Allie

3.5 stars. Steamy and a fun read, but it was really, really long for a romance novel. I liked the community and dynamics of the hockey players and the “found family” aspect for both Stassi and Nate, since they were both a long way (distance or emotionally) from their real families. No lack of communication here, that was one thing that was done truly excellently - Stassi had been in therapy for a long time and was quite adept at telling people what she needed and what was what, without being preachy and while still having things she needed to work on herself.

Do I believe at all that hockey-player Nate could be a figure skating partner while Stassi's actual skating partner was injured? Absolutely not, but romance reasons. Their dynamic was cute, she was the grumpy one, a kinda-one-night-stand-turned-more.

It's not super super clear from the description, but also this is a book set in a college town and all the characters are college students, if that's not your thing.

CW: gaslighting, unwanted kissing, disordered eating, parental death (past), epilogue pregnancy

DNF at page 183. I dunno ya'll! Almost every person I know has l-o-v-e LOVED this book, and I can't get into it. I've loved other Emily Henry books, but this is not working for me on basically any level. It's making me ... un-happy, har har. I keep looking over at it and then deciding to play on my phone instead.

I don't like Harriet. I don't like Wyn. Neither of them seems to have a personality other than “horny for each other.” The side characters are better drawn, but there's so much miscommunication happening, and I'm like, YA'LL. You're in your 30s. You should grow up and sit down and have several conversations. I don't believe these people are besties. I don't believe these people even really like each other beyond nostalgia.

I bought a different romance at my indie bookstore yesterday and was immediately more invested in reading that than this.

I'll continue to pick up Henry's books, but I almost universally hate books where miscommunication is a major device. I probably shouldn't have bothered with this one at all.

I didn't love this as much as I loved Becoming. I still love her writing, and we get a teensy bit more of a howl into the void for 2016 that I expected but didn't get from What Happened. But really, this book is full of great advice, some of which resonated with me a lot (gosh, the stuff about Barack allowing her to decide if he should run for president in the first place and the discussions about fear and how it can hold you back - hits home right about now) and some of which I didn't need right now. Still worth a read, but maybe adjust expectations.

Buddy read with Jeananne

I don't remember how I came across this book, or why I got it from the library, but definitely the right book at the right time. I'm trying my best to stop looking back at what I miss about living in Virginia, and start moving forward so that I can be happy where I'm at again. It takes more work than I'd like it to.

Passarella writes essays about the loss of her dad, the loss of her way of life when Covid hit, the way our relationships change and grow over decades, and a big chunk is about her family's long acquisition of an abandoned apartment in their NYC building and the relationship she built with the woman whose husband had owned it before his passing. On paper, I don't know that we have a whole lot in common, she and I - but we have similar sensibilities, and I can say that I suspect we would be friends IRL, except probably I would just be really intimidated if I met her IRL. I appreciate the way we similarly feel like our more human-focused politics can co-exist with our religious beliefs - which shouldn't be a radical idea, but sometimes makes me feel like I'm crazy to think they could. (In which case I call my friend Jeananne, who is way more liberal than I am and also probably loves the Lord more too.)

I will be looking for her other book of essays once we get back from vacation. 4.5 stars.

A satisfying “mystery” about a former Belgian saboteur for the Allies during World Wars I and II. Elinor has tried to live a quiet life after a whole lot of wartime trauma, but her instincts to protect her neighbors — a young couple with a small daughter — get amped up when the husband's Crime Mob family comes calling. I'd read and enjoyed previous Winspear books (quite a few of the Maisie Dobbs books before I fell off that wagon), and when this one was picked for my neighborhood book club, I thought sure! Why not!

So Elinor and Maisie have some overlap, even though Elinor is not a detective per se — she developed a friendship with a detective when they were both stationed with an organization during the Second World War, and so she works with him trying to learn more the Crime Mob family, but he keeps kinda brushing her off, so what's a former spy to do but do all the legwork herself?

Satisfying in that it all wrapped up in a little bow, and that Elinor was able to set boundaries for herself about who she would and would not be seeing again after releasing the wartime memories, but not necessarily from a bad-guy-goes-to-jail perspective.

So swoony! I loved their friendship. I loved their text messaging. I loved their arrangement for tacos after bad blind dates. I loved the fake relationship. I loved them trying to pretend they weren't already so in love with each other. I loved everything about this, and stayed up late to finish after powering through the second half of the book over the course of a single evening. Happy sigh!

