Three Weeks With Lady X - Eloisa James (Desperate Duchesses #7, Duchesses by the Numbers #1)

Eloisa James is one of my favorite historical romance authors, and Three Weeks With Lady X is a sterling example of just why.  It has all of the elements that James does so well: a hero and heroine with a fabulous capacity for witty banter, a family dynamic (the hero here is the child of one of James' other couples), obstacles between them that are just likely enough to allow suspension of disbelief but just small enough to be overcome, a secondary love story that, while not terribly interesting, adds a little bit of a different dynamic to make you want the main couple to get together even more, and a great country-house setting.

In this particular piece of work, Thorn Dautry, born Tobias and later called Juby, is trying to marry into respectability.  The bastard son of the Duke of Villiers, Thorn is beloved by his father and stepmother, has just enough polish to be noticed by well-born women (but not enough to be taken as a true gentleman) and is absolutely filthy rich to boot.  Thorn has set his eye on Laeticia, whose family has a title but is dirt poor.  Lala doesn't particularly want to marry Thorn, but is willing to do so for her family's well-being, provided that her mother will give her blessing.  Thorn figures that he needs to buy a country house to make himself out as a good choice to Lala's mother (who is a true bitch, of course) and buys Starberry Court.  He then hires Lady Xenobia, who goes by her middle name India, to make the estate into something presentable.  India is well-born and rich, but through her own doing; her parents squandered the family fortune and spent their time pretty much worshipping nature, leaving India very much on her own until they were killed in a carriage accident when she was fifteen.  Ever since, India's guardian Adelaide has shuttled her from house to house, letting India work her magic and right their woes while Adelaide visits with her friends.  Now, at twenty-six, India plans to make Starberry Court her last project before retiring and finding a husband of her own.

Over the course of the book, India and Thorn of course engage in witty banter, the exchange of witty notes, and have other witty encounters of various varieties, and of course they become attracted to each other, though Thorn is always very clear that he intends to marry Lala.  This is partly because he really does intend to marry Lala, who he feels is the ideal wife because she will bear his children, love them terribly, and never get in his way, and partly because he feels like he's not good enough for India, or that India thinks he isn't good enough for her because of his low-born origins.  This second part is, of course, not true, but becomes the main source of conflict between Thorn and India, even more than the fact that Thorn intends to marry another woman.

Fleshing out the cast of characters is Vander, Thorn's best friend who also takes a liking to India; Adelaide, India's aunt who means well but seems rather absent-minded, as she is always leaving her unmarried ward alone in Thorn's company; the Duke of Villiers and his wife, Eleanor; Lala's bitch of a mother; and even a brief appearance by Thorn's former mudlark friends.  And then, of course, there is Rose--the daughter of one of the former mudlarks who is entrusted to Thorn after her father dies.  Rose acts more like sixty than six, and bears a resemblance to Thorn even though she isn't related to him, which causes some problems relating to Thorn's respectability.

What more is there really to say?  It's a charming historical romance, which is what James does best.  Despite a few flubs in the past, I think her more recent series have really shone and I've thoroughly enjoyed them.  She does play around with history at some points (this one deals with Thorn running a rubber factory several decades before such a thing would have been realistic, which seems silly; she could have easily picked another industry for him) but honestly, do we really read historical romances for the history?  No.  No we do not.  We read them because they have a charm that is hard to capture in modern-day romances, and that is what James excels at.

4 stars out of 5.

Gretel and the Dark - Eliza Granville

This book had a lot of things that I absolutely love: fairy tales, historical fiction, a psychological element.  At times, it was absolutely enchanting.  But despite the book's very good reviews, I didn't really like it overall.  There were a few reasons for this.  First, until the very end of the book, you're left wondering what the heck is going on.  The two alternating storylines are obviously connected, but I was left wondering if one of the stories was a dream, a delusion, or if Granville was actually going with the idea of someone time-traveling in order to try to kill Hitler.  Second, I'm not sure how, but Granville actually managed to make a main character who is a Holocaust survivor utterly unlikeable.

