The Hate U Give - Angie Thomas

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

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

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

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

4.5 stars out of 5.

Truly Madly Guilty - Liane Moriarty

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

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

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

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

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

Teach your kids to swim, folks.

1.5 stars out of 5.

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

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

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

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

Yes.

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

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

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

Sigh.

2 stars out of 5.

Chemistry - Weike Wang

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

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

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

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

2 stars out of 5.

Our Kind of Cruelty - Araminta Hall

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

Let me back up.

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

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

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

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

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

2 stars out of 5.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

4 stars out of 5.

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.

Pairing Off - Elizabeth Harmon (Red Hot Russians #1)

Once again, can I just state that figure skating romances are da bomb?  Okay, now that that's out of the way, let me get to the actual book...

This came to me as I was perusing lists of figure skating books in the wake of absolutely loving From Lukov with Love.  I picked up Pairing Off and a couple of other titles off the list hoping for good things, and overall I feel that Pairing Off delivered.

Our main characters are Anton and Carrie, Russian and American pairs figure skaters, respectively.  The two met and had a, erm, romantic encounter when they were teenagers competing in junior games, and then completely lost touch.  Years later, Carrie has been banned from US figure skating after her partner initiates a sex scandal by sleeping with a judge in exchange for high scores.  Hoping for a new start in Russia--not in high competition, but at least in something that can keep skating in her life--she finds herself paired up with Anton, who doesn't recognize her from their encounter years before, and whose partner ditched him for another skater, though the two of them remain romantically involved.  But while Anton doesn't remember Carrie, Carrie certainly remembers Anton, and the two find themselves drawing closer both to each other and to Olympic dreams.

This was a solid sports romance novel.  The setting--modern Moscow--is unusual for an American romance novel, and I quite liked it.  The figure skating aspect is wonderful.  Carrie and Anton are a pair that don't immediately click, and they have to work to get to know each other.  It's not a hate-to-love relationship, but it's certainly one that has a rocky start, partially due to their past and partially because of Anton's more reserved character.  There are some good side characters here, too.  Initially Carrie seems to be hated by the entire figure skating community, American, Russian, and otherwise, but she slowly finds friends in Russia, though not everyone falls over themselves to get to know her--which is good, because I didn't want this to turn into Everyone Loves Carrie.  Olga, of course, is a Class A bitch and you have to wonder about why Anton stays with her for so much of the book despite their long connection, but she's not the only one who doesn't fawn over Carrie (though no one else is perhaps quite so venomous).

What I didn't like was Carrie's Tortured Past and her dynamics with her father.  I think one or the other would have been more than adequate here.  But Carrie blames herself for the suicide of her mother, and takes responsibility for her father's political career almost entirely on her own shoulders, which was ridiculous.  I know that people get survivor's guilt, or blame themselves for things they can't control, but the length of time that this was drawn out for and the melodrama that surrounded it was completely out of proportion and took away from some of the better aspects of the book.  And what was up with the sudden paparazzi storm?  That seemed larger than life, as well...

Overall, I liked this one.  It was a solid start to a series.  The second book (Turning It On) involves reality TV and I'm not sure that's really up my alley, so I might skip to the third book (Getting It Back) since there's not an overarching plot, but I'm definitely interested in more books in this vein!

4 stars out of 5.

The Cafe by the Sea - Jenny Colgan

Colgan's The Bookshop on the Corner has been on my to-read list for a while now, but I haven't been able to get it from the library.  However, The Cafe by the Sea came up as available without any waitlist, so I snapped it up for a weekend read.

At first, I was very concerned that this was going to be a chick lit book.  Flora seemed like she might be a chick lit type of character--young and living in London and making somewhat questionable decisions while having a gigantic crush on her aloof boss.  She uses London as a refuge, having fled her hometown of Mure--a tiny Scottish island community so far north it's practically Norwegian--after her mother's funeral with plans to never go back.  But when an American billionaire taps the law firm Flora works at specifically because she works there, she finds herself dispatched back to Mure to attempt to prevent a wind farm from being built and blocking said billionaire's view.

