Allie

My friend Kearah got this book for Christmas and was showing it to me a few months back - because it contained within it a quiz about books that reminded her of me. A few days later I went and got my own copy, and would look at a few pages before falling asleep at night. Mount's stated goal was to make one's TBR explode, and I can say I've added quite a few books to mine because of this one! She is very talented at what she does. My favorite things (other than the few quizzes within the pages) were the hand-drawn book stacks for all different subjects, and the mini portrait sketches of some of the authors and illustrators of those books. There were also things about favorite libraries and bookstores, recommendations by bookish people, and blurbs about cover design, and the whole thing was a delight.

When I finished Volume 1, it was in the middle of lunchtime the other day. I loved the book so much, but most of the time when I'm reading over lunch, I just want to be left alone. But I carried My Brother's Husband over to a coworker, who is Japanese, and said, “I'm reading manga!” He said he was surprised at how much manga has been translated into English, and asked what it was about.

It's about Yaichi, a single dad living in Japan, and his young daughter, Kana. One day, a big Canadian man named Mike shows up at their front door, announcing that he was the husband of Yaichi's recently deceased twin brother, Ryoji. Yaichi accepts Mike into their home, but struggles a lot with the cultural differences between Japan and other parts of the world, what is acceptable here vs. there. He struggles with what it means that his brother was gay and built a life that Yaichi doesn't know, that Yaichi and Ryoji drifted apart after Ryoji came out, what it would feel like if Kana grew up and decided she wanted to marry a woman.

Anyway, as her new Canadian uncle, Kana LOOOOOOOVES Mike, and the three of them spend a lot of time touristing and eating yummy-looking things over his three-week visit to Japan, and it was a really delightful world to be in, even amongst the moments of sadness and growth and frustration. Kana sees the world through her child lens, and Yaichi sees how it must have been for Ryoji, and Mike sees the homeland of his husband, whom he never got to come home with.

The second volume is basically a direct continuation from the first. Both are gorgeous and lovely and hopeful.

I wish I had read this book when I was younger, because I think I would have liked it better as a kid than I did as an adult. Still a cute story, though.

I'm real behind on my reviewing, so I've already got the library copy of sequel, Wildcard, in my possession. Matt saw it on the breakfast table this morning, and commented that it didn't look like a book I would normally pick up. So I told him how it was the sequel to a different book, that Warcross was a YA novel with a heroine who's a hacker and who plays this video game and makes friends with/lurrrrves the guy who created the video game but then has to thwart the system he's created and she's is basically the best hacker to ever hack, but she's not really scrappy (Matt asked if she was scrappy because all YA heroines are scrappy) because she's dating a billionaire and that makes scrappiness kind of unnecessary.

Which I felt was a pretty good summary for something he's never going to read. ANYWAY.

Overall, I really enjoyed. I have a small nitpick that might be a bigger nitpick when you think too hard about it, but WHY must every YA novel heroine be the greatest whatever of all time? Like, Emika seems to be a normal struggling bounty hunter that's about to get evicted because she can't pay her bills, and she hacks/glitches into a video game (which, to me, as a not-video-game-player, feels like she's maybe not that good at it if that happens?), and then the billionaire video game designer hires her because when he asked her to find a problem in his video game code it took her like a minute and a half, despite that his engineers whom he pays have spent hours and days and weeks looking for this problem, because she's the greatest hacker to ever hack despite having super out-of-date equipment and also a two year ban from using computers, but magically she's better at this than everyone who gets paid to create and maintain this game.

I know, I know ... because otherwise we have no story. Sigh.

I could punch some other holes in some other things, but like I said, I did like this, so I think I'll just leave it at that. The world within the game that Lu created was fun, Emika's teammates seemed cool even though she doesn't seem like someone you'd actually want to be on a team on (she like never showed up for practice!), the big bad was interesting and clearly I liked it enough to go ahead and request the sequel immediately, which almost never happens.

I listened to the audiobook and the reader was good.

