Bookish Thoughts

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...