Bookish Thoughts

This book asks the question: what would you do if you knew you only had one day to live? It takes place in a world very much like ours, but with one key difference. On the day you die, you receive a call in the early morning hours letting you know that it's your last day. No information on how you die or exactly what time. Just that you have less than 24 hours to live. So what do you do? The story follows two teenaged boys - Mateo and Rufus - on the last day of their life. They reach out to each other through an app called "Last Friend". They have different goals for the day, but they agree to help each other through, to stand by each other until the very end. Whenever that ends up being. The tragedy is compounded by the fact that these two boys are both so very young. There's a lot that they meant to do that they won't be able to. And their last day is largely about making peace with that. About saying good bye to their loved ones and trying to squeeze in all...

It's been fun to watch John Scalzi grow as an author over the course of this series. It started off as pretty basic military sci-fi (albeit with a fun protagonist/narrator), and has become a sandbox for him to slowly start experimenting. In this book, he decides to play with structure a bit and composes the novel out of thirteen inter-connected short-stories. I love when authors decide to take chances like this, and I think it paid off big here. The short stories mostly follow a diplomatic team as they race around the galaxy trying to form unions with other alien species in the wake of the rift between the Colonial Union and Earth. Some of them are longer, some are shorter. Some of the stories aren't about them at all and their relevance only becomes clear later. All in all, I'm impressed with what Scalzi pulls off here. I'm getting excited to read more of his stuff (lucky for me he's nearly done with a new trilogy that I'll be able to dive into when I finish ...

Tor.com releases a lot of short fiction for free on their website. But somehow I never actually read any of it until they bind it up in a digital book and I can get to it on my kindle app. It's just easier to read that way, I guess. Anyway, the Spring bundle had five stories in it. Knowledgeable Creatures: This story hooked me from the beginning. I love a good narrator, and this world-weary canine PI was just familiar and just strange enough to hold my attention hostage. The story hints at a much wider world that I would happily read several books about. I wonder if they'll ever get written. 1/0: This was a beautiful story about the upsides of AI. So often, these stories become all doom and gloom as the computer learns more and more and attempts to "save" humanity from itself. By placing the learning AI in the hands of children in a refugee camp, this becomes a very hopeful story about the future. There's a way in which we will all be alright, so long as we ca...

Lately I've been seeking out books that don't require too much mental energy from me. I finally picked up the rest of this trilogy at a used book sale, so it seemed like the perfect time to revisit this fun, frothy book about people with more money than sense. Really this book is just fun. I love seeing the ridiculous things the super rich choose to spend their money on, the ways they determine how they're better than everyone else, and the ever-practical every-girl Rachel navigate everything. It was also great to go back and see the things they had changed for the movie. I'm excited to get to the rest of this trilogy now and live vicariously through people who spend freely on absurd things.

My favorite thing about Ursula LeGuin's work is how hard it makes me think. I don't always agree with her, but in reading her arguments I find I have to sharpen my own. I usually come out of her books either having my mind (slightly) changed or feeling much more secure in my own beliefs. It's a fantastic experience. It's also a ton of work. This collection of essays was much more accessible and easier to read than her fiction tends to be. In most cases, she's distilled her ideas into 4-ish page essays. It's a great way to engage with her thoughts without having to do all the work that, say, The Left Hand of Darkness , requires of you. I really liked these essays, which were mostly ruminations on the end of life, as she came to the end of hers. I only wish there had been a few more about her cat, Pard. But I suppose I can always go to her blog for more of that content.

It took me a while to get in to this book, but that was more an issue of timing than the book itself. I shouldn't start epic tomes when I know I'm going to be too busy to read for a week. When I did manage to sink into the story, I got a fun, swashbuckling adventure about an idealistic young man. Which is exactly what I wanted. I particularly enjoyed the narrator of this book. The mystery of her identity (which I figured out long before she revealed herself, as the book expected me to) was a fun hook dragging me through some of the more tedious sections. And her occasional snarky asides added some fun flavor to the book. I loved when the narrator is a character, and Allende did an excellent job of that here. The only thing this book is really lacking is a sequel. Just when it was really getting good, when Diego de la Vega had fully embraced his identity as Zorro and completed his first mission, the book ended. This was more of an origin tale than a series of adventures. And...

It only took a couple of chapters for me to remember how much I absolutely love Sarah MacLean's books. Actually it didn't really take that long, but that's when I came up for air because I needed to sleep. Hattie is a force of nature in this book, and I fell in love with her from the first moment I met her. So it's no wonder that Beast did, too. The banter between these two was perfect, the sex scenes were amazing, and the plot was thrilling. In my head, Beast was played by Tom Hardy, thanks to all his grunting. Being able to visualize the hero like that made this book all the more enjoyable. Also, half the fun of these books, now that I've read literally everything MacLean has written, is seeing the cameos of characters from earlier books. I'm sure they were there in the other books I've read. But since I worked through her books out of order, I missed a lot of them. Here I was able to recognize all sorts of minor characters and it really makes her worl...

Autonomous  is all about, you guessed it, autonomy. It asks what it means to be in charge of your own life, to what extent you can be, and how to find the balance between independence and interconnectedness. The story takes place in the far future where drug patents have severely restricted who has access to medicine. Pirates work to reverse-engineer and sell these drugs on the black market. And the drug companies send people after them to protect their intellectual property. This is all interesting stuff, but the book is also shockingly violent. I had a hard time with the various interrogation scenes and ended up really hating a character. The book didn't condemn that character nearly enough for me (it didn't help that large sections were narrated by his love-interest who wasn't really thinking critically about the harm the two of them were causing). My hatred of said character and the book's efforts to humanize him ended up making me dislike this book more than I ot...