Dogma is but one reason that I prefer to call myself the generic “Christian” rather than a practitioner of any particular denomination of church I have attended in my lifetime - because as I grow and change, my faith also has to grow with me, or risk stagnating and falling away. And I totally understand why it does for a lot of people, when faith no longer seems to fit one's own truths. In that way, my growing up “un-churched” I think has actually helped me, because through attending a variety of different types of church, I've been able to see elements that some churches have embraced that others haven't, and know that even though all Christian denominations similarly claim One Way (Jesus), the actual practice of faith can work in a lot of different ways.

And although I think Arceneaux is semi joking about Beyonce being his lord and savior, I'm glad that it seems that he's come to peace with his own faith through the writing of this book, per the epilogue. Even when that means your faith is different than that of your parents.

I enjoyed this a lot, particularly because Arceneaux (seems? / seemed?) to have a strong faith background, and I don't feel like that's a story that gets told a lot in secular environments, about grappling with the faith of your family and also the way your family has either failed in their own faith or failed YOU in their version of faith. (And whoooo boy do I feel that last one in particular, in the light of the last oh 5-ish years.) I don't think I'm wording this quite right, but will try anyway: Even when not actively addressing the topic of “sinfulness,” there's an undercurrent of anxiety about homosexuality's “sinfulness” despite that being a part of his identity, and Arceneaux tends to gloss over that instead of challenging it head-on (likely because he was raised Catholic, where there was/is not room for pushing against the bounds of Church dogma). Like, I've learned to ask - what if something that is inherently who you are is not sinful? What might that mean, and how can that work with the ground that's already been laid? These kind of things are interesting to me.

Arceneaux is a great writer and I enjoyed his style a lot. I'll keep an eye out for more of his writing in the future.

{And in reading this over again before hitting publish, I have to say - writing about religion with clarity is hard, yo.}

I meant to read this in October, or “spooky season” as everyone seems to be calling it these days, but time got away from me. And also, doesn't a season imply more than one month? So whatever, I missed it by a few days, but I don't care. I'm glad I finally got around to it, because while not totally gripping or anything, I enjoyed the reading experience, the light spookiness of a Headless-Horseman retelling with a (somewhat unrealistic) feminist lens. The very end may have bumped up the rating a tiny bit (the confrontation with Brom) because it was just so well-done. A solid 3.5.

This is not an problem with Jasmine Guillory. I really like her story-telling, and her characters, and her writing. I really like her messages of strong friendship, and feminism, and empowerment, and taking chances. This is absolutely a me problem.

She wasn't even a main character, but I wish Jessie's storyline hadn't been of a pregnant woman on bed-rest for pre-eclampsia. Every time she was mentioned, or anyone worried about the baby, or Carlos freaked out about her blood pressure, I felt mine go up too. Every time, I got upset and thought about whether I needed to put this down and DNF in order to be okay. I finally texted Steph to make sure everything was going to be okay for them, because I know this is a romance novel and they always end happily, but if something happened to this fictional baby ... I could not handle that. It made the book really hard to get through. Mom and baby are fine after emergency C-section at 34 weeks and short NICU stay. There is also mention of a different character's long-ago miscarriage.

I loved Nik and Carlos' relationship though, and that Drew and Alexa showed back up. This might have made me feel like maybe I could give sour cream another chance, because the sour-cream-as-salve-for-chili-pepper-burns thing was hilarious and adorable.

CW: emotional abuse, pregnancy problems, unrelated mention of miscarriage

The first several stories in this collection did not appeal to me, and I thought about putting it down but Googled first, and grabbed the names of other peoples' favorite stories. There were quite a bit more that I liked in the latter half of the book, and that I appreciated for their cleverness and storytelling. My big issue is that I simply didn't find very many of these memorable. (My memory also sucks, fwiw.)

I brought it to the doctor's office this morning, and the doc asked what I was reading. I said, “Short stories - they're supposed to be the best, but I don't know that I'd call them the best.” Not to put Roxane Gay on blast or anything - art is subjective. I still trust her opinion, though it is different than mine.

