Book 41: Authority by Jeff VanderMeer

This is a hard book for me to figure out how to write about! That will be (part of) my excuse for why it took me so long to actually write this post.

Authority is the second book in the Southern Reach trilogy that begins with Annihilation. I went into the second book having been slightly sort of spoiled for something because of a plot point that a book club member had seen on wikipedia and repeated before I said that I was planning to read the whole trilogy and so didn't want spoilers, but honestly I feel like having had any expectation for what the rest of the trilogy would be made the second book even more disorienting. After spending the entire first book with the biologist as our narrator, Authority is told from the perspective of a complete new character. John Rodriguez, who is identified as Control in much the same way that the biologist is simply the biologist, is the new director at Southern Reach, and he's been sent there in order to find out what happened during the biologist's expedition. Similarly to the first book, there are layers after layers of disorientation and unreliable narratives that slowly peel back, but unlike the first book one of the main (and most frustrating) obstacles is that of bureaucracy. I constantly wanted to just get to the part where I knew what was going on in a very different way than I did with the first book, because the mystery of the first book is inherent and the mystery of the second book felt man-made in a way that was infinitely more infuriating, to me.

It was fascinating to feel how defensive I was of the biologist whenever Control would attempt to speak with her; she was mine, even though the first book is careful to maintain a distance, and I felt like I knew the truth of her experience and Control never would, even though every narrator in these books, both internally and externally, has been the definition of unreliable. By the end of the book, however, it made me desperate to know what would be happening to and with both of them. I don't know if the final book of the trilogy will reframe how I see this book in the same way that this book changed how I think of the first one, but I'm definitely anxious to finally get to the front of the line of my library's hold list.

Grade: B

Book 40: Spinning Silver by Naomi Novik

Note: I know the author socially.

This is the second related but not directly connected book of this kind by this author, a story based on fairy or folk tales that goes in a different direction than the original. As may be obvious from the title, the foundational myth for this book is Rumpelstiltskin, but it goes far beyond that.

The story revolves around the choices of three women whose lives become interwoven. Miryem is the daughter of the town moneylender in a village that ranges from suspicious of her Jewish family to outright violent toward them. Wanda is the daughter of a drunk man who can't pay off his debts to Miryem's father and so Wanda (and eventually her two brothers) come to work for and with Miryem. And Irina is the plain daughter of a duke who wants his child to marry as well as she can for his own benefit with no regard to her wishes, and eventually succeeds in marrying her to the tsar. Each of them is framed by their world in the context of the men in their lives, their fathers and brothers and prospective husbands. Each of them rejects this narrow view of them, although it's not possible for them to truly transcend their surroundings.

Miryem first spins silver by being able and willing to collect on the debts that her father could not, solidifying the family's welfare in an incredibly hostile world. When that no longer suffices, she discovers she can spin that silver into gold and satisfy the greater threat to all members of the village, the Staryk monsters who raid for gold.

I don't want to discuss much more of the actual plot, both because I don't want to spoil any of it but also because this book is as much about how it made me feel as it is about what actually happens. I read it in the fall before the weather had actually turned, but the entire story felt like winter, that cold crisp clear silence in the clearing of a forest after a snowfall. The pacing of the story meant that with only fifty and then twenty and then ten pages left I had no idea how everything would be resolved, and it turned out that the answer was with a dagger to my heart in the final two pages. I could have read many pages more of the story, but I didn't need them, because the emotions landed so strongly for me. I want to reread this and her earlier book Uprooted next year, to see how they feel when I know what happens (but may not remember precisely how). I loved this book and I love all three of these women and I have many, many feels about the world created and how fantastical it is while also being deeply, sometimes distressingly real.

Grade: A

Book 39: His Bloody Project by Graeme Macrae Burnet

I actually read this book back in September and have had ‘write book blog post’ on my to do list every day since then for this and two other books, but I finally have some time while home for Christmas and I’m getting things done before the New Year, dammit. So let’s see if I remember what I thought about this book.

We chose this book for our book club, and I was really excited about it because I had read an article about it back when it first came out and loved the concept behind it. It’s a novel that’s told as a true crime book about a gruesome murder in mid-19th century Scotland, with the texts of the novel being the journal account of the crime as written by the murderer in jail, various newspaper accounts of the trial, the writings of an advocate and a researcher on poor peoples’ propensity to commit crimes and it being an indication of their inherently base nature, and autopsy reports of the victims. There’s never any doubt in the novel as to whether Roddie Macrae committed the murders, but the trial revolves around his mental state at the time, and the novel itself is more concerned with why he murdered them, and what it says about the lives of poor villagers in that era.

I really liked a lot of aspects of the novel; the various ‘primary sources’ were all well-written and distinctive and really hammered home how biased all points of view are, no matter how ‘truthful’ they may claim to be, and the way a reader’s opinion of the murders can change with each additional source is really compelling. I felt for Roddie and how he was essentially pushed into believing that murder was his best option in life, because so much was so unfair to him, and yet only one of the three victims could in any way be thought to deserve to die, and various inconsistencies among the accounts of what happened make it (intentionally) hard to fully believe his version. Mostly the book made me mad at the way that the poor in general but specifically poor women and children were treated by men and rich people and rich men most of all. The life of a male laborer or farmer in that era was pretty terrible by modern standards, but I found it hard to fully sympathize with Roddie or any of the men, mostly because I wanted to murder all of them on behalf of the women in their lives. Which either means that the book was completely successful in the way the author intended, or that I can’t read fiction without that as a lens these days. I wanted better for Roddie, but I also desperately wanted better of Roddie. That shouldn’t be that strange to desire of a murderer, but for me it was less about the fact that he killed people (or at least one of the people) and more because of how and why he killed the other two.

Grade: B

Book 38: St. Lucy's Home for Girls Raised by Wolves by Karen Russell

This is another one of those books that I've had for at least ten years and have no recollection of what made me buy it. I'm guessing I was caught by the title and the cover on a display in Barnes & Noble back when there was one within walking distance of my office, but who can say?

That's pretty similar to how I feel about this collection of short stories, honestly: a bit baffled and without a clear sense of how I got here. Each of the stories takes place in a fantasy version of modern reality, such as the titular Catholic school for reforming wolfgirls. That was one of the stories I enjoyed the most, but as with all of the other bizarre universes (a sleepaway camp for various sleep disorders that don't resemble our own at all, an alligator amusement park in the middle of a swamp, a boys' chorus used to bring down avalanches each spring in the great north), I never felt like I could hook into the worlds or the characters. Part of that may just be caused by the short story form, which often don't give me enough time to become properly invested. But most of these stories just made me feel either sad or alienated or like there was something I was supposed to be feeling, but didn't. I don't know that a book always has to have a distinct, identifiable point, but I kept feeling like I was either missing something, or that I just didn't like it, depending on the story in question. And I can't tell if this is the sort of collection that I don't think is very good, or that just isn't for me as a reader. It's not poorly written, on a sentence or even scene level, but I need something more from stories than what this collection gave me, and whether that's a failing of the book or simply a matter of taste or preference, I'm not sure.

Grade: C

Book 37: Barrayar by Lois McMaster Bujold

This is a story that exists within the context of a much larger series and world. It's the second half of the story begun in Shards of Honor, which brings together Cordelia, a Betan scientist and captain, and Aral Vorkosigan, a captain and noble of Barrayar. Barrayar is a world which had been separate from the rest of the intergalactic society until recently, and it is very war-focused and obsessed with bloodlines and physical abilities and all that. Cordelia and Aral fell in love and got married and Cordelia got pregnant, and on top of all of that, Aral is named regent for the 6 year old grandson of the dying emperor, Gregor.

Barrayar itself focuses on their marriage a bit but mostly on how they can survive in the political situation they're in, and there are attempts on Aral's life and on Gregor's and fights between Cordelia and her father-in-law. Things come to a head in two separate incidents: one in which Cordelia and Aral are poisoned, and while they receive the antidote in time, it affects the health of her baby. So she arranges for essentially a c-section in which the baby is then put into a classic sci-fi incubator and treated, but it's very uncertain if the baby will survive, and even if he does, he will likely be deformed or weak which has made her father-in-law disown him already. And then Gregor is attacked and there's a palace coup and they need to hide the child emperor until they can save the day.