While this book teetered perilously towards chick lit at times, it ultimately managed to wedge itself over the line in regular ol' contemporary fiction.  There's an ill-fated love triangle and a lot of domesticity, but Flora is ultimately on a journey of self-discovery rather than "I must pursue a man."  There is a man involved, but her story is larger than that and is more heavily based on reclaiming her place in the Mure community and repairing her relationship with her father and three brothers while determining what to do with the failing family farm.  The titular Cafe by the Sea is a pop-up shop Flora ends up running in an attempt to foster goodwill with the community on the billionaire's behalf (really, he's not as bad as he seems like he's going to be at the beginning of the book, which was good, because I thought he was going to be a straight up Steve Jobs/Donald Trump conglomerate, which was not the case) with recipes based entirely on her mother's cookbook.  Flora seems an indifferent cook before the discovery of the recipes, but is (of course) an amazing one after with no in between.

The love triangle I was iffy on.  It's pretty obvious from the beginning that Joel is going to be a prominent character, but I was unsure of how suitable a partner he really was.  I do think Colgan tries to show his background and why he is so closed off early in the book as the story progresses...but at the same time, if someone is a jerk, they're probably always going to be a jerk, and one conversation with their therapist's wife and a glimpse of a blonde with her hair blowing in the wind isn't really going to change that.  Charlie, of course, was a Class A tool, so don't get your hopes tied up around him, no matter how deceptively nice he seems when first encountered.  That I think Colgan did a good job with--neither guy is as they first appear.  I'm just not sure I'm entirely sold on the switch.

This was a good weekend read.  I'm still interested in The Bookshop on the Corner, and it will probably be similar: light and fluffy but with poignant moments.  Despite my initial chick lit concerns here, I don't think this falls into that category.  A lot of people have shelved it as such on Goodreads, but honestly, this has deeper themes than chick lit ever does, even if it has a domestic main character, a love story, a quaint setting, and a bright and peppy cover.

3.5 stars out of 5.

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.

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.

#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.

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.

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.

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.

Happily Ever Ninja - Penny Reid (Knitting in the City #5)

This is the worst romance book I'v read in quite some time, and that pains me because I typically really, really like Penny Reid.  She's written some of my favorite contemporary romances.  This one?  No.  Not so much.

The fifth book in the Knitting in the City series, this focuses on Fiona, the only member of the knitting group who was married before the series began.  Her husband, an ex-Marine, is a consultant of some type in the oil business, working to try to make oil drilling more environmentally friendly and ethical (or something--it's kind of vague).  Fiona is an ex-CIA agent (you can kind of intuit this from former books in the series) turned stay-at-home mom and part-time consultant.  Their relationship is under some strain because of Greg's long absences from home for work, but they're trucking along, as they have been doing for fourteen years...until Greg gets kidnapped, and Fiona goes to save him.

First let's talk about this hare-brained plot.  This is nothing like the other books.  Reid mentions that, other than Neanderthal Seeks Human, this was the book she was most looking forward to in the series.  It's basically a spy novel, though, and it does't fit in with the rest of the books at all.  There is no character or emotional depth here.  There is a novella about Fiona and Greg's origin story floating about somewhere, but that does not excuse shoddy plotting and characterization in the main book.  We know that Greg was a Marine and something happened to his parents; but what?  We know that Fiona was apparently a child gymnast and spent six to eight hours a day training, but beyond Greg throwing that out in an argument, there's nothing else about it or how it might have formed her as a character and influenced her decisions.  And, by the way, you can want your kids to have a normal childhood even if you weren't a child gymnast, so it wasn't even a good point for the argument.  Fiona's rescue mission was the most half-thought-out thing I've ever seen, and Greg's improvisations on it were even worse.

But the real problem with this book is Greg.  Greg is the worst romantic hero ever.  You know who I didn't say that about?  Gray Eagle, the "hero" of Savage Ecstasy, which was terrible.  Greg is worse.  Why?  Because Gray Eagle isn't supposed to be a good guy, and Greg is.  Let me discuss some of why Greg is terrible with you.  Ultimately, what much of it boils down to is that while he purports to love Fiona, he does not trust or respect her, which are, you know, kind of important factors of love.  The examples of this are numerous and infuriating, such as...

