The Astonishing Color of After - Emily X. R. Pan

Book of the Month sometimes has some interesting selections.  They tend to be mostly literary fiction or suspense/thriller; I guess the judges' favored genres tend in this direction.  However, every now and then something very different slips in.  Something like Exit West or this one, The Astonishing Color of After, which has a definitive magical realism bend to it.

The story is about Leigh, whose mother commits suicide while Leigh is finally, finally kissing her best friend, Axel.  But while Leigh's mother might be dead, she is not gone, because Leigh is one thousand percent certain that instead of going away, her mother has become a red bird.  Her father thinks she's crazy, but some strange occurrences as well, and he takes Leigh to Taiwan to meet her maternal grandparents, whom Leigh has never seen due to a rift between them and her mother.  Leigh wants to find her mother, to figure out what she's supposed to know or remember, and finds herself on that quest with her grandmother and a strange young woman named Feng.

This is an interesting take on magical realism.  The things that Leigh experiences are definitely  happening.  They are not in her head.  Other people even sometimes acknowledge them.  But there's a whole aspect to it that only Leigh notices, that only she can see, or only she can remember, and I haven't encountered that in other magical realism books, which tend to have everyday magic more closely woven into the real world as a whole.  I spent a lot of the book flopping between "it's magical realism, no, it's just plain fantasy," but overall I think that magical realism is a more apt descriptor, just given how the magical plays into the story and characters.

Most of this book is set in Taiwan, but there are also flashbacks to parts of other people's lives and Leigh's own evolving relationship with Axel.  I really liked Leigh and Axel.  They're teenagers, and they do stupid things and have stupid fights, but their pull is undeniable.  They have a connection, and despite Leigh shutting down after her mother's suicide, that connection persists and grows even when they're separate and not talking...with a little magical help, of course.  But I think the aspect of this book that most intrigued me was Feng.  I had some idea of who she had to be, but I think Pan did a good job of concealing her true origins and revealing them in a way that wasn't designed to trick you but to make you put together all of the little pieces that had come before.

There were some things I didn't like, however.  First, Leigh's father is horrible.  Not in a typical "Leigh is a teenager and doesn't get along with her father" type of way, but in a "I knew my wife was depressed and so I pretty much abandoned her and my daughter rather than deal with it" type of way.  He hates that Leigh loves art.  He sends her off to a camp that she hates to the very depths of her soul and doesn't tell her anything regarding her mother's health, even though Leigh is the one who cares for her mother, because her father isn't present.  Pan tries to reconcile Leigh and her father at the end, but I am not at all convinced that he would suddenly become so supportive of her, or that he would become an involved father.

Second...can we talk about the pretentious color words?  Pan uses so many descriptive color words that I have never, ever encountered before, and I have a large vocabulary and am widely read.  Which means if I haven't encountered these words, I doubt her target young adult audience has.  I actually started highlighting them as I went through the book, there were so many!  The result is that there would be "[some crazy word] orange" and I would just disregard the descriptor, because "orange" was the part that mattered.  There are so many words for colors and hues and shades that the average reader knows, so I'm not sure why Pan veered away from those and to these spelling bee ones instead.

Overall, I did like this quite a bit.  Leigh's father was awful and the vocabulary was eye-roll worthy at times, but the story itself is solid.  The magical realism is done well, Leigh is a compelling main character, and the setting of Taiwan is a strong one.

4 stars out of 5.

A Discovery of Witches - Deborah Harkness (All Souls #1)

A Discovery of Witches had been on my to-read list for a while, in a sort of vague, "That sounds interesting, maybe someday" way.  It bumped its way up towards the top when I needed a book involving Halloween for my reading challenge--while books that take place entirely on Halloween seem to be few and far between, books that have a climax or conclusion involving Halloween seem to be more common, and this book is one of them.

Diana is witch in a world where there are basically four types of humaoids: humans, and then three types of "creatures," witches/wizards, vampires, and daemons.  But Diana has scorned her witchy ancestry and tries to use magic as little as possible.  This changes when, in the course of conducting research for a conference, she stumbles across an enchanted manuscript that no one else has been able to get for hundreds of years.  Diana doesn't really care for it, and sends it back to the stacks, where it vanishes again--and finds herself being stalked by all kinds of creatures who want her to get it back for them, including vampire Matthew, with whom Diana quickly develops a romantic attachment.

This is a long book for its type.  The pacing is decidedly better in the first part, when Diana is in Oxford and is being increasingly stalked by creatures and little bits of her magic occasionally pop up.  Once she and Matthew decamp for France, however, things slow down.  There's meals and horseback riding and dancing in a castle he built.  Yes, there's a little bit of drama while they're there, but overall the pace is much slower, and the slow pace continues--again with one anomaly--once they move on from France to the US.  And while I normally like a strong romantic plot in my novels, no matter what their primary genre falls into, this one just didn't seem to hit the right points.  There's no sizzling chemistry or attraction between Diana and Matthew; in fact, the repeated reminders of how cold he is seems like a complete turn-off.  There aren't any good kissing scenes, or any sort of other scenes, if you know what I mean.  (Which, you know, aren't necessary, but if you're going to write a 600-page book relying heavily on romance...)

Diana herself is also a Special Snowflake Supreme.  She has All the Powers, which of course no one else has, and is the only witch--literally the only one--to be stronger than her parents were.  Now, I am not entirely against Special Snowflakes.  In some cases, I actually quite like them.  Diana was obnoxious, though.  Not as a person, but as a concept.  There's no sign of her magic her entire life, and then suddenly she views a report of her DNA and they start popping out all over the place, stronger than anyone has ever seen.  This seemed a bit odd, honestly.  Apparently the use of her magic is tied to "need," but that didn't seem to be the case in most of the instances in which her magic made its appearance.

Overall, this was an okay one.  It was one I found myself picking at rather than just reading, which is generally an indication that I'm not enjoying it very much.  There were some interesting concepts here, but the pacing and romance were off, and Diana's Special Snowflake status was annoying.  I also have absolutely no interest in where Diana and Matthew are going next, so I think I'm probably unlikely to read the second book.

2 stars out of 5.

Bleaker House - Nell Stevens

The happy, pale turquoise and penguin clutching a page  on the cover caught my eye while perusing books at a well-known local bookstore a few weeks ago.  Unfortunately, I'd already bought a few other books at said store (at full cover price--ouch) and didn't have it in the budget for this one.  Luckily, the library came through for me, because I'd skimmed the first few pages and was intrigued by the premise of this memoir: young woman finishes MFA and, with the opportunity of going anywhere in the world for up to three months, chooses Bleaker Island, a tiny hunk of land in the Falklands (just north of Antarctica) in the middle of the southern hemisphere's winter, in the hopes that a sense of extreme isolation will give her the discipline and concentration she needs to write a novel.  Does it work?  Well...