These books are prequels, and they do feel like it in many ways. I haven't read the rest of the series, but I know that the protagonist is Miles Vorkosigan, so I know the baby has to survive one way or another. There's a lack of suspense at points as a result, and a feeling that the story is showing various aspects of the society for reasons I don't understand yet but will later. But the main ambivalence I feel about the story is I don't know how to feel about the culture and characters in general! There is a lot of very odd sexual politics--characters who are supposed to be people we like in some ways have very bizarre sexual desires and practices, and while Cordelia herself is also experiencing a sense of outrage over a variety of things, it's just an odd world to be a part of right now. I don't need my characters to all be completely good, but there's a level of moral relativism in this book that I'm not sure how to handle. And again, while there's plenty in the book that's high stakes, that's lessened by the fact that I knew at least one thing that had to happen, and from that I could extrapolate quite a bit more. I don't know! I can't tell if this just isn't exactly my style of speculative fiction, which is possible, or if there's something more that didn't sit quite right with me.

Grade: B

Book 36: It Takes Two to Tumble by Cat Sebastian

Now this is the sort of story I'm hoping for when I pick up a Cat Sebastian novel!

The central focus of this story is in many ways a version of the romance plotline from The Sound of Music. Captain Phillip Dacre has been off with his ship for two years, leaving his three children to be cared for by his sister and tutors after the death of his wife. His last letter from his sister informs him that his children have been running amok, and his plans for his summer at home in the countryside are to re-instill discipline in his household! But when he gets there, he discovers that the most recent tutor is the local vicar Benedict Sedgwick, who is wonderful at handling wild children as a result of raising himself in an even more chaotic home by his bohemian poet father. Ben is engaged to his closest childhood friend Alice out of a sense of friendship rather than passion, since she's quite ill and he feels indebted to her family, and also because his interest is in men rather than women so a marriage based on friendship seems to be the best he could ever want.

Of course, that becomes far more complicated once he meets Phillip and begins to see the caring man underneath the strict disciplinarian. There are other complications in the town caused by Ben's father and brother and Alice's family, but I honestly glazed over a fair amount of them, because the real point and draw of the story is the developing relationship between Phillip and Ben and with the three children as well. I found the story a bit tense at times because I kept being afraid that their attraction would be discovered when it shouldn't be, but it's not really a story that's interested in that kind of conflict. The resolution at the end is a bit too pat for my liking, but it's a reasonably satisfying fantasy ending of how two men could essentially share a life and three children together without raising too many eyebrows, without too many complications too easily waved away. It was definitely my favorite book by this author since The Lawrence Browne Affair.

Grade: B  

Books 34 and 35: Blackout and All Clear by Connie Willis

I'm writing one post for two books because the story is really a single giant novel published in two parts, and I don't think discussing the two parts separately would benefit me or a reader in any way, since I've already finished both of them. So! Here we go.

These books take place in a larger book universe in which time travel has been invented at Oxford University in the mid-twenty-first century, and is used as a means of learning more about historical events by going back in time and essentially observing. The predominant theory is that historians can't make significant changes to history, so they don't need to worry about changing things, just to avoid something calamitous happening to them in the past, because if you die in the past you die in real life, too. In the first book we're introduced to three historians, Michael, Polly and Merope. Merope has an assignment in the English countryside during the Blitz (where she's known as Eileen), when children were sent away from London, Michael is about to go to observe the Dunkirk evacuation, and Polly is going to London itself during the Blitz to work as a shopgirl.

From the very beginning of Blackout the reader is more aware than the characters that something isn't quite right. The way time travel is supposed to work is that there's a drop location in time and place where a person goes when they want to be retrieved by the future again, and for all three of them their drops don't work. They each also get closer to the big inflection point moments of history than they had been taught they would be able to get, and Michael and Polly in particular begin to worry that they've both altered history that they weren't supposed to, and that the reason they can't get home is because they've changed things so much that England no longer wins the war. The book ends with the three of them finding each other in London (which was never a part of their assignment originally).

The second book is more chaos and inability to get home and talking at cross purposes and characters withholding information from each other AND from the reader even when it's in their POV and a couple of big reveals that are either lessened because the reader has realized the truth long before the characters have and/or because the characters really should have been more insightful in general. There's so much about this story that I like, and I enjoyed the setting immensely and Eileen's arc is delightful and the most genuine in my mind, but so much of the tension is from characters behaving in ways that may be understandable but that I found deeply frustrating. The entire story needed to be edited down by about two hundred pages between the two books, in my opinion, and there are aspects of how time travel is supposed to work in this universe that just felt almost unreasonable to me, someone who grew up watching Quantum Leap and has a lot of thoughts and feelings about what people are supposed to be able to change about history and what they're not. These are two books about incredibly high stakes--indeed, what I found the most affecting were the discussions of how many coincidences or quirks of geography resulted in England being able to win the war, and how close it all really was--but I never felt those stakes for the characters themselves, or felt that they truly appreciated what they were doing while they were doing it, and especially before they got trapped in the past. The role of a historian in the universe as described would really be the role of a spy and actor, and none of them seemed to fully appreciate that.

Having said all that, there's another book by the author in the same general Oxford time travel universe that I'm definitely going to read, because while I was quite frustrated by a number of things in these books, I also really enjoyed many aspects of them, and I'm glad I read them. They're the sort of books which are close enough to being great that the flaws are even more frustrating than they would be in a lesser story.

Grade: B

Book 33: Spectred Isle by KJ Charles

Not entirely intentionally, I have read a bunch of books this summer that have been stories about England in the first half of the twentieth century, but with a twist of some kind. This one is set five years after the Great War ended, and it's focused on a man named Saul Lazenby whose life and career is ruined by his experience in the war, but not in the way most were. He takes a job working for an eccentric older Major who is convinced England is at the center of supernatural happenings, and he's there to provide information as someone who had studied archaeology but can no longer be employed in a real position. 

He encounters a tree that spontaneously alights, and also encounters Randolph Glyde, who shows up at every new location Saul is sent to in order to investigate the secrets of the past. As the story progresses, it becomes more and more clear that there are in fact supernatural forces at work, a secret underworld of magic that had contributed to the War and subsequently weakened most of the protections that had existed for years. Randolph is the last of his family, which had been protectors of the world for centuries, and he's very grumpy about all of it. As the two of them are thrown together, their attraction to each other also grows and complicates everything even more. 

I liked a lot of aspects of this book, and the main pairing is a type that I generally enjoy a lot, two damaged people whose strengths and weaknesses complement each other in interesting ways. I wanted the mythology to be a bit more in some way, either more deeply explored or grounded, or even less explainable and incomprehensible. There were parts of it that were handwaved in ways that made it feel insubstantial to me, and I wanted it to either be more fully other or to not actually be supernatural at all. This is a book that at times felt like it wanted to be more of a speculative fiction novel and less of a romance, but in order for it to be that it would have needed to be far more detailed and complex to be satisfying for me. Still, I enjoyed it a lot, and this author writes very good early Twentieth Century gay romances in general. I think I would have preferred a book that was a more straightforward story about the Bright Young Things generation in Britain, and those who couldn't be (or refused to be) a part of that culture.

Grade: B   

Book 32: Hidden Sins by Selena Montgomery

I think one of the best parts of this whole book blog is being able to identify exactly what it is that I like and don't like in a story. Some of the books that I read and don't like are simply not good books; the story is thin or the writing is poor or the entire premise is flawed in some fundamental way. But other books are just not stories that I personally am interested in reading more of, and it's good to discover and confirm that, I think.

This is one of the latter kinds of books. It's a contemporary romance that's also sort of a thriller mystery, involving the hidden treasure of one of the main character's grandfather, and as it turns out that's not actually enough for me. The central conflict between the romantic pair is that they had been together when they were teenagers but then she had to leave him, and he's never forgiven her but he's also never forgotten her, and now she's on the run from bad dudes who are also trying to find this treasure, and there's a bunch of mythology about it all that could be interesting but feels both obvious and also so complicated there's no way for the reader to be involved in the discovery of the secrets. All in all, not the book for me.

Grade: C

Book 31: Choose Your Own Autobiography by Neil Patrick Harris

As is probably clear from the title, this is an autobiography. But it's also a book which cannot really be thought about independently from its specific form, and how it both makes it more fun and more interesting and also, in my experience of it, distances the reader from the subject in a way that's a curious choice for a biography!