I picked this book up expecting a light, happy, young adult romance. Instead I got put through an emotional wringer. This book broke my heart. Then is painstakingly pieced it back together again only to completely shatter it at the end. And then it left me with the smallest sliver of hope. It was very nearly perfect, and I'm mad at myself for taking this long to read it. Eleanor and Park  is about the love story of two teenagers (Eleanor and Park) in Omaha in 1986. They bond over comics and mix tapes, they fumble their way together with all the awkwardness and intensity of teenagers falling love for the first time. And then they suddenly have to grow up and they do it imperfectly and wonderfully and it just left me ruined. Park is half Korean and sticks out like a sore thumb in his little midwest town. He's not quite manly enough to win his father's approval, but his mother's love nearly makes up for it. He's incredibly atrtactive and weird and quiet, which puts...

This is such a short book, made shorter by the fact that it's poetry rather than prose and each poem is presented in both Spanish and English. I still barely finished it. I keep wanting to read more poetry, and sometimes I do come across poems that speak to me. But these weren't them. I really tried to give this collection a shot, to linger over the poems rather than speeding through them. But Neruda's work just isn't for me.

This was my favorite John Scalzi book yet, and it's likely to be my favorite of the entire series. A lot of that is due to the protagonist/narrator. Zoe has a fantastic voice, and it was so much fun to read about this smart, sarcastic girl coming of age. But I also think Scalzi is starting to get the hang of the book writing thing. This novel is paced much better than any of the previous ones and there are fewer dangling threads left at the end of it. Zoe's Tale is actually a retelling of The Last Colony , but from Zoe's point of view instead of her father's. This is one of my favorite author tricks. I love revisiting a story from a different perspective. Scalzi did this to fill in gaps and soothe angry fans after the previous book, which was supposed to be the end of the series. Honestly, I would have been madder about that one if I'd thought it was the end. There were so many unanswered questions. But with this one he does a stellar job of redressing his mistak...

This was a book club pick, otherwise I wouldn't have finished it. I'm still a little mad that I did finish it. I could have been reading other, better books in that time. Not that this was really bad. But it was incredibly frustrating. At least some of that was probably my expectations. I went into this expecting a biography of Hedy Lamarr, or at least something closer to a biography than this ended up being. It bills itself as a fictionalized version of her life. So that's on me for expecting more from it. But the author took so many liberties with Lamarr's life that I had a hard time trusting her. It was like she'd built up a version of Hedy Lamarr that she wanted and changed to facts to fit that woman. Which does the real woman a huge disservice. On top of that, the second half of the book felt phoned in. It read more like an outline than a novel. There wasn't nearly enough focus on the relationships Lamarr built up or on what must have been a difficult a...

I will start this by saying that when you name your two protagonists Lizzie and Darcy, you create certain expectations. Even if one of them is a character in a book written by the other one. But especially when one is revealed to be bisexual early on and the other one is, as I said, her creation. And especially when the book is billed as a paranormal romance. So this wasn't the book I was expecting or hoping it would be. Darcy is an eighteen year old who miraculously sells her first novel as part of a two-book deal and moves to NYC for a year to work on revisions, write her second book, and figure out if she can make it as an author. Lizzie is the protagonist of her book, a high school kid who discovers that she's a psycho pomp and falls in love with the God of Death. Sadly, their worlds never cross. This is basically two books, told in alternating chapters. And while the events of the "real world" inform the shape of Darcy's novel to some extent, there's ...

This book was a ton of fun. I loved the couple, especially Lady Penelope and her huge, caring heart. The two leads went from frustration to attraction a tad to quickly to be really believable, and Penelope overcame a metric ton of trauma without any outside help or support. But I don't read these books for the realism. I read them for the happy, in-love couple and the crackling chemistry and the sizzling sex scenes. And there were plenty of those. I actually prefer it when the couple gets together earlier. Slow burns are definitely enjoyable, but I like being able to actually watch the couple be happy together for a while on the page. And this book definitely had that. The issues keeping them apart were almost non-existent and easily dealt with. It was more just a matter of these two finding their way to each other and then letting themselves be happy. Which they both very much wanted to do. I'm excited for the last book in this series now. It's a lot of fun to follow a ...

Years ago I read and loved Elizabeth Kostova's The Historian . So I didn't think too hard when I saw this book at the library book sale. It just went straight into my bag. I guess I assumed that it would be about vampires, too. And I was mildly disappointed to discover that there was nothing at all supernatural here. This is the story of a woman who travels to Bulgaria. She accidentally takes the bag of a family when she helps them into a taxi, and when she discovers that the bag contains a man's ashes she vows to return it to the family. Her own taxi driver agrees with this, frankly insane, decision and they spend the next several days driving all over the country, slowly learning about the life of the man whose ashes they carry. The man's life story is told in parallel through flashbacks and stories. His story was the more interesting of the two, and finding out what happened to him is what propelled me through the book. I learned a lot about Bulgarian history tha...

This is one of those stories that imprinted on me. I was slowly becoming obsessed with Neil Gaiman when I first read it, and I hadn't quite realized that you could do stuff like this, yet. Remix fairy tales, mix and match genres, change the perspective and the story so completely and yet leave it wholly recognizable. It helps that I've always loved vampires. But really, Snow White as a vampire just makes so much sense. When I first read this story, I couldn't believe that I hadn't thought of it first. And I loved and hated Neil Gaiman a bit in equal measure giving me this beautiful, horrifying tale. This is about the recent graphic novel version of this story, though. It's gorgeous. The art is amazing and the perfect complement to this lovely story about a demon and the woman who tried and failed to save her kingdom. It's always haunted me, and now it can haunt me in technicolor.