I found this a charming book set in a depressing AF setting.  Stevens wants to be a writer, desperately.  She picks Bleaker Island as her spot to write out of a sense of wanting to be different; and don't all writers?  But upon her arrival, she finds herself thinking, "If the island is Bleaker, it's bleaker than what?"  The answer: everything.  It is a desolate place, as the Falklands in general seem to be, at least in the winter.  It is devoid of fresh produce, and regular contact with the outside world, with a language that has evolved out of several kinds of language into its own weird sort of dialect.  Nell finds herself scrutinized by citizens who are wary of outsiders in general and writers in particular, and then eventually completely and literally isolated: the only human on Bleaker Island for six weeks.  There, she struggles to apply everything she learned in school to the creation of a novel set in the Falklands, and on Bleaker in particular.  Ultimately, the novel doesn't work, and what she produced--in her diary from her stay, in her attempts at the novel, in short stories from school, in snippets of her life leading up to the trip to the Falklands--became this book instead.

I did like Stevens' writing.  She has a dry and self-deprecating sense of humor, and while her time in the Falklands might not have turned her into a novelist (at least not a published one), it certainly seemed to let herself know herself more, though this seems to have come in an epiphany moment near the end of her stay rather than in a slow but steady stream of self-realization.  In this, she was successful, and I think the book showed that.  She realizes that not everything she has to write is amazing.  She realizes that being alone and being lonely are very different things.  And she realizes that even if she's not going to write a novel based on her time in the Falklands, she can still certainly write a book.

This was a trip taken on a whim; while Stevens has some justification for her choice, she seems aware that it's flimsy and that she's going primarily because no one else was, and that even her written proposal sounded pretty silly once it was read back.  But she definitely got something out of it, I think we can safely say.  The structure of the book feeds into this idea; while it starts with Nell's arrival on Bleaker, it jumps back with the first chapter to do a mostly-chronological account of her time in the Falklands, interspersed with snippets of her life beforehand and other writing projects she worked on, mostly a few short stories in their full form.  Because she includes pieces of her life, you can see her penchant for including life in her writing, just as she was hoping to do with basing a book on Bleaker.  It's an insight into her creative process, and the evolution of it over time.  I personally thought it was interesting--most aspiring writers probably will, if only to see someone else sharing in their struggles.  But other people might not.

Overall, this was a book I really liked.  It's light, but not fluffy, and while there's nothing world- or even life-shattering about it, I found it was a book I could empathize with...though the Falklands are probably off my list of places to visit, honestly.

4 stars out of 5.

Tower of Dawn - Sarah J. Maas (Throne of Glass #6)

Upon reading this book, I had to immediately go back to my reviews of former Throne of Glass books.  This is a strange volume--a book that was supposed to be a novella and ended up at nearly seven hundred pages, taking place concurrently with the prior book in the series, Empire of Storms.  In this, Maas tries to fill in the Chaol-shaped hole that was left in EoS, something that I had mentioned in my review of that book, but I was looking for something else.  The sentence fragments.  Dear lord, did the other books have these sentence fragments?  I don't seem to have mentioned them in my reviews, if they did, and I know I mentioned the use of this "convention" in another book that it drove me crazy in, The Rose and the Dagger.  Either way, whether they were used so blatantly in the other books or not, it is not an excuse, this is a terrible convention and should be abandoned.  Seriously.  The sentence fragments that run amok here continuously yanked me out of the story and had me pounding my head against my Kindle.  Seriously, Maas, did sentence subjects and verbs hurt you as a child?

Now, with that out of the way...

This book dumps Chaol and his traveling companion/kind-of-girlfriend Nesryn on the southern continent of the Throne of Glass world, in Antica, the city of thirty-six gods and the capital of an empire.  If you were looking for a foil to the white, European-based Adarlan, Antica is your answer to it.  With a variety of races and cultures, it's definitely different from Adarlan, in a good way.  Chaol is hoping that the healers who live on the southern continent can fix the paralysis caused by his injuries in the fight against Adarlan's king two books ago.  The healer he is assigned apparently hails from another novella, which I have not read--Yrene Towers.  She is, of course, the most talented and most beautiful healer evah.  While we're on the topic, is Antica not allowed to have people who are the best?  Yrene, from the north, is the best healer.  Nesryn, from the north--her father is from Antica, but Nesryn herself is from the north--is the best archer.  Our absent characters, Aelin and company, are the best at assorted other things.  No one in Antica is apparently the best, and if they are, I'm sure one of those northern characters will soon become interested in that skill and master it and be the best instead.  So, yes, maybe still some subtle racist contexts here.  Hmm...

Anyway.  Chaol gets a hot healer, and Nesryn gets a hot royal who rides a giant bird and thinks she's da bomb, so there goes that relationship.  At first I was onboard with the relationship swapping in this series; after all, few people in real life spend their entire lives with their first romantic partner.  But at this point...just get on with it already.  Anyway (again) Chaol and Nesryn soon split up, Nesryn going off in search of info on the menace that might have followed them to Antica and Chaol...staying put because he's paralyzed, which is a bummer for him, though of course the gorgeous Yrene helps to ease his sorrows.

Remember how Harry Potter spent the entire book in Half Blood Prince angsting over Sirius' death?  This is that book for Chaol.  Except, whereas Harry had faced a very real loss (even if it was still a bit overblown) Chaol was angsty over all kinds of things that, really, he just needed to get over and should have been over already.  This sounds extremely callous of me, I know.  And some of the things, yes, he could feel guilty over, even if they were not directly his fault.  But when the person who is literally going to restore your ability to walk tells you, "Hey, I can do this, but you need to work through what is holding you back.  I will help you do this, but you need to make the effort," and you still refuse to make the effort, well, you lose some of the sympathy factor.  And beyond the healing, there is really not much that goes on for Chaol in this book.  Nesryn only has slightly more action.  There's not a lot of pep in these pages.

Now.  This was not necessarily a bad book.  I liked aspects of it quite a bit--I did like Antica, and the ruks, and Yrene and the Tower.  It's just that this book, and this series, is getting a bit, well, tired.  Repetitive, if I dare say so.  There are only so many times you can try to throw in the same twist before people start calling it, and I saw all of them coming from a mile away--which does not bode well for the one volume remaining.  I'm betting it's going to be pretty much a direct copy of the finale of A Court of Wings and Ruin, because Maas' bread and butter seems to be presenting the same book again and again.  They have fun aspects; they are light and fast and enjoyable to read.  And this same critique could be said of many other authors and genres (romance, anyone?).  Buuuuut you can only write the same story so many times before you lose interest, you know?  Also, there are questions raised that I'm not sure Maas can properly answer at this point, because they seem to be running contrary to what has been set up in other books--like the whole spiders thing?  Why are they not allied in all kinds of different ways with the bad forces running about?  And Maeve?  Really?  That's the route you're taking?