Ones that stuck with me:
• A Big True by Dina Nayeri - about two middle eastern immigrants who become friends while living in a shelter
• Control Negro by Jocelyn Nicole Johnson - about a black professor at a university who is trying to prove that racism is a thing of the past
• The Prairie Wife by Curtis Sittenfeld - about a suburban mom obsessed with a lifestyle blogger she used to date; I liked how it turned on its head midway through.

A family of psychics and con artists (sometimes both at the same time), always looking for greatness or trying to avoid greatness, getting tangled up with both mobsters and the government. I REALLY enjoyed reading this, and spending time with this family, though they would drive me bananas if I actually knew them or were related to these people.

5 stars for the content. I knew there was an opioid epidemic, but didn't know anything about how it started, how it progressed, and how slow finding a solution (and agreeing to any solutions!) has been. A good overview, and also how did I not know how bad this is in my neck of the woods?! Macy kept naming places and I was like, oh yep, I've been there, oh, I know where that is...

The writing was a little disjointed and repetitive, and it took me a bit to figure out how we'd jumped from OxyContin over-prescribing to heroin dealing, but I think where it really shines is in the human element - in the interviews with parents who have lost their teenaged and young adult children to overdose deaths; in conversations with doctors in Virginia counties who saw the problem coming from a mile away, tried to fight it from the pharma-rep all the way up, and how hard they've still been trying to get their patients appropriate help after more than 20 years; and in the text messages with addicted user-dealers, some who want desperately to stay clean, and some who never quite manage it. Macy excels at putting human faces and human stories front and center - they are, first and foremost, still people, not just addicts and dealers.

3.5 stars. Really enjoyed the reading, and Elphaba's story, but it did have some moments in the middle where the story seemed to drag.

I can't. I wanted to power through this, because the parts about the war are so beautiful (which is why I'm giving 2 stars instead of 1). But even with skimming everything but the war stories (because I hate Viola and I'm bored by birding and Augustus), every single other thing in this book is a tedious slog.

This was fine! I enjoyed it!

Fantasy is not really my jam, but I do love stories of brave and powerful and hardworking women uniting against the Patriarchy (or ice kingdom, or whatever - basically Men Behaving Poorly), so there's that.

I didn't love the repetition of the same story from a second person's perspective, which happened frequently and required a bit of backtracking, and I didn't find the multiple viewpoints that useful in telling me any new information (though when I heard there were lots of POV characters with no discernible way of telling the characters apart, it did scare me off listening to the audiobook).

I mean, it was fine! Whenever I picked it up I was engrossed in it. But I don't think it will be particularly memorable, for me anyway.

My favorite parts were Miryem's ice-people servants, Tsop and Flek and Shofer. They were pretty cool. (Har har, I didn't even intend that pun.) I liked her growing relationship to them and the growth of the world-building in her understanding this new kingdom. I also liked the house-in-two-kingdoms.

This was just so DELIGHTFUL. Had I been alive in the 1950s/1960s, perhaps Miss Helene Hanff and I would have been friends - I saw pieces of myself in her letters. Surprisingly touching too. I had to take a photo of the last page before the epilogue, because it was just perfect, and mine was a library copy (which seems wrong since the whole book is correspondence regarding purchasing books). Very good.

This was better than I thought it would be! I'm not the biggest fan of nature books in general, but the slower pace of this was lovely, particularly while the world is falling apart. Did the ending wrap up way too neatly for my tastes? Fo' sho. But it was engaging, and escapism, and well-written, and a who-dunnit, and can't go wrong with that.

This was fantastic.

I had my first overt conversation with my son about race the other day. (He's not even 2, so I know it did not register in any way with him.) He just learned the word “brown” and then pointed at all the brown things in the room before pointing at his own arm and saying “brown.” Little dude is white, and also doesn't know the actual color white yet, let alone what white skin means in the world.

Jacob talks in the book about not always knowing how to have hard conversations about race and racism with her own child, not wanting to give him more than he can understand but knowing he soaks up everything like a sponge, and needing to provide some sense of protection and understanding. And her adorable son, just being a kid, in the midst of these tough conversations, telling his parents he's in the FBI and CIA and can do special ops like moonwalking if necessary. It reminded me that it's important to have these conversations, always, but that kids are silly and innocent and have weird minds that are not the same as those of their parents, and that there will be time for all the truth of the world later (like maybe after their second birthday, jk jk).