Neil Patrick Harris is a former child star who got new life as an actor in his twenties and thirties on both a sitcom and Broadway. He's also openly gay and married to a man with whom he has two children, and the story of how he was outed and then more or less required to be an out public figure feels both quaint in 2018 and also is a good representation of how much has changed and also how much hasn't. This book was published in 2014, and much like Possible Side Effects (although even more startlingly, given how much closer in time it is to the present), the book reads like a tiny time capsule. There are bits and sections of this book that I cannot imagine being edited in the same way if it had been published today, and there's a security in what the future will look like that feels hard to remember experiencing from this vantage point.

The format of the book is to tell the biography in the same way as the Choose Your Own Adventure books did, where the reader gets to the end of a chapter and then decides what they what to happen next in the story. There are two problems with this format for an autobiography. One is practical: there is only one actual narrative to follow, and it's what really happened, and the book isn't constructed in a way to actually get the reader to experience all of the book unless you don't actually follow the paths, which feels poorly constructed! If you're going to make it into a game of sorts, it should actually work.

The second problem is bigger, which is that the story is told in the second person POV, since the conceit is that you are NPH and are choosing what will happen, etc. The problem with this in an autobiography is that it distances the reader from the subject in a way that's difficult to ever bridge successfully. It made me feel like NPH didn't actually have to reveal himself or his experiences in a way that wasn't artificial. I know more about what has happened in his career and life, but I don't actually feel like I know him better, and while that may mean that he feels like he succeeded, it's not what I want from an autobiography. I wanted less gimmick and more introspection, I guess.

Having said all that, it was still worth reading in the end, even if it made me feel like 2014 was forty years ago rather than only four.

Grade: B

Book 30: Possible Side Effects by Augusten Burroughs

Man, it's really fascinating to read a memoir of essays like this in 2018. Possible Side Effects is the fourth collection of personal essays based on his life that Augusten Burroughs published in the 2000s, and there was a period of time for five or six years when that style of writing dominated book publishing, in large part due to the success of his first memoir, Running with Scissors. I had read his first three books around the time they were published, and enjoyed all of them, but I had purchased this book back when there was still a Borders next to Penn Station.

The book is only twelve years old, and depicts events that take place in the 1970s through the mid-2000s, but it's remarkable just how dated it feels. That datedness isn't necessarily a problem; my reaction wasn't exactly 'oh this didn't age well,' but it was more an awareness of the fact that it was describing a different time, both in terms of the settings of the stories and the time in which those stories were written. I was reminded of a couple of essays in The Salmon of Doubt in which Douglas Adams described how he interacted with technology in the 1990s and how he expected technology and life to evolve as a result. It wasn't even that he was wrong about everything, but I had to grapple with just how differently the world I was a teenager was from how today is. We adapt so quickly to changes, even ones that feel (and, truly, are) monumental, and Burrough's descriptions of dating via personal ads and then craigslist postings and other methods of the trade feel simultaneously very familiar and completely foreign.

This book feels like a fourth collection of essays, which is to say that while the writing is still as inventive and compulsively readable, the stories being shared don't feel like the big jewels anymore. There's still something to be discovered in them, and I don't regret reading them as well, but I didn't really engage with them as a reader so much as I engaged with them as someone who is approximately the age now that Burroughs was when he wrote them, and that's an interesting place to be when thinking about the stories. I discovered from reading them that I still deeply care about whether the person of Augusten Burroughs is doing okay now; he's married, although not to the man who he was dating while writing this book, and he's working on a couple of projects, although nothing too major, compared to his earlier successes. But I really hope the life behind the wiki entry about him is happy.

Grade: B

Book 29: Dragon's Blood by Jane Yolen

This is one of those books which I've had for I don't know how many years and yet had never read. So I finally did, and it was charming!

The book is set on a desert world where dragons are raised and trained to be fighters in pits for entertainment, essentially like gladiators. The protagonist is a boy named Jakkin, whose father had been killed by a feral dragon he had been attempting to train. As a result, he had become a bond boy who had to work off his debt by cleaning and raising dragons on essentially a dragon ranch. But he had a plan to clear that debt by stealing a dragon egg or hatchling and raising it on his own to be a fighter.

It's the first of a trilogy, and you can definitely feel that in terms of how far the story gets, and the way it's setting up the larger arc of the series. But I definitely became invested in Jakkin and his dragon, and the secrets that he keeps while training his dragon and the secrets that others have which he's largely unaware of. There are times when Jakkin is a bit slow on the uptake, but in a way that's largely charming rather than frustrating. I am definitely looking forward to reading the next two books in the trilogy.

Grade: B

Book 28: The Ruin of a Rake by Cat Sebastian

I have hit a string of books this month where I didn't really love anything I read. This was another one of those, unfortunately--a perfectly serviceable story, but not one that left much of a lasting impression on me.

This is the third book in a connected trilogy of stories, and it's the one that hangs together the least well for me. Julian and Courtenay, the couple this book focuses on, are fine, but all of the plot around them essentially revolves around everyone in the story being incapable of having a straightforward conversation about anything. Courtenay is the rake in question, a man who we meet in an earlier book and is described as being terrible and wicked, but of course he's not really. And Julian is the straight-laced man who just needs to let love into his life, who has a sister he adores who he thinks sacrificed her life for his health by moving to England from India, and it's just all very complicated and not particularly satisfying, in the end. The plot intrigue needs to either be more important or less; I have read one too many historical romance novels recently that have insurmountable obstacles that are just magically handwaved without actually convincingly solving those obstacles, and I don't have much patience or interest in it at this point.

Grade: C

Book 27: Don't Stop Believing by Gwen Hayes and Tragen Moss

This is a classic holiday romance novella, featuring a former marine loner who was hurt in the past and a librarian who always falls for the wrong guy who happen to get snowed in together over Christmas. It was written by the same author of Romancing the Beat, and you can really see the point by point beats she laid out in her book in the story. The book is fine because the premise itself is the draw, but it doesn't really get any deeper or more interesting than that, unfortunately. Also, this is one of those gay romances where the names of the characters don't match--I kept wanting Simon to be the librarian and Adam to be the marine, and the fact that it was the opposite made reading the story genuinely harder. Not the worst option if you need a quick holiday romance to read, but not much more to recommend it.

Grade: C 

Book 26: Romancing the Beat by Gwen Hayes

This is a pretty straightforward 'how to structure a romance novel' book that I bought because I've had an idea floating through my head for the past year and I was sort of hoping that mapping it out via a beat sheet would help me actually write it. There's some good and useful tips in this book, but my reaction to a bunch of the beats outlined was more along the lines of 'oh, here's the section in a lot of romance novels that I dislike' rather than 'this is how the magic works!' I don't regret buying or reading it, and I think there's some useful structural advice in there, but it feels a bit like a paint by numbers instruction manual that doesn't actually result in a pretty or particularly interesting picture.

Grade: C

Book 25: Wicked Intentions by Elizabeth Hoyt

I read this book two weeks ago and have already forgotten most of it, other than that it is the sort of historical romance novel that is surely perfect for someone but isn't for me. There's a rich guy with unusual sexual appetites who everyone thinks is bad but really he's just kinky and sad because his mother didn't show him enough love, and there's a widow with a secret who's trying to save all of the orphans from the slums of London, plus the deaths of a bunch of prostitutes and overprotective older brothers and a sister who sacrifices her own virtue to save her ungrateful husband, like you do. So there's obviously a lot of stuff that happens in this book, but there's very little heart or real human behavior, and I just don't like straight romance well enough these days to get past all of the nonsense, sorry.

Grade: C

Book 24: The Guru Investor by John P. Reese

So this is one of those books which I own because of a friend. Usually in those situations it's because the friend is the recognized author, and in this case my friend is the ghostwriter of this book. I went into it a bit skeptical because it's a personal finance book about how ten money managers/investors have systems to do the thing that historically speaking almost no one manages to do in the long term (beat the market), but I was also curious about it because I am in personal finance fandom and so this stuff is of interest to me. I came out of it slightly less skeptical of the theory but even more firmly convinced that for the vast majority of people, investing in index funds rather than attempting to actively manage your portfolio (or paying someone else to do it) is the way to go.

The structure of the book is basically ten mini-biographies of investors who fall into three main categories, depending on what their investing focus is: value investors, growth investors, and quant investors. All of them managed to beat the market average gain over the lifespan of whatever their fund was/is, and essentially all of them have numbers-based (rather than impulse-based) reasons for holding or selling the particular stocks in their funds, and they make calls based on that. And whether or not their individual methods succeed basically depend on a person's ability to trust that a downturn in a particular fund is temporary, because there's science behind the method, and that the fund will bounce back up eventually.