Whatever.  I'm over it.

I'm in this for the long haul, I guess, since there's only one book left.  But it had better be a doozy, because I'm getting kind of tired of this.

2.5 stars out of 5.

The Death of Ivan Ilych - Leo Tolstoy

The Death of Ivan Ilych isn't my first Tolstoy.  That would be War and Peace (the foreword to Ivan Ilych talks about how Tolstoy used W&P as a vehicle to discuss theories of history!!!) and I followed it up a year or two later with Anna Karenina.  But Ivan Ilych wouldn't have made it onto my reading list if not for it being a book club selection at The Deliberate Reader, because it is a novella, clocking in at around 75 pages depending on your edition and format.  Starting with the funeral of the eponymous Ivan Ilych, the story then jumps back to the beginning of his fall, first slow and then fast, in a series of short chapters.

I don't really like short stories because I typically don't find them to have enough substance for me.  There are some exceptions, of course; Neil Gaiman can write an amazing fantasy short story when the mood strikes him, and I've read some absolutely wonderful literary ones, as well.  Unfortunately for me, Ivan Ilych didn't fall into this wonderful character.  It is exactly what it purports to be: an account of Ilych's death.  Always wanting more and better, his greed drives him to spend beyond his means to no success, and it's in the process of this spending and remodeling of a new home that he quite literally falls, injuring himself in the process.  The injury initially seems minor, but drags him down towards a slow and painful death that's not only torturous to him, but to everyone around him, none of whom seem to particularly like him to begin with.  In the process of dying, Ilych reflects on his life--he feels that he has been wronged by dying, because he lived as he should have, though questions of things like love and meaning come to him as he lies in excruciating pain for weeks before passing away.

This is a contemplative story, and one that's probably not suited for everyone at every point in life.  Several of Ilych's acquaintances reflect on how he might die, but they couldn't possibly, and that's something that I think a lot of readers can empathize with.  After all, most of us don't spend a lot of time dwelling on our own mortality, and I suppose getting us to do so was part of Tolstoy's goal in writing this tale.  Ilych is not an interesting person; he's a mid-level bureaucrat in the justice system and his life is not exactly filled with adventure.  He wants to better himself and sees money as a way to do that.  He has family issues.  Most of us share these qualities, to some degree, as well as some rather unlikable ones that those close to us come to know.  In this way, though we might not like Ilych, I think we can probably understand where he's coming from, why he finds his demise so unfair, etc.  In this, I think Tolstoy did a very good job.

The problem?  This story isn't very interesting.  It's not really supposed to be, I guess--contemplative if definitely more its vein.  While this has its purpose, it doesn't make for a very riveting read.  This was a story I found myself wandering away from again and again, and it took me a surprising amount of time to get through less than a hundred pages.  It has its time and place, and I think it's actually quite good in that regard; it just didn't strike me at this time.

Based on the story's clear merit, I'm going to write it higher than I would on pure enjoyment.  I can see myself "enjoying" this more in a more melancholy or contemplative mood, and it's one I could potentially return to at some point, which isn't something I'd say about most tales of this length.

4 stars out of 5.

Hidden Figures - Margot Lee Shetterly

Last September, I was at the National Book Festival hoping to get a signed copy of Outlander for my boyfriend's mother (because Diana Gabaldon is her favorite and I'm thoughtful like that).  A few queues over from the Gabaldon line was one for Margot Lee Shetterly.  There was practically no one in it.  How odd, I thought.  Hidden Figures was a pretty big movie, after all, getting a lot of press, acclaim, the whole shebang.  I found it very odd that there wouldn't be more people in that line.  Well, now I know why the line was so short: this book is boring.

And let me say this.  A book about a story that is this fascinating should not be this boring.  And yet boring it is.

This is, undeniably, an important story.  In a time when segregation was still the norm, female working women were still referred to as "girls," and women were pretty much banned from STEM fields, women were essentially storming NASA's predecessor, NACA, working as human computers and clawing their way upwards to the ranks of mathematicians and engineers, marking various "Firsts" and shattering glass ceilings as they went.  While white women were involved, Shetterly focuses on a much-ignored group, the West Computers and the women who came out of that pool to work in other areas, who were black.  While she talks about a few people here, only two names ultimately stuck in my head: Dorothy Vaughn and Katherine Gobels/Katherine Johnson.  Vaughn eventually ran the West Computers, and Johnson ran the calculations for the first American orbital flight and the reunion of the Apollo 11 moon landing crew and flight crew after departing from the moon.  There was a third main person, but Shetterly does such a poor job of actually distinguishing between these women that I honestly couldn't tell you anything about her.  And actually, there was a fourth woman, too--but she was in college for the events of the book, and I'm not entirely sure why she was included at all.

But my biggest dig against this book is that it's not predominantly about these women.  They are simply a lens through which Shetterly examines the Civil Rights movement, the press for desegregation, and all kinds of other social movements that surrounded these issues in the forties, fifties, and sixties.  While all of this is vitally important, it's not what I picked up the book to read about.  Additionally, the writing is extremely purple at times, not at all suitable for a nonfiction book.  It's entirely possible to do a book of literary nonfiction and do it well, but Shetterly does not.  It's always dangerous to project details of emotions, actions, etc. onto conversations and situations at which you were not present, and are collecting details from second- and sometimes third-hand, and yet that is exactly what Shetterly does.  Between wariness at this practice and sometimes eye-drooping boredom when Shetterly spent ages away from the main narrative to instead talk about the March on Washington, or something else entirely, I found that I didn't enjoy this book much at all.

Overall?  Important, fascinating story, but obscured by poor telling.  The movie might be better on this one.

2 stars out of 5.

Earls Just Want to Have Fun - Shana Galen (Covent Garden Cubs #1)

I'm not entirely sure how this book ended up on my radar; I think I actually saw the third book, I Kissed a Rogue, and went in search of the first one.  Anyway, after a bit of library finangling (because they didn't have it in Kindle format) I finally managed to dig in.

When Elizabeth was five, she was kidnapped from her life as a young lady of the ton and brought into a ring of thieves known as the Covent Garden Cubs.  After fifteen years of lies and stealing and being told she's the daughter of a prostitute, Elizabeth (now known as Marlowe) believes it--but still wonders at the few hazy memories she retains from her early life.  And she's yanked back into that life, and that world, when she's kidnapped again, this time by Sir Brook Derring, a Bow Street Runner Marlowe's parents hired to find her.  But as said parents are out of town and Brook has other things to do, he dumps her with his brother Maxwell, Earl of Dane, and heads off on other business.  Dane is none too pleased to be saddled with a girl who he's convinced is nothing better than thief, but sparks begin to fly between the two as he tries to get her in some sort of shape to meet her potential long-last parents.  Meanwhile, Marlowe's biggest concern is Satin, the head of the Cubs who will undoubtedly come after her, with repercussions for everyone involved.

