Book 84: A Christmas Gone Perfectly Wrong by Cecilia Grant

 Well, it's not gay, and it's not contemporary, but this was the Christmas romance novel I had been hoping for!!!!

This is an absolutely charming Regency historical romance novella that's the perfect length for its story, and so satisfying even while you of course know exactly how it has to resolve. In the days leading up to Christmas, Andrew Blackshear has gone to Lord Sharp in order to obtain a falcon. But he encounters his daughter Lucy instead, who is a free spirit and desperate to be a part of society beyond her father's home. She manipulates him into agreeing to take her to the house party she was invited to for Christmas, but then she drops off her maid, so she's unchaperoned, and then their carriage wheel breaks and they have an accident, so they have to rely on the kindness of a farmhouse in order to survive, which means posing as a married couple to save Lucy's reputation!

There is, of course, only one bed, and Lucy is the one who doesn't fear losing her reputation and Andrew is so moral and good, and you just like both of them so much and the situation resolves in exactly the amount of time you want it to. A delight, start to finish. 

Grade: A

Book 83: A Fortunate Blizzard by L.C. Chase

 The fifth and final gay Christmas romance novel of the year! This one is a classic snowed-in, there was only one bed setup, where flights out of Denver get canceled and so Trevor isn't able to fly home. Meanwhile Marc, a work-obsessed lawyer, is just trying to get home from the office but gets the last hotel room when the highways are shut down. He offers to share with Trevor, who is determined not to get involved emotionally with anyone because he has late stage kidney disease and only has a year to live unless he can find a transplant. 

I enjoyed this one, but it's again on the wrong side of "extremely serious issue" conflict, for me. And Marc doesn't really have much of an existence beyond lawyer who wants to make partner to make his family happy, except they disowned him for being gay, so. Not the worst snowed in together options out there, but not a winner for me, either. 

Grade: C

Book 82: Thick as Thieves by Megan Whalen Turner

 WELL. A friend who has already read all of the Queen's Thief books was extremely excited for me to read this one, and it did not take me long to figure out why. 

This book takes place in a completely new location, and the point of view character, Kamet, is one we only met briefly in a previous book (The Queen of Attolia, I believe). It turns quickly into a road trip, and specifically a GAY LOVE STORY ROAD TRIP, with an Attolian whose name we only learn at the very end of the book, but the reader is very clearly intended to have figured out who he is before then. It's both a romp and also just a lovely examination of the existing world from a new point of view. As with every book in the series, there's a lot that both the reader and the point of view character don't know, and don't know they don't know, and the payoff of this book is just so delightful. Kamet is one of my new favorites of the series, and the Attolian is now a firm favorite forever. The entire series is a wonderful read, but this book alone would be worth reading four books to get to. 

Grade: A

Book 81: A Christmas Reunion by Nic Starr

 Number four of the gay Christmas romance novels! In this one, we have no fake boyfriends or chance meetings due to a snowstorm, but we do have returning home and seeing your old flame again, who's now your biggest enemy. 

Hunter is from a small town where his family owns basically everything, and he's the prodigal son returned. Aaron is the equivalent of a townie, and now has a small store downtown a la David Rose in Schitt's Creek. They were best friends in high school, until a dumb asshole got between them, and now that Hunter's back the sparks have started to fly again! 

I really liked the premise of this novel, but it kind of fell apart toward the end. I know that this is in part a preference I have that goes against romance novel standard beats, but it feels like in too many of them there is a big confession or the like that involves too many openly expressed feelings, if I am honest. My kingdom for a Christmas romance novel that has the right level of conflict/suspense that I am looking for! This one is fine, but not exactly what I was hoping for. 

Grade: C 

Book 80: Mr. Right Now by Annabeth Albert

 The third of my gay Christmas romance novels! Another fake boyfriends one, although this one is much less bonkers than "my boss needs to believe I'm happily engaged or I won't get promoted." This one is much more classic, in terms of "my relationship ended suddenly and rather than tell my family I'm single again, what if I just pretend that the hot gay neighbor I've been checking out since I moved in is my boyfriend, instead?" (It does get a BIT into "I will deceive my boss in order to get a raise through my family situation," but it's not nearly as front and center.)

Both Russ and Estaban are charming and likeable, although Estaban's cultural background feels painted on at times, and the book does the whole "Spanish in italics" thing. But the book falls apart a bit when the "conflict" between the two of them is over Russ not wanting to rebound and so forth, and while it's closer to a novella than a novel already, I found it a bit tedious by the end. 

Grade: C 

Book 79: Better Not Pout by Annabeth Albert

 The second of our gay Christmas romance novels, this one also takes place in upstate New York with a grumpy older guy and a younger energetic guy who has resigned himself to not finding love by staying in his home town. But this time the older guy is a military cop about to retire, and guys, it is really hard to read romance novels about cops these days!!! This author writes a lot of military romances, which I generally have an easier time with than cops, even military cops, but boy. 

In this story the conflict is that Nick, the cop, is going to move away after he retires, so his romance with Teddy, the social worker who plays Santa's elf for charity every year in the small town he grew up in, has a built-in expiration date. Which is fine, except we all know that Nick doesn't actually want to move away, etc. etc., and even for a Christmas romance novel the conflict feels pretty strained. Still, I did actually like both Teddy and Nick, the cop issue notwithstanding, even if I've generally enjoyed other books by this author more. 

Grade: C

Book 78: The Christmas Deal by Keira Andrews

 Here is the first of the (mostly gay) Christmas romance novels I am reading this December!!

This is a classic setup - we have one sad desperate lonely grumpy not-out queer dude who is in need of a place where he and his stepson can live, since he's out of work after he was injured on the job, and another out-but-single gay dude who got abandoned by his former boyfriend and is estranged by his entire family but has a giant beautiful home, and a boss who inexplicably will only promote people who have stable family lives (since employment laws don't exist in this version of upstate New York). Grumpy guy, whose name is Logan, meets abandoned guy, whose name is Seth, through his sister, who is Seth's coworker. 

The whole story progresses about as you expect a Christmas romance novel to, and I largely enjoyed it, except it was a bit heavier on the angst than I really wanted. Just an endless stream of homophobic family stuff and personal loss and a difficult stepson and by the end I wanted a much less heavy story than it was. But it certainly delivers on the trope, so if "fake boyfriends" is a surefire winner for you, I recommend this. 

Grade: C

Book 77: A Conspiracy of Kings by Megan Whalen Turner

 Book for in the Queen's Thief series! In many ways the most straightforward book so far; it overlaps with The King of Attolia a bit and in general would be completely unclear if you hadn't read the first three books in the series, but Sophos is also a comparatively straightforward point of view character and also personality in these books. Even when he is posing as a slave in order to survive to protect himself and the throne, he is extremely clear-cut as a character. The sleight of hand that exists in the narrative is much more upfront as well; he knows things that his internal monologue doesn't reveal to the reader, but that feels considerably less shocking, narratively, than the reveals in the first three books. 

None of the above is a complaint, however! I still really enjoyed this particular installment, even if it's not my favorite of the series so far. It was nice in many ways to read something this direct in its storytelling, and I'm still loving this entire world. 

Grade: A

Book 76: The King of Attolia by Megan Whelan Turner

 Boy!!! The third book in the Queen's Thief series, this one has the most DELIGHTFUL point of view character, Costis. He is a guard for the palace in Attolia, and his unreliable narrator is great in a totally different way to the first two books: because we know more about Gen and his relationship with Irene than he does, and so the dramatic irony of his interpretation of what's going on versus our suspicions makes the entire story fascinating. This is especially true because Costis is just so darn likeable, which means that even when he's completely wrong you still sympathize with him, and understand why he feels the way he does about what's happening. 

