Allie

I keep trying, but this is only okay. Setting aside at 39%. The grieving part of this is A+, and rang totally true to me. But! It is mismarketed as a romance. It is NOT a romance.

It's going back and forth between the present day, when Freddie is dead, but with the aid of sleeping pills, Lydia enters an alternate reality where her fiance is still alive and they continue along like he didn't die at all. It ... does not work for me. I want to know why Lydia and Freddie fell in love, I don't want to know what their future might have looked like if he hadn't died. That's not how this works! That's not how any of this works!

Neither Lydia nor Freddie are really people I want to root for either. Lydia is kind of snobby about how special her and Freddie's love is, not cliche like other people's love! And she's not very kind to Freddie's best friend, who also happens to have been her own friend for like a decade. I know from reading other reviews that Silver was going to try to make Fetch happen with the best friend, and I reject this very much because they have zero chemistry, just happen to be grieving simultaneously.

There's not enough character development, in either the waking or “dreaming” storylines. So much telling, not enough showing. I'll be kinda enjoying it while I'm reading, but the second I put the book down, my irritation with it starts up.

Meh. Next!

Edit: OH GOOD I'M GLAD I PUT IT DOWN NOW. Other reviews indicate that in the “dreaming” storyline, Lydia's sister has a miscarriage. Nope nope nope.

The war story deserves 3 stars. The rest of it - the romance, Catherine Barkley, the dialogue, the ending - gets NO STARS, and I threw the book across the room as soon as I finished.

Aaaaaaaughhhaaaaaaaaahhh.

Well! I'm probably gonna need to read something REAL fluffy after this! This short book was surprisingly depressing and unsettling. Like, I finished over my lunch break and then just sat there because HUH, that ... is disturbing.

I wish I had gotten a bit more of Jiyoung's personality throughout, but by the end, it made sense why that was not provided. I also wished that there had been more exploration of her multiple-voices thing that was introduced at the beginning; I thought there would be more of that after we got her life story, why she was having the issues she was having, and HOO BOY, get ready to RAGE about some patriarchal bullshit! It's pretty shocking, and also sad that it isn't that shocking in Korea. Women put up with a lot of crap everywhere, but I felt so crummy for Jiyoung, for stay-at-home mothers, for women in the workforce. It was all just terrible. And I didn't know it was terrible.

A good read, but yeah. Depressing and unsettling. 3.5 stars.

I really enjoyed hanging out with Eric while I read these essays and feel like maybe we could be friends, which is why I already subscribed to his newsletter. (I had not previously been aware of his Elle column.) Particularly enjoyed his thoughts throughout on Church in all its dysfunction, glory, and the variety of things that can also be religious experiences.

I wish I could give this three and a half stars. While I enjoyed reading it, I found parts of it to be confusing, particularly who was supposed to be narrating in certain chapters. But a decent read, otherwise.

This one definitely got better as it went; I found it kind of slow at the beginning. An interesting look at how the medium affects the message of faith, and how it has evolved through our various technological iterations. Ultimately, it concludes that technology often hurts our relationships instead of helping them. Not groundbreaking stuff, but it was an interesting enough read, and I liked how it pulled in information about media during Jesus' life; I only wish there had been more of it.

I am only going to say this once, and then I will try my hardest never to harp on it again, as I suspect I have reached my complaint quota on this particular issue ...

When I was 16, I walked into our local weekly newspaper's office and told them I wanted to work for them, and thus I got an internship copyediting the paper and doing some very minor reporting work. One of the first things I remember the editor telling me was that you can't just interview the people you already know. And I know Kristoff and WuDunn worked at much bigger and more important publications than my little weekly, and have won Pulitzers for their previous work on much more hard-hitting subjects than this week's school board meeting, and that's why it bothered me so much that the framing of this book was so much around kids that Kristoff was friends with on the school bus.

OK, shutting up about that now.

This was a broad look at poverty and how America has failed its citizens through unemployment/underemployment, addiction, lack of healthcare, homelessness, incarceration, and more. It includes a lot of statistics, and also a lot of wrenching personal stories. If you don't already know about our country's poorest people, I think this is an eye-opening read of the issues and possible solutions. Particularly the anecdotes in the healthcare chapter regarding people waiting for free health fairs in order to get treatment, and how poverty affects pregnancy, were harrowing to me.