I vividly remember writing something on Facebook (of all places) like a decade ago - it was around the time Wendy Davis in her pink sneakers was filibustering in the Texas Senate to block an abortion ban - about how the government was going about attempting to reduce abortions all wrong. I wrote impassionedly about how better sex education was key, and if the government was serious about reducing abortions (which, sidebar, we all know they're not), they needed to make better, comprehensive sex education a priority.

In Ejaculate Responsibly it was so refreshing to finally, finally see someone else talking about this issue from another perspective, one that doesn't penalize and punish women* (and only women) for the fact they had the audacity to have sex.

This tiny book has short, clear chapters that walk step by step through women's fertility, men being the cause of pregnancy through ejaculation, and how women have historically been made to bear the brunt of pregnancy prevention, despite birth control for women being harder to access and more difficult on the user than birth control options for men. Then, of course, women being forced to carry unwanted pregnancies despite the risks to the woman's health, life and livelihood, even though that ends well for absolutely no one, when the solution is so simple - men need to take more responsibility for their bodies and their bodily fluids and where they put those fluids. A reduction in unwanted pregnancies will, obviously, result in a reduction in abortions.

What a concept!

I thought this was excellent, and wish everyone would read it, though I know the ones who most need to will not. I was thrilled, and then worked my way into anger and grief, and finally, optimism again because there are next steps at the end of the book.

(Also, I looked up the PDF of sources on the publisher's website during a conversation with Matt about this book, and seriously there are over 100 pages of source notes, which is impressive. The book is only like 140 pages long!)

*Blair notes early on in the book that for the sake of reducing confusion, she used the terms women and men throughout, though acknowledged that people who do not identify as women can still get pregnant, and people who do not identify as men can still ejaculate.

Well, this book broke my 10-year-old Kindle.

Was it because technology isn't really meant to last that many years?

Or was it because our hero, Beck, is turned on by everything and therefore spent 90% of this book sporting a partial, if not full-on boner? eyebrow waggle

This is a very horny book. There's your warning and/or endorsement. Beck and Everly - or Beverly, as is their portmanteau - are BFFs and she moves in with him after her house burns down, and there's only one bed and oops they banged in the shower. (I don't know about you, but I've never had this accidentally happen to me LOL.)

I've been really enjoying the setting of this series, and that the characters from the previous and next books are all involved in the storylines so I've already gotten a taste as to what's coming in the next one, and grabby hands

Luckily my new Kindle arrived this afternoon because reading on my phone is no bueno.

Gotta do whatever brings us joy!

A conversation I had with Matt immediately upon finishing this last night:

A: This was a Frankenstein retelling.

M: Did she create a monster? (I'm assuming it's a “she.”)

A: It is a she, and yes, she did create a monster. Actually, Mary and her husband and this crappy dude were paleontologists and were trying to re-create a prehistoric dinosaur even though they didn't entirely know what it was supposed to look like since they had incomplete fossil records.

M: Did they learn NOTHING from Jurassic Park?!

A: Well considering this was set in the 1850s, it would be another 150 years before Jurassic Park would come out.

M: Michael Crichton could have warned them! They were so preoccupied with whether they could, they didn't think whether they should!

—–

I had a lot of fun reading this. Was Mary kind of written out of her time frame? Probably. Girl was a pretty radical feminist, and wanted a divorce from her lousy gambling husband in A Time When That Didn't Happen, and also might have been a lesbian, or at the very least bisexual. Did we all see it coming from a mile away that nothing good comes of trying to bring living things back from the dead and there was no way this was going to bring Acclaim on Both Their Houses? Obviously. Did I adore the Creature like Mary did? No, but I could see why she loved it so, as history repeated itself (the original Victor Frankenstein was her great-uncle in this iteration). So ultimately, this was a book I wouldn't have picked up if not for book club, and I ended up being really invested in it.

TW: many internal conversations about the loss of a baby (unclear whether it was a late neonatal loss or a loss just after birth), grief, sexism, racism, a bit of gore related to the assembling of the Creature

I'm very glad I came back and revisited this one after Just For the Summer - you get glimpses of some of the minor characters from that book in here that I had forgotten about, as well as both Daniel's historic house and the house Alexis finally left to Neil. I still wish they'd had a conversation about WHY Alexis felt Daniel wasn't going to be a good fit in her circles, instead of leaving him hanging at every step. Briana continued to be the best in this book. I think she might be my favorite of all in this series.

Starts with a one-night stand, and the 3rd act breakup is so slow and drawn out that I didn't even cry, but I won't hold that against this book. I still loved it.

—

Original Review 2022:

I loved this book (with the Just Have A Conversation! caveat). You know they'll end up together, because Romance Novel, but the how of it just seemed so complicated that I didn't know the turns it would take.