-Greg's job takes him away from home for long periods of time; okay, that happens.  However, while he's gone, he expects Fiona to live and parent by ridiculous decrees that he leaves behind, such as their five-year-old daughter is not allowed to have a princess costume, or their son can't play soccer unless their daughter does too, and their daughter doesn't want to play soccer.  Greg pushes this as not molding their children to gender norms, but it doesn't work, because the daughter has lots of other interests that are not typically keyed to women, she just doesn't want to play soccer and she happens to like princesses.  When it comes out that Fiona is letting her children have a bit of freedom--the daughter gets her costume, the son gets to play soccer--Greg pretty much flips and blames Fiona for making decisions without him.

-On the note of making decisions without him: Greg and Fiona do talk while he's gone, via Skype.  However, Greg doesn't seem to want to be involved with making decisions, he just wants Fiona to follow his rules while he's gone and have phone sex with him.  The book opens with Fiona trying to talk to Greg about their retirement, which he argues about why they basically shouldn't have a retirement investment because all corporations are evil, and then says he'll sign the papers if she has Skype sex with him, shows him her boobs, sends him dirty pictures, etc.  He never does sign the papers, and his demands for sexual favors in return for acting like a Goddamn adult are ridiculous in the extreme.

-Even when Fiona basically single-handedly saves him from Nigerian kidnappers using her elite CIA training, he does not trust her planning or skills enough to get them out of Nigeria.  Instead, he chooses to drug her against her will and haul her off into an even bigger mess of his own creation, which involves him getting re-kidnapped and almost killed in a gunfight and Fiona almost being arrested for treason.

-He has no respect for the work Fiona does or the hard decisions she has to make as a functionally single parent; he comes home, trashes the apartment, gets upset at Fiona for having a male neighbor/friend, and then mocks her when she expresses her anger and frustration at his behavior, before saying he loves her and leaving, as if saying that you love someone fixes everything you've done to hurt them.

-He was furious at her for keeping her CIA status from him earlier in their relationship and made her promise not to do anything dangerous beyond her abilities, but he doesn't have the respect for courtesy to act the same in his own career.  Per a promise he made, he never brings up the CIA thing in arguments, at least vocally--however, he makes his resentment known, even a decade and a half later, through his actions towards her.

-He makes rape jokes that he actually thinks are funny.

Fiona eventually addresses Greg's behavior, demanding that he value and respect her.  And poof!  He suddenly does!  But I don't for one secton believe that, if he clearly has not valued or respected her for the first fourteen years of their marriage (and eighteen or nineteen years of their total relationship; I forget the exact number), that he is about to start now, harrowing near-death experiences or no.  Yes, marriages have problems; but this is beyond reasonable.  Greg seems to have really loved Fiona when they were younger, and I don't blame her for marrying him.  However, I do blame her for not divorcing him in a hot second by the end of this book, and I have to wonder where her spine has been for the past fourteen years if she's supposedly such a kick-ass person.

There are other problems with this book, too; Marie is apparently suddenly a lawyer though she never went to law school because she decided to take the bar exam one day, when this isn't actually possible--you can take the bar without going to law school, but you have to spend an extended period studying under an attorney or judge to do so.  This might be addressed in the next book, Dating-ish, which focuses on Marie as the main character, but is an illustrated point that while Reid seems to have done some research on Nigeria for this book, she skimped in other areas.  It's also not as well-edited, with misspelled, misused, misplaced, or just plain missing words in several places.  It kind of feels like Reid was so eager to write Fiona's book that she just did it and never looked back to see if it was actually any good.

Let me wrap it up this way: if Happily Ever Ninja was the first Penny Reid book I read, I would never read another.  That is not the case, however.  I've read many of Reid's other books and like them quite a bit, so I will read more...but knowing that this is what Reid sees as one of her favorite stories and implied favorite heroes has made me lose quite a bit of respect for her as an author.

1 star out of 5.

Perennials - Mandy Berman

I never went to sleepaway camp as a kid or teen.  I went to week-long day camp a few summers as a Girl Scout, and I think there were a few weekend-long overnight excursions, but nothing long-term.  It was just something that never came up and something, reflecting back, that my family probably couldn't have afforded even if it had come up.  So to me, summer camp has all the sheen of media, and typically in the horror movie sense.  You know, campers missing in the woods, something in the lake that's killing people...that kind of stuff.