The authors identify as more left-leaning, as do I, and I still found myself having a bit of a hard time accepting that so many of their suggested solutions to reducing poverty and its effects required government policy, programming and funding. Particularly if the super wealthy continue to get tax breaks for just about anything. They outlined some wonderful programs that are helping with keeping kids in school and away from violence and drugs, programs to help women through addiction, etc. and talk about ways of scaling those programs, and to me that sounds like a more reasonable solution than asking the government to step in and intervene (... we've seen how well that worked for the Covid vaccine rollout ...). But as they point out, programs often have unintended consequences. I am still learning.

Other reading if this subject is something that interests, you: Dopesick by Beth Macy.

I don't even know what to say about this book. It's very much a YA novel, and it feels so lived in and honest in a way that YA doesn't always, to me. It's very different than anything else I've read about being queer, questioning and coming to terms with one's various intersecting identities, and LEARNING! Coming along on Juliet's journey, learning about her own history and family and sexuality and discovering for herself what does and doesn't work for her and why. I loved spending time with her. I only wish we got a reading list of the other books Ava recommended Juliet needed to read besides Harlowe's.

I think her comedy specials are hilarious, but those are presumably tighter from working in comedy clubs and bars until Wong had perfected them. I enjoyed this for the most part, but got a little bored of an overlong chapter about her study abroad experiences, and then found that, even with her reading her own audiobook, it felt too long - like a comedy special that hadn't been quite workshopped enough.

Giving it an extra few points, though, for her husband's letter at the end - I did wonder what he thought of her comedy, since she talks about him a decent amount in it - and I LOVED his perspective on supporting his wife in non-traditional ways when she far-and-above out-earns him.

Essentially, if you like the Baby Cobra and Hard Knock Wife Netflix specials, you'll like this, and vice versa. If you don't, you won't. 3.5 stars.

Man, this high school sounds like a nightmare. More drama, more secrets, and wow am I glad I had a brick of a phone when I was in high school because text-messaging was barely a thing then, and you had to pay 25 cents for each one and F if I was going to pay for that with my $5.45-an-hour job sacking groceries.

Anyway. Fun escapism since this isn't my life, though the ending (and I mean literally like the last five minutes of the audio) skipped a little into SUPER unbelievable territory.

This book is garbage.

CW: infertility, miscarriages (early and late-stage), gaslighting/emotional manipulation, emotional abuse, physical abuse, unnamed mental illness

So let's start here: I like stories of polygamy/polyamory. It's not a lifestyle I can imagine for myself, and I find it interesting to live in someone else's shoes for a little bit. I should have eaten The Wives up with a spoon.

The blurb is grossly misleading. That is not what this book is. You think you know what you're getting, but this book has more twists than a crazy-straw. I'm not sure how to review this without putting spoiler tags all over it, so be forewarned that Beyond This Point There Be Spoilers. (I want to promise that I'll try not to ruin it just for the hell of it, but the idea of someone else picking up this book ... I literally threw my copy across the room, then threw it in the recycle bin, so I make no promises.)

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Things I Hated:
• Mental illness as a twist - most of my problems with this book boiled down to this.
• Using the trauma of a late-stage miscarriage and birth, hemorrhage and subsequent loss of reproductive organs as the impetus for descent into madness.

Look, I'm not saying that it's impossible, but I reject this notion as the book's theme; it's no longer a book about polygamy at this point! Now it's about Thursday being crazy, and imagining all this shit? While Seth denies the plural marriage, even though he is literally sleeping with all three women despite only being married to one of them (and it's not the one you think)?????

Things I Hated, Cont'd:
• Convenient Memory Loss. About so. much. stuff.
• Seth. What an asshat.
• Regina emotionally manipulating Thursday into believing that Seth had intentionally aborted both Regina's and Thursday's pregnancies. And making Thursday fear that Seth would do the same to Hannah.

Ohhhhhh that made me RAGE. Like it's not traumatic enough to lose a baby more than halfway through a pregnancy, you're seriously going to introduce the idea that Seth intentionally killed multiple of his own children while they were still in the womb? At the risk of his wives? Knowing that Thursday is struggling to identify what's real and what's not??

