Julia

I liked this! Family drama plus murder, what's not to like? One piece of nepotistic strangeness is that the narrator is the son of a Scotland Yard person, and engaged to a member of the family that experienced the murder, and yet, all the family members spoke freely to him without totally questioning what the hell he was doing in the house post-murder asking such nosy questions? That's a minor point, however. I felt surprised, although not shocked, by the end, and appreciated the clip at which this little mystery moved along.

This was pleasant! I would file this under “true romance” as opposed to “steamy romance,” and my preference is for the latter, so this was never going to be 5 stars for me based on personal taste. If you'd like an easy read with likable characters, however, this fits that bill. It's also great to read a romance with diversity in its characters that feels true to life, neither central to the plot in a didactic way nor a side bar that is only addressed as lip service - there's a moving scene when the protagonist goes from dreading meeting her love interest's friends to relief when she realizes that the friend's girlfriend is also Black, with a restaurant bathroom conversation about it between them that is funny and joyful. One thing I did notice is that there's something about witty banter in modern romance novels that can feel a bit clunky to me - I can imagine a reader in the not-so-distant-future being baffled about the references to whatever the current technology is at the moment in a way that would distract from the actual interpersonal connection being depicted that ends up feeling distracting for me in the present (like the last romance novel I read before this had a subplot about the male love interest not having a mobile phone, but the novel was set during the present day based on references to social media, so that issue felt more like one that would have cropped up 15 years ago...but I digress). Like, I'm sure I'm missing TONS of context clues reading Austen, but that somehow doesn't seem to interfere with the zippiness of the dialogue for me, which can feel more forced in romances with modern settings. Overall, I was happy to pick this up in a lending library, even if I'm not sure I'd seek out the rest of the series. But writing this, now I'm thinking I would? Time will tell!

Yalom wrote what is still a definitive tome on group therapy, in addition to many other things, but I wanted to read his writing on individual psychotherapy and more of his personal reflections about the practice. I think a star rating is sort of beside the point on this one. I found it useful to read and use as a self-reflective tool for my own practice.

There are parts of this that have aged TERRIBLY, as they should. For example, Yalom is highly fat-phobic, and his story of a woman working toward weight loss is frankly painful to read. He's also very focused on people's physical appearances generally, has a tendency to sexualize women that he recognizes but doesn't always manage successfully, and although he is good at spotting how anxiety about mortality shows up for his therapy clients, I would argue significantly less good at recognizing how what I'd bet is his own death anxiety shows up around some of his own ageism about his older clients.

I've seen lots of reviews commenting on his judgment of his therapy clients, and I can imagine reading this as someone who is or has been in therapy and feeling shocked and quite unsettled, wondering if all therapists feel this way all the time. I actually think some of this might be an artifact of what this book is: Yalom selected episodes of therapy that he found especially challenging, and times when we struggle to be effective are often times we struggle with countertransference toward the people we are finding “difficult to help” in a way that reflects our performance anxiety as opposed to the people themselves being “difficult.” My guess would be that he often treated people in therapy toward whom he did not have these strong reactions (likely even the majority of the time), but also those times would be less interesting to a reader for other reasons, too.

For therapists reading Yalom, I would urge myself and others not to turn away from his petty judgments and biases. Are we not all capable of the same???? I think if we see Yalom as qualitatively different from us, as opposed to just writing about the relatively extreme reactions that all therapists can have at times to people they serve, that weakens our own ability to identify the times that we are similarly problematic. Yalom is effective at destroying the idea of therapist neutrality for himself, and our field is still heavily colonized! What could be more reflective of the hegemony of White supremacy than to treat the therapist's perspective as “neutral”?? If psychotherapy is going to have a future outside of that origin story, we have to grapple meaningfully with deeply embedded but seriously flawed ideas such as there being an “objective reality” that is somehow unimpacted by one's worldview. I would argue that there is more harm to be done to people entering therapy by the therapist who has not closely examined the specific ways they personally are most likely to cause harm to others than the therapist who is uncomfortable with the idea that they might cause harm at all. To me, this is how the idea of intention /= impact plays out in mental health. Of course my intentions are good. My intentions are irrelevant to the impact I have on others, so I need to pay much more attention to the actual results of my work than my good intentions for my work.

For people who have been in therapy reading Yalom, I do find myself wishing that he had given more context to some of his strong reactions, if such context existed. Like more discussion of how he wrestled with his biases in his own therapy (which he superficially references), and the process of getting consent from the therapy clients he depicts - I imagine that some relational repair work would have been needed for them to reconcile their experience of the therapy as it was versus how it became after reading his version of it, as well. A good therapist might indeed sometimes have the challenges Yalom lays bare, and it is also the good therapist's responsibility to attend to those challenges fearlessly and persistently.