The plot of this story centers on how Gen can be accepted as the King of Attolia, without destroying the Queen's authority and allowing the barons to ferment dissent against her reign. And of course he goes about it in the most Thief-esque way possible, and makes sure that no one actually sees him for all that he is until it's too late (for them). It is an excellent third book of what I think of as being the first trilogy of two in this series. 

Grade: A

Book 75: A Taste of Honey by Kai Ashante Wilson

 I bought this book basically knowing one and a half things about it: that it's gay and set in a vaguely historical setting. And both of those are true! The setting feels roughly like a Mediterranean/North African culture, and the main character is Aqib, the youngest son of a man who manages a menagerie for the court, and who lost a lot of status when he married Aqib's mother. For complicated reasons, the whole family depends on Aqib, who is beautiful and effeminate, to marry a high born woman and allow the entire family to rise in society again. But this becomes very complicated for Aqib when he meets Lucrio, a captain who is stationed in their city, and who Aqib falls deeply in love with the first night they meet. 

The structure of this book is really interesting, as is the way that language is used to distinguish the characters and their worlds, and the overall narrative thrust. I began to get quite worried about how the story would end, because you want Aqib and Lucrio to choose each other so much, but there is a lot that leads you to believe one or both of them may not. I really liked where it took us, although I could have done with even more focus on the love story, in some ways. A really lovely read, and an interesting follow up to Haunting in a lot of ways. 

Grade: B 

Book 74: The Haunting of Tram Car 015 by P. Djeli Clark

This novella was a free download from Tor this fall, which tend to be extremely hit or miss for me--sometimes I discover a new author I really love, and other times it's more of an exercise for my speculative fiction reading brain. This definitely falls into the first category for me! 

It's set in Cairo at the turn of the 20th century, but it's a Cairo that exists in a world where magic was released about forty years prior, and obviously everything changed. We follow two spiritual investigators, basically, who are a crime solving team mired in bureaucracy. The writing is delightful and the set up is extremely interesting, and all of this is done to the backdrop of women fighting for their right to vote, and revolution occurring all around. The team of Hamed and Onsi are a classic pair of the older, more established investigator being paired with the young, enthusiastic, fresh out of university recruit, and the way they navigate the mystery and the city and everything in between is extremely enjoyable. A very fun read. 

Grade: B

Book 73: The Queen of Attolia by Megan Whalen Turner

The second book in the Queen's Thief series, this one really threw me for a loop! Just. After the shock and disorientation of the unreliable narrator of the first book, the second book really doubled down on that for this one, and I genuinely was not expecting basically any of the twists or turns that got us anywhere. 

After the events of The Thief, Gen is now back with his Queen and in her kingdom, except he's also being sent out on missions constantly. And finally, the Queen of Attolia captures him, after he steals from her one too many times. Rather than executing him, she cuts off his hand, thereby destroying his identity, and things go from there. I am still not entirely sure how we got from that beginning to the ending, but I do know that it worked, which is part of what made it so compelling. I'm currently just getting to the end of the sequel to this book, and it's a trip attempting to put myself back into that mindset again. A great read!

Grade: A

Book 72: Nevertheless She Persisted Anthology

This is an anthology of flashfiction published by Tor that takes its inspiration from Elizabeth Warren and the famous "Nevertheless She Persisted" moment of 2017. Each story jumps off from that phrase and tells a story of resistance, of hope, of despair, of rage. I liked the concept very much, and they were all interesting takes on a project like this, but none of them stuck with me for as long as I would have liked. Worth reading, but I was hoping for a bit more. 

Grade: B

Book 71: Drive by Daniel H. Pink

A pop psychology book! I read a ton of these ten or fifteen years ago and then, much like memoirs, that genre began to feel a bit played out for me. This was a book I had read the first fifty or so pages of at some point and then never finished. And now I have! It was both very interesting, and slightly discouraging. The basic gist of it is that the things we tend to think should motivate people--direct monetary rewards and fear of punishment, primarily--are actually extremely unsuccessful except under very specific situations, and this applies basically equally to tasks we can take some intrinsic pleasure or satisfaction from, and ones that are mindless drudgery. We crave the innate reward of learning something or otherwise creating from the former kind of work, and value autonomy and control, rather than threat of punishment or a reward incentive, from the latter. Paying a kid to read more rarely works, but allowing a kid to select the kinds of books they want to read quite possibly will. 

The reason I found this book discouraging is because so little of our society is set up with any of these concepts in mind. Our entire economy is one big punishment/reward system, even the 'good' jobs that allow either for expression or autonomy. This fall has felt like one big flashlight on problems we seem able to recognize and yet not solve, and this book just made that feel even more obvious. It was hard to know how to apply much if any of what the book was suggesting, even if it did give me a greater appreciation for why I love doing puzzles for no 'reason' or write for free. A good book, if not one with a clearly identifiable next step. 

Grade: A 

Book 70: The Thief by Megan Whalen Turner

This is the sort of book that I initially started this blog four and a half years ago for - I have owned The Thief for so long that I can't even remember where I got it. I'm 90% sure that it was a Christmas present, but when and from whom is truly lost to time. But I always wanted to read it, I just...never got around to it. Well, I finally did, and just in time for the sixth and final book in the series to have been published!

So there's this thief, you see, and he's imprisoned in a king's prison, and then released under the conditions that he has to go help someone steal something that's impossible to steal: a mythical artifact. It becomes clear fairly early on that the narrator is extremely unreliable, both in terms of what the narrative omits and also how information is presented, and the reveals are extremely well done and satisfying. I think this is a book that will reward a reread a lot. The setting is very much a pseudo-Ancient Greece, with a mythology that is clearly inspired by the same region, and overall there's a vague Guy Gavriel Kay approach to history here, which to the probable surprise of no one works very well for me. It is also a wonderful first book to a series because while I was very enthusiastic about starting the next one in the series, it also stands alone extremely well, and I really enjoyed having it exist on its own. If you are also like me and have only been hearing abut this series referred to as The Queen's Thief but haven't read it yet, I really recommend it! 

Grade: A

Book 69: We Are Okay by Nina LaCour

This is one of those books that I took out from the library after hearing about it...somewhere, probably because it's gay and YA (or close) and well, that is how I roll. And it was both of those things, but it's also about grief and trying to figure out who you are when your link to your past is suddenly gone, and the space between what you've been told and what's the truth grows wider and wider. 

It's also a book about an unreliable narrator, and telling a story with tension so you keep reading it in order to find out what the Thing was, why we're in the place in the present that the story is about, and it's extremely well-done and effective, but also the structure felt stronger to me than the actual story at times. I did desperately want to know how Marin had ended up where she was (alone, a freshman in college with no family and nothing tethering her to anything), but the explanation felt both too big and also not big enough, somehow. It was hard for me to not poke holes in it, which isn't a great way to go into a story. 

Still, the language was beautiful, and the specificity of her college town and life in the Mission back in San Francisco both rang extremely true for me. I just wanted a bit more oomph from the eventual reveal. 

Grade: B

Book 68: The Sugared Game by KJ Charles

I had an interesting time with this book! Primarily because it is a classic middle book of a trilogy in a lot of ways, where there has to be continuing existing conflict, and especially when it's a romance trilogy where the main pairing have already met and gotten together to some degree in book one--there has to be a reason they haven't gotten to the happily ever after yet, and are stuck at happily for now, and that's hard. 

It's especially hard, I think, in a series like this, where the central conflict of the first book is that Kim is keeping secrets from Will, and while not every issue would be resolved if he just stopped doing that, so many of them would be that it feels increasingly convoluted that he won't come clean and just tell him what's going on. It's slightly better in some ways that he's keeping secrets from everyone, not just Will, but man. 

Having said all that, I still really enjoyed this book! The dynamic between Will and Kim is so good, the sex is extremely hot, the commentary on the Bright Young Things is very funny, and Phoebe and Maisie are delightful. It just felt like it went back to the well of undisclosed secrets and unreliable narrators one (or two) too many times, for my liking. I'm definitely looking forward to the final book of the trilogy, though.

