In the Garden of Beasts - Erik Larson

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

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

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

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

4 stars out of 5.

Salt & Storm - Kendall Kulper

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

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

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

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

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

2 stars out of 5.

The Unimaginable - Dina Silver

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Sparrow - Mary Doria Russell (Sparrow #1)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

2 stars out of 5.

The Bollywood Bride - Sonali Dev (Bollywood #2)

This is another one of those books that I've had for ages but, despite being intrigued by it, just never got it.  When you own a book, sometimes reading it doesn't seem as pressing as reading all of your library books that have due dates attached to them!  But the Popsugar Reading Challenge for 2018 has a category for "A book by an author of a different ethnicity than you," and since this was hovering so close to the top of my to-read list anyway, it was an easy one to slot in for that category.

Given the title of the book, with the emphasis on the word "Bride," I thought that this was going to be a romance.  While there is a romantic plot, perhaps one that is really the central driving force of the book, what this really felt like was a book about family, particularly family you choose over family you're born to.  Heroine Ria was mostly raised by her aunt and uncle following a terrible encounter with her mentally-ill mother, and while she and her father loved each other, their relationship was strained by that encounter and everything that followed it.  But Ria is now somewhat estranged from her aunt and uncle, who she kind of sees as her real parents, stemming from a secret relationship with her not-cousin (seriously, not her cousin, but around a lot, and the cousin of her cousin) that ended poorly on several fronts.  Ria has spent the last decade in India as a Bollywood star, and returns to Chicago and her family in order to attend the wedding of her actual, blood cousin who is more like a brother to her than anything.

Ria is perhaps not the ideal heroine.  She's kind of mean, and deliberately does things that hurt people.  Ostensibly she does these things to protect them, but it seems like what would really be better would be letting people make informed decisions for themselves.  Vikram is also kind of terrible.  He holds grudges and does spiteful things, and while he might be entitled to do so, he doesn't just hurt Ria, he hurts everyone else around him in the process.  However, they are surrounded by absolutely wonderful people who love and support each other and welcome misfits into their fold and make everyone around them feel wanted.  They keep each others' secrets, but to actually protect each other, rather than out of some misguided sense of righteousness.  Ria's aunt and uncle are both wonderful, her cousin is wonderful, his fiancee is wonderful, the aunties are wonderful, everyone is wonderful except our main characters.  Luckily this isn't a book that depended totally on romance between the heroine and hero to propel it; the supporting characters were so important in building the feeling in the story.

The writing itself is decent; Dev an write a good romantic scene, but I think her true strength was in those wonderful family scenes, and even more so in descriptions of food!  Oh geeze, I got so hungry reading this book.  I wanted to eat so much Indian food, it wasn't even funny.  Except Indian food is like a million dollars in the United States, and so I didn't.

Overall, a good book, and I might be interested in readings others by Dev--but not the sequel to this one, because it sounds depressing af.

3.5 stars out of 5.

Watership Down - Richard Adams

Watership Down is one of those children's books that I never read.  It's not that I disliked books about animals--in fact, I loved the Redwall books when I was younger, and the Narnia books have a good number of talking animals as well.  But for some reason, I thought this was a book about rabbits going to war.  And like in rabbit-y ways--like, basically World War II with rabbits.  I'm not entirely sure where I got this idea, but I think it might have been the title; it just sounds like some sort of distress call from a boat that's been struck by a torpedo: "SOS!  Watership down, I repeat, Watership down!  SOS!"

I finally got around to reading it because it was the Deliberate Reader book club selection for April in the Facebook group.  It also slotted nicely into my reading challenge category for a book that is a parable; while Adams did not intend the book to be a parable, saying that it was just a book about rabbits, it seems it's frequently read as a parable, and that's good enough for me.

The plot here is fairly basic.  Adams builds a society of rabbits, but keeps them in their natural habits and forms; they talk and act and think, but they're not necessarily anthropomorphized in the way that, say, Mickey Mouse is.  Within this society, some rabbits are gifted with seeing; in the warren of rabbits that starts the book, one of these seers if Fiver, the best friend of the main rabbit, Hazel.  Fiver predicts some unknown devastation for the warren, and on his warning, Hazel convinces some other rabbits to leave the warren with them.  They strike out into the countryside, seeking a place to build a new warren.  Along the way they encounter other rabbits who fled their warren, and encounter other rabbits not of their group.  And even when they establish a new home, they can't live in contentment, because without any females, they can't sustain a new colony.  And it's this struggle for survival, both immediately and in the long term, that drives the book.