Most of the time when an author tries to put a thieving/roguery plot into a historical romance novel, it doesn't go particularly well.  Luckily, this book was the exception to that.  This is probably because Marlowe's thief status and her position in the Cubs is an intrinsic part of her character, rather than something Galen just tacked onto her in order to make her seem more interesting.  Her escape from this situation is also vital to her future and Dane's as well, since anyone involved with keeping her from the Cubs is going to come under Satin's line of fire.  Because this was a primary plot point, rather than one just shoved in for kicks, it worked out very well.

Now, let's talk about Dane.  Dane at the beginning of the book is completely insufferable.  Why?  Because he's extremely prejudiced and hates poor people, thinking that they deserve their situations.  Basically, he's the embodiment of the thought that if they didn't want to be poor, then they shouldn't have been born poor to begin with.  He is a prick.  It's bad enough that I almost quit the book when he showed up, because I knew I would never be able to root for a hero so small-minded and just--ugh.  Thankfully, he changes his tune pretty quickly.  It's not unbelievably so--as much as any timeline in a book that takes place over the course of a few days can be believably stretched out, at least--and it takes a lot of arguing in order to get him to that point, but he gets there eventually and it is a change for the better.  And you can see the change slowly occurring, which is good because it doesn't make his change of position at the end of the book seem like it came out of nowhere.  If only people in real life could be reasoned with like Dane...

The writing here is good.  Galen writes a good relationship, good kissing, good sex scenes.  It's a great historical romance novel.  I don't think I've read any other ones by Galen, and while I'm not fawning and drooling over this one and going back to read it immediately after finishing it, it's definitely a good intro to Galen, and I look forward to reading other books by her.

4 stars out of 5.

The Starlit Wood: New Fairy Tales - Dominik Parisien and Navah Wolfe (eds.)

It recently came across my radar that Naomi Novik, of the breaktaking Uprooted, would be putting out a book later this year called Spinning Silver, which would be an expanded take on the 30-page short story of the same title in this collection.  That was enough for me to snap it up, and other stories by the likes of Garth Nix and Max Gladstone were extra treats.

A few notes about the collection as a whole.  First, these are not "new" fairy tales.  They are well-known (and, in one or two cases, less-well-known) fairy tales that have been adapted, as is so de rigueur these days.  I don't have any complaints about that, but it's something worth keeping in mind.  Second, as with all short story collections, I didn't find all of the inclusions to be of even quality.  They can vary wildly in story telling style, themes, deviation from the original story, etc.  With that in mind, I've composed this review as a series of short blurbs regarding each story, including its author and origin story, in order to give a better scope of what the book is like as a whole.

-"In the Desert Like a Bone" by Seanan McGuire, based on "Little Red Riding Hood."  The book starts off on a strong note with this one, taking Red out of the woods and dumping her instead in the deserts of the American West.  There are no werewolves here, though there are dangers and menaces all of their own, and nods to Native American mythology in the form of Coyote.  This was a great story of justice and vengeance.

-"Underground" by Karin Tidbeck, based on "East of the Sun and West of the Moon."  Tidbeck actually notes using a different story for the basis of this, but it's definitely a variation of EotSaWotM, and is denoted as that in the table of contents.  East, an adaptation by Edith Pattou, is one of my favorite fantasy novels.  I didn't find "Underground" to be as strong.  Tidbeck twists the story in a way that I really didn't like; in the original, the girl goes voluntarily, and Tidbeck has her taken by force (in more ways than one) which lends an extremely icky feel to the whole thing.  However, ultimately this story is less about the heroine saving her kidnapper than it is about saving herself.  It had a satisfying ending, but made me feel kind of dirty overall.

-"Even the Crumbs Were Delicious" by Daryl Gregory, based on "Hansel and Gretel."  I did not like this one.  Though there were obvious parallels to the original tale, it did not read as a warping or a retelling, and instead just seemed like a story about a bunch of people getting high and saying weird things while the author went, "See the parallel there?  Aren't I so clever?" in the background.

-"The Super Ultra Duchess of Fedora Forest" by Charlie Jane Anders, based on "The Bird, the Mouse, and the Sausage."  Having never heard of this story before, I had to look it up.  It is weird and bleak.  This adaptation is possibly even weirder.  Though it lacks the bleakness of the original (probably an improvement) it was another story that really read like the author was going "See how funny I am?" while spouting a bunch of nonsense that was posing as coherent worldbuilding and plot.  It felt more like a fever dream than anything else.  It has a lot of strong elements to it--women helping women, non-traditional families, despotic governments, etc.--but none of that could really redeem it from the feeling of "WTF is going on right now?" that permeated every sentence.

-"Familiaris" by Genevieve Valentine, based on "The Wolves."  "The Wolves" is a rather recently-discovered fairy tale.  Knowing that many of her readers won't have the same knowledge of it as they would of, say, something that's been made into an animated musical, Valentine weaves the real original story, though in her own words, throughout her adaptation.  It is the first truly depressing story of the book, boiling down to how women are expected to give up their lives and their selves to children, even if we don't particularly want children.  While I can appreciate this thematically, the constant switching of perspectives as disorientating and gave me a sense of motion sickness that most prose doesn't inspire.

-"Seasons of Glass and Iron" by Amal El-Mohtar, based on "The Glass Mountain" with minor elements from "The Black Bull of Norroway."  While its preceding story was the first truly bleak one, this is the first one that truly felt like a fairy tale, but in a new way.  It's another story about women helping each other and, in this case, loving each other, though it's very subtle.  Remember the ending of The Legend of Korra?  Yeah, it was kind of like that.  It's a very sweet story, without a lot of action, but rather about self-forgiveness and helping others not because of a reward, but because you like and care for them, as well as being about women escaping men's expectations, which was a welcome change from "Familiaris."  The juxtaposition there was very well done.

-"Badgirl, the Deadman, and The Wheel of Fortune" by Catherynne M. Valente, based on "The Girl with No Hands."  If there was an award for "Most Depressing Story in the Book," this one would win it, hands down.  Or maybe no hands down.  If "Familiaris" was bleak, "Badgirl" was downright depressing.  Valente notes that the story upset her so much she had to frequently put it down and walk away while writing, and I can see why.  There aren't any real fairy tale elements here, which is part of the reason it's so depressing--there is no veil of fantasy to take away the sorrow here.  It is something that would easily happen in real life, and that sense of reality makes it so much worse.  It is a story without a lesson or hope for the future, and left me utterly depressed.