All in all, I find this book functional, I suppose. One of Yalom's strengths is his willingness to admit that there were times when he had no idea what the next right thing to do was, which is a truth that therapists continue to find uncomfortable, and I appreciated what he offered as food for thought for the ways my own frailties (different than his, but still very present!) show up in the work I try to do with others.

As a testament to how much I loved this, I was really struggling with my “books can only come and go, not stay, in the 31' travel trailer in which I currently live” policy, wanting to hang on to this foreverrrrrrr. Then a good friend I saw this past weekend said they'd been wanting to read Erdich but couldn't decide where to start, and that felt like the kind of interconnectedness that Erdich herself would appreciate, so off it went. This novel is just gorgeous. It seems to me that writers who create both poetry and prose well have especially gobsmacking prose, and that is certainly true of Erdich. It documents her ancestors' experience of the federal attempt to “terminate” (what an evil word/concept) the Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa in the 1950s in ways that always feel evocative, not didactic, and I'm hard-pressed to think of a novel with this many characters whose humanity is all drawn in full-fledged detail, not to mention a few ghosts and assorted animals. So I suppose humanity isn't the right word, but aliveness. Will definitely be reading more of her work.

This was sweet. Definitely romance, with only the most brief/euphemistic moments of eroticism, but I appreciated that Major is transparent about believing that happy endings are worth both writing and reading, and the central couple has a nice rapport. This is also a romance novel that handily passes the Bechdel test as the protagonist builds a successful business with female partnerships/friendships in addition to the romance. I don't know if the overall vibe is as sexy as I like my romance to be, although I could see myself returning to the author if I knew I wanted an uplifting ending I can read my way to peaceably in a few hours.

A friend sent me this, and I felt so seen when it arrived and the blurb on the bottom of the cover is, “Lesbian necromancers explore a haunted gothic palace in space!”! Totally my jam! I've been doing this a lot lately, but this book might become a 4-star review later. It's not yet because my feelings are currently about the end (don't worry, no spoilers here), which I understand is both PERFECT and also SAD and I am leaning into SAD WHYYYYYY right now. Muir is laugh-out-loud funny as a writer, especially with her dialogue full of zingers (I didn't know I needed a just-post-adolescence protagonist who makes the occasional well-timed “That's what she said” joke, but I did!), and this book is clever, poignant, and campy in excellent proportions. I could have used a little less plot complexity (bones, so many ways of using bones, sometimes in ways that are hard to transmit the visual idea of via writing) for more explication of Gideon's very complicated relationship with her peer/dictator/it's complicated Harrowhark, although the (SAD) ending still rang true. Will read the 2nd for sure, but will give myself time to get over the ending first.

(Still thinking about this weeks later! My feelings are less hurt by the ending. 4 stars!)

I might go back and change this to 4 stars as I keep percolating about it...my main complaint with this book is that I think it's a wee bit crushed under my all-consuming love for A Memory Called Empire. Which is not Martine's fault! This sequel is sexier and higher stakes, with another doozy of an apt opening quote: “To ravage, to slaughter, to usurp under false titles - this they named empire; and where they make a desert, they call it peace” (Tacitus quoting Calgacus). For me personally, the tension in this book around clashing war tactics was less compelling than the geopolitics without the immediate threat of genocide of the first, and I think some of my star rating reflects the profound sense of melancholy I was left with about Mahit & Three Seagrass - Martine is so, so skilled at illustrating the ways that bias embedded in language itself makes it impossible for Three Seagrass to really see, and therefore truly love, Mahit, and I didn't want a happy ending, I don't think, but maybe just a squee less pathos? These are personal problems, though, and this is a beautiful book. A quote from a review on whatever you call the part of a book where they put quotes from reviews struck me as very accurate: “demands and rewards the reader's attention.” I couldn't have torn through this even if I wanted to, which I didn't, and I feel myself uncomfortably, but maybe ultimately productively, provoked by all the many things Martine gives a person to think about, especially what it means to be alive. Okay, there, I wrote myself into it. 4 stars!

This is a very useful book. It is, of course, of its era/discipline; at one point, Gunther observes that none of her “informants” had distinct names for the 3 different varieties of blackberries out here, but then reminds herself and the readers that only the most horticulturally-focused people in any culture tend to have language that specific. I agree with Kelda's review that a known response to settler-colonialism on the Olympic Peninsula was for Indigenous people to give ridiculous answers with a completely deadpan delivery to nosy White question-askers, but I have to say I'm glad that such answers might also be documented in this book! My major complaints about its ease of use is that I really hate how the drawings of the plants are in an index at the back, and I wish the pronunciation guide was embedded, instead of also appearing as an index. BUT, if you're into ethnobotany, all the flipping is worth it.