Throughout the story, Hazel grows from an undersized, un-listened-to rabbit to the leader of the group, using logic instead of emotion and pushing on in the face of fear in order to take the new warren to safety.  We also get to see several different modes of warren society; the home warren, the one they encounter on the way, the one they establish on Watership Down, and Efrafa.  We also encounter other colorful characters, such as General Woundwort and the best character in the entire book, the bird Kehaar.  Human society is glimpsed through the rabbits' eyes and the story is bulked up by tales of the mythical rabbit who was the original rabbit leader, in the style of Br'er Rabbit and other trickster stories.

The writing was surprisingly engaging.  While it got off to a slow start, I soon found myself wrapped up in the story.  I didn't expect to enjoy it nearly as much as I did, but the different types of rabbit societies offered a wonderful study of contrasts, and seeing our core group of rabbits come together and learn to triumph as a cohesive group rather than a bunch of misfits was a great central propulsion.  Hazel was also definitely the proper choice for a central character.  The other two obvious choices would be Bigwig or Fiver, either of whom would have quickly become annoying as a main character--Bigwig because of his impulsivity, and Fiver because of his Timidity.  The other types of animals also held enough difference and interest to not make the book bland, which it could have easily become.

Overall, I was pleasantly surprised by my reading experience.  This is another one I can cross of my classics list, and I even recommended it to a few people who'd had similar misconceptions about the book.  A worthy read.

4 stars out of 5.

Shrill - Lindy West

My pick for a feminist book for my 2018 Popsugar reading challenge, Shrill is an angry book.  And why shouldn't it be?  Women get the short end of the stick in pretty much every area of life.  West isn't at the very bottom of the social structure--she is straight and white, which are two points in her favor--but she is overweight and loud, which are two things that society does not take kindly to.  Take, for example, the recent internet kerfluffle that was "Describe yourself as if a male author was describing you," in which many older (read: not twenty-three-year-old) and/or overweight women had to point out that either they would automatically be relegated to the role of villain, or they wouldn't be in a book written by a man at all.  West has a career built in comedy, but it's one she fought for tooth and nail against pretty much every odd, and in this book she takes on that, as well as the struggle to just be seen as a person while fat and female.

West is loud.  She is opinionated.  This book has probably made a lot of people angry, because how dare a woman--and a fat one at that--have opinions like that?  How dare a woman not find rape jokes funny?  How dare she not find it flattering that men threaten to rape and kill her for protesting against the very un-funniness of rape jokes?  How dare she put it out that hey, it's hard to be a fat person, so please stop piling on the emotional abuse on top of an already challenged existence?  How dare she suggest that we don't go out of the way to shame and humiliate each other?

Nothing is off limits here, and that's probably one of the things that will make people mad.  West is a modern woman.  She has had an abortion, one she does not regret, though the emotions surrounding it were hard for her.  She is in a relationship with someone of another race.  She has struck out alone, written scathing articles directed at her own editor and climbed a professional ladder.  She has dealt with death and grieving and rejection and basically every sort of humiliation that she could possibly face.  In Shrill, she tears into all of it.  She mourns the loss of her "funny" card, from when the comedy community turned on her for speaking out about rape jokes.  She talks about online harassment, about being absolutely terrified at some of the things anonymous commenters threaten and the personal details they reveal they know, the fear that stalks her at the things they say--Are they watching me?  How do they know that?  She swears, she mocks herself and others, and she is angry, and justified in being so.  The title of the book, cooked up during the 2016 presidential campaigns, is deliberate, because West's anger, like so many other women's, comes to the surface in a time when a populace--including a majority of white women--would elect a sexual predator rather than a woman.

Her writing is good.  It is raw in some instances, but it reads like it seems West would speak, and that makes the book seem like a conversation, and a deeply personal one at that.  Is it the most polished thing in the entire world?  Probably not, because it's hard to be completely polished while being so forthright.  However, West has an extensive journalistic background, and that expertise shows here.  Among her new writing are excerpts of some of her former works, and in reviewing them she adds a few points of polish and remarks on things that she wished she had done, reflecting that not only is she not writing a 260-page rant--this is much more than that, more structured, more thought-out, more everything--but that it's largely her professional growth that has attributed to this.  That said, there are points where her writing is shocking, particularly at the beginning, and I found myself reeling back somewhat.  Maybe a bit more of easing in would have been good for the reader who wasn't quite prepared, but wanted to know--but then again, maybe that would defeat the point.