Okay, that was kind of a lie.  I know exactly how Granville managed to make her Holocaust-survivor main character unlikeable.  Mainly, she made Krysta a complete brat, so much that I wanted to slap her and lock her in a cupboard just as much as most of the characters that surrounded her did.  We weren't supposed to like Johanna, but man, I sympathized with Johanna and her desire to put Krysta in her place way more than I sympathized with Krysta herself.  Her constant streams of "Won't," "Want," "Don't want to," and so on were absolutely unbearable at more than one point.  Granville tried to turn her obstinacy into a positive trait later in the narrative, successfully, but even that wasn't enough to wash away the dislike of Krysta that had built up over the first three-quarters of the book.

The other characters I liked.  Lilie's character was weird but cool, Josef's character was creepy but realistic and added an interesting psychological element to the story, Benjamin was easily the most empathy-worthy character of the lot, and Gudrun and Greet both had the "gruff housekeeper who means well" dynamic to them.  I found that I enjoyed the Vienna storyline much more than the Ravensbruck storyline, which is kind of problematic given the structure of the two and how they fit together.  Whenever Krysta appeared on the page, I wanted her off it as soon as possible, and considering she was our main point-of-view character...that's an issue.  I know Krysta was young--exactly how young I don't remember, if it was ever mentioned, though it is mentioned that she's older than one would think--and had somewhat-recently lost her mother, but let me tell you: in all my years of dealing with precocious children and entitled students, I have never met a child as insufferable as Krysta is.

The inclusion of all the different fairy tales and how they fit together and morphed from telling to telling was interesting, but trying to figure out how they fit into the different timelines and storylines was disorientating and didn't allow me to get a good feel for the story as a whole.  It was just a weird feeling, and in the end I wasn't sure where I was left standing with this one.  Normally I would read a fairy tale-inspired book more than once, but this one?  Not so much.

2.5 stars out of 5.

The Tastemakers - David Sax

My name is Chelsea, and I'm crazy about cupcakes.  It's true.  As a resident of Washington, DC, I am one of the people absolutely mad for Georgetown Cupcakes, one of the many cupcakeries mentioned in The Tastemakers.  On the other hand, I'm not "fed up with fondue," as the rest of the subtitle would insinuate.  Granted, I don't think I've had fondue on many occasions, but I'm not fed up with it.  It's fun.  We should call it fundue!  Haha.  I am 100% positive no one has ever made that joke before.  However, apparently a lot of people are fed up with fondue, and The Tastemakers tries to explain why.

Sax dives into a lot of the reasons foods become trends, from pop-culture appeal (cupcakes appearing on Sex and the City) to money (bacon is a huge industry) to health appeals, true or not (acai and chia, anyone?).  While the concepts are interesting, the book itself didn't really capture my interest.  I thought Sax's writing could trend purple and a lot of the time he lost my attention as he wandered off on philosophical bents that weren't exactly on-topic.  While anecdotes about the author's childhood can add to some aspects of a book, I thought Sax went overboard, feeling the need to shoehorn mini-memoirs into every aspect of Tastemakers.  I also thought this book would dive more into why people like foods for the foods themselves, but instead it's completely about how we are manipulated into liking certain foods by different industries.  I understand that industries do manipulate us into liking different foods (I read Salt, Sugar, Fat a couple of winters ago, and a finer example of food-industry manipulation there cannot be) but I though Tastemakers would be a little different.  The diverse focus of foods was good, but overall I found that Sax couldn't hold my attention.  I put this book down almost constantly to read other things, which never happens with food books.  An intriguing concept this was, but I found it just didn't live up to my tastes or expectations.

2 stars out of 5.

A Court of Thorns and Roses - Sarah J. Maas (A Court of Thorns and Roses #1)

I'm a Sarah J. Maas hipster, by which I mean that I liked her before it was cool to like her, back when she had a real doorstop of a book called Queen of Glass posted on Fictionpress.com.  That doorstop is now the best-selling Throne of Glass series.  After reading the first one, I found that I didn't like it as much as I had the original draft, which was much darker (at least in my memory) and, while A Court of Thorns and Roses looked beautiful, I was leery about reading it because I didn't want to be disappointed again.  But then a friend read it and gave it four stars, and so up to the top of my list it went.  And was I disappointed?  No.  No I was not.

