The Hate U Give - Angie Thomas

Sometimes a book comes out that everyone is talking about.  Sometimes it's in a good way, sometimes it's in a bad way, sometimes it's in a mix of the two.  The Hate U Give seems to fall into the third category; from what I've seen, it's mostly good chatter, but then a handful of people who seem to feel that Thomas is just "stirring the pot."  Which...let's not get into it.  Anyway, this is a book that had people talking, and made the long list for the National Book Award.  So when Emma Watson put it up as the May/June read for her Our Shared Shelf book club, of course it was an easy one to pick up.

The story follows Starr, a high school student who sees her best friend shot by a police officer after they're pulled over for having a tail light out.  Starr is the only witness, but she doesn't want anyone to know who doesn't absolutely have to, because she knows it could tear her life apart.  But the trauma itself has a lasting impact, and the events shake her city to its core, dividing communities, families, and friends.

Is the writing in this book the most amazing ever in style?  No.  However, it's very, very good.  Thomas uses slang and dialect without making it seem obnoxious--like the dreaded phonetically-written Scottish accent I seem to encounter so much--and instead it reads as natural.  She shows the division that inherently exists in Starr's life, between her home life and her school, where she carefully monitors her clothing and behavior so she doesn't come across as "ghetto" or "an angry black woman" and can fit in better with her peers.  She has a masterfully-crafted narrative of empathy, and that is really what this book knocked out of the park.  It truly does allow the reader to step into Starr's shoes and see things from her perspective--how there are conflicting narratives and how those narratives came to be from one set of facts, and how they affect her and those around her.  Starr is not a person of conflict by nature, but finds herself surrounded by it, from protests that turn to riots in her neighborhood to a friend who doesn't outright mean harm but is unwilling to recognize or work to correct her prejudices and racist tendencies.

This book does not have a specific location, as far as I can tell.  It has generic place names and a generic place feel.  It is not a retelling or a spin of any one incident, but instead a look at a mentality and the events that lead up to it, and provides a lens for which those of us who have not and never will experience things like this because of our privilege and background and can really see where these characters are coming from.  There is some info-dumping; there is some awkward time-skipping.  There is some "It's two months later"-ing, which is never really a good narrative device.  But the emotion and purpose in this book ring true, and once I figured out the out-of-order pages at the beginning of my library copy (a printing error and not something inherent in the book, I'd guess) I was truly engrossed.

4.5 stars out of 5.

Firelight - Kristen Callihan (Darkest London #1)

Firelight is a book that kept catching my eye as it popped up on various to-read lists.  I like Kristen Callihan's contemporary romance books in her VIP series--both Idol and Managed were very good.  If that caliber of writing with a Victorian-era fantasy setting, I thought we'd be good to go.  And the library even had a copy!

The story here follows Miranda, a young woman who has the ability to start fires, and Benjamin Archer, a lord who has fallen under a curse and never shows his face or other parts of his body, instead going about in a mask and dark clothing.  Several years after an initial encounter in an alley, Archer gets Miranda to marry him through coercion.  Despite this, Miranda decides he's hot and that she loves him immediately, no matter why he's so weird--and despite the fact that he might be, you know, a murderer.

And herein lies the root of our problem.  Callihan's contemporary novels have great chemistry and build in the romance department, and that is entirely absent here.  There is no spark between these characters, despite Miranda being literally able to create fire.  There is no sense of fairy tale whimsy or destined or doomed romance, despite the story drawing heavily on East of the Sun and West of the Moon, my favorite of all fairy tales.  And there is no decent-strength fantasy to propel the story in lieu of these other elements.  There is no apparent reason that Miranda has these abilities.  Archer's curse is a mishmash of religions that don't really seem to click together, and seem to have been compiled merely to seem mystical without any thought as to what might actually be behind them.  And his curse doesn't really make much sense, either...  What information we are provided is dumped into our laps in a monologue by one character literally as Miranda gets ready to walk into the final conflict.

I'm not entirely turned off this series.  I do have faith in Callihan's writing skills, and Miranda's sisters have promise as main characters in other books.  Hopefully this was just a bad start to a series, in which Callihan hadn't really fully thought through what she wanted to put forth, and the other ones will be better.  I'll give it another try, but this one in particular was not a home run for me.

2 stars out of 5.

In the Garden of Beasts - Erik Larson

Erik Larson is an awesome history author.  I've read both Dead Wake (about the sinking of the Lusitania) and Devil In the White City (about a serial killer and the Chicago World's Fair) by him, and found both of them to be excellent in quality.  When I was looking for a book linked to my family history for my reading challenge, I decided to just pick something set in Germany, because I didn't know what else to focus on.  (Despite this book focusing on the family of an ambassador in WWII Germany, I am neither related to the Dodds, nor am I aware that any of my direct family were Nazis, though I suppose anything is possible; wouldn't that be a nasty surprise?)

In this book, Larson focuses on Ambassador William Dodd, the first US ambassador to Hitler's Germany, and Dodd's daughter Margaret.  His wife and son were also present in Germany, but are not looked as much in the course of the book.  And what the book is, is a startling examination of the old adage "Hindsight is 20/20."  Now, we have such clear hindsight, being able to see that Hitler was bad news, and that something should have been done sooner--but through the Dodds, we can see how that wasn't the case at the time.  They initially were kind of friendly toward Nazism in general, being somewhat anti-Semitic themselves, though Hitler himself was seen as kind of a kooky guy who Hindenburg had well in hand and who probably wouldn't remain in power very long.  But the Dodds slowly become more and more aware of what a terrible situation is brewing in Germany--and are stonewalled by everyone else, who either outright don't believe them or don't want to believe them, or do believe them but don't want to get involved with European affairs and instead only want to focus on Germany paying its reparations from World War I.  It's an incredibly frustrating story to read, because you can see the trouble building in the background, and the Dodds growing increasingly concerned and Ambassador Dodd's attempts in particular to do something without causing an international incident--and without getting himself fired in the process, as he isn't well-liked in the State Department to begin with--and knowing that it's all futile.

Larson builds the tension here wonderfully.  This is a true work of nonfiction, as well--everything he implements is taken from letters, cables, diaries, etc.  He does step back to speculate once or twice, but always notes that he's doing so, saying something such as, "Perhaps, but they didn't write about it they did, so we can't really know."  The Dodds aren't really the most interesting people on their own; the details of their day-to-day lives can be boring, mostly consisting of Dodd's colleagues at the State Department planning to oust him and working to undermine him at pretty much every turn and Margaret having a bunch of affairs, but I think that provided exactly what it was supposed to: an idea of how life went on for most people in Germany, and it was not a sudden event that Hitler rose to power, made being Jewish illegal, and started killing people and planning to take over Europe.  Rather, it was a slippery slope that rose against a background of existing tensions, and no one action took place until the preceding ones seemed normal.  Hm...does that sound familiar to anyone alive today...?

This is not a "fast" read, nor is it a thrilling one.  But it is one that is chilling in the way that it, in many ways, mirrors the world we live in now.  They say that those who don't study history are doomed to repeat it--so study up, folks.

4 stars out of 5.

Ten Ways to Be Adored When Landing a Lord - Sarah MacLean (Love By Numbers #2)

Sarah MacLean is an author whose back catalog I am now working through.  After reading Nine Rules to Break When Romancing a Rake, I got another of her books, The Rogue Not Taken, from the library.  However, I quickly discovered that the heroine of that book was a side character in the third book of the series that Nine Rules started, so I set to reading through those first.  Ten Ways is the second book there.

Our heroine here is Isabel, the daughter of an earl who has barely kept the estate together in the face of his wasteful behavior--and has run a house for women looking to escape terrible situations to boot.  All of that seems to be in danger when her father dies, the estate is left to a mysterious guardian until her ten-year-old brother can come of age, and there's not a penny to be found.  Oh, and the daughter of a duke shows up on her doorstep looking for help, which Isabel knows is going to cause trouble.

Trouble comes calling indeed, though Isabel doesn't know it right away.  It arrives in the form of Nicholas St. John, the brother of the hero from the first book, who has been asked by the aforementioned duke to find the missing sister, a task he gladly takes up to escape the slavering women of London, who are eager to nab him as one of London's most landable lords.  But when he and Isabel first run into each other, she sees Nick's value in his knowledge of antiquities, particularly marble statues--a bunch of which she owns and is eager to sell to fund the ongoing existence of Minerva House.  With an invitation into Isabel's abode, things are set for the two worlds to collide.

