Julia

Gifted from my uncle. Hits the spot for a book you don't want to put down plot-wise. Plus two bisexual main characters!! The sort of book where you can feel your feelings being played like a fiddle and you don't care.

I started reading this with my collective liberation book club before the most recent conflict erupted, and finished it last night, the day Netanyahu formally declared war against Hamas. It was pretty instructive to follow a fellow book club member's advice to compare U.S. coverage of this with other countries, now that this book has enabled me to disentangle Zionism from Jewishness and better see the purposefully hidden entanglements between Zionism, settler-colonialism, and White supremacy. This book is beautiful and necessary, and I learned a great deal while also recognizing I have much more learning to do. I just wish it had had even more poetry!

Taken from my mother's library. Do you ever find yourself reading a translation and feeling jealous of the folks who got to read it in its original language? Not to knock the translator, because the prose of this absolutely sings - I just suspect it's even more exquisite in Polish. I loved the magical realism, loved the embedded study of Blake and astrology, loved the narrator winding her way through town and the woods knowing few people are more invisible than an older woman.

Charming, charming, charming!! Hibbert for sure sticks to a plot arc formula, so that feels less fresh by the 3rd time, but each character is truly unique, and it's nice to get cameos from the other Brown sisters. Plus, Hibbert is really, really gifted at representation (e.g., for this novel, neurodivergence) in a way that feels loving, genuine, and not preachy.

Talia Hibbert is 2/2 in the 2/3rds of the Brown sisters trilogy I've devoured. This isn't a full 5 stars for me because Dani's commitment phobia is so similar to Chloe's, but is still relatable and charming, and the dynamic with her love interest is sufficiently unique to the first one to make it enjoyable if not surprising. Plus these books are funny! #DrRugbae forever. I am also always here for a bisexual protagonist of a heterosexual romance novel when it's not treated as a token schtick, and Hibbert is A+++ at including reality (e.g., anxiety disorders! chronic pain!) into her romance novels without weighing them down.

I'm reserving the right to amend this star rating after rating the whole Brown sisters trilogy. So far, so excellent! I'm not sure what more you could want in a romance novel: real adult characters who talk about their feelings, hot hot sex, and Tibbert is very funny, to boot! Perhaps the clearest indication of how good this is is that I ordered the other two books the day after finishing this one.

Read this in an afternoon. It is incisive ("shining your crown / of neoliberal / likes," p. 219) and luminous ("we love / when we are able," p. 213) and many other things, including too beautiful to summarize adequately.

This a 3.5-4 star most of the way through, until the end which BLEW MY MIND. I liked House of Earth and Blood just fine, but was feeling a bit Maas-ed out. After the ending of this one, however, my friend's exhortation to JUST READ THIS made perfect sense. You know an author's hooked you on the plot(s) when you feel aggravated that the next one doesn't come out for SIX MONTHS! Patience is not one of my virtues. My only plot-related note is that Maas is getting gayer as she goes, and I'm in full support of that!

This is a powerful anthology: Page & Woodland make lyrically clear that healing justice is more than just "healing" and "justice," and chart a line from past to future of what liberation looks like. A few standouts included Kenyon Farrow's chapter ("A House Is a Temple: How Dance Music Culture Became a Refuge in the HIV/AIDS Epidemic) and related playlist, and Page's chapter, "Our Land as Kin," with such powerful wisdom from environmental justice activists. One particular theme that will stay with me is how Page & Woodland normalized and depathologized the ebbs and flow of activist work. Would recommend for anyone thinking about sustainabile activism.

Was just sitting here twiddling my thumbs, because who knows when another of Maas' ACOTAR books will be published, and then a friend recommended the Crescent City series (and to skip the Throne of Glass series). Don't let my star rating fool you: I was captivated! Maas knows how to write imperfect characters you really root for, and Bryce Quinlan are Hunt Athalar are great examples. What kept this just a bit less zippy than something like A Court of Mist and Fury or A Court of Silver Flames was both slightly clunkier world-building (I'm not sure how else to say this, but this high fantasy world has too many middle managers), and there's plenty of sexual tension, but not one full sex scene! So prob great for folks who find some of the later ACOTAR books too steamy.

Really enjoyed this. Daunis Firekeeper and Perry Firekeeper-Birch are an amazing auntie-niece pair across this and Firekeeper's Daughter. Perry is smart and sassy and impetuous and loving, and there are so many excellent parts (like her complicated relationship with twin sister Pauline). 4 stars instead of 4.5 because I wanted a little more of the cute love story, and the end felt like it had one plot twist too many. Will read whatever Boulley writes next! Plus, loved the detail that she was inspired to write this by a tweet from Sarah C. Montoya: "movie idea: laura croft but she's native and returning artifacts that meuseums stole." Yes yes yes!