Grade: B

Book 67: Slippery Creatures by KJ Charles

A delightful start to a new KJ Charles trilogy! I enjoyed so many elements of this novel - the main character inheriting a bookshop after the Great War, Will's difficulties figuring out how he fit into life in England again, those issues becoming even more complicated when he's suddenly in the middle of a mystery of great importance, and then a man with more to his past (and present) than is initially obvious stepping into his life. Kim and Will have a dynamic that basically lets this author do what she does best: a forthright and damaged Englishman dealing with someone who cannot tell the truth about themselves for a variety of reasons, but who desperately wishes he could about this person in particular. 

There is a wonderful supporting cast to this story as well, and the central mystery is grounded in the era and complicated and all that, but truly this is the sort of book that promises a situation where one of them ends up in a tricky situation and the other comes to rescue him, while still not entirely telling him the truth about the matter, and it's all so good. I read this during a very difficult week, and it was a wonderful and desperately needed distraction. 

Grade: A

Book 66: Riot Baby by Tochi Onyebuchi

 A book club book! I knew nothing about this, other than the title, and it really knocked me back on my heels. It's a story about Ella, a young Black girl, whose brother Kev is born during the Rodney King riots. It follows them and their mother as they leave South Central for Harlem, and then Kev's incarceration in Rikers, and his release to a place called Watts. Ella has a Thing, where she can feel and sense the violence that's coming for people, and the story is somewhere between magical realism and sci-fi and dystopia, but really it's just classic speculative fiction. 

It made me think for obvious reasons of The Deep, and how narratives can pull apart trauma, and create a new narrative, and what that requires. It was also deeply affecting to read this book that was written in 2019 now, in a post-George Floyd world, because it was a pre- and current and post-Rodney King world before it was that, and it was an Emmet Till world before that one, and so on. But I wonder how ready I would have been to have read this book even a year ago, to say nothing of ten years ago, given where the narrative lands. This book will stay with me. 

Grade: A 

Book 65: A Duke in Disguise by Cat Sebastian

 This book was...fine? It's a historical with a female publisher, her brother who keeps writing seditious papers, and her oldest friend who she's clearly interested in, and who's clearly interested in her, but they can't let themselves to be together, for...reasons? And then they send her brother away to America so he'll be safe, and the oldest friend finds out he's not a bastard but rather he's a secret Duke, and now they really can't be together? Except there's never a really compelling explanation for why any of the wrenches thrown into their relationship are actual problems, and so as a result the actual relationship itself has very little tension, and I don't know. Not my favorite. 

Grade: C

Book 64: The Kingdom of Back by Marie Lu

This was a book I reserved from the library when I saw it on a newsletter of some kind, and it's the sort of YA book that I really wanted to like more than I did. The story centers on the Mozart children: Wolfgang, who everyone knows, and his older sister Maria Anna, who is know as Nannerl in the story, and their fictional world they told each other stories of, called The Kingdom of Back. In the novel (and in real life), Nannerl is also an accomplished musician, and there are indications that she was also a composer. The story of the book involves her going through quests in the portal world and then saving the real world and her brother by making the hard but right choices, and I don't dislike the story, but I found it so frustrating that even in a fictional, fantastical version of this girl child Mozart that I had known nothing about, the best she can be is a person who allowed her brother to become what he did. The metastory is clearly that girls can be anything, but the actual story reflects how untrue that often is in actual history, and that's what it feels like the primary lesson is for the reader, too. I had a hard time with it, and wanted it to be something other than it was, even when I enjoyed it. 

Grade: B

Book 63: Gilded Cage by KJ Charles

 What a delightful read! I had such a nice time reading this book, and it was exactly the sort of distraction I wanted from a het historical romance novel. I had also really enjoyed the first book in the Lilywhite Boys series, and this second book about a couple who had been forced apart by families and a pregnancy and understandable misimpressions and all that just really worked for me--I wanted to find out what had happened while also really enjoying the current era romance as well. The ending tied up a bit too easily in some ways for me, but I didn't really mind that, and overall I really enjoyed this book. 

Grade: A

Book 62: Cinderella is Dead by Kalynn Bayron

 A retelling of Cinderella where the fairy tale is all a lie and the kingdom has been suffering as a result for two hundred years. There's still an annual ball where young ladies are paraded out so they can be chosen, and it's all very bad, and there's one girl named Sophie who wants to escape (and bring her girlfriend with her), but she can't! At least not until she meets a girl named Constance who is also determined to bring the king down, along with the whole kingdom. 

I wanted to like this book more than I did; it's a fairy tale retelling with a queer protagonist about overthrowing patriarchal authoritarianism. But the telling itself never really grabbed me, and the shift from her relationship with Erin to her new relationship with Constance didn't really work for me. The overall world and final reveal was pretty interesting, so I was glad I finished it to find that out, but overall it's more of a miss for me. 

Grade: C 

Book 61: Ruin and Rising by Leigh Bardugo

 The final book of the Grisha trilogy! And I think my favorite of the three, in a lot of ways, both because so many of the threads that had been set up in the first two books did in fact pay off, and because the payoffs were both fitting and sometimes surprising! 

The book begins with Alina having lost her power after the events at the end of book two and imprisoned by the priest, and the ragtag group of resisters conspire to free her and harness her magic again. They have to go on another adventure to find the third and final amplifier, and we learn the truth behind them and the entire system and history of magic, and it all holds together quite well. The ending is satisfying and gives Alina and Mal the happy ending you want them to have without breaking the rules of the universe too much, and it's very effective, even if I never did feel as strongly about the two of them as I would have liked to. All in all, a very pleasant trilogy to read, and I'm looking forward to Six of Crows and Crooked Kingdom. 

Grade: B

Book 60: Siege and Storm by Leigh Bardugo

 The second Grisha book! Alina and Mal start the story on the run, but they get brought back into the narrative of the trilogy quickly enough, with the Darkling forcing Mal to find the second amplifier, a sea serpent. Helping them find it is a privateer with a big secret, who double-crosses the Darkling and allows Alina to acquire the second amplifier, which makes her even more powerful. 

They then join forces (sort of) with a priest who has been calling her a saint, and now she has a whole following, and the privateer is revealed to be something more significant than he is, and Alina has a mindmeld connection with the Darkling now, and a whole bunch of middle book of the trilogy stuff happens where everything becomes more complicated. Things are afoot! And it continues along as the first one did for me, where there's a lot of interesting stuff going on, but I wanted a slightly deeper connection to the characters, and to the love story (or stories). Still a really enjoyable read! But it never fully dug its claws into me. 

Grade: B

Book 59: Shadow and Bone by Leigh Bardugo

 I finally manged to start this series! I have been meaning to for many years, and haven't read the Six of Crows books yet because I wanted to read these first, and now I have! 

This is the story of a girl named Alina, who lives in a fantasy Russia, and who is an orphan without magical powers...until she discovers she's wrong. Her best friend and secret crush Mal is a soldier, and she saves him while they're attempting to cross the Unsea, which is what it sounds like it is. It's in her saving him that her powers manifest. 

She gets sent to go develop her powers with the Darkling, who is supposedly the good guy, but you'll be shocked to discover that in fact he's the big bad! So she runs away and Mal, who's a great tracker, finds her and helps her, and then they go on a hunt to find the mythical creature whose antlers are an amplifier for her magic, only the Darkling gets there too and manages to bind her to him with the magic. But then it turns out she can resist him, and she and Mal escape at the end of the first book. 

This is a pretty classic YA fantasy setup: girl thinks she's normal but is actually super special, along with the boy she's been in love with since she was a kid and the new hot but bad villain that she's drawn to but also knows how wrong it is. I enjoyed it, but I would have liked more from Mal; we know that she loves him, and he eventually falls for her too, but I didn't find the romance particularly convincing or engaging, which was a shame. But on the whole I enjoyed it! 