Let us just say that this did not age well. Plus, the number of times Douglas Lord called Whitney “sugar” appeared to be limitless and limitlessly annoying, and Whitney's “spoiled brat” persona reached truly absurdist heights when a cotton dress she wore while they were fleeing paid assassins was unfortunately “ugly” for her. And yet I still finished this! I can offer no logical explanation.

Lending library find - this was a good palate cleanser to the 2-star romances. Christie was taking a turn at blending her typical murder mystery with a spy thriller, but I think I prefer her usual. I actually picked up an edition that has two of her other novels in it, so I'm looking forward to reading those. The forward noted that Christie's portrayal of German and Russian spies in this one hasn't aged particularly well, but...German and Russian spies in the between-war period were up to no good! I also agree 100% with their observation that Christie spares no one, especially the British upper class, in her satiric sweep: this novel is full of aimless young men of means, and Lord Caterham in particular is Wilde-ean in his absurdity. The standout here is for sure the heroine (in another skewering of social mores, she is ridiculously nicknamed Bundle), who is equal parts zany and disciplined. Forget Superintendent Battle; this should have been the start of the Bundle series.

Nesta, Nesta, Nesta! I was pleased when my bestie alerted me that she is the star of this one.

****SPOILERS AHEAD****

I was also pleased to find that Maas' ability to write sex scenes, which I already found competent, has increased across this series. What this obviously means is that she should next turn her growing abilities to a book with Mor and whomever her lady love turns out to be, for one of the upcoming ones!

But back to this book - I read someone else's comment that another of Maas' skills is presenting a couple you root for, then demolishing your love for them with an even better one, and so on. I really do like Nesta and Cassian together, because Cassian has many of Rhys' good qualities, minus some of his bad (like his terrible habit of attempting to protect loved ones by withholding information from them - dude, get over yourself!!).

I will say that a corner Maas has backed herself into is one I heard someone talking about re: the Marvel franchise: if every character has world-ending powers, then all the conflicts are bombastic in a way that can eventually get boring! Maas has a related but different plot issue: if Rhys is really the most powerful High Lord who has ever lived, and Feyre is his equal, could they really not just have tweaked her pelvis for childbirth on their own? I say that because I love Nesta best as her Death God self, so I was a little sad to see her powers diminished (and think it would have been potentially more interesting to see her continue to wrestle with walking away from the option of total world domination). That loops us back to the Marvel issue, though, which is if Nesta stayed a Death God, what would the conflict in the next book look like? So I'm not smart enough to have a solution, just smart enough to see the issue, lol. Carry on, Maas, I guess!

Sometimes I forget that I like a thriller, if it's more psychological than gory, and I don't think it's a stretch to say this is a ballet thriller. It's other things as well (a study of the complexity of long-term female friendships is certainly one of them), and I also love an author who will write a not-particularly-likeable protagonist. It reminded me a bit of Detransition, Baby in the sense that there were times I was cringing at various characters' choices, but because they were believably terrible, not unbelievable. Kapelke-Dale also writes with great precision about the underestimated depth of female ambition and desire in a patriarchy, especially in the particularly strange patriarchal microcosm of professional ballet. This does feel like a first novel in ways that are hard for me to specify, but if you're looking for a quick, evocative read with some interesting themes, it's good.

I've read a bunch of historical romances, at this point, and I hate to give 2 stars to the most explicitly feminist one, but here we are. First, I'll just say it plainly: not sexy enough! The protagonist and her love interest do have a genuine emotional connection, which is lovely, but this is by far the lowest ratio of eroticism to endless dialogue I've encountered. Second, I really do genuinely like that the protagonist balks once she realizes clearly that she's intended to transition from guardianship of one man to another (although her respectful-of-women-and-their-intelligence intended is a huge improvement from her tyrannical and bigoted father) and how trapped by convention women are even in the best of circumstances, but then...I dunno. I wish Balogh had pushed the limits of that tension further. Let Alex actually go off and be a governess! Then have a sexy reunion! Or have her challenge her fiance more directly about how they could fashion an egalitarian marriage! Instead we get a lot of her internal hemming and hawing, and not much actual plot. I am probably asking too much of something written in 1989, but a girl can dream.