Perennials both is and isn't like that.  Ostensibly about two young women, Fiona and Rachel, who attended a camp as children, as they return for one final summer as camp counselors and learn about growing up in the face of a tragedy.  Well, there is a tragedy indeed--more than one.  And while there are no serial killers lurking in the woods and no monsters cruising the lake, this book sometimes struck me as a horror story of another kind entirely, because what is up at this camp is very, very wrong.  Counselors are sleeping together--as teenagers do--and the camp director even gets involved.  Someone witnesses a rape--a very obvious one, in which the victim is seen saying she wants to go to bed, and is blatantly pulled into the woods and raped despite her protests--and the victim is punished for it along with the perpetrator.  Ill fates await not one but two campers over the course of the same summer. 

The lens Berman chose for this was interesting.  The story is told in third-person through a variety of perspectives; Rachel and Fiona each have a couple of chapters, but most of the book has the viewpoints of a variety of other characters.  The camp director, the two girls' mothers, Fiona's little sister, other counselors, campers, etc. all get to chime in with things happening over the course of the summer.  My favorite was probably Sheera, and I would have liked to see more of her; she was so different from the other characters, which was no doubt the point, and I felt a little robbed when she exited the stage relatively early in the book.  Seeing things through both Rachel and Fiona's perspectives was interesting, though--from Fiona's perspective we can see that she thinks Rachel doesn't really care about her except to serve as the "responsible" one, but from Rachel's we get another view: that she really does love Fiona, she just wishes she would come out of her shell and not need constant reassurance that she's liked.

The title here was especially poignant; while marigolds, the plant the camp is named after, are annual flowers, Fiona and Rachel themselves are perennials, coming back year after year and seeming to pick up right where they left off.  The difference is this final summer, when things seem to change so drastically in such a short period of time.  Both of their lives are ultimately turned upside down and the two are pushed apart by the events of the summer--however, the book ends on a positive note, with the potential for them to recover and grow closer together as a result, if they want to.

On the downside, the multiplicity of viewpoints leads to a lot of info-dumping.  Because there are so many characters and Berman wants to give you the full story about what brought each of them to Camp Marigold, there's a lot of "This happened to this person, which made them feel this way, which led to this."  There are a few great flashback scenes that did far more to contribute to character building than the straight-up info dumping, which showed some of what Berman could do, but the book's short length limited them by necessity and so we were left with long periods of info separating out bits of character interaction and forward movement.

Ultimately, I liked this.  However, I think it's much darker than Berman intended it to be.  Obviously there are some tragic events here, but there's another layer of darkness underlying it all that I'm not sure was deliberate.  And if it was--well, this was marketed in entirely the wrong way.  But for a character-driven book, I thought this was very good.

4 stars out of 5.

I received a free copy of this book from the publisher for winning a Goodreads giveaway.

Deep Down Dark - Hector Tobar

A recommendation from the DC library, I picked up the audiobook of Deep Down Dark to listen to while processing spreadsheets at work.  This is the book about the Chilean mine disaster that trapped thirty-three miners underground in 2010; during their ordeal, the miners made a bargain to sell their story collectively, something they mostly held to, and Hector Tobar ended up being the one to write it.  As the only person who had the full, authorized version, much of the book comes from exclusive interviews conducted with the men involved.

The book starts the morning of the disaster with the men going to work, and goes all the way up until Tobar is actually writing the book.  While thirty-three men were trapped, Tobar focuses on a few "main characters" in order to tell the story, the ones who were the most prominent in one way or another.  Additionally, he pulls in people from the surface who weren't as focused on, such as the sister of one of the miners who was known as the "mayor" of the camp town that sprang up outside the mine during the men's imprisonment and rescue efforts.  He goes over the different plans to reach and rescue the men, which involved personnel and equipment from an unbelievable number of countries.  This was kind of like a real-life The Martian but set underground instead of on Mars--and with more people.  But the basics are the same; there's a disaster, someone (or many someones) are trapped seemingly beyond reach and hope, and the world comes together to get them back.  Tobar also goes into the politics of the rescue and its aftermath; how different parties used it as leverage in campaigns, the backlash against the men when they didn't react like the media wanted them to, etc.  They've never been compensated by the company or the government for their ordeal, which is truly criminal; Oakley sunglasses and trips to countries provided by those countries don't exactly make up for the trauma of being trapped in a mine for months.