This book is brutal, even moreso than the first one. But it has more hope, too. It's the book that made me fall in love with Octavia Butler, the book I think everyone should read, the book I want to get tattooed on my body. Does that make it my favorite book? I suppose it's a strong contender. Although it isn't a comfort read the way so many of my favorites can be classified, so I can't re-read it quite as often. But it's a book that I know I'll continue to come back to and get more out of each time. I really appreciate that this book is told in more than Lauren's voice. Her daughter offers a strong counterpoint to her and really elevates everything. The tension between them hurts so much, especially as more of their history is revealed. I actually wish the book had a little bit more of Asha Vere, especially after she met her mother. I suppose that would have gone in the next book, though. The one Butler didn't have time to write.

This was a lovely little story about love and identity with just a hint of magic sprinkled over the top for flavoring. The bulk of it takes place in San Francisco in the 1940s, where several women are living and making art on the fringes of society. When two of them fall in love, it's almost too good to be true. And when their relationship is inevitably threatened, the two have to find a way to stay together. There were so many elements of this story that I loved - the history, the art, the love story. Klages clearly did a lot of research and her setting comes to life on the page. She examines both the queer experience and the immigrant experience at this particular place and time and the incredible specificity is a great illustration of what this was like in general. I wish there had been a hint more magic, but what was there was a nice bit of seasoning for what was, at it's core, historical fiction. I was just expecting something that leaned a bit more heavily towards fan...

This book has one of the strongest openings of any book I've read in recent memory. I fell in love with it from the second sentence and never looked back. The entire book was atmospheric and lyrical and I can't wait to read it again. Unfortunately, one of the reasons I'm going to need to read it again is that I felt like I missed a lot the first time through. That's more my fault than the book's. It demanded more focus than I could give it. When I tried to read it five minutes at a time between my kids' demands, I kept losing the thread. I had to go back and re-read sections, sure I'd missed stuff, only to discover that the book was simply too subtle for my sleep-deprived and kid-distracted brain. But man, was it beautiful. Hopefully next year I'll have a chance to revisit it, to really sit down and give it the attention it deserves.

This is still one of my favorite books. I still wish I could live inside of it. Re-reading it every year has become a tradition, and there's not that much more to say. If you haven't read it yet, you should.

I have no doubt that this book will resonate strongly for some people. They'll read it and love it and find meaning and connection. But I'm not one of those people. And because of that I couldn't really enjoy this book. This is a quick horror story about a punk anarchist collective that's being tormented by a spirit. A handful of them summoned said spirit to help them maintain their anarchy. It's supposed to kill anyone who wields power over another. But now it's killing the original summoners and the town can't decide whether to stop it or embrace it. The book makes some basic assumptions about anarchy that I can't bring myself to agree with. It's based on a lot of ifs that I don't think hold up well in the real world. So I found the whole premise difficult. Then there's the submersion in the punk subculture. It makes for a nice shorthand for world building, but my lack of familiarity with it just meant that I knew I was missing things. ...

In honor of the 40th anniversary of the theatrical release of Star Wars Episode IV , the editors of this book collected forty short stories, each of which retells a scene from the movie from the point of view of a minor character in that scene. The stormtrooper who stunned Leia, the sand person who attacked Luke, Aunt Beru, etc. I've been wanting to get my hand's on this book since I heard about it. This was a really fun concept, and a lot of the stories were very inventive. It was interesting to consider different points of view, and some of the stories were really out there. Nnendi Okorafor tells her story from the point of view of the trash monster, for example. And being incredibly familiar with the movie only made it that much more fun to see other people's takes on both well-known and unknown characters. But the lack of cohesion was a little frustrating. Especially in the sections that took place in Mos Eisley and Yavin 4. There were so many characters to choose f...

It's been a while since I read or enjoyed The Oatmeal. I stopped finding it amusing fairly early on. But there's no denying that there was a time when it was everywhere. And when I saw this collection of his comics at the library book sale, I threw it in my bag without thinking. This collection is a bit of a throwback, containing a lot of his earlier work. As such, there was a certain nostalgia factor for me. These were comics I remember reading and enjoying back in the day when they all got passed around and linked. So I did enjoy this book. And I'm glad I picked it up for relatively cheap.

This is my second time through Station Eleven.  The first time I read it, I inhaled the entire book in a day. This time I made an effort to stretch it out (by juggling a few other books at the same time) so I could absorb it a little more slowly. This is the sort of book that rewards deeper thought, and it definitely gave me a lot to think about. Station Eleven  is very concerned with home and with interrogating the idea that you can't go home again. It opens with a flu that kills over 99% of the world's population in a few days, leaving the remaining few to find a way to live in a vastly changed world. Small settlements pop up here and there, but the post-apocalypse story focuses on a traveling theater troupe. In a very real sense, these people can't go home again. There's no home to go to, and the main characters have chosen to make their home on the road. Even the pre-apocalypse characters, Arthur and Miranda, have left behind their hometown in favor of making a ...

I've read a lot of contemporary and historical romance, and October seemed like a good month to dive into paranormal romance. Especially since I saw a trio of vampire romance novels at the library book sale. I'm a sucker for vampires, so I was excited to see how they combine with romance. Unfortunately, I wasn't really a fan of this book. With any vampire story you have to accept the author's own particular twist on the lore, and I couldn't quite get there with this book. The romance relied a bit too much on fate and destiny for me to believe that these two people actually loved each other. And it didn't help that she didn't find out he was a vampire until the very end of the book. I want my heroines going in to their vampiric romances with eyes wide open. I ended up way more interested in the side plots than the main romance. Which was a shame because they both ended up fizzling out and not being that interesting in the end. Maybe I'll check out the...

