Julia
Cute!!!! This is a perfect spice level. Almost too bantery, but charming enough to make up for it. I always wonder how books with very era-specific markers (e.g., the protagonist has a Twitter account) will age, but that's not for me to lose sleep over! I found this in the lending library at my laundromat and snapped up another book in Hazelwood's STEMinist series as soon as I saw it, so definitely a worthwhile find.
Also cute! Less banter in this one than in Love on the Brain, just by a hair, which I appreciated. Hazelwood also writes sensitively about living with chronic illness and both asexuality and demisexuality. And still spicy, to boot. Not sure when I'll read her 3rd STEMinisty one, but I definitely will.
I wish I'd liked this more, but How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days is both classic and has aged quite poorly, so this doesn't feel original enough, and then you have to spend most of the novel reading about the two main characters not being all that nice to each other! There are some good bits about female friendship, workplace assertiveness, racial identity development, etc., but I wanted to enjoy these characters more than witness them sort of torture themselves and each other.
This book! THIS BOOK. I am feeling bereft of opportunities to rave about this, because most of my closest book buddies steer clear of anything quite this dark (it is no darker than our world actually is, but that's pretty dark). I had to pause about midway through to process it, but couldn't put it down once I resumed. It broke my heart multiple times, and then mended it.
Can't say enough good things about this book. The subtitle is exactly correct. Beautiful, funny, and wise. I also really enjoyed the format and the disability justice history. Bonus: I got some recommendations of queer disabled sci fi that are now on my "to read" list (already started and enjoying The Marrow Thieves).
From my uncle! The end veered a little Da Vinci Code for me in a "this plot is QUITE complicated" way, and although the setting is current the characters have pretty anachronistic ways of speaking (this is arguably justifiable in 2/3 cases for the main characters, but only arguably). STILL, effective suspense and an interesting threading of various historical themes. And good enough for me to want to read the full trilogy.
This was beautiful, and especially poignant and painful to read now, given that the need for Palestinian liberation has only increased. Only rating it 4/5 because I'm not the most confident poetry reader? But that's a me issue, not an El-Kurd issue! Would recommend to anyone educating themselves about Palestine.
Contains spoilers
I feel torn about this - I did definitely enjoy reading this, but not sure it lived up to my expectations? I could have used more ACOTAR crossover, honestly, the plotlines started to feel a little jumbled/too many characters...I guess perhaps some of the novelty of this series that felt so zippy in the first book has worn off. I'm glad ACOTAR is what Maas is writing next.
Great end to the Ravenel series! Although the title would be a spoiler to anyone who's read others in this series or the Wallflowers, I'll spare any details except to say that some of my favorite characters return here in fun ways. I'm writing this review way late, but suffice it to say I will keep & re-read this one and found it sexy and fun.
Bestie gifted this to me for Christmas, and it was so fun! Knowing that Stacey Abrams is the author did add marginally to the fun, but this novel stands on its own merits. Not a five star romance for me, because I like things spicier (well - this is spicy, just not particularly explicitly spicy), and it has a copaganda element I was a little surprised by and is not totally my jam. Still, an excellent romantic suspense novel, and good enough I'll be buying the sequel.
A book club friend finished this earlier than I did, and said she felt like she needs a re-read to fully absorb this; now having finished, I feel similarly. Now having read 2 nonfiction books and a novel by Betasamosake Simpson, I don't know that I will ever love her nonfiction as much as her fiction (If you're reading this, go read Noopiming: The Cure for White Ladies right now!), which is glorious, but this is almost on par with Hospicing Modernity for me in terms of reads where you have feel your worldview experiencing growing pains (and delight!) as you go along. I'm excited to see what that pain and delight looks like in action as I continue to let Betasamosake's vision for radical resurgence sit with me, and what solidarity with that resurgence looks/feels like.
Wonderful. I think all U.S. history taught in high school include An Indigenous Peoples' History of the United States and this book - maybe bookending the year? Treuer powerfully interweaves historical documents, speeches, policy, etc. with personal narrative in his central argument: the story of Indigenous Americans has never ended, but persisted, with all the complexity that any human history has. His interviewees were generous in sharing their stories, and Treuer is also generous in sharing his own positionality. At the end, I did find myself wondering what this book would look like if published after 2020, but I think that's all part of Treuer's point: Native peoples will continue to change and adapt with the times as will we all.