This book relies much more heavily on instalove than the first book did.  While the pacing in the first book was somewhat whacky, it still took place over at least a few weeks.  This book takes place over a number of days, and suddenly Isabel, who has always been leery of men because of the behavior of her father and the plights of women--mostly done over by men--who she shelters at Minerva house, is suddenly gaga over the first cute guy who shows up.  (Note how I said "cute"; other guys showed up at Isabel's house, claiming she had to marry them because her father gambled her away, but none of them seemed remarkably attractive.)  Honestly, Georgianna was a more interesting plot line here.  I wanted to know about her failed romance, what was going to happen to her.  She has her own book later down the line, in another of MacLean's series, but she definitely overshadowed Isabel, who didn't seem nearly as steady and levelheaded as we're supposed to think.  Her instant gaga-ing, but how she refuses to accept help she so desperately needs, just didn't seem to fit, and it didn't work well as a coherent whole.

But this book was mercifully lacking in mentions of "sweet rain," so at least there's that.

Overall, this was enjoyable, but I didn't like it as much as the first one.  I probably wouldn't read it again, and honestly couldn't remember much about it--even Isabel's name--by the time I went to read the third book only a few days later, which doesn't really speak highly of it.  I think there was a lot of cool concepts here, such as Minerva House.  Women helping women is so great to see!  However, as nothing every really happened to threaten this in any serious way, it was underdone and didn't have enough impact to carry the rest of the book.

2 stars out of 5.

Salt & Storm - Kendall Kulper

This is a book that I eagerly waited for before its release, then didn't purchase because it was too expensive--seriously publishers, what's up with the ridiculous prices for Kindle books?  If authors were getting more of it I'd understand more, but that doesn't appear to be the industry standard--and I was hedging on the library to purchase it, and then finally got when it was on sale...and then proceeded to not read for ages because something was always more pressing.  But I finally queued it up for my 2018 reading challenge for "a book with alliteration in the title."

Salt & Storm is the story of Avery Roe, the youngest in a line of woman who possess magical powers on the fictional Prince Island, which is based on Nantucket.  The island's industry is whaling, and the women of Avery's family have a tradition of supporting the industry through their magic, one at a time.  But Avery's mother forswore magic and her heritage and left her mother, and eventually took Avery away, as well.  But Avery wants nothing more than to claim her birthright and become the Roe witch, taking over the position from her aging and ailing grandmother.  Cursed by her mother and unable to find a way to use her own magic, she turns to a young sailor from the South Pacific, Tane, for help in exchange for reading his dreams which he hopes will help him gain revenge for the murder of his family.

This book got off to a slow start, but things started building when Tane entered the picture and he and Avery began working together.  I had high hopes for this book at that point.  Tane's magic conflicting with Avery's was an interesting aspect, and while I knew Avery's mother couldn't be quite the raging bitch she appeared, I was unsure of how she was really going to enter the narrative.  I wanted Avery to reclaim her magic and become everything she wanted--maybe even save the island from some disaster!  Cliched?  Yes.  Satisfying?  Also yes.  But when Avery came under fire for being a witch, rather than being lauded for it, I was good with that, too.  After all, it was the logical course of things based on how the story had happened up until that point.  And things were finally building, obviously coming up to some big, climactic finish...

But let's talk about Tane, shall we?  An interracial romance set in New England?  Yes.  Please.  More.  He possesses his own magic and is looking to reclaim it, and his heritage, in a similar way to Avery, making them an ideal pair.  But then there's that Roe curse in play...but it could have played out so much better.  I can think of a billion ways that this could have ended rather than the way it actually did, which is Tane fulfilling the Magical Negro trope.  Unfamiliar with this?  It's a trope in which a character of color, usually from a much less privileged background than the white protagonist, enters the story only to help the privileged white protagonist achieve her goals, rather than existing as a character with his own path and journey.  Tane seemed to have so much more going on at first, but ultimately, no, he was tossed to the side so Avery could go off and ~be free~.  Utter garbage.  I expected more of Kulper than this.

What Kulper does really well here is, ultimately, the atmosphere.  I listened to In the Heart of the Sea as an audiobook last year, and Salt & Storm really nailed the way that I expected a Nantucket-based fictional island to feel.  The way that the Roe magic had changed the island, and eventually turned on it, made perfect sense.  Despite the slow pace, all of these things really had me rooting for this book.  If only Kulper hadn't gone and fucked it all up.  And don't get me wrong--I can really go for a good bittersweet ending, one that has me thinking for days, wondering and wishing, "What if...?"  But this was not good.  Characters of color deserve to be characters in their own right, just as white characters are, rather than just tools for white characters to find fulfillment and then toss by the wayside.

2 stars out of 5.

The Unimaginable - Dina Silver

A beautiful cover and convenient timing left me in the mindset that The Unimaginable was going to be something like Station Eleven--not in topic, because the book summary made it very clear that this was nothing like Station Eleven, but for some reason I had it in my mind that this would have the same beautiful writing, construction, and love of life that Station Eleven contained.  Unfortunately, this was not the case.

The story is about Jessica Gregory, who moves to Thailand in the wake of her mother, who she never really got along with.  She has a job teaching English and gets another job at a bar.  After a few months of this she has three weeks of vacation and decides to look for an adventure by crewing on a boat for a long distance sail, despite having no sailing experience or really any sense in her head at all.  She also falls immediately and conveniently in love with a man almost twice her age who really doesn't want anything to do with her, but of course as soon as she bats her eyelashes at him he falls in love with her, too, despite being in mourning for his deceased wife, and takes her on as crew essentially so he can get around to boning her.  And then, of course, come the pirates.

The writing here is sloppy and the romance is eyeroll- and gag-worthy.  I am an avid reader of romance, but this is not good.  The chemistry is nonexistent, the sex scenes sloppy and deserving of nothing more than cringing.  Despite going into detail, it's ultimate unclear whether Jessica--our narrator--even gets to have a decent orgasm.  Poor thing.  The danger, despite being very real, is completely overblown.  And though the entire book builds up to it from a brief--very brief--prologue, it only lasts about fifteen pages and then is over, and the focus of the book is back to Jessica mooning over Grant, in a relationship that seemed more than a little skeevy to me, mainly because Grant just kept putting Jessica off and wouldn't emotionally commit to her, even for a little bit, but was perfectly willing to fuck her all the way across the Indian Ocean.  Ew.

This is also one of those books where the heroine, despite wanting adventure in the great wide somewhere a la Belle, promptly gives up everything when she meets the hero.  This bothers me in any context, but in contemporary books more than in historical ones, because in times like the Regency era women were taught not to have expectations or dreams and, if they did, to give them up to men.  A modern woman should know better than this.  If what Jessica had wanted was to be a wife and nothing else, then fine--that's a woman's prerogative.  But to claim she wanted adventure and to teach and see the world and not be one of the women from her hometown who just got married and gave up on life, and then to immediately abandon everything in favor of mooning over a guy who has literally said three sentences to her.

The pacing is also awful, and the writing itself is terrible.  It's full of sentences like, "And the, on the Imagine, came...the unimaginable.  You can just tell that Silver wants us to gasp and clutch our pearls and be so dismayed by the drama, but I really didn't care about any of the characters and so this ploy was completely unsuccessful.  There is only one remotely dismaying thing that happens in the book, and it has nothing to do with Jessica or Grant.

There is an author's note at the end of the book about where the story--and all of the character names--came from.  While the origins are remarkable, tragic, and worthy of their own story, this particular story did not do them justice, not in any way.  I would not recommend this, nor will I be picking up anything else by this author in the future.

1.5 stars out of 5, and that's only for the setting.

Nine Rules to Break When Romancing a Rake - Sarah MacLean (Love By Numbers #1)

For those who aren't avidly watching the romance community, there is currently a trash fire going on in which an author trademarked the word "cocky" for use in titles of books and series.  This is a bitch move, and it's not going particularly well for her, but it's brought up a lot of interesting conversations about titling and tropes in the romance genre as a whole.  We romance readers love our tropes--and why not, as long as they're done well?  And titles tie in very closely with them, because it lets you know exactly what you're going to get, in a way that other genres don't practice that same variety of branding.  For example, Nine Rules to Break When Romancing a Rake implies that a heroine is going to behave badly while falling in love with a man who is known to be a womanizer in high society.  In contrast, here are a few other books I'm currently reading: The Sparrow, In the Garden of Beasts, The Unimaginable, Salt & Storm.  None of these titles really tell you what the book is about--and let me tell you, The Sparrow is definitely not about small birds.  But these romance titling conventions mean that, while you're never guaranteed to like a book, for a variety of reasons, you know if the book you pick up is going to trend in a direction you'll like.  And for that reason, romance can be an extremely comforting genre to browse, because you know exactly what to look for in order to get what you want.

I've been having reading difficulties recently.  While I've liked a lot of books, I haven't loved very many yet this year, and I've found a lot that ended up being just okay.  In the middle of several other books that weren't impressing me very much, I turned away to a good-old standby, the historical romance.  And luckily, I had just gotten off the waitlist for this book.  Sarah MacLean's name has crossed my field of vision many times--due to friends reading her books, due to her books being recommended for people who like other books I've read, due to her writing a romance column for the Washington Post.  Somehow, despite all of this, I had not read any of hers.  But NRTBWRAR (geeze) seemed like as good a place to start as any.

