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.