I don't know how to summarize this except to say that this is a collection of the most extraordinary love letters from Maynard & Betasamosake Simpson to each other, to their communities, and to possible futures. They made space to bear witness to our current world while imagining new ones; two Maynard quotes especially captured each half of this dialectic for me:

"I am exhausted by the notion that the 'age of humans' - and all the violent universality that the term presumes and disguises - is responsible for what is threatening our communities today. It voids the current catastrophe of its politics, of its history. Put otherwise, it is a way of 'All Lives Matter'-ing the climate crisis by erasing both the real authors and the first victims of the crimes enacted on planetary life." (p. 18-19)

"To value collective livinginess, to touch and know life fully, to know a life that is not in some way predicated on and subsidized by the suffering of another: I suspect that is what liberation is." (p. 250).

Lending library. It's been over a year since I read another of these, and now I really think I'll be able to resist revisiting them. I was entertained, but at the cost of filling my head with stuff that has aged really poorly, and a captivating but also totally irritating dynamic in the central love triangle. Plenty of flirting in this one that felt frustrating as opposed to fun. The internet tells me that Stephanie Plum still hasn't chosen between Joe Morelli and Ranger more than a dozen other books later, which: a) neither of those men would put up with that shit for that long, and b) my completely unsolicited two cents is that Evanovich should have just written them as a throuple, clearly!

Two therapy clients recommended this to me in one week, so I figured I'd better get to it ASAP! This is just so, so good. One could hardly wish for a better hero that Daunis Firekeeper, plus everything else a person could want in fantastic YA: a fast-paced plot, lovingly crafted and complex characters, zero underestimation of teenage intelligence and wisdom, and, in this case, Boulley's centering of Ojibwe history and culture as healing and resilience. There are times when her writing style feels a tiny bit didactic/overly expositional, but that's the smallest of quibbles. I bought her second book at the same time, and am glad I did, because I wanted to hear more from the Firekeeper women right away!

Found this on an endcap at the Elliot Bay Book Company on a trip to Seattle, and am very pleased I did! This was atmospheric, and left me both satisfied and wanting more. Will definitely seek out more of these novellas to hear what else Cleric Chih fastidiously uncovers. Vo is especially skilled at weaving magical realism in seamlessly to this high fantasy world. It is both central to what unfolds without ever being gimmicky or a distraction.

I read this based on a teen therapy client's request. They strongly identify with Eden, the protagonist, unfortunately due to similar experiences, and of course I'm grateful they found something that resonates with their experience! This is a totally serviceable book for any teen book collection, and Smith deals with the aftermath of rape (not a spoiler; that's page 1) generally sensitively. I did have some fairly significant quibbles. First, Smith wrote all the characters as racially ambiguous, and I suppose I see the intention (while noting what certain roads are paved with), and shout out to someone who wrote a great article for their high school news site about why racially ambiguous characters aren't actually helpful: https://conantcrier.com/voices/opinions/young-adult-literature-needs-more-representation/. My other quibbles are that some of the supportive characters are pretty one-dimensional, and I really think the 3rd quarter of the book documenting Eden's struggles with self-neglect could have been shortened while still getting the same point across. To end on a positive, though, since I am glad this is out there for teens, Smith resists the urge to tie things up too prettily with a bow at the end, which certainly rings true to life.

I didn't love this *quite* as much as Erdich's The Night Watchman until near the very the end, when I gasped. The quote from a New York Times review on the front cover of my copy talks about family, but I actually think this book is equally about ride-or-die friendship. I'm also not sure if Erdich gets enough credit for how funny she is, even amidst the darkest topics. The plot starts with a violent sex crime committed against an Indigenous woman in an uncertain jurisdictional location (a nightmarish blend of attempted physical and bureaucratic genocide). Erdich also infused the story with the comedic banter of deeply loyal teenage boys, two elders recalling past sexual adventures, and an athletic Catholic priest who levels cutting insults at the "wayward youth" without cursing at all. A deft balance of heavy and light.

I've loved Havrilesky's advice column, Ask Polly, for a long time, and was further intrigued about Foreverland when it kicked up a shitstorm of misogyny on the internet (https://www.romper.com/entertainment/heather-havrilesky-foreverland-the-view). It's a great example of how people can take an excerpt and basically willfully misinterpret the entire, much larger and more nuance work based on the excerpt to suit their own devices. ANYWAY, Foreverland is extremely funny, self-reflective, brave, and ultimately very romantic.