The book starts with an encounter between our heroine, Calpurnia "Callie" Hartwell, who is curvy and plainer than is fashionable and who languishes for ever finding a husband during a terrible Season when she eighteen, and our hero, Gabriel, a marquess with a bit of a womanizing reputation who never wants to marry due to how his mother acted when he was young.  Then we skip ahead ten years--Callie is on the shelf, sitting in "Spinster Seating" at balls, and watching her dazzling younger sister getting ready to marry a duke.  Gabriel, in the meantime, has found a previously-unknown half-sister dumped on his doorstep, and is determined to do right by her and bring her out in society, but he'll need the help of a respectable woman to do so.  When Callie turns up at his house in the middle of the night, looking for an adventure of her own, Gabriel decides she's perfect for the task, as her reputation has never been objectionable at all--though if Callie completes her adventure list, she'll be ruined for sure...

The banter here is good.  Callie is taking charge of her own life, even if only one or two other people know it.  She is determined to live, and to take hold of the experiences she wants even if she isn't supposed to want them--like learning to fence or attending a duel, things that ladies are not supposed to do.  Her sister is also lovely and charming and supportive, to the degree that she knows what Callie is doing, and Gabriel's sister, Juliana, is definitely set up for a good book of her own at the end of the trilogy--I presume the second book will focus on Gabriel's twin brother.  Even Gabriel's former mistress ended up being surprisingly nice, and I was pleased that MacLean didn't go for cattiness between the old lover and the new in order to drive the plot.  Women don't have to be nasty to each other, guys!  It's possible!

I liked Gabriel overall, though I didn't always find him to be the most interesting.  I also found him a bit more...absent, I guess, than I thought a proper romance hero should have been--both emotionally and physically.  He popped in and out, mostly when Callie was having one of her adventures, but I would have liked to see a bit more reaction between them.  Additionally, oh dear stars above, someone please erase the phrase "sweet rain" from the English language.  Like, what?  Ew.  Stop.  Also, Gabriel is kind of a jerk for most of the book.  This is pretty common in the genre, but even when Gabriel blundered quite badly, he was very, very slow to make apologies or amends for it, more so than he should have been.

Overall, I liked this quite a bit.  Not a raving, "must have it again and again" book, but something that definitely leavened my reading slump somewhat.  I'm looking forward to reading some of MacLean's other books and seeing what else she has to offer.

4 stars out of 5.

Truly Madly Guilty - Liane Moriarty

A colleague was listening to this via audiobook and mentioned it was intriguing--she was about halfway through when this came up--albeit a bit slow.  I already had a copy on my shelf, and I like being able to discuss books with people rather than just shouting into the void of the internet (hello out there!) so I picked it up.  When I was about halfway through with the book, she was done...and when I mentioned it was super slow and probably not going to be as dramatic as it was making itself out to be, she confirmed.  I finished it anyway.  What a mistake.

I am fairly certain this was supposed to be a book of domestic suspense.  The book is divided into two parts that pretty much alternate chapters: the day of the barbecue, and a few months after.  The first half of the book is spent either building up to this barbecue, or characters talking vaguely about how it changed everything, in what was clearly a very negative way.  And there's something about sex!  So here I am going, "Orgy?  Someone gets killed at an orgy?  What is it?"

What it is, is disappointing.  All of the build up for that?  The characters' lives are so mundane.  They all spend all of their time sniping at each other, and even discovering a dead body can't liven things up in this story.  They're all so boring, so blah.  I did not care about any of them, not at all.  And when the big "reveal" happened, I cared even less, because there's no suspense!  You know everything is going to be fine!  There's no real concern about that, because Moriarty has as good as told us that before the reveal happened.  So really, this is just a bunch of adults being melodramatic and having spats and avoiding each other like they are children, instead of talking to each other like functional human beings.

But what is really wrong with this book is the pacing.  It is slower than the slowest of snails.  And this slow pace isn't filled in by character development or self-discovery or anything like that, but rather instead relating every aspect of the characters' lives.  While some of these held promise--such as Erika's mother and Erika's upbringing--most of it was children screaming, adults moaning about their sex lives or lack thereof, and other things that just weren't compelling reading.  For what started out feeling like it was going to be a page-turner, it took me weeks to finish this book.

Also, no one is guilty in this book.  Blah.

Teach your kids to swim, folks.

1.5 stars out of 5.

Marriage of Inconvenience - Penny Reid (Knitting in the City #7)

Finally, finally, the end of the Knitting in the City series is upon us.  And I have to wonder: why do I keep reading Penny Reid?  The thing is, I think I liked a couple of her books that I read early on, and then I just kept reading, hoping I'd like them as much, or that the issues I found in each would be resolved in the next...and they just never are.  Hmmm...

In Marriage of Inconvenience, we finally come to the book of Kat and Dan the Security Man, who have been making eyes at each other since the very first book in the series.  It has been ages.  Kat has to face up to her evil family who want to control her life as a billionaire pharmaceutical heiress, and she has to do so by not letting her cousin commit her to a mental hospital, and she has to do that by getting married.  Oh, and she has to learn to orgasm again.

This plot is paper-thin.  Basically, what I have noticed in Reid's writing is that she wants to be hip and current, and so in this book, she decided to write a romance with pharma bro Martin Shkreli as a villain.

Yes.

This is not the train wreck that Happily Ever Ninja was, but it also didn't have the slow-burn and sex appeal of Dating-ish.  Reid brings back having both leads as point of view narrators, which was lacking in the previous book, which is good...except they are both completely boring.  Dan has exactly two personality characteristics: he says "fuck" a lot and he has the hots for Kat.  Oh, you say those don't constitute a personality?  How odd.  Well, there's still Kat.  She has three personality characteristics: she was a Bad Girl in her youth, she is the heir to a pharmaceutical company, and she has the hots for Dan.  Oh, wait, that's not a personality either...?  Hm...

I wanted so, so much to like this book.  It was so long in coming!  They had been wanting each other for so long.  But ultimately, there is no romance here.  The characters already adore each other and are together within the first few chapters, and the conflicts that arise throughout the course of the book never seriously threaten their relationship.  The conflicts themselves are half-baked.  I never had a single ounce of worry for Kat because the premise of "sending the perfectly-well-functioning woman to a mental hospital on the premise that she did drugs years ago when she was a teenager" was so flimsy.  Reid tries to put in a little relationship tension with the characters not being "allowed" to have sex with each other so that Kat can work on not being able to have an orgasm, but of course they just throw that out and she's suddenly orgasming like crazy.  This happens fairly late in the book...but it's really only a handful of days after this edict comes down from her therapist.

Overall, this book was a lot eye-rolling and sighing in disappointment for me.  Not a great conclusion to the series, and not worthy of a build-up it got throughout the other books.  There are two more Winston Brothers books coming out in the future, but at this point I'm torn on if I read those and give up on Reid, or if I should just cut the cord and do it now.

Sigh.

2 stars out of 5.

The Sparrow - Mary Doria Russell (Sparrow #1)

The Sparrow was the Deliberate Reader's book club book for June, for discussion in the Facebook group, and also the sci-fi selection for the year.  It also conveniently slotted into one of my reading challenge categories, for a book set on another planet.

The Sparrow is an interesting and immensely frustrating book.  It is interesting because it is as sci-fi book with a religious bend, and it involves first contacts with another intelligent species elsewhere in the galaxy--something that put me in mind of The Three-Body Problem, though that is a much "harder" sci-fi book than this.  It is immensely frustrating because all I really wanted was to slam these characters' heads, and the heads of their superiors, against a brick wall for being so incredibly stupid and ignorant of the Fermi Paradox.  I highly recommend reading Wait But Why's Fermi Paradox article, but ultimately it boils down to, in the words of Hank Green, "If they're out there, why don't we hear 'em talk?"  That is, if there is intelligent life out there--and statistically speaking, there should be--why do we not hear anything from other, extraterrestrial species?  There are a few different possible answers to this, but the one that always always always seems to come up in sci-fi is, "Because aliens are bad news," meaning that one of the reasons we don't hear from other intelligent species is that they know better than to be broadcasting stuff out into the void, because they know something we apparently don't, like there is something big and bad and willing to hurt us out there.  There are a few other explanations, too, of course, but obviously danger is a big driver of plot in sci-fi novels, so this is the one that comes up a lot.

Well, it turns out that you don't have to be big and bad and able to travel through space to hurt humans.  You just have to sing well enough to get them (us) to come to you (aliens; hi, aliens!).