Things I Hated, Cont'd 2:
• Regina. I mean, I get her hatred of Thursday, as the usurped first wife, but bitch! You don't do that.
• I stopped being sure that Seth actually existed at one point? Like, I couldn't keep it straight what the story was supposed to be. Did Thursday make up the marriage? The person? The other wives?
• Did I mention I hated the convenient memory loss???

I didn't even hate Thursday as the narrator, because I believed her for so much of this! (You gotta believe the women!) But even though Seth is supposed to be the one who was trying to get out of a bad/scary relationship with Thursday, he still comes off as the bad guy.

I got to the end and I was mad, and then I cried because of the way loss is portrayed and used as a manipulation tool, and then I was mad again, and then I couldn't sleep, so this is what you get.

I was reading this book as a part of a group, but since we had our second meeting over the weekend, and I'm not going to be around for future meetings, I went ahead and finished the book. I was struggling with reading it in chunks, because my brain is swiss cheese, and I could not for the life of me remember what I should be discussing. Even though there are lots of good discussion questions at the end of every chapter! Point is - this was very good book about the need for anti-racism work in the Christian church, and I will probably revisit it again at a non-cheese-brain time.

Loved this story! Gavin rock star and ex-junkie, Marisol 3rd year law student, a chance meeting at one of Gavin's concerts, and his management team deciding he needs a fake relationship to prove to the press he's staying clean. What can go wrong!

I didn't love the implication that when someone does you wrong it's the permission you need to fall back into old habits, but I suspect that is a truthful depiction of living with addiction or loving someone who is. (Thankfully I do not have first-hand experience of this.) I also was so annoyed at his management team for specifying date by date how intimate Gavin and Marisol needed to be for the cameras. Very ick.

V. v. steamy, great banter, real stakes, good boundaries for the most part, good communication for the most part.

TW: addiction, drinking, drugs, physical violence

Also P.S. if you go to Roxie Noir's website you can get a free digital Christmas novella and yes I already downloaded it, because I'mma need some stuff to read over the holiday break, assuming that I get a holiday break, which is seeming less and less likely since Matt came down with a fever yesterday and we're supposed to drive to his parents' tonight, and also I don't want to be a jerk but I NEED this, I CANNOT deal with a week straight of being the sole caretaker of a 3-year-old who does nothing but scream NO at me with no daycare and no grandparents to give me a break, I will go BANANAS, and yes I'm catastrophizing, he was up screaming at 4 a.m., but Matt promised he'd finally be healthy again in 20-30 years. So. Yes. Christmas novella.

Well! This was good and depressing!

The moral of the story is that if you have something good everyone will be jealous of you and try to rob/kill/destroy you and/or everything you love. But Steinbeck is still great, so.

CW: infant death

Our niece got this book for Christmas. Apparently it was one of Matt's favorites from when he was a kid. It was SO cute and fun. Don't turn the page! There's a monster!!!

I don't know what to say about this that hasn't already been said. My instinct is to try to share some of Smith's words, but even excerpts don't feel like they get far enough into the meat of this collection. It is sadness, and memory, and rage, but with moments of levity. (I mean, there's a brilliant poem called dogs! - woof woof motherfuckaaaaa!)

And this:
i braved the stupidest ocean. a man.i waded in his stupid waters.i took his stupid salt & let itbrine my skin ...it was stupid. silly really. i knew nothingthat easy to get & good to feelisn't also trying to eat you.
from “sometimes i wish i felt the side effects”

Favorites:
- “my poems” because of its use of the written word as literal weapon
- the frustration, yet optimism of “what was said at the bus stop”
- “fall poem” - because of the way it considers those who you don't see in your neighborhood anymore, and it is so unexpected in its phrasing:
... no onewants to hear a poem about fall; much prefer the fallen body, something easy to mourn, body cut out of the lightbody lit up with bullets. see how easy it is to bring up bullets?is it possible to ban guns? even from this poem?

I liked Don't Call Us Dead better, but it's Danez Smith, so you know you're getting something fantastic no matter what.