All of that is fine; it's essentially the same theory as buy and hold in general, only more targeted. But the fundamental appeal of buy and hold in index funds, which track the S&P 500 and don't involve active management and so therefore have very low fees associated with them, is that you don't have to think about or worry whether your method is actually a successful one, or whether the numbers you have based your decisions on are an accurate reflection of how a company is likely to do in the future. Plus, the only way to actively manage picking stocks to buy and sell that isn't just based on hunches and emotions is to do so actively, i.e. spend time and energy managing those investments. And if you want to do that, more power to you! But for the vast majority of people who want to invest in the stock market as a form of saving for retirement, that is almost certainly going to demand more time and energy than you want to give, and cause more anxiety and stress in the process. And if you want to invest in a fund someone else is managing to achieve the same 'better than the market' results, you've got to trust that the additional fees you will pay to own those funds won't be more than the market beat the funds will have, and that the particular fund you pick is actually managed by someone who is following a system and whose system works.

This book was written in 2008, before the financial crisis really hit home, and before it became clear that a lot of the public information that was available about various companies was, in a word, unreliable. I don't doubt any of the information included in the book is accurate, in terms of how much the various funds and methodologies had earned in various points in the market. But I do wonder very much how many of the people invested in those funds were able to stop themselves from cashing out at the bottom of the market because they hadn't been saved from that downturn by the money men in charge. If they had stayed in, they would have made back their money and some. But so did anyone invested in index funds, without the additional fees or worries. The structure of the book and the sentence-level writing was as good as I would have expected from my friend's writing ability. But I can't say that I came away convinced by the central arguments of it, or inspired to do more active investing with my money.

Grade: C

Book 23: The Gentleman's Guide to Vice and Virtue by Mackenzi Lee

Man, I really wanted to like this book! But it did not work for me.

The protagonist of this story is Monty, the eldest child of a Lord in England in the early 18th century. He's seventeen and has been kicked out of Eton for love letters between him and another man, and his very mean father has told him that if he doesn't behave himself on his Grand Tour, he will disinherit him and leave the entire family estate to Monty's baby brother. So Monty is viewing his Grand Tour with his best friend Percy, who is biracial and was raised by his aunt and uncle after his father died, as his final adventure before he'll be forced to manage the family estate. Things immediately go wrong in Paris when he behaves badly at a ball and steals something from a Duke in service to the King of France and then there are highway robbers and alchemists in Spain and Barbary pirates in the Mediterranean and a sinking island off of Venice with a treasure inside and all of this should be one hundred percent up my alley, and it's not, in large part because I don't like Monty at all. He's a rich spoiled brat, who has a terrible father, to be sure, but I know I'm supposed to sympathize with him and find him charming and I just don't. He likes drinking and he likes gambling and he likes sex with men and women, none of which I have a problem with in a character, but there's nothing else to him. I understand that running your terrible father's estate probably wouldn't be the most interesting career out there, but there's nothing else Monty wants to DO, other than be an idiot. He likes Percy, which is nice, and there's some decent pining there, but it's established in literally the first chapter that Monty is in love with Percy and yet there is no good reason for that to be a secret between them aside from the fact that the narrative demands it.

Monty's younger sister Felicity is a bit more interesting, but even there I don't understand why that relationship functions the way it does. They start off hating each other, and then as the book goes on they hate each other LESS but only when it seems convenient, and it just doesn't read like real people to me. And the overall story has the same problem a lot of historical romances can run into, which is that there's this big obstacle or issue preventing a couple's long-term happiness that makes them miserable for most of the book, and then the resolution is that...they're just going to do it anyway, and somehow it'll all work out. It doesn't feel believable, and it doesn't read like a happy ending to me, and it just doesn't make for a good story. Monty learns a bunch of valuable life lessons by the end of his misadventures, and I suppose that's good and all, but there's still no place waiting for him and Percy in the world, and the book doesn't do any of the work carving one out for them. I don't know. I expected to like this book a lot, and instead it was just not for me, I'm afraid.

Grade: C

Book 22: Annihilation by Jeff VanderMeer

Another book club book! Our theme for this month was books that had been adapted into movies recently, and I was really excited to read this one because I was intrigued by the movie and had heard from my brother (who has read the entire Southern Reach trilogy, of which Annihilation is the first book) that the movie was quite different from the book. So I wanted to read the series first and then see the movie, even though both aren't in my usual genre wheelhouse. The movie looks quite scary, and that's not normally my jam!

Well. I don't know if I would describe the book as being scary, exactly, but it definitely freaked me out. There is an Area X in this world, that is blocked off from the rest of the world, and periodically there are expeditions sent there to do...something. Observe and record and report on...something. It's never quite clear.

The current expedition is made up of the biologist, the psychologist, the anthropologist and the surveyor. We never learn any of their proper names, not even that of the biologist, who is our (fairly unreliable) narrator. The framing of the book is that she's telling the story of what happened to her after it happened, which is one part of what makes it unreliable--she is choosing when and how to reveal the information she does, and at times mentions casually that something will happen a day later in the narrative, but for the most part the structure of the story is chronological, with flashbacks or memories to her life before the expedition.

I had a sense of unease for the entire time I was reading the book. The reader is never certain what's going on, and it's unclear how certain the biologist is about what's going on, and how accurate her version of events is, for a number of reasons. Other members of my book club found it very frustrating that we rarely get clear cut answers to anything, but that wasn't my experience with it, I think in part because I didn't expect a first book of a trilogy to have a full explanation of anything. But I also thought that was missing the point, a bit. I think it's both a weirder and more subtle book than what they were hoping.

A comparison that kept coming up was the television show LOST, because there's a group of people in this strange place and no one knows where it is or what it is or why they're there, really, and there's definitely scary stuff out there but no one can explain what it is. But LOST ended up collapsing because the creators kept insisting that they knew where it was going and that there was a rational explanation for all of it. Annihilation never makes that promise, implicitly or explicitly. So the creeping dread of not understanding is part and parcel of the experience. I genuinely have no idea what will happen in the next two books, but I'm definitely going to read them now.

Grade: A

Book 21: Darkness at Noon by Arthur Koestler

In the midst of what feels like constant terrible political news and reports of the rise of fascism and authoritarianism in areas all around the world, what better kind of book is there to read than a novel about the arrest, imprisonment, unfair trial and execution of a political dissenter?

Darkness at Noon is one of those books that I've had since college and have no memory of reading, although I did find markings in the book that resemble my marginalia, so it's quite possible I did. Either way, it would have been twenty years since I had read it, so I was almost certainly due for a reread. The book was written by a man who had left the Soviet Union in the late thirties and was imprisoned and almost killed before he was able to flee to the U.K., and the story focuses on the story of a citizen of an unidentified country whose revolutionary party has now become the tyrants. It's a compelling read, even though it takes place almost entirely during his time in a prison cell, but the reader learns who he was before his imprisonment and can see the mechanics of his conviction and execution being carried out. I hesitate to calling it hopeful, or even worse a great warning for our own time, but it gave me a lot to think about specifically regarding the cycles of political and societal progress and regression that occur over time. The protagonist is not presented as a hero wrongly maligned; the reality is far more complicated than that. He is someone who was actively doing the right thing, until it became clear to him that it wasn't right at all, and that sort of reassessment simply wasn't acceptable. The system failed him, whereas they would say that he failed the system. I am glad I read this book, and if I did read it as a college student, I wish I knew what I thought of it then.

Grade: B

Book 20: The Salmon of Doubt by Douglas Adams

What a delightful, bittersweet book.

This is a collection of works by Adams published after his sudden death in 2001. Most of the book consists of magazine essays and other short nonfiction, and introductions he wrote for other books, and short stories he had written that hadn't been published elsewhere, and one transcript of an absolutely incredible extemporaneous speech he gave on religion. The final part of it is the first nine or so chapters of the novel he had been working on (for almost a decade) when he died. 