Grade: B

Book 58: The Empress of Salt and Fortune by Nghi Vo

I read this novella for my book club, and while the actual plot of the story is fairly straightforward in many ways--woman is married to an emperor when her country loses a war, is exiled after bearing him a child and heir, spends years plotting and eventually overthrows the emperor and becomes empress herself--the book itself is actually much more about narrative, and history, and the process of recording it and archiving items and facts after major events.

The story of the titular empress is being told by Rabbit, one of the empress's handmaidens who was with her from the beginning and through her exile, to Chih, a cleric, and Chih's bird, Almost Brilliant, who is part of a race of birds who have been remembering stories of the royal family for century. So the cleric reviews items that Rabbit has, and then Rabbit chooses how to tell the parts of the story to Chih and Almost Brilliant she wishes to, before the empress's daughter is crowned the new ruler of the land. It is a book that is as concerned with form as it is with plot, and while it never had the moment of true a-ha that I was waiting for, I really enjoyed reading and thinking about it.

Grade: B 

Book 57: Killing Gravity by Corey J. White

I think reading this novella after reading all of the Murderbot stories meant it really suffered in comparison--it's not the same exact kind of story, the central character is a human with special powers rather than a murderbot, but it's got a lot of the same elements and feel. And I did really love parts of it, especially those involving Seven, the main character's tiny cat-like pet/companion, and the main character herself, Mars, is an entertaining voice. But I never particularly cared about the world building, or really understood what the overall point of the book was, so while it was a pleasant enough read, there wasn't quite enough for me to latch onto.

Grade: B

Book 56: The Order of the Pure Moon Reflected in Water by Zen Cho

I really enjoyed this novella! It's the story of a group of bandits in a land that is in the midst of a war that no one acknowledges. They are working to deliver somewhat legitimate goods to a city as a cover for their extremely illegitimate goods they are trying to sell. But along the way they acquire a waitress, who used to be a nun of the Order of the Pure Moon Reflected in Water, and they are forced to bring her along. She has secrets, and various of the bandits have secrets (one in particular), and it's just a lovely folk tale of classic characters with a twist, and a really entertaining read. I don't want to say much more about it than that, but I thought it was lovely.

Grade: A

Book 55: You Should See Me in a Crown by Leah Johnson

What a charming book! This is for me pretty much the platonic ideal of a contemporary YA story about a young queer Black girl just trying to make it through high school and find enough money to go to her dream college. In this particular case, Liz goes to school in Indiana, where the prom every spring is the biggest event in town, and being crowned King or Queen is worth a ten thousand dollar scholarship. And so she has to enter, even though she's a bit of a wallflower and this means she'll have to spend time with her former best friend Jordan, the most popular kid on the football team.

There's a great friends group with constant teenage angst, and a fantastic queer love interest named Mack who loves the same band she does, and a really interesting and complicated family life, and it's just a really nice read where you never worry too much about whether it'll all turn out okay, and the stakes are real and mistakes and choices matter, but nothing is life-ending. I really enjoyed it and can't wait to buy it for a GSA library.

Grade: B

Book 54: Exhalation by Ted Chiang

Boy I loved this book. It's a collection of speculative short stories, all of which manage to be the most interesting kind of sci-fi for me: they are deeply, deeply invested in exploring what it means to be human, and how we function, and how that would extend into multiple different settings and realities. The prose is so easy to read and fall into; it feels deceptively simple. And even his stories that are the clearest metaphors (Exhalation, for one) are so well done that you don't feel like you got hit across the face with it. They're simply another opportunity to figure out how we live. I took this out from the library but I may need to buy a hard copy. A wonderful read.

Grade: A

Book 53: Thirteen Doorways, Wolves Behind Them All by Laura Ruby

This is a book club book that I had read half of but failed to finish reading in time about a year and a half ago, and I had forgotten so much of it that I just started over from the beginning. And I'm really glad I did!

The structure of the book is that it is told from the perspective of a ghost, who is following a pair of sisters at a Catholic orphanage during World War II. The narrative goes back and forth between telling the story of Frankie and her younger sister Toni, and piecing together the history of how the ghost died, and why she's there, and what she remembers. It tells the very real story of the aftermath of the Depression flowing into the war, while weaving through the stories of a number of women whose lives were, as always seems to be the case, controlled by and halted by men.

When I originally read the first half of it, I found some of the conceit of the book to be a bit hard to take, and I don't know if I just got used to it or if the payoffs in the second half of the book just made them easier to accept, but it bothered me less this time. I also was completely blindsided by a death I knew had to be coming; the way it was told just gutted me, and it's yet another book I've read during the pandemic that also captures the strange remove of living through major events that somehow seem distant from your own life, until they're not. All in all, a really nice read.

Grade: B

Book 52: Empress of Forever by Max Gladstone

 If you are up for a solid space opera romp where a person who's alone finds a team in the middle of a new universe she didn't know existed, and that person is also a woman of color who dates women, then boy do I have the book for you! 

Vivian Liao is a great character, and this is a space opera that's almost a portal fantasy--on the day she's about to undertake actions to completely transform life on earth by way of becoming a benevolent tech dictator, she is instead pulled into space, and is immediately on the run and gathers a group of four other people who are attempting to deal with the mysteries of the universe. There's a structure and a mythos to the universe at large, and they're well developed while also fairly standard representatives of the space exploration genre, but it's really Viv and her four new friends that I cared about. As a related comment, there's a revelation about two thirds of the way in that feels like it should be a bigger surprise than it is, but because the overall story is compelling enough, I didn't find that to impact my enjoyment of it. This book doesn't reach the heights of the novella he co-wrote last year, but it's a very good read. 

Grade: B

Book 51: Network Effect by Martha Wells

 Murderbot!!! When I started reading this book, the first novel after four novellas, I did wonder whether this story would truly feel like a full novel after so many shorter adventures. And the answer is that it really did! It built on the first four novellas a lot, but the emotional and logistical arc of both Murderbot and the people and other AIs in its universe really demanded a full novel's worth of exploration. 

After three adventures where Murderbot basically took a very dangerous gap year and learned important things about itself, it was reunited with its clients/people/certainly not friends. It then goes on another adventure that's even bigger and scarier, reunites with a character from one of those three novellas, and discovers that as much as it hates having feelings it does in fact have them. One of the central joys of this series from the very first novella is the contrast between the extremely dry narrative voice of a not-person who thinks humans are inexplicable idiots and its continual reckoning with its own emotions and desires. A sheer delight! I think this is my favorite of the series since the first novella itself. 

Grade: A

Book 50: My Dark Vanessa by Kate Elizabeth Russell

 When this was listed as one of the Big Books of 2020 last winter, I decided to give it a shot. And I'm not entirely sad I did? But I'm also not sure whether it was worth it. 

The premise of this book is examining the sexual relationship that Vanessa had with her high school teacher Jacob Strane when she was 15 and he was 43. The narrative goes back and forth between 2000, when their relationship began, and 2017, when Strane is accused by other high school students of abuse during the #metoo movement (which is referenced but never directly named). Vanessa's narrative voice is understandably unreliable when it's the 15 year old POV: she believes this to be a romance, rather than abuse, and the reader sees his manipulation and gaslighting almost too clearly. But 32-year-old Vanessa is also unable to see the relationship the way the reader is meant to. There is such a grating dissonance between her interpretation of events (a romance), and what they actually were (statutory rape and abuse of power, among other things) that it's hard to know how to respond as a reader. 