-"Penny for a Match, Mister?" by Garth Nix, based on "The Little Match Girl."  After "Spinning Silver," this was the story I was most looking forward to in the book, and it did not disappoint.  It veers dramatically away from the "Badgirl" story preceding it, thankfully.  Instead of a drug-ridden South, we're dumped straight into a weird western set in the same universe as another story Nix has put forth, "Crossing the Line."  While this is not the same universe as his Old Kingdom books, there are obvious parallels, like the Line and the Wall and the people who are entrusted with keeping justice and order on both sides.  While there is a dark sense of bloodthirsty-ness and vengeance here, it ends on a positive and hopeful note.  I would love to see a long-form work set in this universe.

-"Some Wait" by Stephen Graham Jones, based on "The Pied Piper of Hamelin."  This would be a story good for fans of Criminal Minds, as long as you're prepared to not have a resolution.  There's a technological menace here, but also a human one, and that menace lingers through the end of the story.  Questions remain once the tale is done.  Where are the children going?  How is no one noticing expect the people in this town?  How has no one made the connection before?  There are a few hints but nothing solid enough to draw an inference or conclusion from, and the hints don't seem to entirely make sense within the context of the story and how the disappearances unfolded.

-"The Thousand Eyes" by Jeffery Ford, based on "The Voice of Death."  Atmosphere rules this story.  While it's set in New Jersey, what it reminded me of more than anything else was the "Bad Things" opening to True Blood.  I think it's the swamp setting; reminds me of the Louisiana bayou.  This is the story that asks the question, "What would happen if Bootstrap Bill from Pirates of the Caribbean was actually a singer at a grody cocktail lounge, but with all the death-luring abilities of a siren?"  The integration of the painting aspects was interesting, with the interweaving of painting and music and even photography--art as a whole, really--forming the core of the story.  It was really well done, though I'm left with a few questions.  What was up with the cameras, anyway?  And who the heck really is Doris???

-"Giants in the Sky" by Max Gladstone, based on "Jack and the Beanstalk."  Definitely the most experimental story of the collection, this takes the form of a series of logs, conversations, and sometimes stream of conscience babblings.  It features space elevators and beings who live in a compressed digital format.  Orm seems pretty awesome, but in general there was a lot of "What the heck is going on here?" that never fully seemed to go away by the end of the story.  It was very different from the novel I read from Gladstone, and I'm not a big form of this format in general, so not my favorite.

-"The Briar and the Rose" by Marjorie Liu, based on "Sleeping Beauty."  This is a very menacing version of "Sleeping Beauty," far more so than the original.  The witch is also a body snatcher who kills her victims when she's done with them, which doesn't bode well for her current victim.  There is no prince here; instead, this is another story of women helping women, and features interesting locales and characters of color.  I really appreciated this one; much like "Seasons of Glass and Iron," it felt like a traditional fairy tale, but fresh and new at the same time.

-"The Other Thea" by Theodora Goss, based on "The Shadow."  Another story that felt like it could have easily been expanded into a full-length book, this has the feel of a school fantasy with the movement of a personal quest.  Both settings, Miss Lavender's school and the Other World, are delightful.  So are the characters Thea encounters in both locales.  I loved the presentation of magic as a blending of physics and poetry; while this seems the most "sensible" structure of magic in the real world (if there is such a thing as a sensible structure of magic in the real world) it seems to be drastically under-utilized in fiction.  Additionally, Thea's eventual recovery of her shadow and the full breadth of her emotions, even grief, looks like a promising start on the rest of her life, so it ended on a great note.

-"When I Lay Frozen" by Margo Lanagan, based on "Thumbelina."  This is one hundred percent my least favorite story in the collection because it relies strongly on rape as a titillating factor.  Tommelise, as she's known, is endowed with a cloud of pheromones that drives animals and people to have crazy sex, and if none of their own kind are around, they target her instead.  Though this only seems to affect male animals, which brings up a problem of its own: If only the males are aroused by Tommelise's presence, then are all of the females in this story being repeatedly raped by their mates?  Tommelise herself spends the entire book dodging rape left and right, which was painful to see.  What was possibly even more painful was seeing Lanagan say that she gave Tommelise "agency" with this cloud of pheromones, because having pheromones that you can't control and which lead everyone you encounter to trying to rape you doesn't really seem like much agency at all.

-"Pearl" by Aliette de Bodard, based on "Da Trang and the Pearl."  A fairy tale written as a space opera, this is one that I think would appeal to fans of Marissa Meyer's Lunar Chronicles.  It's not a story that I'm familiar with, but the semi-intelligent swimming-through-air "remoras" were lovely, and I appreciated that de Bodard retained the Vietnamese origins of the story in her space empire.  I would love to see something longer in this world.  Though it has a melancholy ending, I'm forced to wonder what Pearl will eventually do, coming back from the sun...

-"The Tale of Mahliya and Mauhub and the White-Footed Gazelle" by Sofia Samatar, based on the story of the same name.  "The Tale of Mahliya and Mauhub and the White-Footed Gazelle" is another recently-discovered story, coming from a book that was only translated in 2015 (a year before the copyright on Samatar's adaptation) and, as Samatar says, hails from the same origins as One Thousand and One Nights.  It's a story-within-a-story, and so is Samatar's adaptation.  I'm not familiar with the source material; however, it seemed very much like a lot of time was spent relating the original story (which would need to be done, since most readers wouldn't be familiar with it) and examining parallels and themes from it, and not a lot of time was spent on telling a new story.

-"Reflected" by Kat Howard, based on "The Snow Queen."  This is another "science and magic" story, but one that's a good deal wobblier than the others in the collection because there's no system attached to it.  It involves reflections and travel between worlds, and trying to reclaim a lost loved one--all great themes, for some reason I read this one with a raised eyebrow and found myself going "Really?" a lot.

-"Spinning Silver" by Naomi Novik, based on "Rumpelstiltskin."  This was by far my favorite story in the book.  Novik's heroine is prickly and determined, but with hidden vulnerabilities and a good heart even if she has been pushed to drastic measures.  Seeing this version of spinning silver into gold (instead of straw into gold; that would have been a stretch even for Novik, I would think) was riveting.  Like her long-form work Uprooted, this one features a menacing wood, though it doesn't seem to be the same world as the Wood, similarities in covers notwithstanding.  I can't wait to see this one as a full-length book later this year!

Overall, I did like this collection.  I think "Spinning Silver," "Penny for a Match, Mister?" and "In the Desert Like a Bone" were the strongest stories featuring new takes, while "Seasons of Glass and Iron" and "The Briar and the Rose" were the most fairy tale-like of the lot.  Some of them I did not like, for various reasons, but I think the book as a whole was decent and worth a read.