Overall, a harsh read, but a good and important one nonetheless.

4.5 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.

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.

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.

Burn for Me - Ilona Andrews (Hidden Legacy #1)

I picked up Burn for Me while it was on sale a while back because another member of the Unapologetic Romance Readers group had given it a really good rating.  And Ilona Andrews does really good paranormal fantasy with romance elements, which is right up my alley, so it was perfect.  But it sat on my Kindle, unread, until I slotted it into my reading challenge for "A book by two authors," because "Ilona Andrews" is actually a pen name for a husband-wife writing team, Ilona and Andrew Gordon.  This isn't actually hard to find--they're very open with it--but it's not apparent by just looking at the book cover.

The best-known books by these two are the Kate Daniels books.  Burn for Me and the other Hidden Legacy books take place in a different world from Kate's story.  In this world, a substance called the Osiris Serum was discovered in the nineteenth century and unlocked magic in many people; the unlocked magic became genetic, and in our current time, despite the serum no longer being in use, magic is still rampant.  Heroine Nevada has magic that allows her to tell when someone is lying, though she hides it because she doesn't want to be forced to become a human lie detector for the government, military, etc.  Instead, she runs a private investigation business that brings in money for her family.  But when bad boy Adam Pierce starts burning things down in Houston, Nevada is put on the case of bringing him back to his family against her will by the man who "owns" her family for various reasons.  And to make things worse, she ends up falling with bad man Connor Rogan, aka Mad Rogan, aka the Scourge of Mexico, who can literally level cities with just the power of his mind.  Yikes.

I really, really enjoyed this.  I stayed up too late reading it, which I haven't done in a long time, and immediately bought the second volume, White Hot.  Nevada is an imminently likable character.  She is smart and gorgeous and can kick butt, which is all par for the course in this genre, but her devotion to her family is something new, because most people in this genre tend to be orphans or estranged from their families, for some reason.  Her sad and quiet mother, her kooky grandmother, and her annoying-but-helpful younger siblings and cousins were all so charming and really added a lot to this book.  I have mixed feelings about Rogan--and I actually wasn't sure if he was going to be the love interest for a while (I thought maybe something would end up happening with Adam) because he and Nevada don't meet until so far into the book.  But he's a little psycho.  Nevada is keenly aware of this herself, and purposefully keeps distance between herself and Rogan because of it.  But Rogan is the very typical paranormal romance alpha male, and he is determined to have Nevada.  Which really makes her resistance of her, her shutting him down and backtalking, even though she is definitely attracted to him, even more admirable. 

Of course, the fact that this is a three-book series and this is only the first book probably helps, too.  But what's best about this is that Rogan is fucked up and brutal, yes--and Nevada doesn't let him use that as an excuse.  It's not "Oh, he's broken, he will be so sweet and perfect once I fix him!"  Instead, it's "Yes, he's sexy, but he is dangerous and probably doesn't want me for more than sex and I really cannot deal with that now, so I'm going to nope out of here as fast as I can."  This is the type of stuff that strong heroines are made of, and I really liked it.

This is a great, fun, sexy paranormal fantasy/mystery--there's no sex here (though Nevada is interested, somewhat despite herself) and the tension is really drawn out, so don't expect a resolution in that department.  But White Hot is already shaping up pretty well, so I have hopes there!

5 stars out of 5.

Silver Borne - Patricia Briggs (Mercy Thompson #5)

Clocking in another book for my 2017 Reading Challenge, I've tackled my third Mercy Thompson novel for the year and the fifth in the series, Silver Borne.  This is a book that was a bestseller the year I graduated high school (2010).  I was actually pretty excited to see this, because books in this vein seem to rarely hit bestseller lists and so seeing it there was very refreshing.

One thing about the Mercy Thompson books is that they seem to pile one right after another.  One book picks up exactly after another one lets off, or at least within a few days of it.  Let me tell you, it must be absolutely exhausting to be Mercy, because she never seems to get a break.  Someone or something is always trying to kill her, and despite her protests that she does nothing to deserve it, she does seem to always be poking her nose in places it probably doesn't belong.  Keeping her head down is not something she excels at.  In this volume we find Mercy, just after the events of Bone Crossed.  Mercy is still settling into her role as Adam's mate in the face of a lot of opposition from the pack, dealing with an increasingly-depressed Samuel, and is also sucked into a missing persons case involving the magical book she's been toting around for several volumes.