If you'd told me at some point while I was reading the first half that I'd give this a 4-star rating, I would have been skeptical. I couldn't tell if it was tragic and sort of pedantically so, or comic and a little too amused at its own cleverness, but really, Greer laid out his protagonist's dilemma explicitly (“The tragicomic business of being alive is getting to him.”), and then built skillfully to a point when his protagonist, the brave and hapless Arthur Less, embraces the tragicomedy in a way that I found neither sentimental nor fatalistic. Less is a lovely love story, and I can't recall a “serious” novel that made me laugh out loud this frequently. Great Pride Month read, great summer read.

Read this last month, so my review will suffer from my currently hamster-like memory for books. But I liked it! Enough that I brought it along to a reunion with grad school friends to pass it along to one of them. This is a family drama, but I mean that in an expansive way. Coster's characters are fully imagined: they have strengths to admire and weaknesses that made me cringe in sympathy and recognition. The ties that bind and support are also the ones that constrain, portrayed against the complicated backdrop of racism in the American South.

It is so satisfying when a lending library find is enjoyable! If you are like me, this novel will make you fall head over heels in love with Martha Gellhorn, both the historical figure and this fictionalized version of her, her terrible taste in men and all, briefly contemplate if you also love Ernest Hemingway at his very most charming, and then decide that he just really, really needed to sober up and go to therapy (no, that is not anachronistic, I'm confident he was only several degrees of separation from some great psychoanalysts). McLain's writing especially sings when she works to capture both the atrocities and the “new normal” of the war zones Gellhorn traveled to for her reporting - there was much in here, especially about pre-WWII Spain, that made me think of and feel pangs for Ukrainians right now. I think there were times that she was a bit too heavy-handed with Gellhorn's internal monologue about Hemingway (OF COURSE most other writers would have feelings about being married to the author of “For Whom the Bell Tolls” when it came out, and I wish there had been a bit more nuance in her struggle that I suspect existed in real life), but overall, McLain's achievement here is to introduce me to a remarkable person and journalist (She was one of the only journalists who landed on Omaha Beach on D-Day! And here is her searing account of the trial of Adolf Eichmann, which I suspect is unfortunately perennially relevant to humanity) that I don't think I otherwise would have gotten around to googling.

Wow. This book is a ton plot-wise - just reading the goodreads recap before writing this review reminded me that the whole thing started with Feyre back in the Summer Court! Hah! Feels like forever ago in the timeline of this series. Is there such a thing as too plotty? If so, perhaps this verged on that. But I liked it. It's fine! The novelty of #1 is gone, clearly, the sexy suspense of #2 is past, and this is just a good ole-fashioned battle between good and evil. I will say that the major perk of this part of this series is that roughly 1/4 in, I was talking all things Pride with a friend and sharing my two cents that the ACOTAR series would be better if it was more gay...and then Maas made things more gay! I hope the trend continues in the remainder of the series. The cast of characters is now also more diverse. I do think a weird thing that happens in fantasy is that although it's pretty clear the primary protagonists don't think this way, others in the world distinguish between High Fae and Lesser Fae. Which perhaps is an intentional choice on Maas' part to reflect hierarchical structure in that society, but like, why? Why not, if one is world-building, build a world in which that society, whatever its flaws, doesn't have that particular one, and instead sees the Fae that populate the story as neither higher nor lower than anything else? There is enough animism in Maas' world already that it would be completely consistent (maybe more so) to extend that to flattening philosophical distinctions among Fae and between Fae and other creatures. ANYWAY. I'll keep reading, but this was enough of a temporary conclusion to a bunch of plotlines that I'll be reading some other stuff before #4.

This was just so satisfying. Hot faerie sex, good friendships, exposition of one character I was intrigued by last book and now looooooooove (and which made me appreciate Maas' long game in #1, which I went back and re-read some of to really appreciate the subtle setup she did in that one for #2), danger, magic, complexity of sibling relationships, etc. Also, today I discovered that not only do my best friend and I alternate “Serious Novels” with “trash” (ratio varying by how terrible the outside world is at a given moment), but we both started this series within days of each other and now I am just waitttttting for her to finish this one to discuss! This one ends with a cliffhanger, but not the kind I'm mad about. I will say that if you like your escapism to just be sexy escapism, skip this series, which is violent, but as long as my literary violence is encased in a fantasy world, I'm fine with it.