The plot follows Feyre, a human girl who is spirited off to the faerie realm of Prythian after she kills a faerie wolf one winter day.  In Prythian, she lives on the estate of Tamlin, a High Fae lord with the power of shapeshifting into the form of a beast.  Feyre aches to return to her village and her family, whom she promised to care for, but slowly becomes sucked into the world of Prythian and into Tamlin's life.  But when a magical blight threatens Prythian and everything beyond it, Feyre is both terribly out of her depth and the world's only hope for stopping the blight before it destroys everything.

A Court of Thorns and Roses is supposedly based off of Beauty and the Beast, and I can see that; however, I think it falls in more closely with another fairytale, East of the Sun and West of the Moon, which features a more active heroine.  In fact, Thorns and Roses reminded me of a lot of my favorite books: the faerie world, so beautiful and terrible, of Holly Black's Tithe, the overall plot structure of Dennis L. McKiernan's Once Upon a Winter's Night (STRONG resemblance there), the same "mortal falls in love with immensely powerful immortal" vibe as N. K. Jemisin's The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms, and an overall feel like that of Kristin Cashore's Graceling and Rae Carson's Girl of Fire and Thorns.  This was a very good thing, because it meant I really liked this book.  Did I absolutely love it?  Well...not quite.  For most of the book, I did.  But I felt like the ending left something to be desired.  It's obviously sequel-bait, and I have a nasty feeling that Maas is setting up the future books to include a love triangle, which I feel doesn't work well with the dynamic established in Thorns and Roses.   I found the plot setup and writing truly lovely, but that ending makes me dock a star.  I don't like eyeing future books with apprehension because of the way one ended, and that's exactly what happened here.  I don't feel like this quite ranked up there with Graceling and Girl of Fire and Thorns, but it was certainly very, very good.

4 stars out of 5.

Lucky Us - Amy Bloom

Whoever decided on the title for this book--whether it was Bloom, her editor, publisher, whoever--has a sick sense of humor, because the characters in Lucky Us are lucky only in the sense that they survived infancy.  Beyond that, they are perhaps the unluckiest set of people I have ever read about.  This book was almost painful to read because just when you thought it couldn't get any worse, it does.

The story follows Eva and Iris, half-sisters who share a father.  When Iris' mom dies, Eva's mother (the father's mistress) takes Eva to Edgar's (Iris and Eva's father) house and leaves her there.  Iris and Eva bond pretty quickly and eventually run away to Hollywood where Iris tries to make it as an actress and Eva plays support.  Eventually, a scandal results in Iris being blacklisted from the Hollywood scene, and Edgar tracks the girls down.  The family, plus makeup artist Francisco, heads to New York where Francisco found Edgar a job as a butler and Iris a job as a governess for a rich family.  Things continue to go wrong, however: Iris falls in love with the family's cook, who happens to already be married; the cook's husband is arrested an interned as a Nazi spy; Edgar's health starts going downhill, fast; and so on.  Also involved: a kidnapping and a fatal fire.  Throughout it all, Eva supports herself, and later her family, by reading tarot cards and telling fortunes.

I wasn't a huge fan of how the book was composed.  Most of the chapters are written in first person, from Eva's point of view.  Also interspersed are letters from the other characters to Eva and sections written in third person that focus on the other people.  While I didn't mind the inclusion of letters, many of them seemed very strangely written; they were obviously letters written that were to tell the reader backstory, and therefore didn't feel like genuine letters.  After all, Eva would have known what had happened to herself and Iris.  She wouldn't have needed Iris to write her a letter describing it all, which is exactly what happened.  That didn't quite fit to me, and the letters, especially those from Iris, didn't seem to fit with the content of the book.  Iris gets really roughed up at one point, and ends up going to England for plastic surgery, and it's apparently a smashing success because she writes about her life like she's super pretty and everything is awesome, but according to the rest of the narrative she was terribly disfigured and I'm skeptical of how well plastic surgery would have gone in the mid 1940s.  I certainly don't think it would have been enough to restore her looks to the starlet ones she had before.  I also didn't like the third person bits, because while the things that happened in them were interesting, they jarred me out of the narrative.

