Dan

This was a very tough one to succinctly review. On one hand I actually quite disliked the book. On the other, the book made me actually bawl at the ending. In summary, while I did not like the exercise of reading this book, I respect it.

Here's why I didn't like it: The entire first half of the book genuinely reminded me of some of the most insufferable and truly terminally online people on twitter I have literally actually witnessed behave the way the Norma does. Let me be clear, Norma is seriously burdened mentally with illness or disorder and that is abundantly clear from how she is written and how the audiobook (which was very good) narrates her. And none of my assessment is to be offensive to her or people like her. Earlier I mentioned I didn't like the exercise of reading this book, and that is quite a literal feeling--Enduring Norma's narration and story literally felt burdensome. In that way especially I tremendously respect Alana Saab for drawing that out of the book. However, speaking bluntly for myself, it made reading this book feel fatiguing.

Once the first half is shed and Norma has laid much of her life and trauma out and we start to really dig in and explore solving her issues, the book picks up. However, that is quite literally in the back half of the book. I enjoyed seeing progress in Norma and I enjoyed overturning the rock that is her life with her and her therapist, and I enjoyed seeing how their relationship changed over time. There was payoff to this book, and I really am glad I saw it through to experience that. Perhaps why I felt overly fatigued by this book is because I am going through therapy myself, however Norma's issues are so much more pronounced than mine, and yet I felt myself experiencing them and solving them as she was, and I again truly commend Alana Saab for weaving me through Norma's story with her.

Finally, let me share what part of this book broke me. I read this because it seemed to at some point include a breakup, or an impending breakup, as the title would imply. I was going through my own breakup still when reading this, and hoping to feel something and explore some parallels in this book. I did not get that much of that, except for near the end where we shift perspective a bit to see through Norma's girlfriend's point of view. She is who broke me. Fatiguing in more of a cathartic way, her girlfriend's narration viciously tore me to shreds with how unyielding it was in showing me another person's perspective of a breakup with someone who is in need of therapy, and it broke my heart. When the title of the book is said out loud in the book I dropped it and cried for about ten minutes before continuing. It was gut-wrenching.

I think this is a hard book to recommend because it is not for everyone and it is not easy to read and I don't think that the experience you will get from it is obvious how you will get there. However, I am not at all dismayed I read it. That's why my review for this looks a little low despite getting one of the most raw emotions out of me from a book in quite some time.

I actually quite enjoyed this book, but the reason I gave it a lower rating is because unfortunately I found reading it to be a bit grating.

Let me be clear, I found the book enlightening, I just could not get over how willing the narrator was to overlook how insufferable her partner was. To be fair to her, that was a good bit of the book's innards--Much of the book was spent on self-reflection and realization of herself. I really enjoyed this and growing and learning with the narrator. However, it was so abundantly clear to me from an early stage that her partner was just taking advantage of her in many ways. My disdain for him grew as the book went on. Unfortunately, it made reading the book a bit of a chore as I pitied the narrator and felt contemptuous towards her partner and wanted her to take action over her own life.

I think despite that, I would consider rereading this in the future. I read this shortly after a tough breakup and I think that also gave me a different lens I was reading this book through, which charged some of my feelings. Maybe with a little more time behind me I will find this book still interesting but get less upset at the narrator, because I think I felt like she needed to take so much action because she reminded me in some ways of myself.

Probably my favorite book I've read this year, due in no small part to how captivating I found Rachel Khong's writing to be. I had heard this billed as part romance novel, part inter-generational family story, and it was that, but Rachel was able to make each person's perspective so captivating within itself that I would have loved to read more on any one of the three main narrators.

The book starts with Lily, which is where the romance part takes place. I loved Lily pretty immediately. Despite her tale taking place in the late 90's and early 2000s she felt so modern and relatable to people her age today. I was so interested in where her story was going to go and page after page wanted to hear more of her inner monologue. I loved watching her romance with Matthew bud, I loved seeing the two expose themselves to one another, and I loved them questioning the families they were born to as well. I especially loved seeing Lily progressively explore the people in her life as she got older. She began to see more and more microaggressions against Asian people, which was fascinating and insightful. She began to see the frays of her family's treatment of her as she grew up. This and more, I truly loved Lily's half of the book and was frankly sad it ended as abruptly as it did.

Next it flung us forward in time to follow Nick. Nick himself was so interesting to follow. I loved how relatable he felt as a teenager, but without feeling like "just another teen" rebelling in his own way--He was very vindicated. As a person of mixed race, white-passing myself, I felt a kinship with some of his issues, though they went far further than my own. I really loved this part of not only Nick's story but of the larger one on display in this book. It was especially fascinating seeing Lily in this time period and how she developed past her story's ending.

I won't speak about the final part, but this would be the weakest part of the book in some ways, in my eyes. It was a bit slow and was when I started to lose interest at some small parts, but it was by far the most illuminating too. It provided context for all the other stories as well as serving as a neat conclusion to them as well, and was so interesting in how it was executed.