I liked this a lot more than Bone Crossed.  BC felt like a lot of politicking and hemming and hawing without much happening.  While this one wasn't full of fight scenes, it still felt like things moved.  Mercy developed in her relationship with Adam and with the pack; there were some pack intrigues, but they didn't take over the book; Samuel started to come into his own and we found out more about his past and his potential future; and the characters overall just seemed more integrated into both the story and the world than wandering around trying to resolve events that really should have been left a few books behind.  All of this was a definite improvement over BC, which was tired in comparison.

This book breathed some fresh air into the series, which I think it really needed.  Fifth books are tricky; by this time, it's either clear that the series should have ended a few volumes ago or that it's good for the long haul.  After Bone Crossed, I wasn't very hopeful, but Silver Borne really brought it back up and gives me hope for a series that doesn't really seem to have an end in sight.

4 stars out of 5.

Lost Girls - Robert Kolker

I watch a lot of Criminal Minds.  While I know it's all highly dramatized, moves much faster than any real investigation ever would, etc., it utterly fascinates me.  And so, when I needed a true crime book for my reading challenge, Lost Girls, about an unsolved serial killer case, was an obvious choice.

That said, while this is a true crime book, the crime is--again--unsolved.  That means that the perpetrator isn't know, so there's no way to really dive into the killer, his psychology, etc.  With that in mind, Kolker's focus is very much on the victims and their families and not the investigation itself.  While some information about the investigation is given, it seems like much is still kept under wraps, making reporting on it difficult and necessitating a "bulking out" of the book by talking to the families, relating Facebook drama of the victims' relatives, etc.  So, if you're looking for a true crime book heavy on the police procedural part, this probably is not the book for you.  But if the personal aspect of the victims draws you in, as well as the nasty little secrets and webs of small communities, you'll probably like this one.

So here's the focus: on Long Island, from 1996 to the time the book was written, five young women who worked as escorts and prostitutes vanished.  Following the very loud disappearance of the last one, an investigation was finally launched, and four bodies were discovered--but not the one of the girl whose screaming woke up a community and caused several 911 calls.  With the stage set, Kolker steps backwards, lining up the lives of the victims--Maureen, Melissa, Megan, Amber, and Shannan--including their often-troubled backgrounds, how they ended up as sex workers in New York, and in some cases how they ended up at Oak Beach, the small and insular community that may just be hiding a serial killer.  The cases are also potentially intertwined with a string of other unsolved cases attributed to a serial killer in Manorville, but there's no concrete proof of that and opinion on the matter seems to waffle.  So these five are the core.  Based on interviews with the people who knew these women before their disappearances and dealt with the questions and grief after, Kolker's work has a stronger tilt toward escorts on Craigslist than it does towards bodies in the sand, but until the case is solved, I'm not sure how it could be skewed in the other direction without delving into some very unresponsible reporting and conjecture.

As a study in psychology and spirals, I found this book fascinating.  I really enjoyed Kolker's writing and really felt for these women and their families.  I can't say this was an enjoyable read, because how can a read like this, without a solid resolution, ever really be enjoyable?  But it was riveting.  It's thrown out there that by some studies, the number one cause of death for prostitutes is murder.  Seriously.  Murder.  Not accidents.  Not suicide.  Not any form of disease.  If you're a sex worker, you're more likely to be killed, probably by a client, than you are to be hit by a car.  That is absolutely insane.  And as Kolker points out, a missing girl is only missing to the people who notice, and while these four women had people to notice, those people had a hard time getting authorities to believe them.  People don't care about missing and murdered prostitutes, something Kolker addresses along with the healthy dose of victim-blaming that was handed down by the police once they became involved.

This is not a fun story, and it is one that lacks a satisfying ending--but it is an important one, about how easy it is for people to be lost in the gaps of society, to be pushed aside and forgotten and blamed for their own murders.  Hopefully one day the truth will come out and the guilty party will be held responsible here--but that hope is, of necessity, a slim one, because as Kolker illustrates again and again, the women found at Gilgo Beach aren't exactly high-priority.

4 stars out of 5.