3.5 stars out of 5.

Always the Bridesmaid - Lindsey Kelk

This is a book that was on my radar for a while because I kept seeing it on the DC library's Overdrive page.  There was always a waitlist and it wasn't something I wanted to use a hold on, so I just waited until it eventually came up as available.  It looked like it was going to be a romance, something along the lines of 27 Dresses--so, light and fluffy but still enjoyable for what it is.

Upon reading, it's actually chick lit.

Oh, chick lit.  It seems like a derogatory title for a category of books, but ultimately, it fits them.  They're basically entirely fluff.  There might be romance and friendships, but none of the emotional connections ever seem to ring true.  It's mostly women who are at a low point in their careers bumbling around and wondering why everyone is doing so much better than they are, wondering why they can't get a man, and so on and so forth.  Don't get me wrong; this can be fun.  They're typically reads that only take a few hours and watching some other person bumble through life can honestly make you feel a little better about yourself.  They are good reads for the pool or the beach with some yummy snacks.  For some reason, the ones that I've encountered also seem to predominantly take place in Britain, which means that there's British slang and they spend a lot of time drinking tea and everyone just seems charming.

Unfortunately, this one really didn't hit the spot.  Mainly because Maddie is an idiot.  (This is, unfortunately, another feature of chick lit books, but it seemed particularly egregious here.)  She meets a guy at a wedding she's working, takes him home for a one-night stand, and then continues to pursue him even when it is gratingly, blindingly clear that he is only interested in her for sex and she is not his girlfriend, as she has deluded herself into believing.  Also, girl appears to be wearing mismatched shoes on the cover, so perhaps her mind-boggling obviousness shouldn't come as that much of a surprise.  She lets literally every single person in her life walk all over her, so she's without much of a spine as well.  Her friends are not friends at all, but rather people who take advantage of her again and again--though she takes advantage of them as well, so maybe all's fair play on that matter.  Either way, it seems like it's not really a group of "friends."  Her family is universally horrible as well.

There's a small actual romance element in this book (other than the hooking up) but it didn't ring true in the slightest.  Maddie talks to him for about fifteen minutes total on a couple of separate occasions and suddenly he's willing to drive miles and miles to pick her up, declares he loves her, etc.  This does not say "romance" so much as it says "unhealthy fixation."

Overall, this was a book of self-centered and selfish people who I wanted to push in front of a double-decker bus for much of the book.  Maddie has a few cute moments, there are a few moments of connection, but they couldn't redeem the slap-worthy behavior taking up most of the pages.

2 stars out of 5.

When Breath Becomes Air - Paul Kalanithi

This is a book that I had seen many, many times in various contexts, but avoided like the plague.  Why?  Because it sounded depressing, that's why.  The author, Paul Kalanithi, was finishing up his time as a chief resident in neurosurgery when he was diagnosed with extensive lung cancer, and then eventually brain cancer.  Having struggled with life and medicine and the meaning of it all throughout his life and career, Kalanithi set out to make sense of his own life--and death--and purpose before the end came.  You know all of this from the flap of the book, or the foreword at the very least.  It sounded like a serious downer and possibly preachy as well, which was not a conversation I wanted to delve into.  However, when I needed a book on death or grief for my reading challenge, it seemed like an obvious choice.

I was very much surprised by this book.  It's not religious at all, which I appreciated--a lot of people who aren't even really religious turn to it in the end--though it is deeply introspective.  In his career as a neurosurgeon, Kalanithi worked with the brain which, he points out, ultimately contains the self.  Part of this book looks at what makes life living--is it worth living if you have an injury or disease that takes away your language and ability to communicate?  If it leaves you in a coma or a vegetative state?  And in the process of coming to terms with his own death, he sees the people around him go through their own stages of grief--not only for him, but for things that they thought might be, especially when hope briefly seemed to be so close.

One thing that's worthy of noting is that the writing here is absolutely beautiful.  Kalanithi certainly had a way with words, and his aspirations to spend the second half of his career--the half he never got to experience--as an author were certainly well-merited.  He faces down some of the things that were piling up, such as a dissolving marriage that even most of his family wasn't aware of, the deep pain he was in all the time, and the terror he faced at leaving his life not fully lived, and turns it all into poetry.  When I read the foreword and saw how Verghese lauded Kalanithi's writing, I had to roll my eyes.  Surely the book couldn't actually be that good.  And honestly, depressing as it sounds, it really sounded kind of gimmicky as well.  But no, Verghese was right--the writing really is that good.

This is one of those books that it feels weird to say you enjoyed, because hey, does the average person really enjoy reading about a real person dying tragically?  No, not really.  But it was a wonderful book.  Was it ground breaking in anything it revealed?  No, not really.  But just as Tuesdays with Morrie or The Last Lecture were sad books but lovely at the same time, so was this.  It's not a book that's going to reveal the secrets of the universe.  But it's a personal, insightful journey, and hey, you can learn some about neurosurgery to boot.

4 stars out of 5.

#Starstruck - Sariah Wilson (#Lovestruck #1)

I recently had a bunch of books become available from holds at the library, one of them being the somewhat heavy (but also, in retrospect, somewhat uplifting) When Breath Becomes Air, my reading challenge book for the "book about death or grief" category.  Knowing that was coming up, I knew I was going to need some pure fluff to balance a deeply introspective memoir about dying and the meaning of life.  You know, all that fun stuff.  And then up popped #Starstruck.  I haven't read any of Sariah Wilson's works before, but I've had Royal Date by her sitting on my Kindle for ages.  Still, #Starstruck caught my eye.  There's something intriguing about celebrity romances, and since I had such a great experience with Idol last year (though that celebrity was a rockstar, not an actor) I thought I'd give this a go.

Heroine and narrator Zoe adores Chase Covington, an obsession she picked up in order to bond with her now-best friend, Lexi, when they were children.  Because Zoe didn't have friends and Lexi said that if they both liked Chase Covington (and Lexi loves Chase Covington), then they could be friends.  And so when a Twitter exchange leads to Zoe eventually meeting and then becoming involved with Chase, she is starstruck indeed.

Was this the strongest celebrity romance book I've read?  No.  Something about it just seems to ring false, like how these people would ever actually meet, how fast they fell for each other, etc.  For example, this book takes insta-love to a new level, in which the two characters love each other from before they even lay eyes on each other, just from a series of 140-character Tweets over the course of like, three days.  However, there were a lot of elements I really liked here.  Let's talk about a few.