So, as you have probably figured out by now, this book's central plot revolves around an act of astounding stupidity in which a group of humans, consisting of a Jesuit-led mission, set out to make contact with a newly-discovered intelligent species in the proximity of Alpha Centurai, despite not knowing anything about said other species other than that they exist.  Most of the book takes place significantly after this mission sets out, after the sole survivor (see, we knew it was a bad idea from the beginning) has returned to Earth, and his superiors are trying to figure out what has happened, particularly since the people who rescued him have also gone missing and are, presumably, dead.  The main character is Emilio Sandoz, a Jesuit priest and linguist who is the one to first suggest sending a Jesuit mission to this other planet (BAD EMILIO!) without, you know, anyone with any idea of what should actually be done weighing in.  As a result of the horrible events that take place on Rakhat during the mission, he suffers a crisis of faith, and the timeline of the book set after his return greatly focuses on him trying to answer that great question: if God exists and is both omnipotent and benevolent, then how is it possible that horrible things still happen?

This is a book that aims for spiritual rather than preachy, which was good.  Some of the relationships between the characters were intriguing; watching them grow and change provided the real reason to read this book, because the characters here are emotionally intelligent even if they are naive and lacking a serious dose of common sense.

This is a slow book.  Nothing happens for much of it, and then everything happens in just a handful of chapters.  When I was close to the end of the book, I couldn't believe that it was supposed to be wrapped up in under a hundred pages, because there was so clearly so much left to go.  Russell resolves this by just dumping it all in a narrative Emilio puts forth that takes a few pages; not exactly ideal.  While the dark subject matter could have made for a very heavy read if broken out separately, this particular way of relating events did nothing for the book's pace.

In other problems, the "sci" part of the "fi" is fairly soft, without a lot of technicalities to it, and with a lot of things that left me raising an eyebrow and going, "Hm..."  Sherwood Smith, an author whom I quite admire, noted in her review that the book overall lacks world building, a statement with which I would agree wholeheartedly in its applications to both her version of Earth and to Rakhat.  Much of the book is focused on other characters' fascination with Emilio's celibacy, and so it's not entirely surprising when it turns out the build-up of the entire book ends up being rape, much like in Outlander--but it also raises the question that, when you can write about literally anything in sci-fi, because you have the entire universe to play with, why turn back to rape?  Is there no way to have a crisis of faith without being raped?  Because, ultimately it's that which causes Emilio's breakdown--not any of the other horrible things to which he is witness.

Overall, a book that, while it has some interesting aspects attached to it, is immensely frustrating from conception to finish.  There is a second book that follows this, but I have no interest in reading it; from the book description, it promises to be nothing but more of the same.

2 stars out of 5.

Small Country - Gael Faye

Genocide is an oil slick: those who don't drown in it are polluted for life.  

Book of the Month has had a few books about the Rwandan genocide recently.  They had The Girl Who Smiled Beads a few months ago, about a woman who fled massacres and lived as a refugee in various camps for years before being granted asylum in the United States; and this month they had Small Country, a translated novel that actually takes place in Burundi, but to which the Rwandan genocide is closely tied.  The genocide is, in fact, the propelling element of the book, though the narrator and main character only briefly sets foot in Rwanda during the course of the book.

The book starts with Gabriel, the main character, living in France as an adult.  His life has obviously been very affected by fleeing from Burundi as a child, and he wonders about it even as his sister refuses to look back.  Then we skip back in time to Gabriel's childhood.  The child of a French man and a Rwandan woman, Gabriel lives a privileged life in Burundi, though his mother is in exile from Rwanda and dreams of either going back there, with the country free, or of moving to France.  He spends his days stealing mangoes and hanging out with his friends, but all around him the environment in Burundi intensifies in tandem with those in neighboring Rwanda, ultimately leading to the breakout of the Burundian Civil War.  Gabriel's mother is a Tutsi and he has family in Rwanda, and so he cannot remain aloof from the events even though he doesn't entirely understand them and his father tries to keep him isolated from politics.  Most of the book is a slow tightening, a gilded cage growing smaller and smaller as conflict grows closer and eventually explodes, driving Gabriel and his sister from their home.

Normally I have some struggles with books in translation.  Something tends to be lost when switching from the original language to the translated one.  Luckily, that was not the case in Small Country (Petit Pays in French).  Sarah Adrizzone is the translator, and she has done a wonderful job of keeping the feel and poetry of the book in translation.  The book does not read as stilted or emotionless, and while there are a few phrases that don't really translate and are kept in French, there's enough of a parenthetical explanation to make the phrase make sense without really jarring the flow of the narrative.

For the story itself, the Burundian Civil War is something I had never heard of, even though it went on for a dozen years.  I'd heard of the Rwandan genocide--and yes, in more contexts than just Hotel Rwanda--but had absolutely no idea that similar ethnic and political tensions were driving a conflict in Burundi.  Faye (and, by extension in translation, Adrizzone) does a wonderful job of showing the tensions while also showing the everyday highs and loves of Gabriel's life in Burundi.  His somewhat idyllic neighborhood, his band of friends, the conflicts with their rival, and how it all slowly descends into chaos are orchestrated masterfully.

Ultimately, however, there is some disconnect in the book.  I can do an ambiguous ending, if it suits the story.  But this was a book in which the prologue did not seem to have any connection to the actual story, and also does not fit with the epilogue--it seemed like the epilogue really should have been broken into two parts and maybe expanded a bit, to serve as prologue and epilogue.  All we really got out of the prologue as it was, was that Gabriel and his sister lived in France, Gabriel liked to sleep around in search of connection, and his sister didn't talk about the past.  While these are important pieces of information, they did not seem woven into the narrative as a whole, particularly in regards to the end of the book.

Overall, a very good read, but I would have liked a bit more connection and resolution between the beginning of the book and the very end.

4 stars out of 5.

The Iron Duke - Meljean Brook (The Iron Seas #1)

I hadn't taken part in the Unapologetic Romance Readers' monthly reads for several months, just because there was nothing coming up that particularly interested me--or, even if they interested me, they weren't available from the library and were too expensive for me to buy.  I spent a lot of money last year buying book club books that I ended up not particularly liking, and so I've tried to dial it back some this year.  But, the monthly theme for May was "steampunk," a genre I really like, and the club choice of The Iron Duke was available from the library, and so I rejoined the fold. 

This is a book that I liked, but not because of the hero.  The world and the heroine are wonderful, and they carried the weight of the book for a hero who at first seemed like he was going to be okay, but really didn't know how to take "no" for an answer.

Our heroine here is Mina, a biracial young woman in an England that lived under the rule of the Mongol Horde for two centuries (I think).  While under Horde rule, those who lived in England were infested with nanotechnology that allowed the Horde to control them, mainly by freezing them or forcing them into breeding frenzies.  The "hero" of the book, Rhys, ended Horde rule by taking down the tower that broadcasted the signals used to control the populace.  Now, about a decade later, Rhys is known as the Iron Duke and ends up in Mina's sights when a body shows up on his doorstep and a conspiracy begins to unfold around them.  Oh, and Mina doesn't really want much to do with him, and so he is determined to own her.

This is such an interesting world.  While I'm not a huge fan of the "Asian Other" theme that's going on, the concepts in general are interesting.  It's a fusing of nanotechnology and steampunk and genetic modification.  Krakens and megalodons, genetically engineered by the Horde, threaten sea ships and airships trawl the skies.  The European continent is infested by zombies.  Mina and her fellow countrymen might be infested with nanotechnology that can let the Horde control them, but that same technology protects their lungs from the smoke and smog of London, gives them superhuman strength, and lets them heal at a supernatural rate.  And while the Horde kept a death grip on England, there are hints that this might be developed further and shown nuance in other books, though I'm not a hundred percent sure--but Mina tells about an incident when the Horde was fleeing after the downfall of their tower, and some of the Horde tried to take Mina with them, and she believes it was to protect her from a wrathful English populace who hate her because of her Mongol blood.

Mina herself is also a great heroine.  She is committed and willful, but loves her family, wants to do best by her position as an inspector, and is a true Englishwoman despite how she is looked down upon because of her racial background.  She wants to live in peace but knows it might not happen, and doesn't let it destroy her life.  She's traumatized by her own life under the Horde, which has scarred her in regards of sexual intimacy, but is not scared of connection.

But then there's Rhys.  At first, I thought it was just going to be a typical "alpha male pursues woman who rebuffs him" story, but with the awesome world thrown in.  In reality, though, Rhys is a total creep.  This became increasingly apparent as he insisted on manhandling her against her express wishes, culminating in a scene in which he sexually assaults her despite her repeatedly telling him no, and that the experience is triggering harmful memories for her--the word "trigger" isn't used at all, but that is definitely what is happening and what Mina expresses.  But Rhys ignores that and carries on anyway, leaving Mina in a position where she literally has to shoot him to eventually get him off of her.  Then, of course, the book tastes a distasteful turn to "woman falls in love with rapist."  While this is somewhat of a trope in historical period romances--not as much anymore, but you still find it--it seemed particularly egregious here because so much about this world was more progressive than the historical period is takes place in (albeit in an alternate universe) was, and this made it feel even more out of place than it normally would.