This was the perfect book to read after finishing Ready Player One. What Douglas Adams did is everything that that depiction of geek culture doesn't understand about what can make geek culture fun and wonderful. The way Adams delighted in the world, and most importantly wanted to share what he found, and discuss it and play with it and reinvent it rather than just regurgitate it, made me want to engage with people and information and history like little else has in recent memory. He was so enthusiastic about so many things that it made me ache for how much he didn't get to see or do or experience, and it also made me feel (mostly in a good way) my own mortality in a way I don't always. I started to read this book the weekend after the 2016 General Election, but I didn't have the capacity for viewing his joy and delight in the world at that point. I do now, thankfully, and it's been a helpful if unintentional benchmark for my own outlook and emotional well-being to compare how much I struggled with this book then and how necessary it felt to read now. The world is so big and so vast and so absurd, as well as being tragic and brutal and sad, and Adams jumped into all of that, and now he is reminding me to do the same.

Grade: A 

Book 19: Ready Player One by Ernest Cline

Okay. I am going to put most of this post under a cut, less because of spoilers (because frankly if you've seen the movie trailer or read literally anything about this book, you already know what's important plot-wise), and more because this is gonna be more of a rant than a post. So uh, if you love this book or aren't interested in reading a bunch of paragraphs that basically start with an unsaid AND ANOTHER THING, you probably shouldn't click. Otherwise, WELCOME.

Book 18: The Women Who Wrote the War by Nancy Caldwell Sorel

This book examines the experiences and the reporting of women newspaper and magazine correspondents who covered World War II across the globe. It's a topic I had never really considered or thought about before reading the book, even though women entered many work forces during the war while so many men were off fighting, so it made perfect sense once I started reading it that war correspondent would be another kind of job women would step into. Journalism and nonfiction writing was also a field that women had begun entering during the 1920's when cultural expectations of a woman's role in the world had started to shift, and that meant there were experienced women journalists who were ready and able to fight for the opportunity to go cover the biggest stories of the times when war broke out.

The main difficulty with a book like this is just how broad a story it is. The book covers dozens of women working over a decade and in numerous locations, and at times it ends up feeling like a recitation of facts about what happened when without enough of a coherent thru-line. It would often highlight a writer doing work in Poland in 1938 and then return to her ten chapters and five years later working in England, and it was difficult at times to keep the stories straight or feel connected to any of the women as individuals. I also found it frustrating how every woman was described physically, and the attention given to their romantic lives. It wasn't irrelevant, since often they were traveling with their husbands who were also journalists, or had left husbands behind who were often quite unenthusiastic about having a woman correspondent for a wife, but it felt like a shorthand that was used to differentiate the women, rather than their work. I understand why the book was written in a chronological format, but I think it might have been a better book if it had focused on fewer women and gone further in-depth with each of them individually, rather than trying to give a broad overview of everything at once. Basically, this book attempts to be a biography of about thirty women all at once, while also giving an overview of the war as a whole, and it ends up feeling slightly shallow and disjointed as a result.

Still, I'm really glad that I read the book. While I do think that attempting to cover so many women weakens the overall narrative, it did a great job of making clear just how wide-ranging and far-flung the war (and therefore the people covering the war) was. Most of the books or movies I've read or watched about WWII are understandably narrower in scope, but that makes it easy not to appreciate what it really meant that the entire world was at war. This book definitely made me want to read more in-depth history books about specific events and locations that are only touched on in this one, and the depiction of just one of the roles that women played during that time was also very interesting and worth exploring.

Grade: B

Book 17: Unfit to Print by KJ Charles

What a delightful little novella. This story takes us on a journey through the pornography trade in Victorian England, something I'd never really thought about existing before but makes perfect sense once I did. There has always been pornographic writings and drawings and sculptures, but for the first time people had the ability to take pictures of nude bodies and sexual acts, and of course the flipside of the rigid outward morality of that era would be the vice underneath.

The story focuses on Gilbert Lawless, the illegitimate biracial son of a Lord who became a pornographic book seller and author after he was cast out of his family following his father's death. After the cousin who inherited the estate from his father also dies, his relatives invite him back to request he dispose of his cousin's extensive pornography collection. Meanwhile, Vikram, an old friend from school who Gil hasn't seen since he had to leave suddenly when his father died, is searching for clues about the disappearance of a young Indian man. He shows up at Gil's bookstore looking for help finding the photographer who took a particular picture. Friendship and romance is rekindled after many years as they go on an adventure together to track down the young man.

I read on the author's blog that a version of this story had originally been the starting point of her Sins in the City trilogy, and I have to say that I would have liked to have seen what a full length novel focusing on these two characters would have been like. It's definitely an enjoyable read and I found it compelling, but the plot was almost too straightforward. I would have liked to have seen how they could have been woven into a more complex universe of characters and events.

Grade: B

Book 16: Talk Sweetly to Me by Courtney Milan

Another excellent read! Often when I read a novella in a romance series I end up wishing it was a full length novel, but this was that perfect kind which had a story arc that didn't require any more time than it got.

Rose Sweetly is the younger daughter of a black shop owner in London, who moves in with her pregnant older sister Patricia to help while her husband is away. While in Greenwich, she has the opportunity to be a computer (i.e., mathematician) for an astronomer, work she deeply loves. But Stephen Shaughnessy, a known rake and writer, is also in Greenwich, and has developed quite an interest in Rose, even arranging for lessons with Rose to ostensibly learn about astronomy for a character he's writing, but really he just wants to spend time with her.

Part of what I liked so much about this book being a novella rather than a full length novel is that at its heart there's only one major conflict or question, once it's established that Stephen is actually serious in his intentions toward Rose (which he has to be in order to be a likable character). The story comes down to whether Stephen and Rose are willing to deal with the realities of being in a mixed race marriage, and more specifically whether Stephen is ready to be the husband of a black woman and all that will entail, even for an Irishman who is used to poor treatment from the English. It's not a conflict that can reasonably withstand too much equivocation, because either it will be deemed worth it or not, and nothing within the timeframe of the novel can change outside of their relationship to shift their decision. The way it's handled neither minimizes the realities to the point of handwaving, nor does it make you think it's a relationship that's doomed to failure. And the progression of their attraction and love is really lovely, with just the right small and big moments. Milan writes historical romances so well it feels effortless and it makes me wish every book read so well.

Grade: A

    

Book 15: The Cruel Prince by Holly Black

For the last month or so I had been stuck in a bit of a reading rut, where everything I read was okay or sometimes even better than okay, but not quite as good as I had been hoping. I am very pleased to report that with this book, that curse has been broken, because boy did I love this book.

Jude is the daughter of two mortals who had met in Faerieland and escaped to the mortal world together. She, her twin sister Taryn, and their older half-sister Vivienne are brought back to Faerieland by Vivienne's father, Madoc, who kills both of their parents. Madoc raises his former wife's children along with Vivienne, even though they aren't his and aren't Faerie. Because he's the general for one of the sons of the Faerie King and a very high ranking warrior, Jude and Taryn are raised along with the elite of the Court of Faerie. This does not go particularly well for either Jude or Taryn, as one might expect.

One of the things I love about this book is that instead of the now-standard YA girl character who's an average jane thrust into the middle of intrigue she's ill-equipped to deal with and doesn't want to deal with, Jude is determined to find her role and shape her life in whatever ways she can. She's a mortal, which means she's vulnerable in ways that Vivi and other faeries aren't: she's susceptible to glamours and faerie fruits and the like. But she spends all of her time trying to figure out how she can be effective, in both very openly confrontational ways and in secrecy.

She's incredibly confrontational at school with the cool faerie folk, especially the youngest prince of the Court, Cardan. He and his friends are the perfect supernatural version of every popular high school clique, and one of the ways this book works so well is by blending the standard tropes of being the odd girl out who fights back against the cool kids but also wishes that she had their power with all of the magic intrigue of the Faerie Court. And there is plenty of intrigue! The other aspect of this book that I loved is how many classic tropes and storylines it works with that zig when you expect them to zag. It's not that everything is a shock reveal; in fact, most of the plot points feel very consistent with the world that's built. But the specifics--how the characters get there, or who knows what when, or the explanations for why characters behave in certain ways--all feel genuinely fresh and interesting. The end of the book feels perfect for where the first book of a trilogy should end, and it's both not a cliffhanger and also left me totally unsure of what would happen in book 2. It's just a really satisfying, extremely well written YA faerie romp, that happens to have a couple of my favorite tropes in it, and I'm very much looking forward to the next one.

Grade: A

Book 14: All I Am by Nicole Helm

Sometimes I wonder if I find contemporary straight romance novels baffling, or if I just find straight culture itself baffling. Who can say?  Not this book.

