altlovesbooks

"Don't just try to be happy when you think of me--be happy."

It took me a bit, but I finally remembered why I had this book on my to-read shelf at home. My mom dropped it in my hands the last time they visited, and said I had to read it. And while I generally don't read books with teenage protagonists, this one was really good. If you know anything about me and my reading preferences, that says something.

So Finn and several members of her family are on a vacation trip in the winter. Dad, mom, sister Chloe and her boyfriend, brother Oz, Uncle Bob, Aunt Karen, and their daughter Natalie, Finn's friend Mo, and hitchhiker Kyle they picked up because his car broke down. The weather deteriorates, their vehicle crashes, and Finn dies. But rather than that being the end of her POV, she lingers as a ghost, as she witnesses what happens to everyone immediately after the accident, after rescue, after they all try and move on after experiencing the things they experienced. Closure is hard, as it turns out.

While the accident is tragic, the actual focus of the book is on how the family moves on. Several bad things happened during the accident, stories about who did what and when got muddled, and sitting on lies causes them to fester. I loved the unique POV of Finn, ghost, unable to really do anything meaningful for anyone, but still forced to witness her family as things start spiraling. It's almost an omniscient POV, except for Finn being unable to know their thoughts, so it's really just her interpreting their actions and what she knows about them. Everybody is flawed in different ways here, and the beauty of the book is how (almost) everyone comes to terms with what happened and moves on in their own way.

Just a really moving book, I think. I felt things about Finn's family and the circumstances. I even think just the right amount of time was spent at the very end tying up the (ending spoiler here) Uncle Bob/Oz incident, because the focus the entire time was on closure after tragedy. I really liked this one.

I was expecting some sort of gritty survival tale using the Franklin expedition story as a framework. Instead, I got a barely lukewarm courtroom drama where Virginia herself has very little impact. Just a disappointment all around.

Virginia is tasked by Lady Franklin to find her husband, with a crew of all women. Lady Franklin has something to prove by using women, ostensibly because they're more thorough than men (something mentioned outright in the beginning of the book). We get a ragtag crew of women of various stripes and backgrounds, including Caprice, whose family is bankrolling the expedition and who is also a rich girl with a mountaineering background. Virginia and Caprice get along for most of the book like oil and water, until on the ice when suddenly after just a few sentences spoken together, they're friends. Tragedy strikes on the ice though, and Virginia finds herself being tried as a murderer for her actions taken while trying to keep everyone safe.

It's a story told in two points of time; the days leading up to and during the expedition to find Franklin, and the period after they return with Virginia on trial. The majority of the chapter POVs are from Virginia herself, but we do occasionally get a chapter or two from some of the other side characters where we get a sense of their backstories and motivations for being there. None of these really made an impact on me though, because other than these brief chapters, all the women felt largely the same in writing.

I didn't care for this book at all. For one, the history this is supposedly built on isn't really used at all in the story beyond giving the author a point in time to write about. I'm fairly familiar with the Franklin expedition, and beyond maybe the cairn of canned goods they find at some point with some throwaway lines about the food being potentially tainted, nothing else is really mentioned about it. If you're going to use an existing historical event as your jumping off point, I feel like more should be done to integrate it into the story.

I also felt like the actual arctic expedition part was glossed over entirely too much. I was expecting some sort of gritty survival tale, but we get entirely too much shipboard drama, and too little actual expedition once they go ashore. Most of the winter is handwaved away, and is mentioned but not shown. The trial afterward, however, feels more like the crux of this book, and it was lukewarm at best. Virginia had very little sway over the events of the trial, which made it just a day-by-day recitation of people lining up to shame her, not a very compelling thing.

All of that combined made it just boring to get through. I don't know who I'd recommend this to, since neither the historical aspect nor the fictional aspect were all that great.

"Have a little faith in your wife, dear. I can be resourceful when I need to be."

Last year, I read Ascension by this author and wasn't too in love with it. I thought I'd give him another try though, and I'm really glad I did. While not perfect, this one was a really enjoyable time travel/memory story, with a really sweet lifelong love story sandwiched in. It reminded me a lot of Blake Crouch's Recursion (which I also really liked), but more thoughtful and less Hollywood action-y.

