delightful. It made me wonder what it must have been like to be nonbinary at this point in history when there was no label or way of life to hold on to. Charity has been masquerading as Mr. Robert Selby for many years now. First, she did it to gain entrance to Cambridge so she could attend school and then, she continued living as a man because it’s what felt right and normal to her. And then there’s the Marquess of Pembroke. Alistair has been a reclusive for many years and it’s not until he meets Selby that he finally finds something worth coming out from his hermit ways for. I loved the way the relationship between Charity and Alistair grew over the course of this book, and I have to say, I was really curious as to how Sebastian was going to give them their happy ending. It seemed impossible! And that, my friends, is the sign of a fantastic romance novel. (Open-door romance.)

Note: I use the pronouns she/her and the character’s given name, as that is how they were referred to in the book.

The Last House on the Street by Diane Chamberlain (★★★★☆)

Audiobook • Libby • Contemporary/Historical Fiction • 2022

This is our January book club pick, and it’s definitely a book that was written for book clubs. It’s rife with plot points that will be great for discussion. It’s one of those historical fiction novels that jumps back and forth between the past and the present. In the present, we meet Kayla who is a recent widow, having lost her husband in a freak accident while he was working on their home—the home they had been building together in a remote area. Days before she is going to move into her new home with her 3-year-old daughter, a woman comes into Kayla’s work to give her a scary warning about moving in. In the past storyline, we meet Ellie who is 20 years old and has decided to join the Summer Community Organization and Political Education (SCOPE). She’s a young girl living in the South in the 1960s, so obviously, her family and community are not very happy about this decision, but she goes against their wishes to join an organization she deeply cares about. Of course, as with all of these books, both storylines come together near the end. I found it to be a fascinating and propulsive read and I think we’ll have a lot to discuss at book club! There was a lot that happened in this book that was fairly predictable and I felt like things went a little off the rails near the end, but overall, I found it to be a fascinating look at what college students were doing at this pivotal time in history, right before the Voting Rights Act was signed into law. There are tons of trigger warnings for this book (Ellie’s chapters were hard to read for obvious reasons), so take care if you decide to pick this one up. But I definitely think it’s worth a read.

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