There are elements about this story I like. I'm a sucker for a romanticized version of the country, with a farmer's market and artisan everything and a loner in a cabin up in the woods. Wes is a combat veteran who had to give up his dream of becoming a veterinarian after being injured in Afghanistan and now makes his own organic dog treats. Cara is the flighty middle sister of a family that owns a farm and has a stand at the same farmer's market as Wes does. They're a fairly classic opposites attract and make each other better set up, and the story is fine for what it is, but there's no depth to any of the characters or their relationships, and all of the conflict and decision making exists to create plot rather than because it feels remotely real. It wasn't the worst way to spend an afternoon, but there are better versions of this kind of book.

Grade: C 

Book 13: Unmasked by the Marquess by Cat Sebastian

Man, it's always a bummer when you hit the first book by an author you really like that just doesn't work for you. There's so much to like about this story, too, but it's a classic unsuccessful romance novel where the characters spend 90% of the book discussing all of the reasons why their love can never work and you're nodding along the whole time thinking 'yes, they really are in a pickle, how will they resolve this???' and then they get to the end and are like jk who cares about social mores and the realities of the world this story takes place in, love should be enough! And ugh.

The story centers on Robert Selby, the older brother of the beautiful Louisa, who goes to Alistair de Lacey, the Marquess of Pembroke, for assistance in the Ton. The reason he needs this assistance is because Robin is actually Charity Church, a female servant for the Selbys who assumed Robert's identity with his knowledge in order to attend Cambridge and then assumed his identity permanently when he died in order to prevent the estate from being entailed away from Louisa and leaving her destitute. So they're in London in order to find an acceptable match for Louisa.

Alistair is a very straight-laced Marquess who is only interested in restoring his family's good name and financial well-being after his father had long-running affairs and spent too much money too often. He's kind of a Darcy-esque figure who softens and learns valuable lessons about himself when he falls for Selby (whom he calls Robin), first when he thinks he's a man and then for a second time when she confesses that she's a woman. There are all sorts of misunderstandings about Alistair's intentions and the cousin whom Louisa and Charity prevented from inheriting by concealing Selby's death plus an ill-advised elopement attempt and all that, but the main conflict is how can Alistair and Selby aka Charity aka Robin be together given everything?

There are a bunch of different answers to that question that could theoretically work, but for me the one the book goes with doesn't at all. I'm glad that queer historical romances are expanding the idea of what a queer romance can be, and I'm here for happy endings for those characters and an examination of how people lived non-cisgender heterosexual lives back in the day. But the resolution here feels both so ahistorical and out of character for basically everyone in the book that it just reads like utter fantasy. I think a happy ending was possible for Robin and Alistair, but this one wasn't it.

Grade: C

Book 12: American Born Chinese by Gene Luen Yang

I read this graphic novel for my book club. It's got a story structure that I enjoy very much and is a good fit for the storytelling flexibility that graphic novels can provide: there are three separate yet connected stories that are being told in alternating chapters, and each of them is compelling on its own but come together in a satisfying way. The first story is a fable about the Monkey King, who loves dinner parties and is rejected from one for being a monkey. So he goes back to his kingdom and does everything he can not to be a monkey, to the point where his actions cause him to lose everything rather than gain everything and he must make a choice and all that.

The second story is the primary story, and it's the one that makes the book read the most like a memoir (which I think it is). It's about a Chinese-American boy named Jin Wang whose family moves from Chinatown in San Francisco to an unnamed very white suburb and struggles to find his way. He has one friend, a boy from Taiwan who blends in even less, and in middle school he develops a crush on a white girl.

The third story is about a white teenager named Danny who has a cousin who visits him from China every year. His cousin is a pretty dramatic and clearly satirical version of a Chinese caricature, and this third tale feels even less strictly realistic than the Monkey King fable.

I really enjoyed this book right up until the end, which didn't quite land for me. It felt very abrupt, and left a number of threads unresolved in ways that weakened the entire book for me. Jin Wang's experiences felt so true to life, and the details of being a child in the eighties in particular were so specific and grounding, that the ending was almost too metaphorical and didn't end up satisfying me as a result. The book as a whole is still worth reading, but I expected it to nail the ending after such a solid build up, and it didn't.

Grade: B 

Book 11: The Henchmen of Zenda by KJ Charles

I spent a lot of time while reading this book attempting to figure out exactly what it is. It's definitely fanfic, in that the story is based on another novel from the late 19th century (The Prisoner of Zenda) only told from a different perspective. But it's also a bit of a backstage comedy, because while the reader's focus is always on the characters and events that the narrator cares about, the "main" story is on the other side of the wall, so to speak. It's also a fanfic that doesn't expect or even require the reader to know the original story at all, the details of which are more or less hand-waved away. There's a bit of the novel The Princess Bride to it, in that the version of the story we're getting is told as being the "good parts" or at the very less the true account of what actually happened, with all the built-in commentary that how a story goes depends almost entirely on who's doing the telling.

So, the story here is that there are these henchmen, and from the outside they're all evil, but we learn through following the tale of Jasper Detchard that most of the henchmen are in fact evil but that he and Rupert von Hentzau in particular are not. They both work for Michael, a Duke and the brother of the future king of Ruritania, and Michael is in fact quite evil. However, both Jasper and Hentzau have other plans in play: Detchard is there at the request of Antoinette de Mauban, Michael's mistress and Detchard's longtime friend. Michael wants the throne, Antoinette wants to escape Michael and find her daughter, Detchard wants to help her do that and escape with his own life, and Hentzau's motives are unclear at the start of the story but are revealed over time. What is never unclear is his interest in Detchard sexually, and the developing relationship between the two of them is entertaining if not particularly passionate.

The book does a pretty compelling job of explaining the actual motives for lots of things that happen in the original story which change how that story is perceived, even for those readers who don't actually know the original story. The one odd thing though is that I as a reader never actually cared what the result of the overall narrative would be, because Jasper clearly survives in this telling since he's the one writing it. It's another way in which it's obviously fanfic, except that it's also a story that doesn't expect anyone to know the original story, so as a result the actual plot to the story is more or less irrelevant. It's cleverly done, and I am somewhat curious about how the original novel told the story, but it never made me fully invested in the tale. I'm always here for gay hi jinx and adventures and things not being what they seem and all that, but I could never quite lose the feeling of being behind the scenes and not in the central narrative, which of course we're not, but it should feel like the main narrative to the characters themselves, at least. It felt like a story that was weighed down a bit too much by its own narrative framing, in the end. I was happy enough while reading it, but it never flowed on its own as a story, for me.

Grade: B  

Book 10: An Unsuitable Heir by K.J. Charles

This is the final book in the Sins of the Cities trilogy, following An Unseen Attraction and An Unnatural Vice. The first book in the series didn't work for me at all, but I enjoyed the second book a a lot. The third book split the difference of the two. Spoilers for the first two books ahead.

In An Unsuitable Heir, we finally meet the titular character, Pen Starling. He and his twin sister Greta are a pair of trapeze artists in a theatre troop, and as far as they know their mother was unmarried when they were born and the three of them were trapped in a terrible religious cult, essentially, until the twins escaped at age 14. They changed their last names and worked together to have a career flying and in general live the sort of bohemian artist life that looks very sexy from the outside but is actually quite fraught and unstable on the inside. The arc of the trilogy starts for them when Mark Braglewicz, a private inquiry agent, finds them because it turns out they're actually the oldest children of a dead earl, which means Pen stands to inherit a title and a whole bunch of money and property. And of course, they don't want it, both because they're trapeze artists and also because Pen is whatever the equivalent of genderqueer would be in that time period, and a future in which he would need to present as male publicly all the time feels unbearable to him.

Meanwhile, Mark is in a difficult spot, because he falls for Pen on first meeting and believes Pen when he tells Mark that he would never want inherit, but a. whether Pen wants it or not, he is legally a Lord, and b. there's a murderer out there determined to not let Pen and Greta inherit, which makes hiding away a bit complicated also. So he's trying to do the right thing, and also kind of making a mess of it, but eventually he and Pen fall in love and there manage to be enough twists and turns to both secure all of their futures while also allowing Pen to continue in his life.