When Gone Girl  came out, there was a ton of buzz around it, most centered on the shocking twist. It was like The Sixth Sense  all over again, with everyone swearing you had to read it but refusing to tell you anything about it. Sometimes stories can rely on these twists to much, making that the only worthwhile thing about them. And they end up falling apart once you know the secret. But Gone Girl  holds up incredibly well. Even knowing what Amy's plotting from the beginning, it remains gripping and thrilling. Gillian Flynn populates the novel with some truly horrible, selfish, twisted people, and it's so much fun to watch them play games with each other and see how Amy comes out on top of everyone. It helps that she's the most ruthless and least moral. She'll literally do whatever it takes to get what she wants, including killing a (mostly) innocent guy. (Seriously, though, Desi was just as bad as the rest of them.) I really enjoyed my re-read of this book. Knowing...

This was a delightfully quick read that reminded me rather strongly of We Have Always Lived in the Castle . The book opens on Korede helping her sister Ayoola dispose of the body of her most recent boyfriend. Ayoola claims she killed him in self-defense. But this is the third boyfriend she's killed and Korede is starting to wonder. And when Ayoola starts dating the man that Korede has a crush on, she finds herself with divided loyalties. Ayoola is a terrifying creation. She's beautiful and charming and she has always gotten her way. Men fawn over her, and she uses her power over them to get whatever she wants. She's so good at playing the victim, naive and innocent and badly in need of protection, that sometimes it's hard to tell how much she believes this role she's playing, how much it's actually a role at all. I had so much fun reading this book, anticipating Ayoola's next appearance and wondering how Korede would react to her, what she'd decide t...

Every time I try to analyze this collection of Sandman  shorts, I want it to be more coherent than it is. There's no underlying theme or message or motif in these stories. They were initially spread across the run much more than they appear to be in this collection. So some but not all of them are named for months, and some but not all concern themselves with names. Dream himself doesn't even appear in all of the stories (though the one he's absent from takes place most wholly in his kingdom). Given that, it only makes sense to tackle each story individually. Fear of Falling : This is an incredibly short story that is nonetheless one of the most remembered and quoted from the entire run. A director is scared of his new play failing and is planning to abandon it before that happens. His anxiety manifests as a dream in which he falls off the top of the cliff and sees only two options: die or wake up. But Dream appears to him and presents a third option in what is probably t...

I first read this book three or four years ago, and it has really stuck with me. My thoughts return to it again and again, especially with the current political climate, not to mention the actual climate. I've recommended it to more people than I can remember and loaned my copies out enough times that I have no idea what happened to them. So when they announced a re-issue with a new introduction by NK Jemisin, it was all the excuse I needed to buy new copies and re-read them. Having now re-read the first book, I'm seeing how much the two blurred together in my mind. And I think it was actually the second one that impacted me the most. This one started out a lot more slowly than I remembered. They weren't on the road for nearly as much of the book as I thought they were, and a lot of things that I thought were in this book weren't. But I think I actually liked it more this time around. I've lived and learned a lot in the past few years, and I have a greater appre...

How do I talk about this book without talking about the ending? I'm not sure I can. I don't think the ending ruined the trilogy, or even this book. There's still a lot that I loved in it. But the ending overshadowed everything else. And being right at the end, it's the freshest in my mind. I can't decide if I think it was lazy or not. It reminded me a bit of Breaking Dawn , where the whole story builds up to a conclusion that just doesn't happen because Stephenie Meyer didn't want to write it. Erika Johansen seemed to chicken out from writing the hard ending that her book was heading towards. The part that really gets me is that it felt like such a bait and switch. Most of the chapters begin with epigraphs that seem to imply a very different ending than the one Johansen gives us. Recognizable characters, like Father Tyler and Glee, provide commentary on the events of this book as if writing about it with the benefit of hindsight. "Don't worry,...

I love this book so much. Every time I read it, I get something new out of it. It's fantastic and dense and remains a glittering kaleidoscope of a story. This time through I recognized a lot more of the references to Greek mythology, having recently read The Odyssey , and I'm a little floored by how well Valente wove all those references into her story. And I still love the way she bounces between genres while somehow creating a cohesive whole. That said, I'm not as big a fan of the Gothic section, which gets a bit unwieldy at times. But I suspect that has more to do with my own unfamiliarity with that particular genre. The fairy tale and closed-room mysteries are delightful, balancing perfectly between homage and send-up of their respective genres, and if I read a bit more Gothic literature, I'm sure I'd find that section to be equally ingenious. Valente uses all those genre trappings and tropes to remind that reader that a life is not a story. A person can...

If knowledge is power, then ignorance cannot be bliss. I first read this critique of high school American History textbooks when I was in high school. I was just precocious enough that I couldn't resist the title. Especially since I was at the bookstore to pick up a text that we'd received a censored version of in English class. I was keenly aware that my teachers were holding information back, and I was not happy about it. Loewen argues that kids hate history because the textbooks have removed everything interesting from it. Historical figures are presented as two-dimensional heroes rather than complex people and every major decision is presented as a foregone conclusion rather than the result of a complicated debate with many competing interests. In an attempt to make (white, male) students proud of America, the textbooks authors remove anything that might paint the country in a bad light. The narrative that's left is flimsy, inconsistent, and largely untrue. There...