This was a really weird book. And yet I kind of had a hard time putting it down. Shadow has been in prison for three years, and upon his release, he has plans to go back home to his wife and work at a gym his buddy owns. But when both of them die in a car wreck just days before he is released, he has to change his plans. On the flight back home, Shadow meets the secretive Mr. Wednesday, who offers him a job as his personal bodyguard. But it's the most unusual job ever — really, they're recruiting other “gods” for the war Wednesday claims is coming. Meanwhile the mysterious Mister World is on the opposing side, and he keeps sending his lackeys to thwart Wednesday and Shadow's progress. Throw in some late-night visits from Shadow's dead wife's not-quite-ghost, several disappearances and the weirdest sex scene ever (seriously), and you've got a really strange, interesting book. I'll give it a solid B, just because it was entertaining to read.

I was not a very good high school English student. Every book we were assigned, I read just enough to write the essay and pass the test. Usually that meant I read until about a hundred pages from the end before quitting.

East of Eden is the only book that I ever regretted not finishing in high school.

I'm so glad I've finally read the whole thing. This book is amazing.

A decent book to read during a pandemic! Watching Gavin fight to save his marriage is a good way to avoid thinking about illness.

I liked both Gavin and Thea and their twin daughters, and some aspects of his teammates and their secret book club. (I could have done without the discussions of one guy's digestive problems, and it was annoying that that guy was not named until the absolute end of the book.) I also didn't necessarily need the portions of the Regency romance that Gavin was reading throughout, but I did enjoy the nicknames Gavin came up with for “Lord Benedict” in his mind. Thea had a looooot of problems, but I appreciated that she started to deal with them, even though it took a long time to get there. But Thea fighting with the other baseball wives was awesome, and the sexytimes were hot.

Back when we were in college, I would come down to visit Matt a couple of times a semester. Whenever I could swing it — it was usually during finals week — I would try to come to Matt's Percussion Studio performances. It was great because I knew I'd get to see him performing something he loved and was proud of; but it was also a terrible decision to ever make the six-hour drive for that weekend, because it meant I wouldn't actually get to see him in person for most of the weekend, as the group would be busy with last-minute preparations and rehearsals, and then celebrating once the show was over.

So I would usually make plans with friends for the times when I wouldn't be able to hang out with him. But on a few occasions, plans fell through, and I was left with nothing to do. For most of his life, Matt wasn't much of a reader. When I would visit him on campus, he had a total of four books that weren't textbooks: two of them were Sherlock Holmes anthologies, one was some sports book, and one was The Grapes of Wrath.

On a couple of occasions, I picked up TGoW and started reading it in the hours before the show was to start, but inevitably I would leave it behind when I headed back home, only to forget everything I'd read and do the whole thing again the following semester.

This time I just kept reading.

I always forget how much I like John Steinbeck's writing, but I do enjoy his work. TGoW is about the Joad family and thousands of families like them who picked up and headed to California in search of work during the Dust Bowl right before the Great Depression. Except everyone else in the Midwest had basically the same idea, so there was very little work available and everyone was starving and the Californians were resentful that so many people were migrating in when they could barely afford their own farms anyway, much less good wages for workers.

In between the Joads' story, Steinbeck painted a vivid picture of life on the road and in tent camps called “Hoovervilles,” and of all the families that were struggling the same way as the Joads. It was sad, but I found it interesting because I have never read much about the domestic problems leading up to the Great Depression.

Really liked this and the stories of the packhorse librarians and their messed up marriages, awful parents and gossipy small town. Ah, small towns. I loved getting to meet the families that Alice and Margery visited as they did their library rounds up and down the Appalachian mountains, and how that simple act of delivering books made such a difference to the remote parts of their communities. The sense of place was so great, and these characters and their struggles were believable. For a book whose pace was often languid, it read quite quickly and I powered through the last third of the book in one sitting.

The only thing though, is it always irritates me when an author has a great story and muddies it up by throwing a MURDER INTRIGUE plot in where it's not needed. Like, there was enough drama happening here, between Alice and her husband who didn't want to touch her; her abusive father-in-law who also happened to own the mining town next door and wanted to shut the library down and also control Alice by slandering Margery all over town; Izzy, whose mother didn't believe she was capable of librarian-ing because of her bum polio leg; Sophia, a black woman breadwinner whose brother lost his leg in a mining incident, but who worked in the library despite white townspeople not wanting her there. I was never like, you know what this plot needs is MORE ACTION! There was plenty going on!