I'm trying to figure out why the novel didn't end up feeling that satisfying to me. Part of it is that even though Pen is one of the central characters in the story, because his main motivation is to somehow avoid having something be true rather than taking action to do something, he ends up feeling oddly passive to me. Plus the story all comes together, but it's a mystery where the reader has been left so far in the dark that there's no way to anticipate any of the big surprises, but the smaller ones feel obvious. And there are a bunch of people from all three books of the trilogy involved, but they still feel quite disconnected from each other, and there are a few too many scenes of people explaining things rather than scenes showing us what happens. The POV doesn't always feel right.

I think this trilogy also suffers quite a bit in comparison with the author's Society of Gentlemen series, which has a similar sort of situation where all of our favorite characters are suddenly in a bind and the reader has no idea how they'll manage to escape but somehow they do and it's a DELIGHT. In that series the great escape is orchestrated and pulled off by the characters themselves. In this trilogy, a situation presents itself and Pen manages to take advantage of it at the last second, but it feels more like the writer figuring out a way to get themselves out of a corner than it does like something that would actually happen.

All of this also connects to one of my other issues with the book, which is that there are times when Pen's gender identity feels, to me, like it exists to provide the character with a Good Reason for why he's so opposed to being an Earl. I understand and believe that society wouldn't look kindly on these two trapeze artists who are suddenly elevated because it turns out their father was a bigamist and all that. But there's a very modern viewpoint from both Pen and Mark when they assert, with fairly limited effort, that of course it would be too much to expect Pen to live publicly as a man all the time. It ends up feeling both anachronistic and very unreasonable of the characters, which is a shitty way to feel about a character's (or person's) gender identity, but I kept thinking that the only reason there is to feel like Pen's refusal to be the Earl is at all understandable is because of his gender identity, which makes it feel like a plot point rather than who he is as a character.

It wasn't a bad book, and I definitely kept reading it because I wanted to know how it would all end up working out, but it didn't quite come together the way I was hoping it would.

Grade: B


  

Book 9: The Omega Learns a Lesson by Dessa Lux

This is a short story sequel to The Omega's Pack, and it’s basically exactly what I want from a short story in an existing romance series. There’s a conflict between the main pairing that’s real and fits into the overall narrative well, but it’s not a novel or even novella length conflict, and as a result this is the perfect bite sized treat for the reader.

Sam hasn't come home from the office in two nights, and Rusty needs to figure out what's wrong and how to get him to come back to the pack. He approaches the situation as basically a mission, and goes to the office ready to reassert his role as Sam's alpha, and to make sure that Sam knows he's loved and safe and secure. The story does a really good job of balancing the appeal of a wolf-style relationship, where words are unnecessary because emotions can be expressed through physical displays of dominance and submission and all that, with the reader's need to know that Sam and Rusty do actually want the same things, and that this is a functional situation for both of it. That can be a very tricky line to walk in this kind of story, and the author does a really nice job of grounding the relationship while also giving the reader the kind of over the top alpha/omega dynamic that you want in a story and universe like this. Sam is struggling on his own, so Rusty makes sure he knows he's not alone, and then he and his pack reassert their claim on Sam and everyone is happy again. The ideal lesson to learn, really.

Grade: B

Book 8: Nor Iron Bars a Cage by Kaje Harper

This is one of those books that I've had for...years with little to no recollection of why, exactly, but I figured that now was the time to read it because why not.

It's set in a vaguely medieval world were sorcery and conjuring still happen, but most of the strength and lore of their magic has been lost. Our POV character is Lyon, who had been a sorcerer but then his former teacher got possessed by a wraith and then it spent months attempting to possess Lyon, until he burned off the brand on his wrist and managed to kill his teacher and the wraith in a massive fire. Fifteen years later, he's a translator and hermit who still suffers from nightmares and can't deal with being around too many people, living in a small village far away from everything. And our story begins when his closest childhood friend Tobin is sent to the village by the king to fetch this master translator on an urgent matter and discovers that Lyon is still alive.

After a bit of back and forth, Tobin manages to convince Lyon to come back with him, and the rest of the story is one part trauma recovery as Lyon attempts to reintegrate into the world and one part 'you need to do this magic thing to save the entire kingdom.' Lyon is absolutely deadset against ever communicating with something that isn't living again, after his experience with the wraith, and so when it turns out that the kingdom's survival depends upon mind-linking with a ghost, it becomes obvious to the reader far before it does to the characters that Lyon is going to overcome this trauma in order to save the world. Which is all fine, but there's not much tension or suspense there.

The same is true for Lyon and Tobin. They confirm that both of them are gay within the first chapter of their reunion, and for the rest of the book the only tension between them is whether Lyon will sufficiently recover from his trauma in order to be able to fully love, etc. But there's never any question that he will, because Tobin as a character is so grateful to have him back at all that whatever level of recovery Lyon reaches, Tobin will be happy to meet him there. Which on the one hand is lovely! Recovering from trauma doesn't mean suddenly behaving the way you did prior to the trauma again! But from a narrative standpoint it meant that there's very little there in the way of conflict within the main relationship of the book. 

All in all, I found this story a very readable one, and I did want to know how it would get to the ending that was never in doubt, but it wasn't quite developed enough as either a fantasy book or as a romance, for me.

Grade: B

Book 7: The Hazel Wood by Melissa Albert

This was one of those books where I knew nothing about it or the author, but I found the cover really compelling and it had a blurb from one of my favorite authors and I love fairy tale retellings and when contemporary urban fantasy works for me, it really works for me. So I gave it a shot, and it ended up being one of those books that I was uncertain about for the first 95% of it, but the final chapter somehow managed to pull it off.

Alice and her mother are basically a mother-teenage daughter version of Sam and Dean from Supernatural, constantly moving from place to place and never putting down roots. But instead of hunting demons, they’re running from them, of course. The demons or monsters or darkness seem to originate from Alice’s grandmother’s estate, the Hazel Wood, and as soon as something Very Bad happens to wherever they’re living, they pack up and flee for the next life. They’re also running from the legacy of Alice’s grandmother, who wrote one book of fairy tales and then became a hermit on her estate, a sort of old Hollywood Grey Gardens situation. The book of fairy tales is clearly also related to the darkness, because Alice’s mother forbids her from reading it or even having a copy, and there’s an obsessive internet fanbase devoted to both the book and the stories behind it. The novel starts with them in New York, where Alice’s mother has gotten married and so Alice has, rather than an evil stepmother, a fairly evil and rich stepfather and stepsister. But the story really starts when Alice's mother is kidnapped by the Hinterland, i.e. the setting of Alice's grandmother's book of fairy tales, and Alice needs to rely upon the help of her classmate Ellery, who's one of the internet superfans, to help her get to the Hazel Wood and figure all this out.

The book is set up to be a mystery, and it is, but it also exists in this weird world where things are clearly a bit bonkers in general and that’s not really commented upon. Alice isn't a real girl, and Alice's stepsister and stepfather aren't real in that way that exceedingly rich people aren't real, and Ellery also exists in that world of wealth, too. But the characters are supposed to believe that they don't live in a world where supernatural or fairy tale stuff really exist, and none of that actually makes any sense. The book has a tone and a place issue at times; it was very unclear to me just how off their universe is supposed to be from ours, and I found it a bit difficult to get invested in as a result. The revelation about who and what Alice is should be more of a shock, and instead it feels like it's the only thing that would actually make any sense, and I still didn't actually fully care about anyone because no one feels real.

Having said all that, I was surprised at how much the ending did actually affect me, given how neutral I had felt about the story for most of the book. I was prepared to be righteously grumpy about it, and then it managed to both wrap everything up very quickly, and do so in a way that felt satisfying and narratively correct, and there's something really lovely about discovering that the weird pacing of a book is intentional and pays off in the end, rather than it being a flaw that hadn't been corrected in the editing stage. Overall, I'm glad I read it.

Grade: B 

Book 6: Abroad by Liz Jacobs (Book 2)

Note: I know the author of this book socially.

This is the continuation of Abroad Part I, which you have to read first in order to have any understanding of what's happening. If the first book was about Nick internally coming to terms with who he is and what he wants, the second book is all about him discovering how to be that person out in the world, both within a relationship and also as an individual. That journey is paralleled by Izzy's own exploration of how to express what's going on in her life, and her need to create something out of her past in order to grow into the future. And then there's Dex, who has to balance his own needs and insecurities with caring for someone whose struggles are similar to his own but also wildly different. There's a lot going on, in other words!