This book went in a direction I didn't expect, and I loved it. While the first one hinted that it takes place in our own far future, rather than the distant past or on another world, I didn't really think much of it. It was fun to see nods to Tolkien, and it allowed the author a quick shorthand for some of her world-building. I wondered vaguely where this might be taking place. As far as I know there aren't any pristine, unsettled landmasses that a group of travelers can get to and completely escape the modern world. But it honestly seemed like such a big plot hole that I tried not to think about it too much lest it ruin my enjoyment of the story. In the second novel, Johansen embraces the setting, giving her protagonist visions of a woman who lived in her distant past, which happens to be our near-future. It's a fascinating combination of high fantasy and dystopian future that highlights some of the similarities between the two genres and asks whether anyone can real...

I've been reading a ton of historical romance lately as I made my way through Sarah MacLean's backlog. So it was a nice change of pace to pick up a contemporary romance. I've been hearing great things about Alisha Rai for a while, and this book did not disappoint. It was sexy and angsty and everything I want when I pick up a romance. The story follows Livvy and Nicholas. They dated once upon a time and seemed destined for marriage. Until bad blood between their families trickled down and forced them to break up. They've been meeting in secret once a year to have sex. But when Livvy decides to break the pattern and stop showing up, everything else changes too. I loved the second chance at love trope. The history between the two characters made every ache hurt that much more and every cute moment that much sweeter. There's a lot of pain that the two need to overcome to find their way back to each other, not to mention the judgement of their respective families. Bu...

This book moved a lot faster than the previous one, with all sorts of fun political maneuverings and a really exciting battle scene. The mysteries set up in the previous books start to unravel here as the Conclave finally takes power and humanity makes its first move against the assemblage of alien races. But as John and Jane try to usher their fledgling colony through these power plays, it becomes less and less obvious which side is in the right. I liked that this book got back to John Perry, who has a fun sarcastic voice that makes the book more interesting to read. It was also nice to see him and Jane together, post army, figuring out how to make a life with their adopted daughter. And I really liked that we finally get to draw the curtain back on the Colonial Union and see their various failings as a government. I'm a little concerned that I'm having a hard time remembering characters from book to book. A lot of them don't really make a huge impression. When they tu...

This book immediately appealed to me for the nostalgia. I can remember playing "Light as a Feather, Stiff as a Board" and "Bloody Mary" all the time when I was younger. Seeing them collected here with a bunch of other games I'd never heard of made me wish I'd had this book as a kid. The games are divided up by category, getting progressively more "dangerous" as the book goes along. There's a brief history of each game followed by instructions for playing it. And a whole lot of tongue-in-cheek warnings about the danger of each one. The book balances the fun of these games with that bit of fear that makes them so much more fun. I can only hope that my own kids discover this book on the shelf some day and spend countless hours summoning spirits with their friends.

I loved this book so much. I'd been intrigued by it since I first heard of it and every new thing I learned just made me want to read it more. So I convinced my book club to give it a go, and I'm so glad I did. I read it in two days, because I just couldn't put it down. Evelyn is a wonderful character. She's ruthless and manipulative and mostly unapologetic about it. After all, she got everything she ever wanted, didn't she? Why change a thing when she was met with so much success? And if that success was swathed in scandal? Well that just makes it more fun. I was surprised by the variation in her many marriages. She married for all sorts of reasons: to get to Hollywood, for love, for family, to further her career, to distract from an entirely different scandal. Some of her marriages were complete shams, but others had a surprising amount of honesty and affection at their core. I think Evelyn experienced just about every kind of love there is over the course of ...

I liked this book so much more than I thought I would. I went in expecting a fairly standard young adult fantasy novel, with some magic and some romance and a girl who has to save the world. But this book definitely isn't young adult, and there's only the barest whiff of romance. Instead it's about a young woman inheriting a kingdom in distress. Her mother was a terrible ruler and her uncle was a worse regent. She grew up in isolation, preparing to take the throne but shielded from the worst mistakes of the generation before. And she quickly finds herself in over her head. The story reminded me a lot of Kristin Cashore's Bitterblue . The people of the Tear have been living with atrocities. Many of them found themselves committing atrocities in an attempt to survive. Kelsea wants to put an end to all that, but it's not nearly as simple as she hopes it is. It ends up being a more mature take on the same themes in Bitterblue  because the corruption in the government ...

Back in April a friend of mine gifted me this entire twelve book series. I enjoy historical fiction, but the truth is that I don't read a ton of it. And this series, about a Redcoat who returns home from the Revolutionary War to discover his fiance thought him dead and is marrying his cousin, is not exactly in my wheelhouse. So it sat on my shelf while I wavered back and forth between reading it and taking the entire series to the local used book store. But, as long as my to-read list is, I just can't pass up a free book. Especially when it's already sitting on my shelf waiting to be read. So I finally picked up the first one, telling myself that I was in no way committing to reading the whole series. It actually took me a while to get in to this book. The style is a little obtuse, the characters' dialects can be difficult to parse, and it switches between characters more than I was prepared for. But I ended up liking that the focus was as much on Ross Poldark's...

I've been waiting to get to Georgiana's book for so long. I loved her cameos back in MacLean's Love by Numbers  books, and seeing her happily married in a later book had me itching to read her story. But of course I had to read the rest of the series first for the proper setup. And knowing what was coming made it that much more fun to watch a disguised Georgiana flirt with an oblivious Duncan. The attraction between these two is there from the very first pages, which I appreciate. Slow burns have nice payoffs, but it's also a lot of fun when the two people are attracted to each other from the get go and all their obstacles are external. And boy are there some obstacles in this one. Though it basically boils down to the fact that both of them have built their empires on secrets and manipulation. They've been lying to each other and about themselves for so long that they barely know how to tell the truth anymore. Especially about the important things. But that jus...