Pitched as a cross between Americanah and Bridget Jones's Diary. It's been quite a long time since I read BJD, but I watched the movie over and over (and over) in college - when I couldn't sleep, it's what I'd put on because I knew it well enough that I didn't have to watch it, could just listen with my eyes closed and inevitably would wake up in the morning with the gentle DVD music playing in the background.

Which is to say, I get why publishing houses pitch books the way they do, but I don't think BJD is an apt comparison, and it took a bit for me to figure out why. Bridget seems to make poor decisions, which is also true of Queenie. But I don't get the sense that Bridget uses those poor choices as a means of trying to self-destruct.

I don't normally do summaries of books when I review, but I think this is an important addition to the blurb: it says a messy breakup (“we were on a break!!!”) causes a bit of a spiral for Queenie, but (not a spoiler, this is mentioned right at the beginning) a lot of this book hinges on a miscarriage, though Queenie didn't realize she was pregnant until after she'd lost both the baby and the relationship. I can't say I was thrilled about this being a plot point, especially since none of the reviews I'd seen beforehand mentioned it, but so much of Queenie's later behavior makes way more sense to me in the context of grieving.

So yes, Queenie makes awful decisions that are a detriment to her health, her body, her self-worth, her job. But does any of it surprise me when it comes down to it? No. In the first few weeks after we lost Nora, I remember telling Matt that I wished I had more self-destructive tendencies, because all I wanted was to feel that pain on the outside and not just the inside. This book is self-destruction actualized. I can't fault her that. She gets help, eventually, thankfully.

I personally think that all these aspects of grief are the primary factor in this book, tbh, and no one else seems to have made it a big priority in their reviews. But that's all I have to add to the conversation about this book.

If this hadn't been a library book, I would have highlighted like, half the book. Instead, I had to make do with taking pictures of the passages I wanted to remember.

I love the compassion with which Evans wrote about tough topics. Lately I've been wrestling with the idea that so many people can have such vastly different, deeply-held beliefs of what the Bible says, in exact opposition to others' deeply-held beliefs. It makes me crazy, a little bit.

This book was like Evans wrapping her arm around my shoulders, with a calming shhhh, and telling me it's okay and let's look at all the hard parts, and sure let's roll our eyes at Paul a little bit before we start reading his mail to other people, and let's talk about what good news actually is and who it's for.

There's so much goodness in here, and I think the biggest takeaway I need to remember from this is that context matters. The Bible is a library of books in a variety of genres, and the authors had different reasons for telling the stories the way they did. Divinely inspired does not have to mean literally true, or literally historical.

———-

On war stories: “God save me from the day when stories of violence, rape and ethnic cleansing inspire within me anything other than revulsion. I don't want to become a person who is unbothered by these texts, and if Jesus is who he says he is, then I don't think he wants me to be either. There are parts of the Bible that inspire, parts that perplex, and parts that leave you with an open wound. I'm still wrestling, and like Jacob, I will wrestle until I am blessed. God hasn't let go of me yet.” - page 79

“Job's friends make the mistake of assuming that what is true in one context must be true in every context - a common error among modern Bible readers who like to trawl the text for universal answers. Eliphaz, Bildad and Zophar said some ‘biblical' things in their remarks to Job, and yet in that context, those things weren't true. We should be wary then, of grand pronouncements that begin ‘The Bible says.' Where? To whom? In what context? Why?” - page 98

The gospel writers using storytelling to talk about Jesus: “Sometimes those gospel stories step on your toes. Sometimes they challenge or annoy. Sometimes they force you to confront your privilege, your pride, or your lack of imagination for just how reckless and wild and indiscriminate the Holy Spirit can be.” - page 155

When talking about Jesus' miracles and how he went out among historically “unclean” people: “The apostles remembered what many modern Christians tend to forget - that what makes the gospel offensive isn't who it keeps out, but who it lets in.” - page 186

Listened to the audio, which was read by the author. A relatively quick read, just under 6 hours.