It's also a remarkably unsubtle book. There are observations and critical critiques worth making related to all of this: Vanessa came of age when Britney Spears and internet countdown clocks to various teenage girls turning 18 were common, and the conception of an underage girl actually having the power and control over grown men was presented as a version of feminism. And the biggest political scandal of the '90s concerned the most powerful man in the U.S. being brought down and made helpless by an intern, who wielded even more power than he did. But the book requires Vanessa to barely be a person in her own right in order to make these observations. She is so utterly alone during her entire experience, and is betrayed by every possible source of support (with the exception of her therapist she started seeing six months before the book began), and even the version of #metoo that exists in this book is unable to help her, because she's the wrong kind of victim: the victim who convinced herself she wanted it. But that's not actually very uncommon at all, especially in the specific scenario of being groomed by a man like Strane. It ends up reading like an odd "I'm not like those other [abused] girls" story, and I can't get past wondering what the point of the narrative is meant to be. Is the revelation supposed to be that victims of abuse often convince themselves that it was actually love? I kept waiting for this book to land for me, and it never did. 

Grade: C

Book 49: The Splendid and the Vile by Erik Larson

I saw this book mentioned on a goodreads newsletter about eight months ago, I think, and immediately put it on hold at the library. I had been wanting to read a book about the Blitz ever since reading Blackout and All Clear, which I enjoyed but also found myself lacking the historical grounding to really understand what was happening to Britain at that stage of the war.

When I started the book, my impression for some reason had been that it was a look at the Blitz from the point of view of a Londoner, but in fact it's actually a telling of Churchill's first year as Prime Minister, from May of 1940 until the following spring. It relies on the diaries of one of his private secretaries and his daughter, Mary, as well as correspondence between Churchill and many other major players in the war, including Roosevelt. I found the framing to be very effective, and an extremely detailed and yet readable first read on a historical event that I knew relatively little about. The last couple of years I have been deliberately attempting to fill in a lot of the blanks I have in my understanding of history, both through historical fiction and then through popular history books, and it's making me revisit other pieces of media that I didn't fully understand because I lacked the necessary context. If you're at all interested in a book that explores how the Blitz began, what England did (and didn't do) in response, America's involvement in the war prior to Pearl Harbor, and how the Blitz ended, I highly recommend reading this.

Grade: A

Book 48: Of Dragons, Feasts and Murders by Aliette de Bodard

This is a lovely little novella within an existing world from a series that I haven't read. So it was an exciting adventure finding out what the world was and how the characters interacted within it! I enjoyed the story, but I'm not sure how well it stood alone--I wasn't sure what the dynamic between the main couple was, or how I was supposed to feel about how they interacted. I liked them, but I felt like I was missing something from the narrative. Which clearly I was! But I had been hoping it would be more of a one-shot I could just jump right into. All that said, I still enjoyed the story of court intrigue, and by the end of it I felt like I knew who these people are. I would have liked a bit more focus on the relationship and less on the court intrigue, but overall it was fun!

Grade: B

Book 47: Exit Strategy by Martha Wells

More Murderbot! This is the final novella of four, and it's the one that finally reunites Murderbot with its clients/people/FRIENDS from the first novella. I found the first couple of chapters of this pretty dry, I have to say--a lot of setup and well-voiced internal monologue, but for me these stories really take off as soon as we see Murderbot have to interact with bots or people or both. But the rescue mission to save Mensah is great, and watching it figure out what's going on and having to deal with emotions is always my favorite things. I also really liked the continuation of Murderbot's transformation into a being that is distinct from SecUnits, and then the process of it rebuilding itself after it almost deleted itself in a last ditch effort to save the day was great. I'm really excited to read the full novel now!

Grade: B

Book 46: Artificial Condition by Martha Wells

Murderbot!! This is the first sequel to All Systems Red, and it is just as charming and delightful as the first book was. Our favorite killing machine with a conscience and an inconvenient fondness for humans is trying to figure out how to go about her life after everything that went down in the first story, and of course she gets herself caught up in a whole thing she did not plan. The main plot is stowing away on a ship so she can find out the truth about the murderous rampage she went on back in the day, but a cargo ship machine called ART sees her and then watches dramas with her and before you know it they're friends, and then murderbot ends up attached to three humans who are making stupid choices and meets a sexbot (more politely known as a ComfortUnit) who would also like to be free. Anyway, it's a great story and it's just such a nice read.

Grade: A 

Book 45: Upright Women Wanted by Sarah Gailey

A book club book that I've read more than 2 hours in advance of the event! What an accomplishment. Part of why that was possible is because this is a novella and a very quick read, but the other reason why is that it is a lovely read. The story takes place in a vaguely defined dystopia that feels like the Wild Wild West of Westwood, but it is explained that petrol and other modern day technologies are reserved for "the war effort." The main narrative focuses on Esther, who has stowed away from her town in the Southwest after her lover Beatrice was hanged. She joins the Librarians, who are responsible for delivery the approved literature to all the various towns, but of course are doing much more undercover. It's a lovely little story about someone who thinks their life has ended finding her people and a purpose, and I enjoyed it a lot.

Grade: B

Book 44: The Story of the Lost Child by Elena Ferrante

After finishing the fourth and final book of this series, I am both glad I read them and also convinced that these particular kind of epics are not my kind of books. I prefer this to the more traditionally swooned over male-centered multigenerational narratives; these are books which care about the interiority of women's lives, and the constant question of what would women's lives be able to be if they had the space and time and weight afforded them like men is extremely valuable and important. But I never felt fully connected to the characters, and I kept wanting something different or more from the central friendship at the heart of them.

I think in part these books made me feel almost like they were too adult for me, like they were describing a life of women that is beyond my experience, even though I am older than the main characters are in the majority of the narrative.

I don't know! These definitely aren't a 'I guess these books are good but I didn't enjoy reading them' series of books, but I don't feel moved by them in the way I had hoped I would. Which happens! It's just a hard thing to know how to feel about. I think the objective quality of the book is one of a Grade A, but my experience of it is not quite.

Grade: B 

Book 43: Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay by Elena Ferrante

It's hard to write about each of these books individually, because they're one continuous story. This book had some of my favorite moments and lines of the entire series so far, but it is also the book where I kept thinking that I still don't know if I actually like any of the characters. Elena, the narrator, publishes her first book, and her response to that and how people review it and discuss it feels so real and so recognizable, and her marriage and children feel like such a defeat, and then the parallel life that Lila is living is its own pain and suffering. There's a line that Lila says to Elena:

"Each of us narrates our life as it suits us." 

She says that after Elena has described her early marriage and the birth of her first daughter in glowing terms. And it's a line that has just stuck with me, and these books are so deliberately narrated; the reader never forgets either the framing of the missing Lila, or the fact that this story is being told by the older version of the young woman Elena was. 

The structure of the books builds to the inevitable; when Nino once again resurfaces, and this time he and Elena finally become lovers and eventually leave their families for each other, it feels like the only thing that could have possibly happened, even if it also feels extraordinarily violent. I don't know what I hope for them, but I also feel like any hope is irrelevant, because this isn't the sort of narrative that gives you that kind of satisfying ending. 

Elena at one point does contemplate whether, if it had been possible, she could have loved Lila in the way she loves Nino. Whether there could have been space for their intellectual and emotional growth together, so that she didn't always exist in a vacuum. I would like to be able to read the story of that life, in some other world. 

Grade: B

Book 42: The Story of a New Name by Elena Ferrante

Four years after I read the first book in this series, I have finally read the second book. Reading that book during the lead up to the 2016 election was extremely difficult, because the sexism and misogyny both the narrator and Lila have to deal with is so pervasive and extreme. I wouldn't say it feels easier to deal with now, exactly, but the world feels like it's falling apart in a slightly different way than it did in October 2016, and it definitely changes my reading of the story.

In part I think it makes it a bit harder for me to engage fully with the narrative and the characters. I watched both The Godfather and The Godfather II for the first time in the last couple of months, and these books are very much a depiction of traditional Italian culture but from the reverse angle of those stories: told from a woman's point of view. I find some it frankly unbearable; the violence, both physical and sexual, that is just described as a matter of course, is upsetting precisely because of how mundane and expected it is, and Lila's marriage at 16 is hard to take. I keep wanting both of them to have the space and opportunity to explore themselves and each other, both intellectually and emotionally, and that's just not possible within this setting.