There's a lot of WWII fiction out there. So no matter how much I say I don't want to read any more of it, I always end up with another WWII novel on my shelf waiting to be read. This one was nominated in my book club last year, although we ultimately didn't choose it. Partly because everyone was feeling a bit burnt out on WWII stories. But shortly after that, Book Riot highlighted it as one of the top rated books on Goodreads . So when I saw it at the library book sale a few weeks later, I picked it up almost without thinking. And then I spent almost a year pointedly not reading it. Even though I knew it was going to be good. And it was good. It was completely fantastic. The novel follows two sisters in France during the German occupation. They are polar opposites, and they never really get along. But each ends up working for the resistance in her own way. Despite their antagonism, they end up taking strength from each other to make it through impossible circumstances. ...

The first time I read this book, I liked it a lot. The second time I read it, I loved it. But that's been my experience with nearly all of Catherynne Valente's work, so I should be surprised. Her books get better every time you revisit them, because the more you know about them the more they reveal themselves. Once you know where the story is going, you have a much greater appreciation for how Valente gets there. It's all about the journey with her. But that journey becomes so much richer when the destination is known. The central theme of this book pops up early: Life is beautiful and life is stupid. It has seemed particularly relevant to my life lately. Recently my husband was diagnosed with leukemia. Though he achieved remission in just a few months, the doctors are still recommending a bone marrow transplant as our best option for beating the disease. I recently gave birth to twins and was initially disappointed when it became clear that I would have to have a c-sec...

I was surprised when I picked up this book and found that it followed a completely different character than the first book in the series. In fact, the protagonist of Old Man's War  is only mentioned in passing at the very end of the book. There are plenty of other minor characters from the first book who also appear in this one, but the main character is someone completely new. This book follows the clone of a traitor. Initially he remembers nothing of his previous life, but his commanding officers are hoping that his memory will return and provide some insight into what the traitor did and why. In the meantime, we get to learn more about the special forces and the larger threats to the human race start to take shape. Where the first book just threw the humans against a whole bunch of different alien species, this one introduces alliances and plans among the aliens. This allows for more of a plot rather than a montage of battles, and it helps make the mystery at the heart of the ...

I was hesitant heading into this book. A lot of romance is somewhat contrived, but this premise seemed a bit much. Twelve years previously the heroine faked her own death and the hero was blamed for it. She disappeared and he had to live with a reputation as the "Killer Duke", which pushed him underground. And somehow the two of them are going to overcome this disastrous first meeting to find true love. It was a tall order. But I should know by now to trust MacLean. Halfway through the book she had completely won me over. It helped that the sex scenes were some of the hottest MacLean has ever written. But she's also just really good at finding the humanity in these absurd situations. She's also good at finding reasonable justifications for seemingly monstrous actions (I'm really excited for the last book in her Bare Knuckle Bastards series for this very reason). So ultimately I enjoyed this book. It wasn't my favorite MacLean, but it wasn't my least fa...

The Girl Who Smiled Beads  is the memoir of a Rwandan refugee who spent six years in various refugee camps before making her way to America with her sister, niece, and nephew. Clemantine left her home and family behind before she had any concept of war or genocide or any of the things she was running from or the reasons people wanted her dead. Traveling with only her sister from camp to camp, she became incredibly tough in order to survive. And when she finally made it to safety in America, it took a long time for her to make her way back to normalcy. The book alternates chapters between her time in camps in various African countries and her time in America, learning to trust her safety and stability. It's a very stark account of her experience, and it's clear that Clemantine herself is still processing a lot of what she went through. She became a sort of poster child for Rwandan refugees in America and has been doing what she can to shed light on her experience while also c...

As I've begun to embrace my love of horror over the past several years, I've come to understand the key to horror stories. They're not about being scared, not really. They're about catharsis. They're about facing your fear or dealing with your trauma or even just acknowledging that sometimes life is terrible. And if you can say that and share it, it gets a little better. So it makes sense, in a weird, twisted, horror-novel-logic sort of way, that Jack and Jill would escape from their stifling household and too-strict, largely absent parents and find comfort and solace in the trappings of a classic horror story. Jack as the apprentice to a mad scientist, Jill as the protege to the vampire lord. Really, though, this story is pretty light on the horror. It's got the shape of a horror story, with the details fading into the background. In the foreground we have a story about family and sisterhood, about disappointment and loyalty. It's an excellent prequel t...

I'm two for two in books being a lot more intense than I was expecting. Not that I was expecting this book, a series of interconnected short stories about several Native Americans attending a Powwow in Oakland, to be lighthearted or anything like that. The subject material meant that it was definitely going to be heavy. But it was so much heavier than I was expecting. Almost every character is dealing with alcoholism, or at least with an unhealthy relationship with alcohol. Some of them are alcoholics themselves, either resigned to an early death by liver failure or attempting to get sober for the umpteenth time. Others are dealing with family members who are absent or violent due to alcohol, and they're mostly trying and failing to break those patterns in their own lives. There's a wide array of characters, but this constant struggle is a theme in all of their lives. It also quickly becomes apparent that the event at the powwow that will tie everyone together is an arm...

Going in to The Poppy War , I really thought I knew what I was getting in to. Everyone's been gushing about this book since it came out. And with the recent release of the sequel, that gushing has only increased. It seemed like a standard high fantasy adventure, albeit with the background based in Chinese history rather than European history. I figured I'd get a fun story and learn a bit about another culture thanks to osmosis. The first third of the book played right in to these expectations. It felt startlingly similar to the University sections of The Name of the Wind . Rin is a poor war orphan whose only chance of escaping marriage to a much-older man is to ace a nation-wide test that would win her admission and a scholarship to a prestigious school where she could train to be a general. She nearly kills herself studying for this exam for two years, but it pays off when she scores high enough to escape her provincial life. And when she discovers that her classmates are ne...