Oooh, the last line was chilling - after 30-some-odd years of being undocumented in the United States, with no obvious path forward - Vargas' mom was like, maybe it's time to come back to the Philippines*? (I have to assume he said no, since he'd had so many opportunities to leave over those years, knowing he might not be able to make it back to the only life he knows. And also as he mentioned, Philippines leadership wasn't exactly gung-ho about gay men.) *Vargas' mom put him on a plane when he was a tween with the intention of following him later, but per the book was never legally able to make her own way to the U.S.

I appreciated Vargas' story a lot, especially because it provided a different perspective than the ones we see most often from the southern borders. Especially as he became a journalist as an adult - I loved hearing about the newsrooms and his career at WaPo and his technology writing back when it was The Facebook. He talked about his “coming out” as undocumented and all the ways he was forced to lie to survive (getting a job, getting a license, etc.) once he found out he was not in the U.S. legally (and DACA hadn't been invented yet). The descriptions of his travel around the country and speaking to people of all walks of life about the experiences of being undocumented and what undocumented people actually want and need from their adopted homeland, and the policies that came in and out over the years that somehow never applied to him, leaving him in a perpetual state of limbo.

And ohhhhh the stuff about the Texas border and his being detained in Brownsville/McAllen. I mean, I know the Powers That Be in Texas have basically never done anything good for our neighbors to the south, but Vargas could have been in way worse trouble if he didn't have journalist and ambassador friends in high places from all his years of reporting.

I'd recommend. I didn't wholeheartedly love it, but it was very good.

This book was not what I was expecting. I enjoyed the story, though I felt like the author used a lot of “ten dollar words” that were unnecessary.

Anthologies are incredibly difficult to rate, but let's start here: of the 21 indigenous and native poets that make up this collection, I had previously heard of exactly four of them, and I had previously only read one of them (Layli Long Soldier's Whereas, which I was pleased to get to revisit in brief).

I love that this book gave me a small taste of the language of each of these poets, and gave a short biography of each with their published collections listed, and then in the authors' notes at the end, each suggested other native poets that more people should read. I've got quite a list going of other poets to check out now.

My favorites seem to be poems that are clear truth, sharp irony, vivid imagery.

—–

From “My Standard Response” by Karenne Wood:
As they ask, they think yesI can see it in her face. High cheekbones(whatever those are) and dark hair.Here's a thought: don't we all have high cheekbones? If we didn't,our faces would cave in.

—–

“What Is Left” by Sy Hoahwah:
What is leftof my family's 160 acres:A lone pecan treeOn the fringe of Cache CreekA squirrel runs up and downthe trunkcarrying insultsbetween my dead grandfatherand the birds that livein the top branches.I carve my nameon the moon's teeth.

—–
(I read that line about the squirrel's insults out loud to Matt because it was just awesome and hilarious.)
—–

And finally, “Dakota Homecoming” by Gwen Nell Westerman:
We are so honored thatyou are here, they said.We know that this isyour homeland, they said.The admission priceis five dollars, they said.Here is your buttonfor the event, they said.It means so much to us thatyou are here, they said.We want to write an apology letter, they said.Tell us what to say.

—–

DAMN.

I'd say, if you're at all interested in poetry, check this collection out. There will likely be something you will love here among these authors, and it'll give you a glimpse of some of the amazing work that isn't necessarily getting a lot of mainstream attention (but should be!).

I love it when books end right in the middle of the story!!! But I should have known, I mean it's practically a law that all fantasy books have to be part of a series... sigh. And of course the next one isn't out yet, which also seems to be law with these things.

I was pretty entertained by this story - it flips the Chosen One narrative, if not on its head, then at least kind of sideways. Matthias and Aaslo are BFFs, and when Matthias finds out he's the Chosen One, prophesied to save what looks like Europe but is named something else, he sets out to save Not-Europe, and immediately gets attacked by monsters and dies. (This is not a spoiler.) Aaslo followed Matthias just in time to see him die, and takes up his mantle instead. Everyone proceeds to tell Aaslo it's a fool's errand, everyone is doomed, might as well lay down and wait. Aaslo doesn't like doing nothing.