Maggie's husband Stanley is in a home for memory loss patients, and routine is really the only thing keeping her going as she watches her husband and all their memories fade. What she thought was brought on by old age or disease turns out to be something more sinister, as a strange caller named Hassan reveals to her that Stanley's memories are actively being erased and Maggie is the only one who can maybe stop the whole thing. She reluctantly plays along with Hassan and his lab of strange equipment, and begins diving into Stanley's memories as if she's actually living them alongside him. But the more she delves into his memories ostensibly to save them, the stranger things get, and the less and less she trusts Hassan and his motives.

Okay, so up front, Maggie is a badass old lady. You're going to need to suspend some disbelief here, because she's 83, maybe she works out a ton and doesn't skip yoga. But this really was a fun, thoughtful story about memories, and experiencing a life with someone from another angle. We get two points of view here, Maggie in the...current time, I guess, strapped up to the memory device with Hassan guiding her as a voice in her head, told as an interview of sorts, and Stanley in the...past, I guess, told straight up as a normal story. Things get a little confusing as the story progresses and things start being revealed, but that's essentially the format of the story. I sort of thought the interview format of Maggie's chapters was a bit confusing, especially with what happens later on, but once you get going it's not so bad. I was pleasantly surprised to see how much care the author put into Stanley's and Maggie's relationship together, and how pivotal it ends up being to the story as a whole. I really was invested in seeing these two through their ordeal, and the ending made me feel things.

One of the reasons for the four stars rather than the five stars is the ending. IT'S NOT A BAD ENDING, please don't get me wrong, but (major ending spoilers here) are we to assume then that Stanley is just fucked? Because while Maggie gets to live her never-ending loop of great memories over and over and over again with Hassan/Jacques probably, inevitably, going crazy right there with her, Stanley is wheelchair-bound, locked in his mind, never to be fixed. I assume, anyway, since that's how the book ends. I feel like more needed to be done/said regarding Stanley for that ending to sit right with me. But in broad strokes, I really loved the sentiment that a life between two people lived well is enough for one lady to be willing to keep a memory-eating force and megalomaniac at bay by reliving it over and over and over again, potentially with a crazy man in tow.

Just a book that made me sit back and go, "huh", for many reasons. This one will probably stick with me for a bit.

"Have a little faith in your wife, dear. I can be resourceful when I need to be."

Last year, I read Ascension by this author and wasn't too in love with it. I thought I'd give him another try though, and I'm really glad I did. While not perfect, this one was a really enjoyable time travel/memory story, with a really sweet lifelong love story sandwiched in. It reminded me a lot of Blake Crouch's Recursion (which I also really liked), but more thoughtful and less Hollywood action-y.

Maggie's husband Stanley is in a home for memory loss patients, and routine is really the only thing keeping her going as she watches her husband and all their memories fade. What she thought was brought on by old age or disease turns out to be something more sinister, as a strange caller named Hassan reveals to her that Stanley's memories are actively being erased and Maggie is the only one who can maybe stop the whole thing. She reluctantly plays along with Hassan and his lab of strange equipment, and begins diving into Stanley's memories as if she's actually living them alongside him. But the more she delves into his memories ostensibly to save them, the stranger things get, and the less and less she trusts Hassan and his motives.

Okay, so up front, Maggie is a badass old lady. You're going to need to suspend some disbelief here, because she's 83, maybe she works out a ton and doesn't skip yoga. But this really was a fun, thoughtful story about memories, and experiencing a life with someone from another angle. We get two points of view here, Maggie in the...current time, I guess, strapped up to the memory device with Hassan guiding her as a voice in her head, told as an interview of sorts, and Stanley in the...past, I guess, told straight up as a normal story. Things get a little confusing as the story progresses and things start being revealed, but that's essentially the format of the story. I sort of thought the interview format of Maggie's chapters was a bit confusing, especially with what happens later on, but once you get going it's not so bad. I was pleasantly surprised to see how much care the author put into Stanley's and Maggie's relationship together, and how pivotal it ends up being to the story as a whole. I really was invested in seeing these two through their ordeal, and the ending made me feel things.

One of the reasons for the four stars rather than the five stars is the ending. IT'S NOT A BAD ENDING, please don't get me wrong, but (major ending spoilers here) are we to assume then that Stanley is just fucked? Because while Maggie gets to live her never-ending loop of great memories over and over and over again with Hassan/Jacques probably, inevitably, going crazy right there with her, Stanley is wheelchair-bound, locked in his mind, never to be fixed. I assume, anyway, since that's how the book ends. I feel like more needed to be done/said regarding Stanley for that ending to sit right with me. But in broad strokes, I really loved the sentiment that a life between two people lived well is enough for one lady to be willing to keep a memory-eating force and megalomaniac at bay by reliving it over and over and over again, potentially with a crazy man in tow.