ALSO this book involves lesbianism!!!  Very prominently!!!!  Iris realizes her sexuality as a lesbian relatively early on (there is a lesbian orgy in this book, guys; not a very explicit one, but still) and has two major relationships with other women (none with men) throughout.  This seemed to be remarkably well accepted, considering the time period; I would have thought there would have been a lot more stigma attached to a homosexual relationship in the 1940s, though female homosexual relationships have never been frowned upon quite to the degree that male ones have been.  Anyway, it was cool to see a non-straight character in a historical fiction, and especially one where her sexuality is an element of the plot but is not the main thing driving it.  So many books that involve non-straight characters can become completely about the character's non-straight identity, and this one didn't do that.  Which was good, because there is always more to a person than their sexuality, and Iris was no exception.

One more thing: this book is full of terrible people.  Pretty much all of the main characters (with the exception of Francisco) do terrible things at one point or another, Iris most notably of all.  This made them hard to like, and almost made you feel like they deserved all of the hardships that came their way which....might have been the point?  I'm not sure.  I liked Eva, overall, but even she facilitated a kidnapping at one point, which obviously is not good.  Some of their actions were very jarring for protagonists, because protagonists are supposed to be easy to identify with, and I didn't find Eva or Iris that easy to empathize with.  I can't imagine kidnapping someone or reporting someone as a spy so that I could hook up her husband; it just doesn't work in my mind, and it alienated me from Eva and Iris quite a bit.

And can we talk, briefly, about how that cover has nothing to do with the book?  Nothing.  At all.

Overall, 3 stars out of 5.  It was short but complicated, and not necessarily in a good way...the end somewhat made up for the other bits, but not entirely.

The Third Plate - Dan Barber

Dan Barber is a chef, known for farm-to-table cooking at his restaurants Blue Hill in NYC and Blue Hill at Stone Barns outside the city in a slightly more rural part of New York state.  He was also the subject of one episode of Chef's Table, a recent documentary mini-series produced by Netflix.  The episode, as far as I can remember, didn't mention this book at all, but it left enough of an impression that when I saw the book chilling out in the waiting area of local DC restaurant Founding Farmers (delicious, simply delicious; if  you're ever in Washington, DC, you should make this a stop, but I would suggest a reservation) I was interested.  I didn't have enough time to pick the book up at the restaurant, but it was at the library the next time I stopped by, and so home it came.  I then had to share it with one of my coworkers, who is also a food fanatic, and so when she went out of town I took my chance and devoured it.  (Devoured.  Haha.)

Let me put one thing out there about Dan Barber: I don't know him personally, but in the documentary...he's a jerk.  A real asshole.  He has a tendency to be verbally abusive towards his staff, with a terrible temper, which he freely admits; he also says it's a problem, but admitting it doesn't make it better.  He came off so poorly that when a contestant on Chopped mentioned having interned at Blue Hill, my only thought was, "Oh, that poor kid."  So I was a little leery about the book at first; would he be as much of an ass on the page as he was on the screen?  The answer is, resoundingly, no.  On the page, Barber comes across as charming and a little naive but willing to learn, which is a weird juxtaposition with his documentary persona and I'm not quite sure how I feel about that.

The book is divided into four sections: Soil, Land, Sea, and Seed, and each one focuses on a different aspect of food and relies heavily on Barber's interactions with different farmers who specialize in each section.  Soil revolves around just that: a farmer in New York who switched his farm to organic and uses different crop rotations to enrich the soil and improve the quality of the food he grows, a process that Barber considers vital to the future of good, sustainable food.  Land and Sea both take place mostly in Spain, where Barber looks at sustainable foie gras made without force feeding ("freedom gras") and at a sustainable fish farm that's smack dab in the middle of a national park, both of which produce superior products on a smaller scale.  Seed moves back to the United States and talks about breeding different varieties of vegetables and grains (the focus is mostly on wheat, though a few other things are mentioned) without genetically modifying them.  Overall, the message is one of encouraging diversity of foods, supporting smaller-scale production on a wider scale (more small farms instead of a few big farms, less farms with monocrops, etc.) and generally shifting the way we eat and view food to make the future of cuisine more sustainable.  It's a movement that has to take place at every level, because if one level doesn't change, the others are stuck in the same loop.