Other than it ending in the middle of a bunch of action, this was action-packed and full of interesting characters that were fleshed out well. I stayed engaged with it the whole time. Particularly liked Aaslo's admissions that he's just bumbling along most of the time because he doesn't know how to save anyone, but might as well try. I LOVED Teza and Peck and Mory, and also came to really like Myropa. Great characterizations.

But again, it's not outside the realm of possibility for a fantasy novel to be like, 700 pages, so whyyyyy stop therrrrrrre.

3.5 stars.

High School Allie would have L-O-V-E loved this book, had it existed then. She would have identified so much with Twinkle as a 14- or 15-year-old, having unrequited crushes, loving the idea of secret admirers, feeling sad that her BFF wasn't hanging out with her anymore and feeling like high school was her last, best chance to change the world.

Present Day Allie laughed out loud at the idea of a magazine paying a dollar per word for a 1000-word article about being a filmmaker, especially to a teenager who has made one! movie! for a high-school festival.

I enjoyed the audiobook reader, but after about the halfway point, I really didn't like Twinkle that much anymore.

This was not as good as Beartown. I didn't even get mad at Matt once!

Pretty early on in the book, I had a thought: I don't know how Backman manages to break my heart and irritate the crap out of me in the same sentence. He continued to do that throughout the book; his omniscient narrator kept dragging me out of the story, and his continual fake-outs drove me nuts. He couldn't be trusted to just tell the story. It made me wonder if it had been translated by someone different, but nope. Same author, same translator. I would have made some different editorial decisions, but no one asked my opinion.

Even so, Backman still knows how to make tears spring to my eyes, even if I'm not letting them fall or yelling at my husband because MEN. I'm a different person than I was when I read Beartown. I have a better understanding and appreciation of some of these characters, and a different understanding of grief and community. Maybe that's ruined me for the ways Backman has previously been able to rip my heart out, or maybe I just didn't need a sequel to Beartown and no sequel was ever going to be as good as the original.

I so want to give this a higher rating than the 3.5 I've settled on. I pre-ordered My Plain Jane because I enjoyed [b:My Lady Jane 22840421 My Lady Jane (The Lady Janies, #1) Cynthia Hand https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1444923765s/22840421.jpg 42397220] so much, and I just read [b:Jane Eyre 10210 Jane Eyre Charlotte Brontë https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1327867269s/10210.jpg 2977639] for the first time earlier this year, and I also really liked that. And ... there is a lot that I liked here: Helen Burns is dead but still awesome as a ghost, Mr. Brocklehurst gets what's coming to him, Bertha Rochester is pretty cool when she's finally let out of that stinkin' attic, pretty much everything about Charlotte Brontë (this book is just as much about Charlotte as it is about Jane, and Charlotte is a wonderful character). Just as in My Lady Jane, there's still royal intrigue, and ridiculous mishaps, and evil people who want to steal the throne using nefarious means.And I love a good throwback reference to other works of art, but I think My Plain Jane got a little carried away with it; I started highlighting when I noticed them, because at first I thought it was super fun to try to catch them (gotta catch ‘em all?!?). Obviously, the source material is followed pretty closely, and because one of the POV characters is trying to recruit Jane into the Society of the Relocation of Wayward Spirits, of course there's some Ghostbusters references. There's also a cute reference to My Lady Jane near the end. But there's also references to Oliver Twist, the musical Hamilton, Harry Potter, the Copa Cabana, [b:an Al Franken book 23577 Lies & the Lying Liars Who Tell Them A Fair & Balanced Look at the Right Al Franken https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1438778188s/23577.jpg 344426], Shrek, and the TV show Pushing Daisies, and those are just the ones I noticed and thought to highlight. It got to be a little much.I did really enjoy the story, and probably will still end up getting the third book in the series when it comes out, because these books are a lot of fun and perfect escapism, but I think overall My Lady Jane was better.(Having not been a die-hard Jane Eyre fan for years or an English major, I wouldn't have known some of the things that other reviewers have complained about, re: comparisons to Jane Austen. If you don't already know those things, I don't think they affect the enjoyment of the story or its characters at all.)