Just a book that made me sit back and go, "huh", for many reasons. This one will probably stick with me for a bit.

"It's possible that all these little moments that meant so much to me never meant quite the same thing to him."

This is me, trying very hard to keep an open mind, about a genre I don't normally read. I love that this genre exists for people, because I earnestly believe that there's a book out there for everyone, I just never connected well with romances in general. Maybe I'm too much of a realist.

I'll start with what I liked, because there are good things here for people who enjoy the genre. I loved the early days of Poppy/Alex's friendship, maybe because I can identify with that part. Just two awkward college students exploring a maybe friendship and being along for the ride as it slowly morphs into something more (in their heads). I thought that was done well, realistically, believably. I also did like how the author managed to build up some feelings about how things end up. I wasn't totally in love with the back-and-forth in time format of the story, but it did keep me reading to figure out A) what happened in Croatia (spoiler alert: not as much as I was expecting), and B) how they managed to resolve things.

Poppy started out endearing with how over-the-top she is in basically everything, but as the book went on, it started to become a bit much. I especially thought it was unnecessary after (late book spoilers)Alex and Poppy finally start being honest with each other about their feelings. Rather than confront things head on, Poppy makes jokes, deflects, and flails about to avoid being direct and honestly exploring her feelings. She seems a bit needy in both attention and affection, and that seems like a poor match for Alex.

I also have never seen two people who claim to be such good friends be so entirely unable to communicate with one another. Jokes, lighthearted conversation, anything superficial is fine, but having an honest, direct, deep conversation about the two of them seems entirely beyond them. Had they just said what needed to be said 8 years ago, they wouldn't be pining after each other for so long. Plot built on miscommunication/noncommunication drives me up a particular wall, so I admit this is maybe a personal hangup.

Finally, while I did like how the author portrayed Poppy and Alex, I didn't feel like enough of the story was actually dedicated to them. Instead, we get lots of short chapters with short, choppy sentences about the places they go together, but nothing that really shows their relationship developing at all. We just have to trust it happens at some point, based on the This Summer story happening concurrently with the flashbacks. Show, don't tell.

I promise I love my husband and am not anti-love/romance. But I just couldn't get into this one.

I want you to know that I waffled hard on this rating. The universe, the unique characters, the premise, the writing, were all really well done and a joy to read about. I really wanted to give this book a high rating for that alone. But without the full package of a satisfying ending tying a bow on things, I have a hard time recommending it, and that bums me out.

The story is told from three different viewpoints. Ocean is a pilot with a past that follows her wherever she goes. Her current ship captain doesn't think much of her, but as the ship's XO, she gets on well with everyone else. Haven is out on his own for the first time after growing up in an insular community (think an Amish rumspringa, but in space), and doesn't understand why his father insisted he see the outside universe before settling down. He's currently acting as a medic on Ocean's ship. And Teo, rich kid and youngest sibling, forever underestimated on account of his family, becomes a scapegoat for a terrible tragedy and ends up on the run and taking shelter on Ocean's ship.

The strong points of this book are the three main characters. Each feels different, refreshing, and new, and bring a lot of thoughtful points to think about. Haven, in particular, allows the author to muse about death, loss, and grieving, through the lens of Haven's culture that seems maybe Buddhist through its use of sky burials. There's also a bit of romantic build-up between characters, which I thought was handled well. I thought the setting, too, was very unique, with South Korea now the dominant space race, space pirates, planet colonies, and all sorts of tasty sci-fi things for your brain to envision. Unfortunately, a lot of the setting goes unused. The book focuses itself on a very narrow group of people, in a very closed setting. You don't get a real sense for how large the Alliance is or what it is they even do in space. It's kind of a letdown.

I'm willing to overlook a lot of flaws for the sake of well developed characters, thoughtful dialogue, and quiet moments where we get to know the cast, but I cannot overlook the ending of this book. Or, rather, the not-ending of this book, because after a slow, deliberate pace for 80% of the book, suddenly within the last 30 or 40 pages the author hits the gas and you start hurtling past plot points. There's not even a wall of a climax to hit at the end either, because the book just ends, lots of things unfinished or unresolved. That's a bummer! There's apparently a second book coming later this year that maybe will pick things up, but I hate how this book feels like half of a book.

Still, great writing, imaginative setting, characters I wish we could get to know more about. The lack of a proper ending to the book, though, makes it hard for me to recommend it as-is.