The first part of the book feels like the reader finally gets to exhale for a bit after all of the drama in Part I, at least when it comes to Dex and Nick. After Part I set up the attraction and interest between the two of them so beautifully, Part II pays that off right off the bat, both in terms of the sex and also the emotional intimacy between them. It just feels a bit like a blanket fort in the middle of all the craziness, which I liked a lot. It mirrored how a lot of young queer relationships can feel: as long as it's just the two of you in your own secret space, it's not so scary. But it can be much harder out in the rest of the world.

Meanwhile, Izzy is having a bit of a disaster of her own, trying to figure out what to do about both her friendship with Nat and her own sense of her identity. I have to admit, I was genuinely surprised by where this plotline went! I was definitely expecting Izzy to realize that she had always felt something more for Nat than she had recognized, because she hadn't known she could feel that way about women. That is a thing that happens quite frequently, both in fiction and in life, but this story went in a slightly more painful and, because of that pain, more believable direction. Nat hadn't been the thunderbolt for Izzy's realization because she genuinely was separate from it, and as neat and tidy as it would have been for the two of them to end up together, it wouldn't actually have felt right. At one point in the novel Izzy reflects on how much she hates feeling feelings and how much easier it would be if we didn't have to, and I definitely understand and empathize with that. Izzy still gets a romance, which I won't reveal for fear of spoilers, and I really liked how her entire journey was handled.

The rest of the book deals with how these two sets of characters manage to get out of their own heads and into the world, and the pitfalls they face. Dex and Nick finally get on the same page with each other, but they're in wildly different places in terms of how they are in the world as gay men. It's the classic university relationship that on the one hand is moving far too quickly, given the circumstances, and on the other hand, that's how these things happen sometimes. But being in a relationship doesn't automatically ease outside anxieties, and that's especially true when Nick's reluctance to come out to his mom feels to Dex like a commentary about how seriously Nick feels about him and their relationship. I found myself frustrated with Dex during this section, both because neither one of them were actually communicating with each other (in an all-too-realistic way) and also because while six or eight months of emotional entanglement feels like a long time when you're twenty, in the context of coming out it's not very long at all. But Dex's fears were also understandable, and that's part of what makes all of this a struggle for people--queer people aren't just dealing with their own coming out experiences, but often the experiences of their partners as well, who may have radically different circumstances to deal with.

I really liked how the story ended, too. It wasn't too neat and easy, but it was still the happily ever after that you want from this kind of romance, with a nod to the specific challenges that they would have. It's the happy ending you want for them that sometimes happens in real life, but doesn't always. I think these novels toe the line beautifully in telling a realistic-feeling story with the conclusions we don't always get in reality, which is the perfect balance in a contemporary queer romance, for me. It never feels too easy for them, but it also never feels hopeless, because it's not. There's a future for them all.

Grade: A 

Book 5: Christmas at the Wellands by Liz Jacobs

Note: I know the author of this book socially.

As is probably clear from the title, this is a holiday romance in the form of a (free!) short story. It involves a whole bunch of fairly heavy themes (death of a parent, depression, racist and homophobic relatives), but at its heart it's about two friends discovering that maybe there's more than friendship there.

Kev and Andrew are college roommates and best friends, and Andrew invites Kev home with him for Christmas the first year after Kev's mom died of cancer. Kev is out of his element on multiple fronts: Andrew's family is large, and white, and lives in the heart of suburban WASPy Connecticut, and Kev's family had consisted of himself and his mom in Queens, and he's black. He's also gay, and out to Andrew, but he feels completely at sea during this holiday even when it's only Andrew and his immediate family. Things get much worse when Andrew's racist and homophobic Uncle Mike joins the gathering, and more confusing for Kev when he discovers Uncle Mike's homophobia as a result of Andrew coming out as bisexual, which Kev hadn't known before this visit.

Parts of the story are stressful simply because of how accurately they nail the tension and simultaneous boredom and insane busyness of large family gatherings at the holidays, but the friendship between Kev and Andrew is so strong and clear that you never lose the way. It's a classic Christmas romance about two friends finding comfort and love with each other, and well worth reading even in the spring.

Grade: B

Book 4: The Hero and the Crown by Robin McKinley

Somehow I had made it all the way to 2018 without having read anything by Robin McKinley, and I decided that this was the year that would change. This was the book I had heard mentioned the most, so I thought I would start here.

The story is the (at least now) classic tale of the young daughter of the king who can't lead her people becoming the person who can lead her people. Aerin is an absolute delight of a character, and the first part of the book gives the backstory of how she secretly learned how to brew a potion that would protect her from dragon fire, and rode her father's old warhorse who was injured in battle but still had enough life left in him to be her trusty steed, and how her cousin Tor trained her in swordplay while also falling in love with her. She is feared by the people of the kingdom because she resembles her mother, and there are rumors that her mother bewitched the king, and so Tor is the heir to the throne rather than Aerin. But the kingdom has been without its hero's crown for ages, and is therefore vulnerable to attacks. Aerin's father and Tor and the entire army is about to go North to deal with a demon attack, and while they go off to do this, Aerin goes to fight a massive dragon, Maur. Will she find the hero's crown? Who can say???

All of this is great! I really liked the first half of the story, and it hits tropes super well, and I love Aerin being completely oblivious to Tor's feelings for her, and all that. The pacing of the book started to concern me right at the midpoint, because the first time Maur is mentioned early on as a myth, you know Aerin is going to have to defeat him, but she does so at just about the halfway point, which feels too soon. And then in order to recover from her wounds from the fight, she finds Luthe, who's immortal and knew her mother who wasn't exactly a witch but wasn't NOT a witch, and they train and she goes and fights the final big bad of the book in a confrontation that is far more metaphorical and symbolic than I want from my fights, magic or not. Plus Luthe healing her made her immortal too, which is great but also makes her less of the world than I want her to be, and the relationship and love she has with Luthe is great, but then she goes back and marries Tor, and I'm fine with BOTH of those things happening but I want them each to have more weight than the book gives them. I love the idea of Tor being her human love and Luthe being her immortal love, but Tor ends up being much less of that, and it makes the entire narrative unsatisfying to me in a way that it didn't have to be. Basically: I understand why there would be fanfic about this universe (SORRY, ROBIN).

The book definitely feels like a early novel in a writer's career, and also some of the subplots and themes feel quite dated: Aerin has a girl cousin named Galanna who she's constantly sparring with, which is fine, but that character more or less fades away when her husband (yet another cousin) dies in the final battle, and it feels very out of nowhere and a disservice to Galanna, who should be more relevant in general. The deepest and most emotionally consistent relationship throughout the whole book is between Aerin and her horse Talat, which is great, but I would have liked to have seen that with other characters as well. The book becomes more uneven as it goes, which is a shame, because I was completely on board with the start of it. I still enjoyed the story as a whole, but it definitely lost its way for me toward the end.

Grade: B 

Book 3: Sing, Unburied, Sing by Jesmyn Ward

I read this book as part of my book club, which normally reads YA or middle grade award winners, but we're shifting at least temporarily to award-winning adult novels. One thing this book has in common with YA is that it's a coming of age story about a 13 year old boy, but the way it tells the story of his family is definitely aimed at an adult reader.

The story starts out in the POV of Jojo, who lives with his grandparents, his mom and his three year old sister Kayla near the Mississippi coast. Jojo's mother Leonie is black, and his father Michael is white and from a family that doesn't recognize his biracial children. Michael is up in the state penitentiary in the Mississippi Delta, and the narrative of the book really begins when we learn he's about to be released and Leonie takes their children on a road trip to pick up him.

The POV switches back and forth between Jojo and Leonie and one other character midway through the book, and it's an incredibly effective way of describing a family and an existence that is ruled by extremes. I found Jojo to be a very sympathetic narrator and Leonie to be a challenging one, because her choices are so easy to censure from the outside and yet from within her experience it's hard to know what other choices she had.

The subjects and themes of this book were difficult to deal with. The story lays out with crushing clarity the direct line between slavery and mass incarceration, and the cycles of oppression and hurt that play into every aspect of Jojo's family and life. One of the main strengths of the book is how beautiful the writing is, so the reader really feels the hurt and injustice and hopelessness of it all. It's the story of America few people want to hear, and it must be heard, and I hope this book becomes a part of high school curriculums like The Grapes of Wrath is. I doubt it will, for exactly the reasons you would expect, but it should be. The writing is harsh and visceral and necessary, and it's a story that will stay with me for a long time.

Grade: A