I feel very wishy-washy about this book. I didn't hate it? It was a quick read, and kept me engaged overall, but there were just SO many things to quirk an eyebrow at.

First of all? There was absolutely no growth from any of the characters from beginning to end. Every single character is happy to hang their entire lives on the lies they tell themselves, and even with changes in circumstance, nothing really ever changes for anyone. So frustrating!

I felt like the character interactions were overwrought, and some of the characters were under-developed. I mean, I know Alix is a Well-Intentioned White Lady, but some parts of her personality felt so unrealistic. And I know Emira is supposed to be Not Sure What She Wants, but the ways she interacted with her friend group mostly reminded me of college instead of mid-20s. And sooooo many issues with boundaries.

I hated the not-even love triangle. It's been 15 years Alex/Alix! Let it go! (Also YOU WEREN'T EVEN WRONGED!!)

I'm going to stop thinking about this book now.

Mama: Don't carry around the hurtful words that others say. Drop them. They are not yours to keep.

Beautiful and beautifully illustrated book. Told from the perspective of a little girl, Faizah, whose big sister, Asiya, is wearing hijab for the first day of sixth grade. All the ways Faizah looks up to, and looks for validation from, Asiya, and how beautiful she thinks her sister's scarf is. A really sweet picture book.

My first thought was, I'm surprised Fox was allowed/willing/able to share so much about her missions and the training she underwent as part of the CIA. I read an article partway through about how she didn't wait for permission from the agency to send this book to her publisher, but that they (allegedly) had a copy for over a year and had only requested superficial changes, and that surprised me a lot. I think that I expected that, with a book as fascinating as Life Undercover is, more would need to be redacted, that there would be more cover-up (particularly in those sections where Fox is critical of the CIA, in how they handle common names in the Middle East, in how they willfully choose to act first and apologize never, and how they look down on things that may take time even if it will produce more effective results in the long run). Maybe I just don't have a lot of faith in the Systems That Be, so it was kind of refreshing that Fox was allowed to be proud of the work she was doing while also admitting that it was not perfect by any means.

This is not a very action-oriented spy story, but it really delves into the psyche of those who participate, as active agents and those on the periphery (families, spouses, etc.). I loved seeing why and how someone like Fox would be attracted to and recruited into this work, what it takes as far as training, and the toll on one's personal life and emotional health. I'm glad she didn't shy away from describing Dean's PTSD after leaving Afghanistan, and I can only hope the CIA has systems in place to help their employees deal with that trauma. I was also glad to see that there is a time and place in which the best option is to walk away - I think I expected that once you're in, you're in for life ... even if that life doesn't work for you anymore.

It was very well-written, and I think I just convinced myself to bump this up to a 4.5.

Book club selection. This is not something I would have ever known existed were it not for book club, and while enjoy is a strong word (there's a whole mess of rough stuff in this story, see trigger warnings below) I found myself fully engaged in a book I was prepared to write off from page 1. And I ended up really liking the book overall, except for maybe the last chapter. (But that's a me thing - I would argue it wrapped up either too neatly or too quickly.)

Also, timeline. This book was published in 2019 and presumably takes place in the same general time frame, and presumably one of our main characters, Josie/Mari was able to successfully take on/discard two different identities during the previous 15 years while everyone (admittedly not many people) assumed that she had been killed in a train explosion in Europe. And I'm giving it a little bit of a side-eye that in 2004-ish you could take the passport off one of your fellow dead passengers and pass it off as your own, and continue to get away with all the legal documentation for 15 years (which she would have had to do, as she got married, acquired property, etc.). SIDE EYE. But story reasons. Okay, sure.

But also, you can hate your former self but that doesn't mean you have to figuratively kill yourself off to start over. Like, she could have moved to New Zealand, detoxed, did all the same things, and still let her mom and sister know that she was, you know, not dead in the train accident. Even if she never wanted to see them again.

Again, complicated story, but yeah I still liked it and thought it was overall successful and surprisingly will make for a good discussion. 3.5 stars

TW: child neglect, child sexual abuse (molestation, rape), child physical abuse (off-page), alcoholism, suicide, drug addiction, abortion, fatphobia