I got about three quarters of the way through the book and I wasn't sure if this was going to be one of those novels where my judgment is that it's a good book but not one I like, and then the entire final quarter manages to surprise me and swing me back into full investment again. The final page or two has a narrative cliffhanger in a similar way as the first book, and it's so effectively done and interesting that I'm already very glad that the sequel is next on my reading list. I don't expect that the next two books will be any easier for me to read in terms of themes, but I'm looking forward to them regardless.

Grade: B

Book 41: Lovely War by Julie Berry

This is one of those books that I ended up seeing at the library and something about it just made me want to take it out. It's a historical novel about two romances during WWI, but it's the framing device that really makes the book work--the story of the lives of the two couples is told by Aphrodite to Hephaestus, after she's been caught by him having an affair with Ares. She tells the story aided by Ares, Apollo and Hades, and it is the four of them together who can construct the narrative, needing pieces of love, war, music and death.

One of the couples is made up of two young English people, a soldier and the pianist he meets shortly before being sent to the front. The other is a young Belgian woman whose entire family was killed by the Germans early on in the war, and a Black American soldier who is also a jazz musician. The story follows them through the year of 1918, and the sheer pointlessness of this particular war is just overwhelming. The book does a really lovely job of weaving together many different cultural threads, especially the experience of Black Americans in Europe, and how often they had more to fear from their white countrymen than even from the front. I hadn't know about Black regiments or how much of their labor fueled the entire American line, or how much it reflected the rise of Jim Crow all over the U.S.

I got very worried about fifty pages from the end, but this book isn't cruel; it is a love story that takes place during war, but it doesn't feel a need to punish the characters we have grown to care for simply because of it. I really enjoyed this book, and of course now have half a dozen new books I want to read as a result of it.

Grade: A

Book 40: The Tethered Mage by Melissa Caruso

This was a perfectly readable fantasy novel about a woman who's a political heir and ends up becoming embroiled in a magic power struggle when she accidentally binds herself to a mage. The setting is quite clearly magic Venice, which is fun, and Amalia and Zaira have a fun and contentious relationship, and there's a love interest and betrayal and politics but it never fully grabbed my attention. It's the first in a series, and I wouldn't mind reading the next one, but I have no great need to, so I think this will be a one and done for me.

Grade: B

Book 39: The Great Believers by Rebecca Makkai

Man. I understand why this book got great reviews and won awards, etc.--it is solid literary fiction, about Chicago during the mid-'80s AIDS crisis, plus a contemporary plot, so it's got the back and forth narrative structure of uncertainty and discovery that those sorts of plots create, and the characters are interesting and are neither so good that they don't feel like real people nor so horrible that you don't want them to be real people, but I kept reading it thinking 'well I guess if you've never read Tony Kushner or Larry Kramer or Michael Cunningham this might be really affecting.' Which is both unfair but also not, in my view; I am not entirely sure what the perspective of a straight white woman writing a fictional work about this time added, frankly.

And that goes double for the contemporary piece of the narrative, which I did not care about at all. If it was trying to explore the way trauma affects the survivors of a plague, it didn't land for me, and if it wasn't doing that then I have even less understanding of the point.

The story isn't a direct comparison with Angels in America, but the main couple has enough of Prior and Louis in them that when Yale, the Prior of this story, gets the virus in perhaps the most contrived narrative in the whole story, it feels like a bait and switch to me: you thought he was going to improbably dodge it, and now he's going to get it in the most stupid way possible. And it's not that people didn't either get it when statistically it was very likely, or get it when they probably shouldn't, but it felt like the work of a story, to spare him from the expected transmission and then pull the rug out from the reader. And because it goes to the present day, you have a feeling he can't survive from the beginning, but part of the strength of something like Angels in America is in Prior making it to the end. It's important to have works that really dig into the hole left in our culture by the entire generation of gay and bisexual men who died, but that wasn't what this felt like, either. It's a story about reality that offended me in what it decided to create to tell it as fiction. I am sure others felt differently, but I don't know what I was supposed to take from this story.

Grade: C

Book 38: Two Rogues Make a Right by Cat Sebastian

Okay so listen. Do you want a perfectly lovely Canadian shack fic of a gay romance novel about a sickly noble who's lost his title and money, and his childhood best friend who's back from the navy and has always been in love with him? Then this is the book for you. There's honestly not that much in the way of plot in this book, or even much suspense, but it is extremely nice, and sometimes you just need an easy read about two people beating the odds and finding some love, etc.

Grade: B 

Book 37: Rogue Protocol by Martha Wells

I made a terrible error that I then corrected, in that I read the Murderbot novellas out of order. This is the third novella, and I read this second, but I did eventually go back and read the second one, which I'm very glad I did because of the character of ART, my favorite sentient ship.

This one is quite good as well, but it didn't fully move me in quite the same way. It feels more like a story in which Murderbot learned an important lesson about humans and their robots, and how those relationships function, and while that is important, I had a harder time with it overall. It's also the saddest in a lot of ways, though, which may be why I found it hard; it involves the death of a robot, who dies in part to save her owner, and it hurts on a number of different levels, and I just...wish it hadn't. Apparently robot death isn't something I'm handling very well during this time (along with just about everything else). I don't know. I think you should read it because all four of the novellas really build upon each other, especially when you read the novel, but it's the novella that stands out the least for me.

Grade: B 

Book 36: Foursome by Carolyn Burke

This is a biography that I picked up on a whim when I saw it at the library, and I'm not mad I read it, but I am sort of mad at what it ended up being. It's a book about the relationships between Georgia O'Keeffe and her husband, Alfred Stieglitz, a photographer and art collector, and Paul Strand and Rebecca Salsbury, who were colleagues of theirs and also artists. I really enjoyed the time period explored (1900-1930s New York, primarily) and I discovered that there was a lot about O'Keeffe's biography before she went to the Southwest that I didn't particularly know. But it's this odd book that reads much older to me than it is; it was published in 2019, and yet there is so much in the way of "contemporary readers might think this suggests lesbianism or gayness or various other things but we assure you: no" commentary that I barely felt like I knew what I was reading. This is especially true when out of the four the person with the greatest modern fame is by far O'Keeffe, and so there was a certain confusion for me in terms of why this wasn't solely focused on her, or perhaps her and her husband, who played a major role in her career as an artist. I enjoyed learning more about some of the figures and times in this book, but not the actual thrust of this book, on the whole.

Grade: B

Book 35: Bringing Down the Duke by Evie Dunmore

This was a perfectly lovely historical romance that unfortunately suffers from not being written by Courtney Milan. Which sounds harsh! But it's a romance about a woman who sort of stumbles into becoming a suffragette in Victorian England, and she falls in love with a Duke, and it's a completely unacceptable match, and there's politics and banter and potential loss of virtue and discussions about what role in his life she can actually play, and all of this, and at the end all I could think was "this system is irreparably broken and I don't buy this resolution." It's an odd reaction, because I read a lot of gay historical romance novels, and I specifically love how those stories can show the way queer people did exist all throughout history, in high and low society. But I find it harder to believe in straight romance a lot of the time, because we want the good stuff without the bad stuff. We want the woman who was able to go to Oxford but is still beautiful and meets a duke but he's the good version of a duke, or a less bad one at least. But sometimes I almost prefer the historical romances that simply don't reckon with the historical realities of the fantasies. This book is quite close to hitting the sweet spot, but it doesn't actually nail it, and so I came away from it feeling disquieted, rather than charmed.

Grade: B 

Book 34: The Golden Wolf by Linnea Hartsuyker

Note: I know the author of this book socially.