This Rhys plot really left a bad taste in my mouth.  I liked the rest of the book a lot--the consensual encounters would have been awesome, had they not been tainted by the earlier one, the world was cool, and I really liked Mina and so, so many of the side characters.  I'm one hundred percent interested in other books in this series.  But this one...I just can't get over the Rhys thing, and so despite my overall liking of the book, I'm going to have to give it...

2 stars out of 5.

Chemistry - Weike Wang

Oh, books that you just keep around and never read, despite having been interested when you bought them.  This particular one lived under my bed for almost a year, where I would glimpse it every time I went looking for misplaced bottles of lotion, nail files, hair brushes, etc.  I finally pulled it out, really for lack of anything better to read--I've been reading, but I feel like I'm in a slump--and went to it, which was easy, because it was short.

This is one of those books that wants to be artsy, because it doesn't have a named narrator or any dialogue punctuation, so it all kind of just blends together and it's sometimes hard to tell when someone is talking or just thinking.  Oi.  The story itself is a very simple one: the unnamed narrator is a young woman in chemistry PhD program in Boston, until she has a breakdown after not making any progress on her thesis, is put on a medical leave, and finds herself in tough straights with her fellow chemistry PhD student boyfriend, who wants to marry her but whom she's not sure she wants to marry.  It's a tale of self-discovery in the wake of all of this, and of coming to terms not only with her parents' expectations of her but what she really wants for herself.

There is some lovely prose in here, descriptions of Boston and of chemistry.  There's some good introspection, into aspects of this narrator's life; for example, how she's expected to go into science because of her parents and has always been the "smart Asian kid' but doesn't really want to be, and is actually more interested in teaching, or how she struggles with being a woman in science while her boyfriend sails through with no obstacles, or how she wants a relationship but she doesn't want to entirely lose herself to it, or be expected to give up a professional life to be someone's wife.  These are all important aspects of the narrator's (I hesitate to call her a heroine, it's not really that type of book, nor would I call a man in this role a hero) life and struggles, both internal and external...however, none of them are particularly interesting.  One thing I did find interesting was the role that language played in the narrator's life, as it draws so many connections and divisions between cultures very clearly and helps to illuminate the struggles of the narrator and those around her in a way that I don't think most books hit upon--or even can hit upon, because they're not from this same perspective.

This is one of those books that just drifts from place to place, from thought to thought.  It's not stream of conscience, thankfully--a style I can't stand--but there is not a lot of structure.  The narrator is just drifting through life, and the book of course reflects that.  There is not really a plot, there is not really a pace.  It just kind of is.  While the premise is strong, I felt like it just wasn't really a great read.  This book had a lot of buzz when it came out, but it just didn't capture me as much as I had hoped.  A book can have a lot of wonderful, important things in it--but still not be a good book for everyone, and I think that's the category this hit upon for me.

2 stars out of 5.

Our Kind of Cruelty - Araminta Hall

Approximately half of women who are killed are killed by their current or former partners, or individuals closely involved with them.  In this book, V/Verity does not die--but the reasoning the main character in this book uses is the sort of thing that leads to those deaths.  It is deeply, deeply disturbing, all the more because it's painfully obvious that these sorts of thought patterns actually exist.

Let me back up.

This book is written from the perspective of Mike, in the form of a statement he's written for his lawyer when he's on trial for murder.  It follows Mike's stalking, harassment, and assault of his ex-girlfriend, V--though Mike doesn't see it that way.  He thinks that he and Verity are still deeply in love, and that she's just punishing him for cheating on her.  Because obviously you punish someone by marrying someone else, claiming you are deeply in love with that person, etc.  But Mike is convinced that V is just stringing him along to the next stage in their old sex game, the Crave, and that when she gives the signal, he will swoop in and save her and they will have rough sex forever more.

This book, and Mike himself, made me so angry.  Hall clearly does not subscribe to Mike's thoughts, which is good, but there's this knowledge that there really are people who think this is normal lurking in the background that made me want to punch someone in the face.  Mike thinks he's completely fine, but we can see in a variety of ways that he is completely falling apart and is a total sociopath to boot.  The horror of watching this, and the anger of what is doing and how he's treating V, really propelled along the parts of the book that led up to Mike's arrest and trial.

What comes after his arrest is even worse, because when Mike is on the line for his absolutely horrible actions, he decides to pull V down with him, and everyone goes along with it.  The actual pacing of this part of the book is terrible, because it's basically just a step-by-step account of the trial, much of it in a "he said, she said" format to some degree--not always between Mike and V, but between their families, lawyers, etc.  But the anger just keeps rising, because the slut-shaming is rampant and V's life is ruined in even more ways just because she likes to have sex with a dedicated partner and uuuuugh I'm just so angry.

I've never read anything by Hall before, so it's hard for me to say what the writing quality actually is here.  The thing is, the writing isn't that good--it's very stilted, and lurches about, and just does not flow very well at all.  But, because of the form this book takes, it's hard to tell if that's Hall's writing style of if it's just the style she has adapted for the character of Mike--who, let's be honest, doesn't exactly seem like he would be a great author.  And while the pacing is definitely bad in the second part of the book, it's not exactly ideal in the first part, either.  You can tell that something bad is coming and going to happen, but Mike spends a lot of time bragging about how fit he is, renovating his house or thinking about renovating his house, and eating things in the meantime, all the while pondering how said it is that everyone wants him even though, no, people don't actually really like psychos.

If you want a book that fills you with blind rage, this is the book for you.  If not, not ideal.

2 stars out of 5.

Howl's Moving Castle - Diana Wynne Jones (Howl's Castle #1)

Howl's Moving Castle is a book that has been on my radar for ages--since plenty before the movie--but which I have never read.  I had the sequel, Castle in the Air, that I bought at a discount bookstore at some point, and then never read because I realized it wasn't the first book in a series after I had already obtained it.  Eventually, I saw the Miyazaki adaptation, which is an absolutely beautiful film.  It has beautiful imagery and the characters are wonderful.  However, I had always found the movie's biggest weakness to be that it lacked a tightness of plot.  Things happened, but there was never a sense of how or why.  With that in mind, and knowing in advance that the book and the movie were going to vary to a pretty decent degree--much like the book and movie versions of Stardust--I was excited to see what the original story had in store.

The bones of the story and movie are much the same: Sophie Hatter is turned into an old woman because she annoys a witch, and exiles herself to the wilds beyond her town where she encounters Howl's moving castle, enters, and strikes a deal with the fire demon Calcifer that he will break her curse if she will find a way to get him out of the mysterious contract he has with Howl.  Beyond that, there are great differences, and so many instances of, "Oh, that's why that happened" that weren't clear in the film.  The feel of the two is definitely the same--the movie is more centered around a random war and Howl's decreasing humanity as he shapeshifts, whereas the book is more focused on the conflict with the Witch of the Waste and Sophie coming into her own instead of writing herself off as just the eldest sister, but the feel of both mediums matches, and to those who liked the beauty and whimsy of the movie, the book is equally suitable.  The book just makes so much more sense than the movie does, as well.  Character motivations and subplots are fleshed out, the world feels more complete, and all of the best moments of the movie--"May all your bacon burn"--are present and accounted for.

Now, for the usual book things.  This book has a fairly steady, sedate pace throughout, but things pick up quite abruptly at the end.  It did have a bit of a strange feel to it--Sophie and Michael and Howl have been drifting along for so long, occasionally tangling with others bust mostly working out their own inner dynamics, and suddenly BAM! there's a room full of people and an angry fire demon and trips across the desert and a curse coming true.  Additionally, Sophie and Howl's developing feelings for each other didn't feel real throughout.  Now, this is a book that was written for a young audience.  I certainly didn't expect a steamy romance from it.  However, I've read plenty of other books for young readers that had relationships in them that felt real and genuine and present without anyone needing to do any steamy scenes or even really any kissing--A College of Magics comes immediately to mind there.  Sophie and Howl just felt distant, and their relationship at the end of the book didn't really feel too different from the beginning.  The dual-world setup feels a bit strange, and I couldn't put my finger on why Jones decided to go that route--would having Howl's family in the same world really have made that much of a difference?  (And how did that woman get there, anyway???)  And finally, Sophie is more annoying here.  She's resigned to being a failure because she's the eldest, even when everyone around her is obviously overturning cliches, and at the same time she--an otherwise relatively sensible person--assumes that she knows more about magic than the actual magicians running around her.  All together, though, I still really, really liked this; the issues seem a bit bigger upon reflection but didn't really tarnish the reading experience at all.