That said, sometimes the narrative seemed to stall, and not because forward movement in the search and rescue had stalled.  More, it would be because Tobar started repeating things or repeating the same thing but in the words of different people.  While I can see the value of multiple perspectives, at some point it really seemed to not be necessary and to just be taking up space.  Additionally, though Tobar focuses on a smaller cast of characters than was actually involved, the cast is still large enough that it's hard to keep track of who is who at times--particularly for someone unfamiliar with Latin American names like myself; had I seen them on a page I think I would have pinned them by sight, but listening they sometimes blended together especially as they were frequently known by nickname and relationships in addition to given names.  He does reveal a lot of the bickering and conflict that took place surrounding the rescue, which I liked--because not everyone gets to be a sparkling white hero.  In fact, no one does; everyone has flaws, and he shows them, which I think was necessary in order for this book to be sincere.

Overall, a very good listen.  It's long, but worth it if you have the time and the interest.

4 stars out of 5.

The Death and Life of the Great Lakes - Dan Egan

Recently my boyfriend decided that we should read more books together so that we can discuss them, and since more books is always okay with me, off we went.  He picked the first book, The Death and Life of the Great Lakes, which was also hugely interesting to me because I grew up on the Great Lakes, specifically Lake Erie but with visits to Lake Michigan and also the Niagara River in the Niagara Falls area.  I'm familiar with zebra mussels and sea weed and algae slicks and dead fish on the beach.  I knew that the Cuyahoga River used to catch fire with some regularity, and that Erie, PA was the largest freshwater fishing port in the world, and that the lake just didn't freeze over like it used to, and that Lake Erie was, quite frankly, pretty polluted and gross.  But I didn't know how bad things actually were.

Egan divides his book into three parts: the front door, the back door, and the future.  The "front door" to the Great Lakes is the Saint Lawrence Seaway, over which foreign ships bring cargo and also ballast water laden with invasive species, which they then proceed to dump in the Great Lakes.  Enter the zebra mussel and the quagga mussel, plagues upon fresh water systems everywhere.  This part also deals with the sea lamprey (mostly dealt with now due to a massive ongoing poisoning campaign--pleasant, right?), the alewife, and the chinook and coho salmon, planted in the lakes by a misguided campaign by one person to make the lakes into some sort of sport fishing paradise.  All of this, of course, ravaged the lakes' natural ecosystem, to the point that they will never truly recover.  The "back door" is the Chicago Sanitary and Ship Canal, which connects the Great Lakes to the Mississippi River Basin.  Not only has it provided a route for the quagga and zebra mussels to spread to much of the country beyond the lakes, but it's providing a route for extremely invasive species of Asian Carp to get into the lakes, which would make all the devastation the mussels have wreaked look like nothing.  This part also talks about runoff that has led to toxic algae blooms on Lake Erie that threaten clean water supplies.  And finally, the third part talks about threats to the lakes from climate change, cities wanting to funnel away the water for various reasons, and finally a drop of hope in the bucket of despair in regards to how the lakes are, in some small way, adapting and people are working to "fix" them.

This is a bleak book.  Despite Egan's attempts to show that, if we really try, we can stop the damage and start to repair it, it's pretty clear that the lakes will never be what they once were again.  The invasive species can't be gotten rid of.  There's some hope with genetic manipulation of them, but that can be a Pandora's box all on its own.  And then there's an absolute reluctance for people to actually do anything to begin with.  Farmers don't want to change their fertilizing practices, saying that the agricultural runoff isn't really due to them, even though there's overwhelming evidence to show that it is.  Agreements to funnel water away from the lakes keep going through.  There's no real teeth in an order that ships coming from overseas implement better methods of cleansing their ballast tanks of invasive species before dumping in the lakes.  And everyone fights tooth and nail against suggestions to cut the Chicago canal off from the lakes to stop the march of Asian carp.  All of this despite the fact that all of this going on is costing money and stopping it would not really affect trade or the economy at all.  It's infuriating.  Rage-inducing.  And pretty darn hopeless.