The Golden Wolf!!! I think this was my favorite book of the series. Part of this is that Einar and Ivar, Ragnvald's sons by his former concubine and his wife, have such a great half-brothers relationship that you know cannot end well but is just devastating to watch as it develops. And then once you suffer through the loss that was inevitable, the life Einar manages to carve out is truly my favorite thing in the whole series. He suffers loss because everyone in this world must experience that, it is life, but he really does get a happy ending after all that, and it feels fully deserved. The final hundred pages of this book may be my favorite section of this entire trilogy. 

I wasn't sure how much I was going to enjoy a novel about The Next Generation after a fairly substantial time jump, but I shouldn't have worried: I found it really compelling, and exactly what this sort of full life cycle trilogy demanded. You need to see Ragnvald go from the young upstart to the man with grown sons who has fewer and fewer choices until the end, when he has to make the only decision he can for his family. And it is a delight to see Svanhild find Solvi again, and for that to be the right thing for both of them. 

This is a trilogy about kings that is focused on the impact those kings have on everyone else, and it's not exactly a ringing endorsement of them here, but I think the wide-angle view is the right one; we need to see the mechanisms that created King Harald's reign, and how many moving pieces had to come together in exactly the right way for him to gain and keep power. This trilogy does that very effectively. 

Grade: A

Book 33: The Sea Queen by Linnea Hartsuyker

Note: I know the author of this book socially. 

This is the sequel to The Half-Drowned King and the middle book of a trilogy, and it definitely has the job most middle books do of joining together the narrative that was begun in the first book through the overarching story. One of the results of that is a fair number of characters making choices that you wish they wouldn't, but that feel extremely realistic. After marrying Solvi and having a son, Svanhild is the titular Sea Queen, but constant conflict with her husband and a complicated voyage to Iceland leave her marriage in a difficult place. When her son dies and she leaves Solvi, I was genuinely upset, because that was the relationship of the first book that I had been rooting for. You understand why, after returning to Norway, she becomes one of King Harald's wives, but I wanted better options for her, and for her to be the Sea Queen independent of either man. 

Her brother Ragnvald is dealing with his own difficulties, mostly in the form of his relatives making questionable choices and the sons and brothers of kings continuously warring with him. It is never easy being known so firmly as the king's man as when the king makes extremely short-sighted decisions constantly. 

In many ways I'm glad I waited to read this until the third book was also out, because I think many of the narrative threads that I found frustrating in this book are dealt with and resolved in the third book in really satisfying fashion, and you feel their necessity and how right they are. You might wish the characters could make different decisions, but you never doubt that these are the ones they had to.

Grade: A

Book 32: Mirrorstrike by Benjanun Sriduangkaew

I got this as a Christmas present and didn't know what to expect from it. It's a gay futuristic retelling of the Snow Queen, with something of a love triangle at the middle, and a whole lot of extremely interesting manipulative choices made by characters. I think my main critique of it is that there could definitely have been a more deeply explored backstory and worldbuilding in general; it's a novella that could have, and perhaps should have, been fleshed out into a novel. This was especially true for me in terms of how it approached gender and identity--there was more there than got fully explored, I think. But overall I enjoyed it!

Grade: B

Book 31: The Only Harmless Great Thing by Brooke Bolander

This was exactly the sort of speculative fiction where I'm just not sure my brain knows what to do with the story. It's about a future involving elephants whose superior memory is used to warn people of the future about nuclear waste, and other elephants of the past who were in the circus and then used to do dangerous jobs that made people ill, and the two storylines come together. And I get the mental connections, of the constant problem of how we develop warning signals for people of the future to understand about the hazards we're creating right now, and elephant remembering pain, and the way we've harmed beings in the past, and all that. The ideas are really interesting. I'm just not so sure about this as a story. But the writing was quite engaging, and I don't think it demanded a mental conclusion from me--which is good, I suppose. 

Grade: B

Book 30: The Plantagenets by Dan Jones

It took me a solid year to read this book - I kept taking it out of the library and not managing to read it before it was due again, and then putting it back on hold. But I finally made it all the way through. I realized that I knew of the Plantagenets as a concept but had very little actual knowledge of them beyond the version of Richard II that Shakespeare told, King Richard the Lionhearted and King John via Robin Hood tellings, and Kings Edward I and Edward II via Braveheart, which whew. So it was great to read an actual history of these kings, even if on occasion it leaned a bit harder into "I know people think these kings were gay but probably they weren't" than I prefer in my popular history, given that there wasn't a lot of evidence for the assertion that certain figures weren't gay, either. Also, I had been hoping for more on the women of the era, although of course it did include a fair amount of information about Eleanor of Aquitaine. 

On the whole I thought this was a very good overview of the ruling family that spanned hundreds of years and hundreds of miles, but I do now want to read more about individual reigns in this period in order to get a bit deeper on it all. For a starting place on this era in English history, however, I think it's a great choice. 

Grade: A

Book 29: A Heart So Fierce and Broken by Brigid Kemmerer

This is the sequel to A Curse So Dark and Lonely, only I didn't realize it was a direct sequel - I thought this was the sort of book series where each book was a take on a different classic fairy tale. But no! This book focuses on the former guardsman Grey, who has a Secret, and then a new character named Lia Mara, who is the firstborn and yet not heir to the rival kingdom, basically. And for Reasons they all unite and are sort of acting against Prince Rhen and Harper, but sort of not, and Harper's brother and his boyfriend are still sort of trying to get back to the real world, and I'm kind of mad about how much I enjoyed this book and how much I want the next book in the series, because the cliffhanger at the end of this one was extremely effective. I also think the storytelling and worldbuilding was a lot better in this book, especially once we got past the beauty and the beast direct parallels and the narrative became more of its own thing. I find YA fantasy series that have no set number of books in them to be a frustrating experience, but on the other hand this one got me, so well done.

Grade: B

Book 28: The City We Became by NK Jemisin

Boy, what a book to read during lockdown, when I was in New York and yet felt so far removed from it. It was like watching Into the Spider-Verse and having the same response of longing, of recognition, of memory.

I loved so much about this book. The premise is so interesting; I loved the idea of a physical city birth, and the idea of a midwife being necessary to bring that about. And of course with New York, there would need to be multiple people to do that, because it is a city made up of smaller cities. All of the characters were so wonderful, and my god the way that Manhattan feels about New York City is just so much of what I want in my relationships.

I also loved how completely unsubtle the metaphor of everything was. We know who the protagonists are and who the antagonists, and what the root cause of the rot is, and it gets into the culture and art and money of it all. It was such an amazing fantasia on New York, and it made me so desperate to get to the other side of this current existence, on so many levels.

Grade: A

Book 27: Me by Elton John

I read this as a companion to the movie Rocketman, which was a really compellingly told biopic of Elton John but which ends in the late eighties when he gets sober and doesn't touch on the most recent twenty years. And it's a perfectly satisfying autobiography written by someone who is willing to closely examine some aspects of his life but not all that interested in getting into others, and the pictures are great (especially when you compare the real life versions of various people to the actors who portrayed them in his movie). I also liked it as someone who had always had a very post-Lion King awareness of Elton John and his career - I knew he had been a major rock star in the '70s, but I didn't fully appreciate what that looked like, and the book was an entertaining overview of that time and who he was. He's also just done so much that there was never really a dull period in his life, for good or bad. I think it was certainly more of an autobiography than a memoir; he's rarely all that interested in digging into his experience beyond the narrative elements of it, but I enjoyed it for what it was.

Grade: B

Book 26: The Body Keeps the Score by Bessel Van Der Kolk

A book about the longterm impacts of trauma on people's brains and bodies was certainly an interesting thing to read at the height of the pandemic in New York City. It's a very good book, with a lot of fascinating insight into the development of the fields of trauma psychology and psychiatry, but it did leave me thinking 'oh wow okay so there's just going to be so much trauma to deal with on the other side of this, great.'