It's such a treat to be this close to reading all of an author's work and still be finding new favorites. One Good Earl Deserves a Lover  is definitely my favorite of MacLean's work. It has the adorably geeky and naive Phillipa, who is sure that she can conquer all her fears with knowledge. It has the incredibly repressed Cross who's so haunted by his past that he's denying himself every possible bit of pleasure. It has fun side plots and a wealth of interesting secondary characters. All that and a heist to boot. It's almost like this book was written just for me. Actually, this book put me in mind of a historical version of The Kiss Quotient . It's never stated or even hinted that Pippa might be on the spectrum, but that also was really a concept in the 1800s. She is described as strange. She hopes for nothing more than a kind husband who will let her go her own way. She's hungry for knowledge and follows her own pursuits without ever really caring ho...

This isn't the first of John Scalzi's books I've ever read. But Redshirts  is a bit of a one-off. It's not connected to any of his other series, and it's not really considered indicative of the rest of his body of work. By going back to the beginning, I feel like I'm finally going to see what the hype is all about. Old Man's War  is a lot of fun. It's a classic science-fiction setup, with a never-ending war between humanity and a series of alien species. The twist being that all the soldiers are septegenarians. You can enlist in the army on your seventy-fifth birthday in exchange for a new, younger body, a chance to see the universe, and a possibility of settling on one of the new colonies, assuming you survive your ten years of military service. The book follows John Perry. He and his wife had intended to sign up together, but she died a few years prior. So, with nothing really to live for and not knowing what to expect, he  joins the military by hi...

Lois McMaster Bujold remains an auto-buy and auto-read for me. It doesn't matter what she writes or when, as soon as I hear about it I buy it. And then I read it as soon as I can. It probably helps that her "retirement project" has her releasing e-novellas for less than $5 each. They're the perfect impulse buys. That said, I think Bujold's best work may be behind her. Her Penric and Desdemona series is a light-hearted fun, and I always enjoy the adventures these two go on. But they don't quite have the depth of some of the mid-late Vorkosigan books (particularly Memory ). Not that there's anything wrong with that. A quick, light adventure can be exactly what I want to read. It helps that everyone is competent and well-intentioned and everything always works out for the best in the end. I think Bujold is becoming more of an idealist in her old age. Or at least she's writing books that embrace an idealism, perhaps as a response to what's going on...

When I gave birth to my son, I packed a book in my hospital bag. It was more out of habit than anything else, though I was optimistic that I'd have some time to read in the hospital. That didn't end up happening, and it took me nearly six weeks to finish reading that book after Gavin was born. Despite this historical precedent, I once again packed a book in my hospital bag when I went to give birth to the twins. I can't just not have a book with me. And whether it was because this book was shorter or because it was one that I'd already read a few years previously, I actually read the whole thing before I was discharged from the hospital. I'm really glad I decided to re-read this book. I caught a lot of things I'd missed on my first read-through, and those details led to a richer experience. It made me appreciate the ending more, too. My first time through I felt like it left something to be desired, but this time it seemed like a perfect fit. McGuire has als...

I'm starting the last of Sarah MacLean's finished series, which is really impressive considering I only started reading her books a year or so ago. I can't remember the last time I tore through an author's entire backlog so quickly. But I'm getting ahead of myself - there are still a few of her books left that I haven't read. I don't expect that to be the case for long, though. This series focuses on the four co-owners of a gaming hell. Each has fled society for a different reason, each believes he is beyond redemption. Each will fall in love and be proven wrong. First up is Bourne, who lost his entire estate in a card game ten years prior. Since then he's focused only on regaining his land and getting revenge against the man who took it from him. When the land is attached to the dowry of his childhood friend, he coerces her into marriage. But he gets a lot more than he bargained for. Penelope has been out in society for nearly a decade by the time s...

The cover of this book shows a creature that's half woman, half octopus and has an unsettling number of teeth in a slightly too large mouth. My son was obsessed with it, and kept stealing the book while I was reading it or requesting to see the monster book. At one point he attempted to use it to threaten his dad into giving him a cookie. It was a pretty great use of the book. The stories within the book are classic children's stories with a twist. Ortberg has an uncanny ability to hone in on the most horrifying aspect of any given children's story and expand on it. Without changing much at all, he can take a story from comforting to terrifying and leave you questioning everything. As with any short story collection, I was more drawn to some stories than others. But everything in here really forces you to contend with the default point of view. What do we mean when we talk about daughters or love or abuse or redemption? Where is the line between good and evil and how do...

I wasn't as immediately engrossed by Spinning Silver  as I was by Uprooted . It starts a little slower, and it took me a while to really get into the book. But by the time I was halfway through I was completely engrossed and couldn't wait to see how it all came together in the end. Novik switches the narrative between six characters, though three have them have significantly more chapters than the other three. And it takes a while for all the different points of view to show up. Still, she does an impressive job of giving everyone a distinct voice. I was never confused about whose head I was in, even without obvious clues like chapter titles. This is probably the most subtly impressive part of the entire book. And the three main women are all fascinating. Miryem is ruthless, first in her pursuit of money for her family and then in trying to escape from her captor-husband. Wanda is brilliant and strong and I only want good things for her. But my favorite character by far was...