In the end, Lily stands out as my favorite character from all of this. I loved seeing her story unfold, and as some small twists that explain her behavior at points unfold I felt so sympathetic to her. Some of the last pieces written about her were in some ways so sad, but it gave me such relief to see her at least at peace with herself and her life in the end. I would so have loved to read more about her alone, but of any of the characters in this book.

I try to keep my reviews on the shorter end, but I feel like I could not get enough of this book, truly. I wasn't finished by the time I closed the cover on this one.

This year I took a concerted effort to read more books from series. A lot of what I tend to read are one-off books and I want to explore more series, especially longer ones. The Rook was a recommendation by a friend and seemed perfect for this effort, being one of 3 in a series, and something a little less popular than some long standing series that I've also been afraid to approach.

Right from the outset the book is intriguing. Waking up with amnesia surrounded by assumed assailants, and then entering the strange sci-fi James Bond-esque world the main character's previous self was a part of is compelling. I really enjoyed the drip feed of information about the world of espionage she's been dropped in and the ways the author separated out the two identities of the main character to take us through learning about things ourselves. I also thoroughly enjoyed following her piece together the strange world and try to discover an insidious plot from within. It was a thoroughly enjoyable story that was a bit like reading an action movie, and that was a lot of fun. However, I did feel like there was quite a lot going on at points, dealing with many villainous parties that I wasn't sure connected and by the end of the story really didn't feel super relevant. It felt like plot padding, and because it lacked presence in the greater story I did feel myself losing attention at times on these B-plot adventures that were gone off several times. Despite this, I'd gladly read more into this world as I found it a fun romp way more often than not.

I listened to the audiobook of this and I also must call particular attention to the voice actress who did a fantastic job at voicing some of the different European dialects, particularly some of the villains.

I love Joan. I see and respect and appreciate her so much. This book read a little differently than I think it was billed (I thought it was going to be much more of an intimate look at doctors and their struggles with being unsung and necessary heroes throughout events like the COVID-19 pandemic), but I still loved it because I really enjoy Weike Wang's characters and style of writing.

"An immigrant family controls nothing and so raises two average children obsessed with gaining it back, albeit in different ways." This line is from about halfway through the book, and it really stuck with me. It so simply describes what this book is about. Joan, like Weike, being an Asian American, has her own struggles that are shared by countless of this identity. Through explorations into Joan's family we see the ways Joan deals with these struggles, as well as her brother, who responds as an almost polar opposite way. We see the ways they conflict with one another and their family and the almost insidious way it strains all of their relationships.

This book is about so much more than simply the tough life of a doctor. So much of this book is spent about the treatment of oneself in the company of a harsh, overbearing family. We see the compartmentalization of one's entire person as chipped away at by their family and those close to them for years and years--the inability to even get close to anybody simply because they are so worn down and boxed up over time. And yet, despite that, Joan truly is okay. What I loved about this book, tragic though it may be, is that you can see Joan's inner monologue and she is indeed okay. But you very much want her to be more than okay but to be better, to be thriving, to be living.

I can fully acknowledge and appreciate that there is a good--perhaps even excellent--book in here. However, it was a little too dense and frankly a bit too smart for me to follow at times, and that did detract from my enjoyment of it. When reviewing this, I felt like the book itself was quite good but also like I did not enjoy reading it particularly much. Don't get me wrong, there were concepts I really dug and parts that really pulled me in, but overall reading this did feel a bit muddy and like my mind often wandered FAR off from it. Would I continue reading this series? Frankly, to my disappointment, the ending really grabbed me and made me want to continue reading the series but I did know that it would probably be the same experience. Maybe I'll go dive back in, but this is a book where I needed some incredibly soft, sweet candy to chew on immediately after putting it down.

I wish I liked this book more than I ended up liking it. To be fair to it, I started it in something of a lackadaisical mood and that hurt my impression of the first half, which was by far my favorite part of it. Reading about the bookstore itself and exploring two disparate but connected humans finding out about one another was very fun and exactly what I was hoping for in the book. The second half of it, however, completely lost me, and it's really a shame because I wish I knew why, too. I think I lost interest in the "new" character introduced and explored there, and was really looking forward to spending more time with those in the first half of the book. By the end of the book I felt sufficiently done with this story, which did leave me feeling sad. I give this overall a review right down the middle because when I liked it I was really thriving but when I did not like it I was just wholly uninterested, and it felt like that was squarely half and half.

Although my sentiment towards this movie was simple, I really struggled with how to say it here. I liked this book, overall. However, I also spent so much of the book teetering back and forth from being intrigued to being completely over the main character.

The premise really is as simple as everyone said it was. A housewife thinks she's turning into a dog. Of course, the themes become incredibly clear almost as soon as you get into the book and start seeing her life for what it is, but there really was something about this that kept me curious. It's about motherhood, and about losing one's self to the duties of it. It's about finding community, it's about letting out the literal beast within you when it needs to say something. It's about expression, really. And I liked all of these themes and how they were explored.