This was my 3rd pick from Book of the Month. As an aside, if I wasn't in another book club and a frequent buyer from my local bookstore, I'd totally stick with BoTM beyond my gift subscription. Good variety, very easy to use. Plus great covers! ANYWAY, I enjoyed Hart's debut effort. I think it could leaned into the witchery/magic realism more, honestly, there were elements across the three Weyward women's stories that felt too repetitious as opposed to harmonious echoes, and there was a missed opportunity for a more fleshed-out queer love story. But, it was nicely paced, with moments of real suspense, and is a beautiful ode to the natural world.

My bestie recommended this back to me when it came out, and I have no idea why I didn't just read it immediately! She and I are literary "twin flames" (thanks, Megan Fox, for the parlance), so she was 100% accurate in her educated guess I would love this. 10/10; no notes. Read the last third really slowly because I didn't want it to end!! Epic, intimate, searing.

I don't think this quote from the final pages can be captured in its full glory out of context, but it was rattling around in my head for days afterward and came up in another book club when someone was talking about the tightrope between nihilistic despair and hope: "A breeze would blow them over, and the world is filled with more than breezes: diseases and disasters, monsters and pain in a thousand variations.... How can I live on beneath such a burden of doom?.... Circe, he says, it will be alright.... He does not mean that it does not hurt. He does not mean that we are not frightened. Only that: we are here. This is what it means to swim in the tide, to walk the earth and feel it touch your feet. This is what it means to be alive."

I'm so glad this exists. Dover lived a long and extraordinary life, from surviving the Tulalip Indian School to participating in the long legal battle to restore salmon fishing rights to the coast Salish tribes. Her attention is sweeping and unsparing: we hear about everything from the "drifting, deep fog or mist" that partially obscures prehistory from modern awareness to the boarding school uniforms made of blue wool serge, "the heaviest, scratchiest material that was ever invented on the earth." The book feels less like a book than the series of conversations that it was, and anyone interested in the history and ongoing issues in the Pacific Northwest would benefit from hearing Dover's story.

Just finished this today and am still processing it, but there was so much to love. March is the anniversary of my dad's birth and death, so this was really thematically resonant with me, and George is so incisive about grief, how family can support and abandon, workplace inanity, microaggressions, the perils of googling, friendship, and bad sex. Not all parts were successful: the texts between the protagonist and her mother were very funny and also painful, whereas the perils of googling could have been more succinctly pointed to in just one example of a google search, not many. George's beautiful acknowledgments at the end make explicitly clear what I felt the whole way through: this novel is a love letter to family, chosen and otherwise.

This is now my 3rd Laurens, and now I'm sure I wouldn't buy them as opposed to picking them up as lending library fines. I do think she has skill at weaving romance and intrigue plots together, but this one ran long (over 450 pages), had some very very nicely paced sections with some much slower ones, a bit too much "I will badger you into marrying me" energy (I appreciated a slightly too late point from the hero's female friend about sacrifices he was also making), and sometimes the euphemistic language is just too much: "They gave themselves up and it took them. Lifted them high, filled them with glory, fractured and claimed them, then, like warmed husks tossed on the wind, left them to drift slowly back to earth, to the soft sheets of her bed, to the warmth of each other's arms." I just...it's not my jam.

I take back what I said about an earlier Laurens novel! Actually, I don't, but I am chastened to recognize that if you've written a million books, they can't all be great - but this one was! Funny/moving battle of wits/will between the romantic duo, lots of sexy sexy sex scenes, and a murder mystery subplot that was well-integrated and extra fun. I briefly worried there was going to be a "the Roma gardener did it" plot thunk, but (small spoiler), the Roma gardener was entirely blameless, and Laurens pointed out that bigotry is the only reason he was suspect in the first place. I'm actually reading a 3rd Laurens novel now to keep letting data shape my opinion :)

This was meditative and lovely, punctuated by moments when McDermott really captures the cruel shocks of life and our various bumbling responses to them. Like this (and, despite this quote, the novel wasn't depressing!): "The air was a wall. The heat was a reminder of what I had glimpsed when my father was dying, but had, without plan or even intention, managed to forget: that the ordinary days were a veil, a swath of thin cloth that distorted the eye. Brushed aside, in moments such as these, all that was brittle and terrible and unchanging was made clear. My father would not return to earth, my eyes would not heal, I would never step out of my skin or marry Walter Hartnett in the pretty church. And since this was true for me, it was true, in its own way, for everyone. My brother and I greeted the people we knew walking by, neighborhood women, shopkeepers in doorways trying to catch a breeze. Each one of them, it seemed to me now that the veil was briefly parted, hollow-eyed with disappointment or failure or some solitary grief."