It's always strange to read a book after you've seen its film adaptation; it has a kind of cognitive dissonance to it, where things are mostly as you'd expect, but slightly off, and we frequently have a default affection for the medium in which we first view something.  But in this case, the book is definitely stronger.  Miyazaki's version will remain my second favorite Ghibli movie (behind Spirited Away, of course), but I so, so enjoyed discovering this in book form, and I look forward to finally reading that sequel!  (And that sequel's sequel.)

4 stars out of 5.

Murder in Matera - Helene Sapinski

True crime stories are awesome--terrible, but awesome.  I just started listening to this amazing podcast, My Favorite Murder, which is both terrifying and fascinating at the same time.  I can't stop listening, or looking over my shoulder as I do so to make sure no one is lurking there with a large knife.  And so what could be better than a book combining true crime, history, and Italian food?

Murder in Matera is the story of Helene Stapinski's search for her family's fabled murder.  She grew up with her mother telling her stories of how her great-great-great (I think) grandmother, Vita, murdered someone in Matera, Italy, and fled to the United States with her children in tow, but lost one of them along the way.  Stapinski's family is apparently riddled with criminals, the most notable being her grandfather, Beansie, and she's haunted by a concern that criminality is a genetic trait and that she has passed it down to her children, and so she wants to "solve" the murder in order to figure out what happened...because apparently that will fix it?

There are some awesome things in this book and some things that bothered me.  First off, anything involving tracking down a murder--particularly one that took place over a century ago--is interesting.  Stapinski had to dig down into the archives of various towns in the region in order to find out what happened--with her great-great-great grandmother, grandfather, the padrone of the region, the children, etc.  She speaks some Italian but also hires a few locals to help her as researchers, and struggles with navigating the small-town atmospheres of the places she goes.  The scenery is clearly gorgeous and Stapinski captures it well, as she does with the food.  This is a book that will make you want to eat Italian food--all the Italian food, from fresh fruit to pasta puttanesca to pizza to--well, absolutely everything.  Even foods you don't like will sound good here.

But what I didn't like was when she takes broad liberties with Vita's story.  The actual details of the murder are eventually discovered, because they're contained in a court document.  But for Vita herself, Stapinski blatantly makes up her thoughts, feelings,a and actions, saying in the afterword that the relied on her "Gallitelli blood and bones" to know what her ancestor would have thought...which is ridiculous.  You can't just make up history.  The problem is that she wants Vita to be a saint, and so she decides that's how things must have been, without having any evidence of really knowing it.  Ascribing emotions and actions to people from the past without having any idea of what they actually did is a classic pitfall in talking about history, and Stapinski blunders into it full-throttle here.  These portions do not belong in a work of nonfiction.  Additionally, her obsessing about her children's genes got old quickly.  Apparently there is one study from Iceland about prisoners (or was it Finland?) that said many who committed violent crimes had a gene tied to aggression, but guess what?  You are not your genes!  Just because you have a gene tied to aggression doesn't mean you have to kill people!  In this way, Stapinski seems to throw her hands up in looking at the past, putting it all down to fate and not looking at responsibility for one's own actions, which really bothered me.

Overall, an okay book that could have been a good book, but strayed past its boundaries and into fiction instead of history too much.  The nonfiction portions are excellent, but the "creating stories out of whole cloth" portion left a bad taste in my mouth.

2 stars out of 5.

After the Wedding - Courtney Milan (Worth Saga #2)

Sometimes a book is a long time in coming.  This book, for example.  Courtney Milan self-publishes this series, and she has admitted to having zero loyalty to deadlines.  This means that I've been stalking this book's steadily-receding release date for about two years.  It's one thing when a book doesn't have a release date; it's another when it has one, and it keeps changing, getting your hopes up and then crushing them time and time again as the months march by with no sign of an actual book appearing.  And as those months march by and hope for a release diminishes, well, hope for that book's quality has to go up in proportion.  After all, it must mean an extraordinary story is being written if it's taken so long to appear, right?  Well...

Unfortunately, this book was not everything I had hoped it would be.  The premise is amazing: Camilla Worth, the missing sister of the heroine in the first book, is forced to marry a man at gunpoint.  We last saw Camilla turning up at her sister's house asking for her help; this book takes a step back, relating the events that led up to that reunion and what came after.  Camilla has been shuttled from place to place, always hoping to find love and belonging but never actually finding it, though hope springs as eternal for her as it did for Milan fans hoping this book would ever be published.  While she didn't want to be married at gunpoint, she's hopeful as ever--maybe this will be the time it will stick, that someone will stand by her and choose her.  Her groom is Adrian Hunter, the black nephew of a bishop.  Adrian has a loving family, even if he doesn't see them terribly often and even if some of his brothers died during the American Civil War.  He wants his uncle to finally acknowledge him and the rest of his family after a lifetime of pretending that Adrian is someone else to him--a page, an amanuensis, whatever--and he's willing to do almost anything to earn that acknowledgement...even if it involves spying on his uncle's main political rival.  But Adrian also wants a romance like his parents had, and being married at gunpoint does not factor into that.

This book has so much going for it.  Beyond the strong premise, it has an interracial relationship, set in a place and time--Victorian England--where such romances are extremely rare.  It's nice to see this!  Adrian is a hero who isn't nobility, though he's still wealthy.  There are hints that Camilla is bisexual, or at least open to experimenting, and several other characters blatantly are bisexual, and Adrian's uncles--one by blood and one by relation--are gay (and also the stars of their own story in the compilation Hamilton's Battalion).  Camilla is a heroine who isn't a virgin.  There's so much going on here that could be amazing, which actually isn't surprising, because Milan has always been very vocal about a greater need for diversity in romance.

And yet the book falls flat.  Much of this is due to Camilla.  She is, quite frankly, annoying.  She manages to be Eeyore-level depressed and yet ridiculously peppy at the same time.  She believes she's cursed, in a way, not to be loved because she abandoned her family for comfort and security when she was twelve.  And yet she keeps looking for it.  This is fine!  This is a great character background.  But she harps on it, repeats it so much, that I wanted to slap her and tell her to think of something else at some point.  She has literally no other thoughts or hobbies other than sighing over wanting love and belonging while moaning that she doesn't believe it.  And then, of course, she has a moment of "Yes, I do deserve it," and no internal conflict from then on.

Adrian is also perhaps a bit too nice.  Not that heroes need to be assholes--quite the contrary.  But his niceness was syrupy to the point that he lacked backbone until, like Camilla, he suddenly didn't.  Really, what was lacking in these characters was growth.  They changed, but they did not necessarily grow, and that was disappointing, because Milan has always been so good at showing how her characters grow and evolve and improve.

This book's strongest elements, other than a diverse cast, might have actually boiled down to the set up for future books.  Theresa's character set up and the hints for Anthony, Priya, everyone else, were so great.  I have high hopes for future books in this series, but I wonder if maybe Milan got a little too tied up in this one and it just didn't work out in the long run.

3 stars out of 5.

From Duke Till Dawn - Eva Leigh (London Underground #1)

I've hit a point where there aren't a lot of historical romances I'm looking forward to reading.  This sounds ridiculous; of course there are tons of historical romances out there.  Probably even a lot of good ones!  The problem is finding them, because a lot of them are awful.  So I carefully poked through the ebooks available from my local library and finally got out a few, From Duke Till Dawn being one of them.  A few other ones got returned within reading a few chapters, but I pushed through with this one.

Overall, it was a cute book.  The heroine, Cassandra, is a con artist, which is something I haven't encountered in a historical romance before.  Straight-up thieves, yes, but con women?  Not so much.  Two years before the start of the book, Cassandra conned Alex, the Duke of Greyland, out of five hundred pounds, and then slept with him in a mutual fit of passion.  But she disappeared before he woke up, and he's spent the past two years trying to get over her while simultaneously trying to woo a young woman who would be a suitable wife.  That arrangement has just gone down the drain when Alex finds Cassandra again--running a gaming hell.  And when he quickly finds out about the con, he wants revenge...but he still likes her, and also wants to help her when her partner skips town and leaves Cassandra with all of his debts.  #drama

The problem here is that the initial connection, the sizzle, happens entirely off the page, because it happened in that initial encounter two years before we actually get to the story.  For the entirety of the book, we're told how the two characters are experiencing all these feelings again, but because we never actually get to see that, there doesn't seem to be much of a blooming of romance here.

Without a lot of romance, what is a historical romance to rely on?!  Well, in this case, a few things.  This is not a sweet romance (there are sex scenes, and some of them are considerably raunchier than a lot of historical romance missionary sex--at a sex club, against a wall, from behind, etc.) but many parts have the feel of it.  This is because, while we don't see a lot of the chemistry part of the relationship, what we do see is the growing caring and trust between the two.  This is something that's underplayed in a lot of romances, which focus too much on the sizzle.  So, while this hasn't struck a balance, it was nice to see an emphasis on other parts of the relationship...while still allowing the characters to get down and dirty when the mood called for it.