However, I would say that the book did often spend too much time languishing in it, which is why I am a little soured by it at the same time. While I did like the book I also felt like I spent an agonizing amount of time with the protagonist just struggling to figure out what was really going on in her situation. it made some of the middle of the story seem, honestly, pointless. We treaded the same sort of water for so much of the book, not getting any clearer. I see now that that may have been because it's how introspectiveness sometimes feels, but it did make the book seem at times lacking focus. As well, while I liked the book and its "twist" ending in hindsight, I did feel something akin to a groan without audibly groaning when I saw where we were going. On reflection I really appreciate that, but contextually it did feel a bit lame in the moment.

Overall I absolutely would recommend this book and I do think it was fun to read. I think I just wish it spent so much of the middle section saying new things or solving plotlines rather than spinning its wheels a bit much for me.

I have heard many things about Brandon Sanderson and his books, and his universe, and this year I made it a goal of mine to stretch into more larger series and see if I liked it. I thought this was a good place to start, with a low level of commitment if I didn't end up liking it but the option to dive more into a deeper universe if I ended up finding something I really loved. Where I ended was, frankly, somewhere in the middle, but that's okay.

There seems to be quite a lot to talk about with this book but really two things stick out the most to me. One is that, not being familiar with actually reading anything in the Cosmere universe, I wasn't aware of who or what this Hoid character was--or even that the narrator was himself an established character. I found that an interesting angle overall. Ultimately though I did find it a bit weak for a few specific points, specifically near the end. It seemed a bit of a cop-out for Hoid to explain the nuances of what was going on with Yumi and Painter to us, the reader, out of universe, while the two of them and the broader world wouldn't be able to have learned some of the facts explained. I didn't hate this, as I appreciated the explanations Hoid gave, it just struck me as fairly lazy to have Yumi and Painter discover 90% of it and then a character with essentially omniscience over the history of events explain the 10% they never would have known, but still is important to the book. I think what soured me to this was actually specifically that it didn't come from a narrator, but an actual character, who was speaking to the reader and thus came across like he was taking us aside to tell us what was really going on. I suppose, in the end, I was a little over the use of a narrator character giving his flavor in strange places I just felt were unnecessary.

Secondly, I was struck throughout reading the book how much it was like Final Fantasy X. In the end, Brandon Sanderson admitted as much to himself and it was in such a way that as I listened to the audiobook start the sentence I knew exactly what it was going to say before it said it. This book absolutely borrows from the story, and while that does in fact make it unique in many ways FFX is itself unique, that does somewhat hinder my impression of it knowing the book is explicitly based on FFX. I like FFX enough, and I like this enough, and the reasons for my positive and negative feelings for both are not identical, and that's pretty interesting to me. I think the story works quite well, and is told compellingly enough here that I was pretty gripped to continue on and rarely bored. The characters are fun and their interactions were endearing, especially Yumi and Painter, and one thing I really really did quite enjoy about the story was the emphasis on art and artists and gripping with the value your art brings to the world and to those around you. It felt sincere about this and it did speak to me on some level as someone with a relationship to this myself.

Ultimately, I think I will read some more of Brandon Sanderson here and there, but I am not finding myself compelled to dive deep into his universe, at least not at this time.

I love Joan, I see and respect and appreciate her so much. This book read a little differently than I think it's billed, but I still loved it because I really enjoy Weike Wang's characters and style of writing.

This book is said to be about looking at people like doctors in everyday life, especially those with their own troubled and wound up pasts and families, and especially those who went through traumatic experiences such as the covid-19 pandemic. And it's certainly about that. But it's about so much more. So much of this book is spent about the treatment of oneself in the company of a harsh, overbearing family. The compartmentalization of one's entire person as chipped away at by their family and those close to them for years and years--the inability to even get close to anybody simply because they are so worn down and boxed up over time. And yet, despite that, Joan truly is okay. But what I loved about this book is that you can see and you very much want her to be more than okay but to be better, to be thriving, to be living.

Wow I really enjoyed this. One of my favorite things about it, something I thought quite a lot especially as the book went along, is how the trauma impacts the main character very early on in the book and she appears so jaded to it from the outset that we actually never really get to see her "at her norm" throughout the book, I felt. So much of the book is spent after a very serious injury and traumatic event, one which makes you wonder if she is being the way she is because of the injury, or if she's just like that and not knowing makes this all the more intriguing.

This is a book about self sabotage, about self respect, about coping, about consent, and while all of those may seem obvious while reading they don't feel smeared on. They feel incredibly adequately thought out for someone who has had their entire life upended so quickly in ways that are dazzling to them. Despite the fact this dazzling display seems so obvious to us, the reader, to be able to determine when the good and bad are happening, I loved that things are all the more confusing to the character Alison herself. I really appreciated the lens this book lets us read from and the frankly surprising way that it unfolds.