Into the Water - Paula Hawkins

One of my reading challenge categories this year is a Goodreads Choice Awards Winner, and Into the Water won the category of "Mystery & Thriller" for 2017.  I also already had it as a Book of the Month extra, since I had enjoyed The Girl on the Train. 

The story here centers around a pair of drownings in a small English town.  Told from the perspectives of a multitude of characters, the plot tries to unravel what really happened with these drownings, who is responsible, etc.

This was not as good a book as The Girl on the Train.  While the central premise--the Drowning Pool, a place both for suicides and to get rid of difficult women--is hypnotic, there are too many point-of-view characters running around to easily keep straight.  Additionally, despite this being a mystery, there's not really a mystery here.  Why?  Because we're pretty much told who is responsible for the events here early on in the book, practically bludgeoned over the head with it for the duration of the story, and GASP!  It's supposed to be a big reveal!  Of course, there is a little twist at the end, but it was nothing earth-shaking or life-shattering.

One thing that Hawkins does get right here is atmosphere.  The small town, the rain, the river, the pool, the way that Jules speaks to her dead sister, the creepy and decrepit mill house--all of it combines for a very spooky feeling.  This would be a good rainy day read.  Or maybe one for when it's storming and the power goes out and you're reading by candlelight.  None of the characters are very likable, either, which also adds to this.  Now, I don't think that characters necessarily need to be likable for a book to be good, but if you feel differently, you might not like this very much.  The pace is slow, which I think suits the story, though the frenzy of characters sometimes makes it feel faster than it really is.

But ultimately, if this book is supposed to be a suspense or mystery novel, it fails.  As I mentioned before, the end is put out there very early on, and the little "twist" can easily be inferred from what we're outright told.  With that in mind, the book is too long by far, because we spend all of it watching the characters bumble around going "Whaaaat?" and wanting to smack them upside the head for their blindness.  By the time someone finally put it together, I was ready to drown the lot of them in the same river that was causing all of the problems.

Overall, not as good, shocking, or suspenseful as I had hoped.  The atmosphere was strong, but not strong enough to sustain the book as a whole.

2 stars out of 5.

The Thirteenth Tale - Diane Setterfield

One of my resolutions for the new year is actually to read less books than I did last year.  What?  I mean, in books, it's always a constant climb to the top, right?  Well, not exactly.  I read 232 books last year.  That's a lot of books.  Reading that many books takes a lot of time.  This year, while I'm still going to read a lot, I also want to spend more time focusing on my health and not making reading into a chore.  I still want to enjoy it!  That said, I still have a few reading challenges going on, and even if I cut thirty-two books out of my reading, I'd still hit two hundred, which is a pretty respectable year.  I'm trying to get more challenge books out of the way earlier this year since I have a pretty solid plan for many of categories, and The Thirteenth Tale is a book for one of those categories, namely a book with characters who are twins.

The story here is fairly simple.  Margaret Lea, our narrator and heroine, works in a small bookshop that her father owns and occasionally writes biographical snippets.  When she's contacted by the revered author Vida Winters (revered by apparently everyone but Margaret, who only reads works by authors who already dead) to write Winters' biography, she's initially reluctant, but eventually agrees on the condition that Winters, who has a long history of making up stories about herself, tell the truth.  What slowly unfolds is the story of a deeply dysfunctional family.  A pair of twins who were probably born of incest and are left to grow up mostly feral and the attempts to put them aright, leading up to the time that a fire destroyed Winters' life--as she says, she has only been biding her time ever since it.  There's a mystery lurking here, and I think it's one that the discerning reader can probably figure out.  I nailed all of it down by the end, and was pretty proud of myself for it, too.

This was an interesting book.  While the writing isn't fast-paced, there is plenty going on.  Much of it is happening in the wings, behind the scenes, and have to be teased out.  Margaret does much of this for us, over time, but it can be done before she comes to her realizations, which is a good intellectual exercise.  Her view about books is kind of stuck up--she says that she just prefers old books, but it's definitely implied throughout her attitudes and actions throughout the book that she feels like people who read modern or popular fiction somehow aren't "real readers" as much as she is.  But the book has much of the slow and almost Gothic feel that the books Margaret reveres have.  Her favorite is Jane Eyre, something she appears to share with Winters, and Setterfield herself much like it quite a lot because its influences on this book are obvious; Margaret herself points them out at several times.