TW: emotional abuse, physical abuse, birth complications

Wow. What a strange book. Sci-fi isn't really my cup of tea, but I picked this up for the Read Harder challenge (Task 16: Read the first book in a series by a person of color). I don't even know how to rate this. I read it fairly quickly, and was interested enough, but it was just ... so bizarre. I doubt I'll read the sequels.

But, I tried? Always good to read things in other genres. It's like food; you never know when you'll like something you hated when you were younger.

I wish I hadn't let so much time pass between reading Oryx and Crake and this one; I had forgotten a lot, though thankfully, since this book and that one were supposed to take place simultaneously, the worlds started to overlap towards the end. I won't make the same mistake with the third book in the trilogy.

Man, Margaret Atwood knows how to paint a bleak picture, but it's still fascinating enough that you have to stop and stare. Like a train wreck.

It's really hard to define what this book is about. It's supposed to be after a biblical Flood-style event, but most of the narrative centers on the God's Gardeners cult pre-Flood and the individuals living within it. And like a lot happens, but it's kind of just life and not the whole point?

In the remainder of the narrative, the Waterless Flood has happened, humans are extinct mostly (in Oryx and Crake, a new breed of humans has been genetically created to replace humans, just as - in both books - various species of animals have been spliced together to create new animal species since so many original species have become extinct). And the remainder of the people on earth are either bad guys (Painballers) or former God's Gardeners or the new humans? Plus Ren's might-be-insane ex-boyfriend who calls himself Snowman and is a friend of all the new humans (who call themselves Crakers)?

I'm not really sure where this is going. Probably nowhere good.

This review is mainly just so I don't forget stuff before I get to the next book. I should have written something down after the first book; I remember really liking it but I don't remember why, and I have a vague notion that Year of the Flood was better, but I still didn't love it enough to give it five stars.

I don't do a whole lot of horror, but usually in October I get a hankering for something a little spooky. This was a lightly scary tale by an indigenous author featuring urban Indian characters, and a folkloric monster that terrorizes the main character, Kari, who begins seeing horrifying apparitions of her mother, who disappeared when Kari was two days old.

This is a very interior book, you're mostly in Kari's head, not sure if she's a reliable narrator, but still rooting for her to get her stuff together. She doesn't have a lot of people in her life, and she is a primary caretaker for her dad, who has a brain injury, and her life has not been easy by any stretch.

There were some continuity things I noticed (I received this from Book of the Month a couple years ago, maybe this was an early version?), but the writing was engaging and the story pretty quick paced once I got into it. I enjoyed getting a perspective of modern, less traditional indigenaity (sp?) too, which I have not read much about. I'd check out other of Wurth's books in the future. 3.5 stars.

CW: alcohol (including drinking and driving), drug abuse/overdose, death, ghosts, racism, child sexual assault (off page), smoking, police/FBI, guns

I don't have a whole lot to say about this one, other than it made me happy, and I didn't want to stop reading it. Every character was so lovely and real. 4.5 stars.

TW: I did have a panic moment about Bel's pregnancy, when she started having early labor/Braxton Hicks contractions, but needn't have worried.

Prior to reading this book, I had never heard of Cathy Glass or her work. She's written quite a few of these books that are described as her “fostering memoirs.” I had an icky feeling about the fact that she published stories about children that had been in her care, basically from page 1. I suspect there are issues of consent, which is why she publishes under a pseudonym and changes the names of her charges and their families, but she provides lots of very specific details about the family, regardless.

This whole thing felt exploitative.

In addition, it's kind of amazing that I got through it as fast as I did, considering Glass narrated the daily routines of herself and the two little girls in her care, practically minute by minute, which was basically just doing normal parenting things and setting up video chat with their mom, while throwing in bits about the children's social worker and the previous children she'd fostered. On top of that, this was written during the height of Covid, so there's constant talk about restrictions and social distancing and hand-washing, and I don't think an editor ever looked at this because there was a lot of repetition and grammatical issues that an editor would have caught in an instant.

I guess on the plus side, I did learn a lot about the foster care system in the U.K.? But I will never willingly pick up another of her books.

Despite being about a Hollywood actor, writer and director, this book did not have that much about Hollywood in it, just mentions of lots of his work (most of which I haven't seen). And despite being the memoir of a trans man, there's not much about his transition either. Pageboy is more about Page's life pre-transition than post-. Tons of dysphoria and self-loathing and shame and hiding, and questioning, and hopelessness.