This is an excellent read, though.  Egan's writing is engaging and informative at the same time, and he writes in a narrative style while still conveying so much about the state and future of the lakes.  Sprinkled with interviews and anecdotes, I could definitely see the years of reporting that went into what ultimately became this book.  It's also an important read, and I think that it should be pushed on pretty much everyone possible.  The Great Lakes aren't just the problem of the people who live on them; they are twenty percent of the world's available surface freshwater.  That said, there is something that I think was missing here, and that is that the book is written almost entirely from an American perspective.  Egan's an American who did this research for American papers, so that's understandable.  However, Canada also touches the Great Lakes and has a ton of influence on what happens to them!  I would have loved to see something from the other side of the border--a part, a chapter, something other than a few lines about Canadian initiatives that match American ones.

Overall, an excellent read albeit a depressing one.  Read it anyway.  Educate yourself.  Water is everyone's problem.

4 stars out of 5.

The Lace Reader - Brunonia Barry

The Lace Reader was my final book for my 2017 Popsugar Reading Challenge.  The category was "A book recommended by an author you love."  An author I love is definitely Tamora Pierce, and luckily for me, she has a list of recommended books up on her website--and I already had The Lace Reader on my Kindle, so it was an easy pick.

The main character is narrator Towner, a self-proclaimed unreliable narrator.  On the very first page of the book, Towner (whose real name is not even Towner) proclaims that she always lies, which about sets the tone for the rest of the book.  However, it's pretty clearly not Towner's fault that she lies; she has gaps in her memory and some apparent delusions, all centered around a traumatic past involving the death of her twin sister and a family member who heads an extremely conservative cult, the kind that believes in burning witches, and who happens to believe that Towner and several of her female family members are witches.  You can imagine how well this family functions.

The story takes place when Towner returns to Salem (as in the Salem Witch Trials) after years of being away in the wake of the death of her aunt, to whom she was very close.  Towner thinks there's something suspicious about Eva's death, as does a local cop who liked Eva and becomes close with Towner.  But returning dredges up all kinds of stuff that was probably better buried, puts Towner back in the path of her crazy, cult-leading uncle, and also entwines her in a missing persons case for a young woman who belonged to the uncle's cult.

The book is divided up into a few different formats.  There are first-person chunks from Towner's perspective, third-person chunks that focus on Detective Rafferty, and also some documents, including snippets from "The Lace Reader's Guide," a sort of journal that Eva kept, and a journal that Towner herself kept while she was staying in a psychiatric hospital following the death of her twin.  I think all of these worked well together, for the most part, and I did like her general writing style.  I think the writing felt fluid and she did a great job building a sense of Salem as a place.  The supporting characters were well done, and for most of the book I liked trying to figure out what was true and what wasn't based on what Towner and the other characters told us.

However.  Ultimately, some of the execution here fell flat.  There were just too many holes left at the end, too many things that seemed to contradict what we'd been told for the rest of the book.  If the things that we find out at the end are true, then a lot of townspeople were just going along with Towner's delusions, which didn't feel like it was the case throughout most of the book.  Yes, people said that Towner was crazy--which she kind of was--but no one seemed to indicate anything that directly contradicted anything that she, as a narrator, presented to us.  And they probably should have.  Even if people weren't willing to say something to Towner's face, she--like the other women in her family--was psychic and could pick up on people's thoughts, which certainly seems like it should have brought something to the surface that wasn't there.  And when things do start coming out in the epilogue of the book, it's kind of a jumble and too many things are left unexplained, and though Towner herself seems to know what's what at the end, we as readers do not, which is strange considering she was narrating.

Overall, I think this is a book that needs more than one read-through; I'd need to go back through it knowing what I did know at the end to try to tease some of the loose pieces out of the earlier portions of the book.  However, I don't think this should be a necessary storytelling device.  I enjoyed this, but think that the structure overall had some issues in the unreliability category.  Still, the writing was good and I'd definitely be open to reading more by Barry.

3 stars out of 5.