Borrowed this from the library where I work. I think there are two really helpful things about this book: 1) it's easy to find information on income inequality online, but wealth inequality is a bigger concept, so I appreciated the longitudinal view of how things like income inequality play out over time and across generations; and 2) this was a great survey of the actual legislative oppression that accompanies other forms of discrimination (e.g., I will never not be angry about the blatant highway robbery of the Dawes Act). I would both be interested in and afraid of what a current update to their statistics would look like, as I'm not sure if anything has changed since this was written, let alone for the better. Which I guess means this is still an important piece of scholarship!

Consider me entertained. I would argue that there was so much mystery in the beginning that how the plot was unfolding felt a little inexplicable, followed by too much exposition nearer the end to compensate for the earlier choice. I'm ambivalent about the criticism of the element of coercion in some of the sexual scenes I've read in reviews- this wouldn't be my first choice for a younger teen for that reason, for example, but I also think Maas counterbalanced that element with something that is also important: Feyre is clearly written as having her own desire and sexual agency (when circumstances don't constrain it), and those things are important, too. Another thing she succeeds at is that I really don't buy when romantic and/or sexual attraction is based in a too-flimsy manner on one character's immortality or magical status (and recently read a vampire romance novel I disliked for this very reason); the heat between the protagonist and her primary interest here felt more genuinely about chemistry not related to who was High Fae. ANYWAY, this is altogether too much thinking for a book that I would clearly define as a pleasure read! And I asked my friendly local bookstore owner to keep the next in the series behind the counter for me, so there's that.

I finished this a few days ago, and was going to give it a 4-star review, but how much I keep thinking about it and how many times I've recommended it tells me it's really 5 stars for me! This is...just an epic space opera! I think part of the reason it also resonated so much with me right now started with the dedication: “This book is dedicated to anyone who has ever fallen in love with a culture that was devouring their own.” I've been reading/thinking a lot about modernity and its perils recently, and Martine has a lot to say about culture, how it defines us and others, self-perpetuates, but also self-destructs. There's just so much stuff here about selfhood as well - what is memory, what parts of it are shared and what cannot be, and what do our stories mean to us. I haven't ordered her second book yet, but certainly will.

My god. If you'd ever like to feel incandescently angry (as if there are not enough things in the world right now to prompt such feelings!), please pick up this book. Published in 2019, it makes everything about Russia's current war on Ukraine obvious (spoiler alert: oil, it's always about oil), to the point that I'd love an update from Maddow on how everything she writes about has persisted or even escalated. I would say the anger is worth the increased understanding, and I appreciate Maddow's huge capacity for weaving threads together: everything from Equitorial Guinea's dictatorship to fracking-induced seismic events in Oklahoma are, at the end of the day, about oil. The only reason this isn't a 5-star book for me is that the absolute absurdity of the situation doesn't actually need dark humor as an enhancement, and I think she veers a little too often into snappy asides that don't actually underscore the power of the story she is telling. Basically, her humor feels too much like what she does on television, as opposed to adapted to this form of media. But yeah, overall, everyone should read this.

Okay, my spate of 2-star romance novel reviews tells me I actually need to step away from the genre! Or buy some as opposed to relying on the lending libraries, hah. I inexplicably read this despite already having started “A Memory Called Empire,” which is fantastic at just 65 pages in, so I need to do some good hard reflection on my life and my choices regarding fiction. In all seriousness, I do think my leaning toward romance, even when mediocre, reflects the amount of trauma-focused therapy I'm doing at work right now, but I can still be more intentional about my escapism!

Anyway, this was fine. Fine, fine, fine. There were a few funny choices, like how the protagonist is a widow, and therefore has more freedom than a never-married woman would, but also conveniently had a first husband with erectile dysfunction, so still has “virginal” vibes.... But there's some interesting inner monologuing about the choices available to her, and some nice connections between her and the young American women (i.e., heathens) for whom she is chaperoning. The hero is charming but vapid, and his growth arc from superficial party boy to serious adult is just that he doesn't let his brother's estate go to rack and ruin in his absence. I wasn't captivated, but I didn't dislike it, either. And now I'm going back to what Ann Leckie calls “an absolutely brilliant space opera,” which I suspect is 100% true.

This was...fine. Except the hero is obnoxiously domineering for the first half of the book. 2.5 stars might be more accurate, because there are some romance novels I've picked up and then been completely turned off to reading anymore by that author, but I wouldn't write the other 2 in this series off my list. I just don't know that I'd go seek them out.

Like the title, this book was really beautiful. I'm working with a lot of people with extensive trauma histories at work right now, so I was bracing for the tragedies I was pretty sure were going to unfold, not feeling totally sure about my capacity for non-escapist fiction right now. The central one was indeed wrenching, but I'm glad I stuck it out for what Harris captured about what can come after that.