I don't even know how to write about this one. But Page did, and his writing was beautiful - spare but enough. This collection of autobiographical essays is not linear, which seems to be one of the big issues reviewers had with it, but while I get it, that didn't hamper how I felt about it. It sounds like he's in a better headspace now, better able to get and take what he needs after decades of putting everyone else first. It's a difficult read because you can feel the despair seeping into so much of it, having people not believe you, trying to keep a major part of your identity under wraps and feeling miserable and dissociative anyway, even in the happy times.

CW: eating disorders/anorexia, rape/sexual assaults, homophobia/transphobia, gender dysphoria, verbal abuse, anxiety, depression

In the last couple days I started loading up my old Kindle with fresh reading material in anticipation of traveling for the holidays. A couple romance novellas, a thriller - nothing too crazy, just enough for a few minutes of stolen reading here and there. And then I finished Kiss Her Once For Me, and now nothing sounds good. This book has RUINED ME.

I have a memoir on my nightstand from the library, but I can't start that because I'm already listening to a heavy memoir. But also I can't bring myself to read another romance yet, ‘cause I'm still living in this one. And I read the first page of a very popular behemoth that my grandmother gave me like twelve years ago, and then sighed and tossed it aside because nothing is interesting anymore.

All I want is grand romantic speeches and fake relationships and drunk grandmas and love trapezoids and baked goods and falling snow.

This is Cochrun's second book, and I already read the first, and I'mma need her to get on the next one right now, kthanks. I will buy it immediately.

Goodreads calls this a thriller, and while it has elements that are gripping, I wouldn't call it super fast-paced. Goes along at a steady clip, not breakneck gotta-know-what's-going-on. Survival reality show that turns real survival stakes when the camera crew up and disappears. I enjoyed it. Be aware there's not closure at the end if that's the kind of thing that bugs you. (It kinda bugs me, because I want to know why the crew up and left the survivors to fend for themselves, but it's fiction and I can live with it.)

Once upon a time, I believed it was possible to read every single book, never mind the fact that I'm not actually even interested in every single book. Someone else, in fact, thought of this, and asked, at what point in history would it still have been possible to do so? And What If? 2 answered: likely before sometime in the 1500s.

This actually makes me feel better, even if logically I know I don't want to read every book.

What If? 2 is fun and clever in general, but I realized a few days ago that I was skimming and skipping whole chapters when I didn't understand the science or wasn't interested in the subject matter, and that's okay. This is Matt's book, and he enjoyed it, and I enjoyed it while I enjoyed it and now I'm ready to move onto something else.

Stopped at page 285, in case I ever feel like revisiting.

“For one who ‘doesn't see me as disabled,' God sure focuses on the lame when giving us glimpses of new creation and restoration.”

This book was an excellent primer on how the (U.S. at least) Church handles disability, what the Bible says about disability, how we can reframe our ideas of inclusivity and exclusivity, and imagine all people, disabled or not, as image-bearers of God. I highlighted stuff on like, every page of my Kindle.

It did get a bit repetitive as it went on, though, and could have used a little bit of tighter edit. But I learned a lot and have already noticed ways that ableist language is used around me and ways I perpetuate it myself. So will try to do better on that front.

Buddy read with Jeananne, looking forward to talking to her about it next week.

“We should invite disability to teach us something instead of assuming nondisabled bodies are perfect and complete.”

Luke 14
Jacob wrestling with the angel, and moving with a limp afterwards
The crucifixion disabling Jesus
The banquet where only those who invite/welcome the poor and disabled are blessed

“... the structures we have put in place often disable people more than individual bodies do.”

I'm disappointed that I'm not going to make it to book club tonight, because this would have been really interesting to discuss. (Stupid weather changing/daycare germs.) I don't even really know what to think - normally when I read short stories, I like to write mini reviews and then aggregate my star ratings, but I realized almost immediately that I couldn't do that with this collection - some of the pieces were so short (A Summer Night's Kiss - 2 pages, The Time of The Large Star - 3 pages), abrupt, and so ... bizarre (Poochie, Lover on the Breeze, Puzzle) ... that I wasn't even sure what to really say about them, let alone how to rate them.

This is definitely light horror, in that it's meant to be grotesque, and also there's a kind of distance here. Sometimes almost imagining alternative futures, in which everything about the current way of life is no longer a viable option, whether due to loss of population (Life Ceremony), technological advances (The Time of the Large Star), or an attempt to go back to the way things used to be (Eating the City).

Did I enjoy Murata's creativity in this collection? Absolutely. Did I always enjoy the way it was told/translated? Not always (especially re: the remove of the author from the reader).