That said, Alex is possibly an unrealistically awesome person.  I can't think of many, if any, instances in which a man who found out the woman he was in love with had conned him would dive head-first into helping her.  He's a duke; he doesn't need the five hundred pounds back, which is made glaring obvious again and again and again.  If he really wanted revenge, as he swears he does upon this revelation, he could have just left Cassandra to her debtors.  Of course, he's too honorable of a person to do that, but this whole situation--which, unfortunately, anchors the entire plot--just seems a little weak, to say the least.

The writing itself is decent.  The pacing is good--not great, but good.  There are, for instance, a few occasions when the characters went shopping or for desserts instead of actually trying to accomplish anything.  While I love these scenes in most books, with such pressing circumstances surrounding these two characters, these outings seemed a little out of place.

Still, I enjoyed this book, and while I'm not rushing to read everything Eva Leigh has ever written, I'm certainly open to reading her other works in the future.

3 stars out of 5.

Flat Broke with Two Goats - Jennifer McGaha

This was a book I saw and disregarded, but then it came up again as the Big Library Read.  I probably should have factored this in to reading it, because I actually disliked the last Big Library Read (The Hundred Lies of Lizzie Lovett) quite a bit.  But hey, if everyone was reading it, I wanted to be cognizant of what everyone was talking about, and so I picked it up from the library.

This is a memoir of a time when McGaha and her husband owed over a hundred thousand dollars in taxes to the federal government and over eight thousand to the state of North Carolina.  They lost their house and the friends they had bought it from in the process.  They moved to a crumbling and snake-infested cabin in the Appalachians.  And McGaha blamed her husband for all of it, as he had handled their accounts, even though she was complicit in it all.  You can imagine what a strain this could be on a marriage.

McGaha says she doesn't blame her husband, not entirely, though she certainly put all the blame on him when these events first unfolded.  But really, she still does seem to be blaming him entirely, and she certainly never demonstrated a willingness to take ownership of their financial situation, either before the owed taxes or after it.  She worked as a part-time English instructor at a college, and when she realized she'd need to get a full-time job, she sniffed and turned her nose up at anything that required her to dress professionally (even business casual!) or exhibit the barest minimum of organization, saying she couldn't do it and who would hire her anyway?  This does not seem to bode well for her students; how many papers must she have lost or grades must she have bungled if she couldn't be organized?  Excuses.  I smell them.  Really, what she seems to have wanted was to kick back her feet, drink mixed drinks, and let someone do all the work for her.  And to be fair, who doesn't want that?  But we can't all have that, and that's what McGaha seems to refuse to accept, heading for the hills as soon as things turn sour.

McGaha's background is in writing, and some of the writing here is absolutely lovely.  The descriptions of the Appalachians, of food, are wonderful.  But the entire book is so suffused with McGaha's bumbling around and refusing to take personal responsibility (Oh, you mean moving several states away from your spouse, leaving him in the snake-ridden cabin while you bopped around living your #bestlife, didn't result in your marriage getting better?  WHO KNEW?) that it's hard to see past the author's entitlement and how she wallows in how her privilege didn't give her everything she ever wanted by default.  And even if that was how the events unfolded--and things do unfold in less than satisfactory manners--the writing of a memoir is a time to reflect on how you ended up where you are, what you could have done better, and how the events of your life have changed you.  McGaha doesn't do any of that, which makes this come across as, "Hey, I'll write a book about this and make lots of money and pay off my taxes!"  Which at least has her doing something, but probably not the best something, particularly when considering the product she put out for that purpose.

I had initially given this book three stars for the writing, but upon reflection, I'm downgrading it to two.  If you liked The Rules Do Not Apply for Ariel Levy's entitlement and avoidance of responsibility, you'll probably like this too.  Otherwise, stay away.

2 stars out of 5.

Wildfire - Ilona Andrews (Hidden Legacy #3)

I have fabulous news for those following this series: we're getting three more books.  But not about Nevada--no no, instead the new ones will take place a few years down the road, and will feature Nevada's younger sister Carolina as the main character.  This is excellent news, not just for fans of the series but for Wildfire itself, because by far the weakest part of the book was the ending, which was wildly incomplete.

This book picks up where the last one left off.  Nevada has to face down that her grandmother, the most powerful truth-oriented mage, Victoria Tremaine, who wants to bring Nevada to heel as a member of House Tremaine.  To ward her off, Nevada could declare her own House Baylor, but it means putting not only herself but her relatives in the spotlight and revealing all of the secrets they've kept so carefully hidden.  And then there's what declaring herself as a House could potentially do to Nevada's relationship with Rogan.  Oh, and you know, the whole thing where people are still trying to bring down the government.  You know, the day to day stuff.

Overall, this book was well-constructed.  The main and subplots tied together well.  Nevada and Rogan's relationship wasn't in the spotlight, but the strain placed on it by their circumstances were evident, and despite a few snafus, they handled things as adults.  There's nothing worse than a romantic conflict that could be resolved by the characters literally talking to each other for five minutes, and that's what Nevada and Rogan did when necessary--talked it out.

Some awesome new aspects of the Hidden Legacy came to light here, too--the history behind siren powers, the people who keep the House records and how they keep people from interfering with trials, a look at how these powers can be applied in the practical world.  For example, the applications of having powers over fungi.  It sounds lame, but when you factor in making them rapidly mutate in the search for new antibiotics, that's suddenly a lot more practical and a lot more profitable.  All of these things play in very well.  But as I mentioned above, this book had a big flaw at the end, and that's that it felt drastically in complete.  The main overarching plot of the series is not resolved at all--which is great now that we're getting three more books, but remember, this was put forth as the last book in a trilogy and those three extra books weren't planned when this was released, which makes a sloppy ending a huge flaw.  There's also an annoying thing with a past love interest (well, not really love interest, but kind of?) of Rogan's coming back up--he's not pursuing her, but she's pursuing him, hard core, and he definitely doesn't shut it down as much as he should have.  You can still care for and support someone while explicitly saying, "There never was and never will be anything romantic between us."

Overall, I did really enjoy this.  I'm glad to see there will be three books about Carolina, because she was definitely my favorite character in these books, and where the authors left her was ripe for development.  But those books are going to be a long time coming, so for now...

4 stars out of 5.

The Magicians - Lev Grossman (The Magicians #1)

What an awful book.  I hope the TV series is better, because this was a work of pretension and drabble that I haven't encountered since I read The Name of the Wind.  (Yes, I went there.)

The Magicians is basically Fifty Shades of Gray for the Chronicles of Narnia, but with less BDSM and better writing.  What does this mean?  It's fanfiction, people.  Come on.  It's Grossman reading the Narnia books--particularly The Magician's Nephew in this case--and going, "Hey, I can write that better.  With alcohol and drugs and threesomes!"

This is a book that thrives off the nostalgia it invokes for its vastly superior source material.  Here, the plot follows the whiny main character Quentin, who is determined to be unhappy and destroy any bit of happiness he may possess, and even admits this at various times, even when he has pretty much everything.  Quentin is obsessed with a series of books about Fillory (Narnia) that is found by going through the back of a clock (wardrdobe) by the Chatwins (Pevensies).  The books came to a rather unsatisfactory end, but when Quentin is recruited to a school for magic instead of college, he thinks he's found something even better.  What follows could have been an excellent magical school story...except then Grossman ruined it by tacking on a Fillory/Narnia adventure in the second half of the book that had none of the charm or appeal of the first half, and way more ridiculous drama and stupid decision making.  Other parallels between Fillory and Narnia are the magic buttons/rings, the Neitherlands/Wood Between the Worlds, four thrones that can only be occupied by humans from Earth rather than by anyone from their own land...you know, that sort of stuff.

That said, there were some cool parts of this book.  The incident with The Beast at Brakebills was suitably chilling.  Brakebills South was awesome.  The Neitherlands, despite being an obvious riff on the Wood Between the Worlds, were very, very cool, and I wish we had actually seen more of them.  Brakebills itself offered a heck of a lot of charm, and was in fact the strongest part of the book--stronger than any individual character, setting, or plot line was.  But the insufferable characters, who upon departing Brakebills immediately became a full bunch of assholes rather than just entitled schoolkids, were a huge drag.  They showed no signs of character growth or attempts at redemption.  They held all the power in the world, and instead of choosing to do something with it, they got drunk, did drugs, hurt each other, and scammed non-magical people.  Even Alice, who I initially had hopes for, I ended up hating.  I have no sympathy for anything that happened to any of these people.

After reading this book, I immediately went back and read The Magician's Nephew and got a start on The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, too.  The Magicians' power lies almost entirely in what Grossman draws from Narnia...so why not just read the books that did it right the first time?

2 stars out of 5.

The Rules Do Not Apply - Ariel Levy

"Daring to think that the rules do not apply is the mark of a visionary. It’s also a symptom of narcissism."