I was somewhat perplexed by the subplot of Margaret feeling so lost and adrift in her own life.  I'm not a twin, so maybe it's not something that I can understand, but she feels like she's going to die because her twin died when they were both infants.  It's pretty clear what happened from the beginning, though Margaret dances around spelling it out for much of the book--and her connection to Winters ultimately felt off because, as things are not what they appear, but how they really are means that what seemed like connection isn't.  It's hard to say it better than that without revealing the twists, which I don't want to do, but that was how it came across to me.

Overall, I liked this.  It's very atmospheric and finding a truly modern Gothic seems like a rare experience, and of course I love books about books.  But some of its notes rang a little false and it also falls victim to the Gothic trope of wallowing in melodrama--but being a more recent work, it doesn't carry it off as well as its century-and-a-half-old counterparts.

3.5 stars out of 5.

2018 Popsugar Reading Challenge

It's the new year, and that means a new reading challenge.  I've quite liked Popsugar's in the past for having a broad variety of categories, and ones that mostly change from year to year, so I'm going with that one again.  Here's the category list and some preliminary thoughts on titles.  One thing I'm doing this year is trying to fulfill most of the categories with books that I already own; and, if I don't own a title for a category, trying to fill it with a book that I'd be purchasing anyway for book clubs or because it's a title I was already planning on buying when it came out in 2018.  And if I really can't do it that way, I'm hoping to fill in the gaps from the library!

-A book made into a movie you've already seen.  Howl's Moving Castle, Diana Wynne Jones

-True crime.  Lost Girls, Robert Kolker

-The next book in a series you started.  Cobweb Empire, Vera Nazarian

-A book involving a heist.  The Palace Job, Patrick Weekes

-Nordic noir.  The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, Steig Larsson

-A novel based on a real person.  Circling the Sun, Paula McLain

-A book set in a country that fascinates you.  Sky Burial, Xinran--this is one that I'll be reading for a book club and so will need to obtain somehow.

-A book with a time of day in the title.  Light in the Gloaming, J. B. Simmons

-A book about a villain or antihero.

-A book about death or grief.

-A book by a female author who uses a male pseudonym.  I want to use the new Robert Galbraith (aka J. K. Rowling) book for this but it doesn't have a release date, so if it doesn't work out I'll use a work by one of the Bronte sisters, who used male pseudonyms.

-A book with an LGBTQ+ protagonist.  Wanted, a Gentleman, K. J. Charles--this one isn't actually one I own or is lined up for a book club, but it was reportedly one of the best romance novels of the year and historical romances with LGBTQ+ bends are fairly rare, so I'm going to go for it.

-A book that is also a stage play or musical.  Anna and the King of Siam, Margaret London

-A book by an author of a different ethnicity than you.  The Bollywood Bride, Sonali Dev

-A book about feminism.

-A book about mental illness.  The Bell Jar, Sylvia Plath

-A book you borrowed or that was given to you as a gift.  Clockwork Prince, Cassandra Clare

-A book by two authors.  Burn for Me, Ilona Andrews--this is a pen name used by a writing team of Ilona and Andrew Gordon, who are married and write books together!  #relationshipgoals

-A book about for involving a sport.  Riding Lessons, Sara Gruen

-A book by a local author.

-A book with your favorite color in the title.  Breakfast at Tiffany's, Truman Capote--yes, Tiffany blue is my favorite color.  It's just such a gorgeous shade of blue-green that no other color quite captures.

-A book with alliteration in the title.  Salt & Storm, Kendall Kulper

-A book about time travel.  Drums of Autumn, Diana Gabaldon

-A book with a weather element in the title.  Tempests and Slaughter, Tamora Pierce

-A book set at sea.  The Unimaginable, Dina Silver

-A book with an animal in the title.  Big Fish, Daniel Wallace

-A book set on a different planet.  The Sparrow, Mary Dorica Russell--this is the sci-fi book for discussion this year in the Deliberate Reader book club that I'll need to get.

-A book with song lyrics in the title.  Catch Me If You Can, Rank W. Abagnale--this is like a million songs, apparently, though I'm not familiar with any of them.

-A book about or set on Halloween.

-A book with characters who are twins.  The Thirteenth Tale, Diane Setterfield

-A book mentioned in another book.

-A book from a celebrity book club.

-A childhood classic you've never read.  -The Secret Garden, Frances Hodgson Burnett--I don't own this one but I don't have a lot of "childhood classics" lying about, so I'll have to get one no matter what.