Favorite pieces:
- Life Ceremony - life on earth (/in Japan?) has dwindled dramatically, so when someone dies, their loved ones hold a Life Ceremony, in which the body is cooked and served followed by mass copulation, in which the goal is Insemination to further the species. One woman's colleague died, and he had planned all the recipes he wanted made of his body. Especially interesting ideas re: births as merely propagating the species and the idea of not necessarily having ties to your offspring after birth.
- Hatchling - a woman realizes that she has no personality, rather adapting to every scenario in her life through a handful of personas that allow her to be neutrally well-liked, and what happens when she confesses this to her fiance, when he no longer feels like he needs to mask his own true personality.
- Two's Family - two platonic friends who never married, but created a family of their own with children and a life, and are looking back now that they are in their 70s and one is in the hospital for cancer treatments. One of the least creepy of this collection.

Ultimately coming down around 3 stars.

I unabashedly loved this for the first half. You've got a one-night stand occurring on page 1, and lots of pining when it turns out the H/h are going to be co-stars on a Game of Thrones type TV show, lots of good side characters and humor and adorable grumpy/sunshine-ness.

And then you get to what you think would be the HEA and ... there's still 30% of the book left. At which point, I started mentally deducting stars, because it kept dragging on and on, and you think these characters would be better at communicating what they need from each other since they've done a decent job to that point, but then the conclusions Maria jumped to were just ... like, not okay? (Which she eventually does come to realize, they both make changes and come back for HEA #2, but like, I was happy with HEA #1!) And that was a bummer because to that point, Maria had been a badass boss bitch who was like, yo TV dudes this is a fantasy show, I do not need to lose weight and I will WALK if you try to make me, and then basically just turned into a puddle of insecurity when she didn't get absolutely everything she thought she wanted, when the entire development of her character had been so confident in herself and her choices, and I didn't love that.

Still a good time, but it went on far too long.

I desperately wanted to give this more stars. Because the honesty, the content of Perry's story, it really deserves all the stars.

I love Friends so much. I used to watch the re-runs on Netflix every day, until they switched over to HBO Max and I couldn't justify paying for another streaming service just for the convenience, when I own all the DVDs.

And I knew that Perry had had addiction problems prior to this book - I mean, you can see it in the way he carries weight on that show. I just didn't know how bad it really was, the volume of pills and alcohol, how it dogged him every day, how he loved his job and did his best to show up on time and sober, but he was on a hit TV show and going to rehab and trying to stay clean and failing most of the time.

I listened to the audiobook, which I always try to do with celebrity memoirs, and I think this made it a harder listen. I can't know if he was sober the whole time he narrated - he claims that he's clean at the end, but sometimes his voice slurs in a way it never did on Friends. It broke my heart a little bit. I still love the show, though I don't know that I'll be able to see it the same way after knowing the darkness Chandler hid with his sarcasm and jokes. The same ones Perry uses as a defense mechanism.

So halfway through the audio, I was all set to call this a 5 star, despite its imperfections. I don't mind jumps in timeline, as long as I can keep track of when things are happening. And I thought I was doing okay with it, like when a friend tells you a story and digresses and then comes back to the main narrative, but then I lost track; he'd been high or drunk for most of the narrative, and had talked about several different rehab stays, but then jumped back to one of the early stints, and I got lost in the timeline and never quite got back on track. And then the closer I got to the end, he started repeating himself over and over, about the people who saved his life, his experiences of God, there having to be more meaning than this, about this being the time he has to make a change for good or he will die, and he's afraid of dying.

I very much appreciated the glimpse into both Perry's life and addiction in general. I don't want to misplace my optimism, but I pray he's able to stay clean - it's pretty clear he's not going to survive much longer if he doesn't.

5 stars for the story, 3 stars for the actual writing

I was expecting to like this book a lot more than I did. When it was selected for book club, it was described as a book about life in New York in the 1970s. Well, I've always wanted to live in New York, so I was really excited to start it, but it read fairly slowly until about halfway in. “Spin” is a series of vignettes portraying snapshots of the various characters' lives. All of the stories weave in and out of each other, and culminate on the day Philippe Petit walked a tight-rope between the World Trade Center Twin Towers. (That was the most interesting part; shortly after finishing the book, I watched the documentary Man on Wire, which chronicled the journey to that walk and was MUCH more enthralling than this book.)

I had never heard of Jennette McCurdy until this book came out and it was everywhere. Listened to the audio, read by the author. She reads it in a very straightforward, almost flat manner - despite (or in spite of) the literal chaos and trauma that permeated her childhood and early adulthood. All I have to say is thank goodness for good therapists ... because it's a lot.

TW: eating disorders, fatphobia and discussions of weight, emotional and verbal abuse, abuse disguised as love, mental health slurs, alcohol use, sexual abuse