First, despite Zoe's self-proclaimed "obsession" with Chase, she is not really obsessed with him.  She's a fan, definitely, but she does not do anything crazy.  Lexi is the one who makes Chase scrapbooks, who stalks his manager to get close to him, who would reportedly do anything to be with him.  Despite Zoe saying how much she "loves" Chase even before they meet, she seems remarkably sane and her priorities always lay elsewhere.  The "obsession" is really more just going along with Lexi.  This was good, because Chase falling for a stalker would have been, uhm, weird to the extreme.

Zoe as a character is actually great in general.  Her family is important to her.  While she's attracted to Chase, she's also keenly aware of how fame can bite back, and so remains wary of their relationship.  Additionally, Zoe is abstinent, and it's not because of religion.  Whaaat?  Yes.  This is great to see--not because I'm anti-sex in romances (hey, if you can write a good sex scene, go for it) but because it suits her character and background.  But Wilson has an abstinent-by-choice character who also doesn't feel the need to bash you over the head with religion every two seconds, which is so refreshing.  While waiting for a committed relationship to have sex isn't strange at all, for some reason in fiction, it's always because of religion and not just because it's a personal choice.  Consequently, this was refreshing.  But never fear!  Wilson can write a sizzling attraction and some delicious scenes of kissing and making out without anyone's clothes coming off.  The one thing that bugged me was that, though Chase told Zoe how the media would spin things and that he'd tell her what she wanted regarding what was actually happening, she just freaked out at him whenever something happened.  I understand jealousy and insecurity, but she really seemed to take it to an extreme.

Chase was harder to get a handle on.  This is probably because he's not the narrator, and consequently we can't really get inside his head.  We only have what he says, and while Zoe believes him, she also has doubts from time to time, and those spill over to the reader.  But at the end of the book, I was left with this key question: Why did Chase go out with Zoe?  Once they were together, it's easy to see and understand why they would keep it up.  I don't have any issues with that.  But I have trouble believing that, upon re-entering the dating world, Chase and everyone around him would decide that Zoe was "the one" based on literally a single Tweet, which only said that she didn't think his most recent movie was his best.

Overall, I liked this.  It was a fast read, the two characters had a lot of chemistry even if they never, ahem, got down to business, and I liked Zoe as a main character.  But I never felt like the actual meeting and initial connection rang true.  But hey, Wilson can write a really good kissing scene!

4 stars out of 5.

Practical Magic - Alice Hoffman (Practical Magic #1)

One of the Book of the Month selections last fall was The Rules of Magic, the recently-released prequel to Hoffman's classic Practical Magic, which has also been adapted to the screen in a version featuring Sandra Bullock and Nicole Kidman as the main characters.  I've seen the movie, and liked it quite a bit, and the prequel intrigued me--but I felt like to be on the same page, I should read the original first.

To those who've seen the movie: the book is very different.  But I think they are equally good, in different ways.  The book has less of a focus on the trouble brought on by the vile Jimmy and more of a focus on the relationships between the two sisters, the growing-up of Sally's daughters, and the powerful ways in which love affects all of their lives.  Jimmy and the trouble he brings are still present, but they don't provide the same central propulsion that they do in the movie.  Additionally, while the movie takes place on the island in Massachusetts, the setting moves away from there after the first part of this book, instead being set mostly in a small community in New York where no one has ever heard of the Owenses and never thinks they might be witches, which in itself lends a very different atmosphere to the story.

This book definitely falls into the magical realism category.  Fantastic things happen and are treated as just everyday happenstance, not just by Sally and Gillian and their family but by others around them.  The Owenses might be the source of the magic, but it's not strange in and of itself.  Magical realism tends to have a definite writing style associated with it; not a ton of dialogue, but a lot of prose narrative relating what's happening, probably because the characters commenting too much on the magical events would contribute to breaking the spell, as it were.  That said, the characters still feel real and complete and the events of the book, while of course strange and unreal, still seem to ring true.

The focus of the book here is on the relationships between the characters, with the Jimmy subplot being just that.  The sisters, the aunts, Sally's daughters--the ties between all of them are stretched and warped and torn, and the story here is both that separation and bringing them back together, with a few extra folks thrown in for good measure.  Luckily, this is a definite strength of the book.  Hoffman shows that you can absolutely hate someone for what they've done or what they've pulled you into, but love them and want to help them at the same time.  Additionally, part of the "relationship" aspect of this is Sally and Gillian's relationships with themselves.  Both ultimately fled Massachusetts and the aunts, leaving their whacky childhoods and accusations of witchcraft behind, but are forced to come back to their heritage and embrace it in order to solve the problems that rear their ugly heads.  The climax isn't very climactic in a movie sort of way--there's no possession, no calling of the phone tree, etc.--but is extremely climactic in how you can see Sally and Gillian change.  It might not look monumental, but it certainly feels so.

It's a slow story, a lot of wandering rather than racing, backtracking and then jumping back to the present.  Some people feel like they should have been included more than they were--like Gary!  Where the heck was all of his page time?  Ben got so much in comparison, and even the teenage love interests got more.  But overall, it still felt, well, magical, and I really enjoyed reading it.

4 stars out of 5.

Beard in Mind - Penny Reid (Winston Brothers #4)

It took me a while to get back into the Winston Brothers series because I was somewhat disappointed by Beard Science, which I had really been looking forward to.  That, and Beau wasn't really a character I cared much about.  He featured in the other books but in a comparatively minor supporting role, against his brothers who, even as supporting characters, seemed a bit more prominent.  I also wasn't super interested in Shelly, who we encountered in Beard Science for the first time.  All of this together meant that this was kind of a "Yeah, sure, I guess," book, but I was still hoping it would take me by surprise and I would love it.

Ultimately, though, I left this book disappointed.  The setup is fairly uneven compared to the others in the series--while both Beau and Shelly get perspective chapters, Shelly's are greatly outnumbered by Beau's.  I don't know what Reid was thinking, but I'm willing to hazard a guess that she didn't want to get too deep "in the head" of someone with OCD and then get slammed by people who actually have OCD for "not getting it right," which would be a motivation that I understand.  The problem is, Shelly is a vastly more interesting character than Beau, and that's not even taking her condition into consideration.  Her links to Quinn, her past with her family, her interest in mechanics, her position as an extremely talented artist, her somewhat abrasive personality--all of this made Shelly seem like a really fleshed-out character, and the very low number of chapters from her perspective was a disappointment.  The imbalance made her feel more like someone Beau pursued and wanted than someone who was engaged in a mutual relationship.

Compared to Shelly, Beau was...blah.  At one point, he says that his twin brother Duane isn't just his brother, he's Beau's other half.  And that's exactly what Beau felt like: half a character.  All of this book is about his fixation on Shelly, and really nothing else.  Even the subplot with the Iron Wraiths that Reid tried to throw in didn't make him feel more complex or complete.  And because he was the point of view character for most of the book, that made it feel just "meh."  I could never really see why he liked Shelly, other than her being off-the-charts gorgeous, which doesn't get you very far in a romance novel.  Even if someone is attracted because of physical appearances at first (which, fine, cool, I get it) it has to evolve, and even though Beau kept saying he loved Shelly for other reasons, I never really saw evidence of it.  I never felt chemistry between him and Shelly, either, and a romance book with no chemistry isn't really much of a romance at all.