-A book that's published in 2018.  A Reaper at the Gates, Sabaa Tahir

-A past Goodreads Choice Awards Winner.  Into the Water, Paula Hawkins

-A book set in the decade you were born.

-A book you meant to read in 2017 but didn't get to.  Arcana Rising, Kresley Cole

-A book with an ugly cover.  Brave New World, Aldous Huxley--I know there are tons of editions of this book, but mine has these weird blood cell-like things on the cover and it is weird and gross.

-A book that involves a bookstore or library.  Smoke and Iron, Rachel Caine

-Your favorite prompt from the 2015, 2016, or 2017 Popsugar Reading Challenges.  Beauty, Robin McKinley, from the 2016 category "A book based on a fairy tale."

-A bestseller from the year you graduated high school.  Silver Borne, Patricia Briggs--I don't own this one, but I've been reading the entire series through the library so continuing just makes sense!

-A cyberpunk book.

-A book that was being read by a stranger in a public place.

-A book tied to your ancestry.  In the Garden of Beasts, Erik Larson--I'm half German so I picked a book that takes place in Germany, since I don't think there's anything both more specific and particularly interesting in my ancestry that there'd be a good book about.

-A book with a fruit or vegetable in the title.  The Garlic Ballads, Mo Yan--yes, garlic is a vegetable!  It is actually a type of onion.  #themoreyouknow

-An allegory.  Watership Down, Richard Adams--another book club title.

-A book by an author with the same first or last name as you.

-A microhistory.  The Radium Girls, Kate Moore

-A book about a problem facing society today.  Sex Object, Jessica Valenti

-A book recommended by someone else taking the Popsugar Reading Challenge.

I have to comb through my library in search of books for some of these other categories, but I'm confident I can fulfill most of them; I might also inadvertently end up with books that fill some of them throughout the year through places such as Book of the Month.  I'm optimistic that this year I won't have to go searching for titles for many categories like I sometimes have in the past!

The Gifts of Imperfection - Brene Brown

This is the selection for the Deliberate Reader Book Club on Facebook for 2018, with the focus on an easy-to-discuss nonfiction.  I've actually read one of Brown's books before (Daring Greatly) and so knew what to expect upon opening this one, which predates DG.  I was also pleasantly surprised to find out that it was short, since I was rushing to finish other books before the end of 2017 before I picked this one up.

Brown has spent her career researching shame, and has encountered a phenomenon of people she calls "the Wholehearted" in the process.  Basically, this book is kind of a self-help book on how to let go and relax into living what is, ultimately, a more fulfilling life.  It is not a checklist; anyone looking for one here will be disappointed.  Instead, she goes into the things that she's found common in people who are Wholehearted, and things that get in the way.  She punctuates the book with stories from her life and her research that illustrate her points.

Self-help books are very much not my genre of choice.  However, this wasn't an awful read.  While there are some things that Brown promotes that I don't really buy into (she talks about spirituality and says that it's not about religion, but she certainly deals with it like it is) but there are some good things to keep in mind, such as the importance of taking time to step back, play, rest, and not embracing a culture of scarcity--you know, never having enough time, sleep, beauty, etc.  Instead, try more to embrace what you have, and you'll be happier for it.  Brown herself admits to not liking everything she found in her research; our culture tells us that exhaustion is a sign of hard work and therefore being exhausted is a good thing.  However, it's not good for us as people.  Much of what Brown puts forward here is at odds with American culture and seems like it might be better in line with other places in the world--though of course, nowhere will hit everything she wants.  But beyond all, what's she's emphasizing, sometimes implicitly and sometimes explicitly, is creating and enforcing boundaries.  Letting people push us is how we end up unhappy so much of the time, so being able and willing to put up boundaries, and then stick to them, is vital to overall happiness.

This is a pretty readable book and Brown is an enjoyable author; she writes like it's an easy conversation, which was nice.  However, if you've read any of her other works, you'll probably find this more repetitive.  Daring Greatly focuses on parenting and leading, but she talks about all of the stuff from this book in one way or another, so if you're reading more than one of her books, be aware that you're going to re-tread some ground.  I think this one is probably more outright useful than DG because the things here can be applied to any point of life whereas DG is more focused on parenting and leading, things that I am not particularly interested in; of course, that might be just me.  Still, a good read for this time of year, with things to keep in mind for the year ahead.

3.5 stars out of 5.