This is my second Agatha Christie book, and I definitely understand why she was such a popular author. She was really a master of her craft, and surprisingly prolific to boot. And Then There Were None  was expertly constructed and very thrilling. I actually have to pat myself on the back for guessing the murderer correctly fairly early on. But then I fell for a masterful red herring, so by the end of the book I was doubting myself. Right up until all was revealed and I was kicking myself for falling for it. Still, Christie always manages to zig where I expect her to zag and ends up thoroughly surprising me with the end of the book. While I'm not as big a fan of mysteries as I am other genres, Christie's books are so short and exciting that I may have to seek out more of them. At the very least I should read a Miss Marple book.

I definitely haven't read widely enough to make the following sweeping statement, but I'm going to make it anyway: Alyssa Cole is the best romance author working today. I say this after reading a mere three of her books. But those books are just so good. And she's clearly incredibly versatile (contemporary romances about modern royalty, historicals set during the Civil War, a series of dystopian romances, novels and novellas and compelling characters from every sort of background you can imagine). So even though I have a lot of her backlog left to get through, I'm gonna go ahead and say she's one of the best in the business. I just finished her most recent release, A Prince on Paper . Sheltered Nya and Playboy Johan find themselves thrown together in a fake engagement to distract the press while they both figure out some stuff. Nya is dealing with the fallout of her traitorous father and trying to break free from the image he crafted for her. Johan is trying to di...

I've been meaning to read The Changeling  since I first heard about it. And I'm so glad I finally got around to it. I hesitated because the premise seemed genuinely upsetting - a woman kills her baby and then disappears, leaving her husband wondering what the hell happened and trying to track her down in an increasingly magical New York City. Probably not the sort of book you should read when you've just had a kid, or when you're pregnant again. But I clung to the hint in the title and decided to take the plunge. And I'm so glad I did. I've read a lot of books over the years that claim to be similar to American Gods , but this is the one that comes closest to hitting that mark for me. It is very much about America and how the tales we tell shape our lives, how we do and don't repeat the mistakes of our forefathers, how we don't always interrogate our traditions when maybe we should, how this country has been shaped entirely by immigration. Like that bo...

Helen Hoang's second novel turns it's focus to Michael's cousin, Khai, and the woman his mother brings over from Vietnam to be his wife. While she doesn't quite force an arranged marriage on the two, giving them a summer to decide if they want to get married and allowing for the possibility that Esme might choose to return home at the end, it still all seems a bit old-fashioned. But the book does what it can to address the throw-back trope and ultimately everything works out. I didn't end up liking this book quite as much as The Kiss Quotient  (though to be fair, I couldn't put The Kiss Quotient  down), but it was still fun and entertaining. Esme is a force to be reckoned with. She wants to come to America and provide a better life for herself and her daughter, but her definition of better life also means not compromising her values. She won't agree to a loveless marriage, and when things with Khai start to fall apart, she quickly shifts her focus to educa...

The movie adaptation of this book came out in high school, at a time when my friends and I were all obsessed with Keira Knightley. (Or at least one friend in particular was, and the rest of us got dragged into the obsession.) Naturally, we watched it, and then several friends read the book (possibly as an AP English assignment). Their consensus was that it left them feeling like they'd never be happy again. I was pretty entrenched in fantasy and fan-fiction at the time, so I never sought it out. Fast forward to last year when someone in my book club nominated it. We didn't end up choosing it, but it reminded me that I'd always half meant to read it. I liked the movie, and it seemed worth picking up the book. So even though my book club ultimately chose not to read it, I bought it at the next used book sale I went to. So maybe it's just that my expectations were too high. Or maybe I'm too stressed out at the moment to find enjoyment in what promises to be a deepl...

The coolest and most unexpected thing about the Tensorate series is the way JY Yang plays with form and structure. The first book was a compressed bildungsroman, following Akeha across forty years as he came to terms with his relationship with his mother. The second was a very focused piece on grief and new beginnings, taking place over only a few days. And the third book is a mystery told in epistolary form. When an accident wipes everyone at a government research facility, a mid-level investigator is assigned her very first lead case. It quickly becomes apparent that she's been given this case in an attempt to make it go away: the government knows what happened and they don't want the truth to get out. The narrative alternates between the investigator's official reports and private diary, with letter and interview transcripts included to round it all out. And it's really amazing what Yang is able to accomplish in such a short story. At this point, I'm official...

Any collection of short stories ends up being a mixed bag. Some of them just speak to you more than others. I really liked half of the stories in this collection, and the other half felt dense and over my head. Inaccessible in a way that meant that they probably just weren't for me. But the ones that worked worked really well. "Especially Heinous" flips Law and Order: SVU on it's head, accusing the audience of being the real monster at the heart of all these stories while Stabler and Benson slowly unravel from the pressure of their lives. "Real Women Have Bodies" and "Eight Bites" were also deliciously creepy, and I enjoyed "Inventory", which has one woman coping with the end of the world by making a list of everyone she's ever had sex with. The rest fell a bit flat for me. Or left me feeling confused or unsettled in a not-particularly-illuminating way. Carmen Maria Macahdo reminds me a bit of Kelly Link and Helen Oyeyemi. Her wo...

In the sixth Incryptid book, Seanan McGuire finally shines the spotlight on the youngest of the Price children, Antimony. I was half-worried going into this book. I love Verity, and the two sisters are huge rivals with very little in common. But McGuire did an excellent job of making Antimony interesting and sympathetic. And the relationship she has with Verity is fascinating now that there are two sides to it. The bulk of this book also takes place at a carnival, which made me really want to go to one. We took Gavin to a few last summer, and it was a lot of fun taking him on the rides and seeing the sights. We knew we wouldn't be able to take him to any this summer, but reading this book made me really sad to be missing that. I hope we're able to go to a few next summer. The next two books are also from Antimony's point of view, and I'm more excited than ever to get to them. I can't wait to read more of her story and see how she deals with all the fallout from ...