Overall, I think this was the weakest book in the series so far.  At times it trended more towards "chore" than "enjoyment," and that's not a good sign.  It had its moments--watching Jennifer and Cletus from another perspective was interesting, and Shelly's parts were good--but I ended up feeling like I probably could have just skipped this one and waited until Dr. Strange Beard came out to rejoin the Winston family.

2 stars out of 5.

White Hot - Ilona Andrews (Hidden Legacy #2)

The second Hidden Legacy book by the Ilona Andrews team picks up about two months after the first, and takes an abrupt turn in direction: from fire to ice.  I was super excited to read this one after tearing through Burn for Me, because I wanted to see the relationship between Nevada and Rogan evolve and come into its own as well as see more of Nevada's wonderful family.  While her family continued to be wonderful and their relationship did indeed evolve, I ultimately didn't find this one as good as the first one.

Nevada is pulled back into the ring of high-stakes investigations when Cornelius, the animal mage we briefly encountered in the first book, comes to her to ask her to take on the investigation of his wife's murder.  He wants to know who killed her, and he wants revenge.  Nevada is reluctant, but agrees, for various reasons.  She's quickly re-enmeshed with Rogan (who has ignored her since the end of the last book) when it turns out that his people were the wife's security team, who were killed along with her, and Rogan wants to avenge them.

Cornelius, while not elevated to main-character status, is definitely one of the primary supporting characters in this book, and that was excellent.  His animal mage powers are vastly different from any of the other ones we've encountered in this world, and they're put to good use in several ways here.  Also, I want a Chinese ferret-badger for a pet now.  I definitely hope he'll continue to be a presence in the third book.  In the supporting character realm, Nevada's family continues to be amazing and we get a glimpse into her origins, as well as the abilities of her two younger siblings and one of her cousins.  This was awesome, and as Nevada evolves into a Prime I hope we get to see more in-depth what her equally-powerful siblings can do.

Nevada's evolution was another interesting aspect of this book.  We knew--or could infer--that she was a Prime from the events of the first book, even if she hadn't come into her own yet.  But here, she's no longer flying under the radar, as much as she might like to be.  She's gathering attention, and it's pretty clear that it's going to come to a head in the third book.  This is a good progression, and I was pretty happy with it.

What I less happy with was the relationship between Nevada and Rogan.  When we left them at the end of the first book, Nevada was attracted to Rogan but unwilling to be just his plaything, and Rogan was attracted to Nevada and determined to have her.  When we rejoin them here, it's all, "I love you!" on both parts, even if the actual words aren't said until later in the book.  Most of Nevada's reservations seem to have just up and vanished, which was very strange, and considering that Rogan's emotional attachment seemed...there, but sparse and under-developed, it seems weird that he jumped so full-on into "I must love and protect Nevada"-mode here.

There's a third book in this series (and it seems like there might potentially be more, but nothing solid so far) and I'm still interested in it, but this was something of a come-down from the first book.  I won't say it suffered from second book syndrome, because that's a plot thing and not a relationship thing, and things definitely moved in this book.  But it wasn't as amazing as the first, and I hope the third can make a come back.

3.5 stars out of 5.

Harmony - Carolyn Parkhurst

One of the reading challenge categories that was posing a problem for me this year was "A book by a local author."  I live in Washington, DC.  I knew that there could be no shortage of local authors with great books available.  However, when I Googled, the ones that came up, the Big Names, were ones that I either wasn't interested in (David Baldacci, Tom Clancy) or I'd already read their works (Laura Hillenbrand).  Thankfully, I eventually found an article by DC Refined, "5 D.C. authors you should know (and their latest books)".  While a bunch of the authors and books listed there caught my interest, one in particular stuck out: Harmony by Caroyln Parkhurst, because she has her MA from American University, which is my school!  Also, the premise seemed very interesting.

Told from multiple perspectives, Harmony is the story of a family (the Hammonds) who seek help for their brilliant but troublesome daughter, Tilly, who has a non-specific disorder along the autism spectrum.  In the search for help, they fall in with Scott Bean, who gets them to come to a camp, Harmony, in New Hampshire that is, for all intents and purposes, cut off from the outside world.  They will live and work at the camp, grow their own food, avoid pesticides and stimulation from screens, and anything that's needed from outside, Scott will get while the rest of them stay at the camp.  A few other families are also present, for similar reasons.  But while Harmony initially seems like it might be exactly what the family needs, might it perhaps be a little more sinister?

Camp Harmony treads along the thin line--is it a cult or isn't it?  At some times, it seems like it is, and at other times it seems like it isn't.  Scott Bean is a masterful manipulator.  He gets the families to feel like they are accomplishing something, and every time something unnerving happens, he backs off, reassures them...and then continues on with his own plans.  There's a menace here, but not one that that's obvious,or even always present.  It leads to a strange balancing act in the mind, which I'm sure is exactly what Parkhurst intended--is this okay, or is it not?  Some of it is, and some of it isn't, and some of it is questionably...and it all adds up to a big, big problem that will shatter the Hammond family's existence.

The writing style here was interesting.  There are three perspectives: Alexandra, the mother; Tilly, the older sister; and Iris, the younger sister.  Alexandra's parts are written in second-person, which I typically dislike, but in this case I think it really worked.  It made her struggle more empathetic, made it easier to see where her difficulties were coming from.  Iris has a more traditional first-person perspective, relating the "present" events; she is our main narrator, telling us the story as it unfolds, whereas Alexandra's parts are more of a "how we got here" set up.  And then there's Tilly.  Tilly's narrative is neither here nor there, first person nor third person, just a sort of weird, floating imagining that happens at an ambiguous place and time, and yet perfectly suited to Tilly's character.

This was a book that intrigued me, but that I was unsure I would actually like.  And while the pacing is somewhat slow, the building unease in the background propels the story forward to its climax.  I do wish there had been a bit more closure here--we are definitely left with the question of, "What happened to the Hammonds, anyway?"  I mean, will the daughters be giving TED Talks about growing up in a cult when they get older?  Or will everything be all right?  These are the things I'm left wondering--and while I would have liked more closure, I gather that the wondering was rather the point.

Anyway, I'm very glad that I picked this title for my "local author" reading challenge category.  It wasn't something I would probably have picked up on my own, but I enjoyed it, and I'm looking forward to reading other books by these local authors.

4 stars out of 5.