The Ravenel series is starting to blur together for me, but I think I really liked this one? A Kleypas weakness is that she doesn't write enough heroines in bigger bodies, but Cassandra is one. Also plenty of good banter from other characters met in the series. I was curious to see how she would redeem Tom Severin, who has been an ass in a few of the previous novels, but she pulled it off. Overall, a fun, characteristic romp.
Really loved this - dystopian in all the best ways. Comparisons to Atwood are completely inevitable, I think (and Atwood's blurb is on the cover), but Alderman as akin to Atwood without being derivative. Multiple narratives are deftly interwoven, the countdown chronology is the drumbeat of a propulsive plot, and there are so many interesting questions raised by the world Alderman has conceived. The only thing I didn't love was the denouement. It felt a bit didactic in a way that none of the rest of the novel did, and I think it might have been stronger without it. Still, a great read!
These are just so consistently pleasant! The main issue here is that West Ravenel isn't nearly as terrible as he thinks he is, especially after exposure to his charm and kindness across the previous 4 Ravenel books. I'm a sucker for the the reappearance of the Wallflowers and their spouses, however, and this book has good heat. Plus it's nice to have a break from the female protagonists as virgins.
I liked this! Nice to have a Kleypas novel not focused on the "upper class," and lots of fun historical doctoring details in here. This suffers a bit from being several years old, because I think a current re-write could have leaned more into British colonial violence against the Irish, which was an interested subplot. Good mix of suspense and romance.
Read for my collective liberation book club. This book is about healing justice. It is about how to be alive and in relationship with others (human and more than human), but especially in the current US framework of "healthcare." I basically underlined the whole thing, so it was hard for me to even choose a few quotes of Raffo's writing that moved me, but here's two:
"Each of these weave together: stopping the violence, coming in to the present moment, and creating the conditions to allow deep healing. They are each part of the other, but, if we don't hold them with intention, systems of supremacy may find the cracks to, one small bit at a time, bring us to a place where healing is about feeling better within our isolated bubbles rather than a fiercely felt connection with life. None of this should be a task list. It is poetry, an incantation you whisper to yourself as you are planning your day, organizing an action, sitting down with a group of people to dream or act together, showing up out of deep respect for someone else's pain, or claiming your own survival." (p. 29)
"...how are we honoring the sovereignty of life rather than trying to control it so that we feel like we have done a good job?" (p. 84)
Practically perfect! I might go back and make this 5 stars later! I confess that part of the appeal is that this novel included the reappearance of one of my favorite couples from Kleypas' Wallflowers series, plus a cameo from one other character. There's also more of "lady doctor" Garrett Gibson, plenty of back-and-forth between the main couple about the legal erasure of women's personhood in marriage at the time, and a heroine with an "impulse control problem" such that she's the person the plot climax centers around. There's also a bit on Irish separatism here, though, that I think Kleypas has more sensitively handled in other novels (like even the previous novel in this series): here it's treated more as a vehicle for some plot drama and there's a missed opportunity to reexamine colonialism. Part of why I like Kleypas, however, is that's a remarkable thing to be saying about the plot of a romance novel!
It's always hard for me to discern exactly how I feel about romances I tear through quickly, but "generally positive" is my overall response to #2 in The Ravenels. Helen is more agentic than some of Kleypas' heroines (and they're all pretty agentic), Garrett Gibson gets introduced as the "lady doctor," and Kleypas has some of her typically good subplots about sociopolitical issues (in this case, anti-Welsh bias endemic to British colonialism). I will say overall that I find her novels pretty equally sexy, which is a great thing to be able to count on in a romance novel!
I haven't read any Kleypas since the beginning of 2023 (her Hathaways series), so excited to bookend (hah...I'll see myself out) with another series! This has all the Kleypas characteristics I read for: smart women, well-developed relationships in addition to the romantic duo (in this case, two brothers maturing with good humor together), class politics, etc. I liked that the "crisis" in this one came mid-plot, not 75% of the way through, and looking forward to plowing through the rest of these.
I wish I liked this better! There are many lovely tidbits in here, and it did make me like birds even more than I already do. Straussmann is a little (or a lot) judgy about competitive birding, and I think the book suffers a bit from what ornothology research is geared toward, which veered toward one too many studies about feeding strategies than I'm actually interested in. I suspect because it's relatively easy to study.