Barber's writing (or did he have a ghostwriter?  I don't know; I'm never sure about these things...) is easily readable and very engaging, with a literary nonfiction feel; he tells the stories of the people he works with in the book, so this doesn't feel like a textbook read at all.  I think this is really how nonfiction needs to be written, so that it is enjoyable and educational at the same time, a balance with which some nonfiction writers struggle.  He's clear in explaining his ideas and doesn't repeat himself over and over again, which can be onerous.  The farmers he works with and the locales he visits are note-worthy enough that you might have heard of them in passing at some point, but small enough that learning about them is enjoyable and doesn't feel like a rehashing of something that's been covered time and time again.  And, perhaps most refreshingly, Barber has a positive outlook on the future of food.  As he points out in the introduction, opinions on food's future often tend toward the dystopian, with pills and drinks providing necessary nutrition while food itself becomes scarcer and scarcer and a thing of the past.  This isn't Barber's opinion at all; he belongs to a school of thought that believes yes, food is headed in a bad direction on the large scale, but positive change isn't impossible, and will benefit everyone involved (except, perhaps, Monsanto).

Despite the book's hefty page count (it clocks in at about 450 pages) I found this a quick and easy read, not bogged down by chapters the length of short novels, sensible transitions, good writing, and a logical progression.  This one will probably have to find a permanent place on my bookshelf.

5 stars!

2 AM at the Cat's Pajamas - Marie-Helene Bertino

Light books with ensemble casts of kooky characters seem to be all the rage recently, and this one is no exception.  Since I read Where'd You Go, Bernadette recently, this book reminded me immensely of that.  It's a book with a child as the main character, even though the book is for adults, and the child gets up to all kinds of trouble when the parents aren't looking.  In Bernadette, it was fourteen/fifteen-year-old Bea who got into trouble trying to solver her mother's disappearance; in this one, it's nine-year-old Madeleine trying to fulfill her dream of being a jazz singer.  Madeleine is described by Bertino as "a jerk," and consequently doesn't have any friends.  Most of the people who associate with her in the book are the adults who have stepped in to care for her following her mother's death and her father's descent into a prolonged depression in which he does nothing but listen to old jazz records.  Madeleine goes to school by herself, eats at a cafe down the road by herself, gets her hair done by herself, and ultimately decides to find The Cat's Pajamas, one of Philadelphia's jazz clubs, by herself so that she can make her onstage debut.

Other than Madeleine, the book features Sarina, Madeleine's teacher who is not enjoying her holiday season one bit for a variety of reasons, and Lorca, the owner of The Cat's Pajamas who has just been slapped with a huge fine for violating a large number of city laws and codes in regards to his club.  Sarina sets out to cheer herself up and Lorca and his band of misfits at The Cat's Pajamas try to find a way to cover the fine and save the club as Christmas Eve Eve creeps onward.

The entire story takes place over the course of one day, from about 7am on December 23rd to the wee hours of December 24th.  Despite that, the narrative doesn't seem rushed at all.  Indeed, at some times it got a little too bogged down with Bertino's wordiness.  She takes great lengths to describe scenes, scenes which were intended to make the city of Philadelphia seem as much a character as Madeleine, Sarina, and Lorca, but which in fact only seemed rambling and left me wondering where we were actually going with the words on the page.  These scenes took place mostly at the beginnings of chapters, though there were a few (two describing girls and boys, specifically) that were in the middle of chapters and seemed to derail what was happening around them.

There's also a very slight magical realism note to this story which involves Madeleine's singing.  It's pretty strongly implied that when Madeleine sings, things happen.  Things float.  People do weird stuff.  At first, this seems charming; levitating food and dishware isn't so menacing, after all.  However, it's later implied that Madeleine's voice, when she sings, can cause people to do much darker things--like sexually assault people.  Yes, there is a sexual assault in this book (perpetrated by a woman on a man) and it's hinted at there was another that occurred before the book actually again.  This was weird, and creepy and uncomfortable in the extreme, and did not at all fit with the whimsical, charming narrative that comprised the rest of the book.  I'm not sure if Bertino meant for this scene to be so jarring, or if she meant for it to be lighthearted, and if it's the latter (heck, even if it's the former!) I have to wonder what she was thinking.  Sexual assault by either gender is nothing to be lighthearted about, and it definitely put a damper on the rest of the book for me.  Why this sort of thing happens when Madeleine sings (But not always?  It was used pretty inconsistently.) is also never explained.

This is a good book, with good characters and setting and sometimes wonderful writing--good bones, but I think it needed more polish, and some points more outright thought, for it to be great.

3 stars out 5.