How right Levy is in putting that statement out there so early in the book.  It sets the tone for what is to come after, when Levy's entire life falls apart in pretty short order.  It's not a book of great reflection, but in a few small moments--like that one--she hints that maybe, just maybe, she was being narcissistic, and some of this dissolution--not all of it, but some--was partly her fault.

Ariel Levy presents in her memoir the story of a life coming unraveled.  A happy marriage maybe wasn't so happy after all, on either side; a baby died; and everything else went down the drain, too.  Levy starts her account at the end, or nearly at it, and then unspools back to the beginning before everything went right, and then wrong, to tell things in chronological order.  Well, mostly chronological order; there are some flashbacks to her younger days, but mostly the chronology isn't disturbed, and it's easy to see when the timeline changes.

That said, Levy isn't necessarily the most reliable narrator for her own story.  Though there are a few short sentences, buried in the rest of the book, that hint that maybe, maybe she sees her complicity in some of the things that happened here, much of the book is very entitled white girl whining.  (And as an entitled white girl, I know how that looks.)  Levy is, of course, not to blame for her miscarriage, no matter what some of the people in her life seem to think.  However, she barely pauses to consider that hey, her wife's alcoholism might have had something to do with their marriage falling apart, but maybe Levy's own ongoing affair had something to do with it, too?  Just maybe?

Levy has a background in journalism, and it shows here.  The sentences and some of the imagery are wonderful; the pictures she paints of Africa, of the lions, of Mongolia, all of that is wonderful.  It's so wonderful that it's easy to miss how unreflective and unrepentant Levy truly is.  She admits in some small degree that maybe she's a narcissist, drops two or three sentences here or there about, "I didn't think about this then," but never reflects on it later, and ultimately never seems to grow as a person.  There's not a lot of resolution in the book for this, either.  Of course, you can easily Google her name and find out what happened to her, but including something of it might have shown some personal growth, and that's something that was sadly lacking here.  Perhaps this is because there was no internal struggle that would have propelled growth, but rather instead just a stream of whinging, "But it's not fair!  No one understands me!"

Levy's writing carries this book.  But she doesn't seem like a great person, and the lack of reflection or evidence of growth in this book lowered it quite a bit from what I was hoping it would be.

3 stars out of 5.

Little Fires Everywhere - Celeste Ng

Little boxes on the hillside, little boxes made of ticky tacky; little boxes on the hillside and they all look just the same.

Shaker Heights is a seemingly perfect community.  The Richardsons are a seemingly perfect family; sure, the youngest daughter, Izzy, is completely odd, but--oh, wait, Izzy burned the house down?  Okay, maybe something is up here after all.

This story focuses around two families: the Richardsons and the Warrens.  The Richardsons, including Mr., Mrs., and children Lexie, Trip, Moody, and Izzy (in descending order for age) have lived in Shaker Heights for Mrs. Richardson's entire life, and those of her children.  Izzy is odd, yes, but the family is basically a perfect picture of upper-middle class America in the late 90s.  The Warrens are a much smaller family, just mother Mia and daughter Pearl.  They've lived a nomadic life driven by Mia's artistic tendencies, but have finally settled in the Richardsons' rental property so that Pearl can have some stability in high school.  Soon Pearl, Lexie, Moody, and Trip are hanging out regularly, and Izzy seeks out Mia, who she feels understands her better than her own family does.  The two families are intertwined, and then abruptly split apart by a custody battle in which neither family is directly involved.

This seems like something of a strange premise for a book, and I was skeptical; how would Ng make this work?  I  liked Everything I Never Told You, but I wasn't amazed by it.  Still, she has a way of writing family life and making it compelling, and that comes through in this book as well.  And while EINTY dealt with suicide (or did it?) this book revolves, deeply and intimately, around issues of motherhood.  What makes a mother?  What makes a good mother?  Is being a blood relative enough?  Or does love matter more?  Or connection to culture?  What matters most here?  And it can't all matter most, and there can't be a balance of it, because that's not a possibility in this particular custody battle, and there are no easy answers surrounding it.  Ng has crafted the ideal scenario for this battle to play out, because everyone is right to some degree, and no one has the right answer--for May Ling/Mirabelle, or for anyone else in the book.

The crafting of the central scenario was well done, though it didn't come into play until fairly late in the book.  Much of the page time is spent building up the characters and the relationships between them so that Ng can later tear them apart, though this is not a tapestry that unravels from all angles; no, there is a central person behind that, and despite having good intentions, she is not very likable.  However, several parts of this book didn't quite work as well as they could have.  First, Izzy was an underutilized character, getting far less page time than the other members of the cast.  I suppose this is because she is supposed to be the person who is sitting back and watching everything, and then acts when no one else is looking.  However, this isn't apparent until much later, and if it had been woven more throughout the book that Izzy knew things that people weren't giving her credit for, there could have been a much better sense of foreboding built up.  Second, the mothers' time lines weren't well woven throughout the rest of the story; they were just dropped in big chunks, and if they'd been broken up a bit and better interspersed with the main timeline, then it would have come across as more even character development instead of info-dumping.

Still, I quite enjoyed this.  I'm not raging that I didn't pick it up from Book of the Month back in 2017, but it was a good book nonetheless and I'm glad I got to it now.

4 stars out of 5.

Dating-ish - Penny Reid (Knitting in the City #6)

Wanting a good jolt of solid romance after a series of books that didn't skew so much in the "romantic tendencies" direction, I turned to Dating-ish, mainly because I already had it on my Kindle and I didn't have to go looking for it.  It was also the next in Penny Reid's Knitting in the City series; the former book in this series, Happily Ever Ninja, was a total dud for me, but I've liked a lot of what Reid has written, and so I was determined to forge onward and give the series another chance.

Oh, and the hero, Matt, had intrigued me in the previous book.

So here's the story: Journalist Marie hasn't had a lot of luck in the dating world, and so she's disappointed but not terribly surprised when she meets up with a guy she met online, finds him to look nothing like she thought--still cute, but completely different from his description and picture--and kind of a total weirdo who asks her invasive questions, part of which was brought on by the book she was reading, but still.  The weirdo is Matt, a scientist who's working on developing a robot that can give love and affection place of actual human connections; he's also the neighbor and long-time acquaintance of Marie's friend Fiona, and the two cross paths again when Matt shows up with Fiona's husband while Marie is present.  Matt was asking the weird questions as part of the research he's conducting for his robot, and he still wants Marie's data.  And Marie needs a story.  So she strikes a deal: in exchange for her data, Matt will have to let her have access to his research.  And if he doesn't?  She'll write a different story, about this creepy guy presumably taking women on dates only to do research on them. And so the two fall into an uneasy partnership, and then a friendship, and then...more?  Maybe, but Marie wants a relationship, and Matt doesn't, so they put the brakes on that, but there's still that more lingering there in the background.

This is a slow-burn romance, far more than Reid's other works.  Neanderthal Seeks Human, the first book in the series, was billed as a slow burn, but it definitely was not.  This fits the slow burn profile far more.  Marie and Matt don't like each other, and then they do, but they don't act on it.  And it's not a friends-with-benefits relationship, either, which is also sometimes billed as a slow burn.  It's a real friendship.  Maybe a bit more affectionate than many, sure, but there is no making out, so no sex, not even any real cuddling.  It's just a friendship, until--of course--that critical moment when it's not.

Marie, the heroine and only point of view character--except for the epilogue, but at the point, it doesn't really count--had not really interested me in previous books.  She was just kind of there.  Reid clearly made a bid for Marie to be more intriguing in HEN, but I wasn't convinced.  And I'm still not entirely convinced, honestly.  Does the book work as a whole?  Yes.  But Marie on her own is just not that fascinating, and if the rest of the series hadn't been propping this volume up, I might not have liked it as much.  Marie just doesn't have much going on.  She likes to learn things, but we don't really see this.  She's a reporter, but we don't really ever see the evolution of that or her skills put to the test.  She had a happy childhood and happy friends and her only real character quirk is that hey, she had one serious relationship that didn't work out, but seriously?  That's it?  Her story is far more interesting than she is, which isn't a good thing.  Though she works at a magazine that's not a fashion one, so at least she's not completely stereotypical, I guess?

Matt interested me far more, and I was quite disappointed that we didn't get any point-of-view chapters from him.  Most of Reid's books have some perspective flipping, and this one didn't, and it's one of the ones that I think could most have used it.  We only get snippets of him through other people's eyes, and it's not enough.  His experience and perspectives are more interesting than Marie, so it's quite a pity that he got sidelined on the perspective front.

Overall, this was a great step up from Happily Ever Ninja, far more in line with the early books of the series in terms of feel and general not awfulness of the her.  (Greg was awful.  I hated him.)  I was pretty pleased by this, and I'm looking forward to the final book in the series, when we finally get to Kat and Dan!

4 stars out of 5.