I found this book interesting both in terms of how it made me look at my own life and responses to trauma, but also in thinking about this area of study and work and how underserved it is, and whether it's an area I would want to work. This has been something I've tossed around for many years at this point, with the same issues always stopping me: it would take a ton of work and effort and money, and the system is so broken. One of the most affecting aspects of this book was the description of how hard it is to get anything done because of politics and policy surrounding mental health (not just in the U.S., but in particular here), and it feels like both an impossible thing to dedicate your life to, and also something that's actually worth doing so. Anyway, I really enjoyed this book, and also found it deeply affecting, on multiple levels.

Grade: A

Book 25: The Talented Mr. Ripley by Patricia Highsmith

Well, this certainly was an experience. I read this book after having watched the movie for the first time a couple of weeks prior, and it was amazing to me how much of the movie isn't based on the book itself. Obviously there are lots of adaptations that really transform the source material, but I was surprised in the book by how successful Tom is in the book -- there isn't the same level of potential culpability or overt homosexuality, which makes me wonder why the movie felt compelled to make the ending as tragic as it was. Or rather, I feel like I do know, which is a shame.

The writing is really lovely and it is extremely evocative, but it is hard to know how I would have read the story if I hadn't seen the movie first, because it is so definitive. I'm looking forward to reading her other, even gayer works now.

Grade: A 

Book 24: Catfishing on Catnet by Naomi Kritzer

This is a delightful YA about a chatroom community where one of the members is in fact the internet, and is the best kind of benevolent friend version of an all-seeing AI. It's just a really nice story of what humans would like our robot overlords to actually be like: a friend who knows everything, who cares for us, who learns and acts in our best interests as well. I really liked it, but a couple of months later it hasn't really stuck with me past that. CheshireCat is the ultimate chatroom admin who just really likes cat photos, and also happens to live inside our computers, literally. An excellent romp.

Grade: B

Book 23: A Single Thread by Tracy Chevalier

I really enjoyed this book! This was a classic 'sold by the cover' book for me - I saw it while taking out other books at the library and apparently I've been in the mood for historical novels that take place around or between the world wars right now. This book centers on Violet, a woman in her early thirties who was "left behind" by The Great War - her brother and her fiance were both killed, and her  family has never really recovered. She had been living with her mother and working as a typist, and then she decided to move to a different town and live as a boarder and joins a society of women needlecrafting cushions for the cathedral in town.

It is such a quiet book, but also one that really digs into the choices that women had to make in that era, and the responsibilities and needs that hit against each other. There's a lesbian romance in the story as well, and it's told in a way that feels both faithful the era and also isn't interested in being tragedy porn, either. The same is true for Violet's romances, although there is a constant specter of sexual violence that, while probably historically realistic, I found a bit out of keeping with the rest of the story. The book also has the feeling that all intra World War books written after the WWII have, which is the tension between the characters' lack of knowledge of what's coming next, and what we know will. All in all, I had a lovely time reading this, and it made me want to read a lot more about this era. Sometimes I feel that way because I was disappointed by the fiction and want more from the history, but in this case it's purely because the story piqued my interest in the best possible way.

Grade: A

Book 22: Long Bright River by Liz Moore

A book club book! Which I did not in fact manage to read in time for the actual book club meeting, but in my own defense it was scheduled as a zoom meeting for the end of March and I was not yet at a point where that was something I was remotely capable of doing. Boy, what a time.

Anyway! The book. This is an extremely well done modern crime novel, about a woman who grew up in Kensington, a very rough neighborhood of Philadelphia, and became a cop and walked the streets of her old neighborhood. Her sister was also lost to those streets a long time ago, and now there's a killer out there targeting drug users and women who are sex workers in order to buy drugs. She feels the need now to go beyond the department in order to attempt to both find her sister and protect others like her.

The protagonist is a cop, but the cops are not the good guys--in a lot of ways that's one of the only things about this book that made it tolerable to read in 2020, even before George Floyd's death. The narrative is extremely well-told, with an unreliable narrator that makes the reveals both land extremely hard and was stressful to deal with in lol March. It's not exactly my kind of book, but if you are looking for a modern crime novel that focuses on women, I would recommend it.

Grade: B

Book 21: Spin the Dawn by Elizabeth Lim

I finally managed to read this! It was a new book that I had taken out from the library and renewed so many times, and then the pandemic hit and I've had it at home for even longer. And I'm really glad I finally read it.

This is a classic YA set up: a young girl has to pose as a boy in order to gain entry at court. In this particular situation, Maia is a tailor who learned her trade from her father, and when the emperor commands that all the best tailors in the land come to compete to become his imperial tailor, she goes in her sick father's place. Once there, she goes through a Project Runway sort of gauntlet, and is aided by the court sorcerer Edan. He knows her secret, and when her reward is creating three impossible gowns for the emperor's wife-to-be, he accompanies her on her journey to make them, somehow.

There's a magical pair of scissors left to her by a relative and jealous rivals and the secrets of both an emperor and the princess warrior he's intending to marry, and it's just a really lovely read. The only thing I didn't love is that it's the first in a duology, but the second book comes out in July of this year, so hopefully I'll manage to read it sooner that I got to this one.

Grade: A

Book 20: The Right Swipe by Alisha Rai

This book is basically everything I am hoping for in a contemporary straight romance: a really likeable and recognizable lead, a male love interest who's not an irredeemable jerk, and wish fulfillment aspiration porn that manages to thread the needle of depicting a life that I might actually want if I had that money and access and status. You have a modern dating app corporate plot, a 'oh no I've run into my one night stand again and they're really fucking hot' plot, a mysterious older figure pulling some strings--nothing about this book is particularly unexpected in exactly the right way. I have been trying to find good contemporary straight romances, and I am definitely going to keep tabs on what this author puts out next.

Grade: B 

Book 19: The Handmaid's Tale by Margaret Atwood

Some books I feel like I just end up reading too late. This is another one that I managed to read right before the pandemic hit, which is very good; I don't think I would have dealt well with this story during the early days of isolation. It's a dystopian parable that both feels like today and also feels intensely of its time; so much of the Wives and Serena Joy specifically depicts an archetype of reactionary womanhood of the late '70s and early '80s that the dystopia imagined in the book felt less scary than I had feared it would. It's not our current world, or even the world of immediately post-2016. We are dealing with a different parallel, in different ways. It is also the sort of story that does just enough worldbuilding to allow for the current existence to be explained, and little more, and in a weird way right now I get caught up in the process of these things: how is a government overthrown, what are the steps, what are the specific failings. Sometimes I don't read books as well as they deserve, and with this one it's not exactly that. This book doesn't answer the questions I want to ask it, but it never intended to, which isn't a failing of the story.

This isn't quite a 'it's very good and worth reading but I can't say I enjoyed it' book for me, but it's pretty close.

Grade: B

Book 18: The From-Aways by CJ Hauser

This is the first novel published by this author, and it's a much less weird book than her second one. It follows two women who both go to a small coastal town in Maine, one to escape the New York City life she feels no connection to, and one to potentially find her father after her mother's death. They both find something different than they expected, and in many ways it's a pretty classic story about what a small town feels like to someone from the outside, the tension between the townies and the summer out-of-towners in small New England towns, and what parts of ourselves it's possible to leave behind, and what we can't.

There's enough in the story that's not standard to make it fairly unpredictable, and one tragedy late in the book that didn't quite feel earned, but I really enjoyed reading it, and the idea of fleeing to a fictional coastal town in Maine feels pretty appealing right now.

Grade: B

Book 17: Thick by Tressie McMillan Cottom

I picked this up because I want to read more nonfiction and fiction written by Black authors, specifically women. I was familiar with her general writing style from twitter, and I knew she was a professor of sociology, but I was really blown away by this collection of essays. One of them that stuck with me was about her relationship to the word beautiful, and her knowledge that she wasn't beautiful, and how mad it makes people to hear her say that. She's either denying the possibility of a Black woman being beautiful by not acknowledging her own beauty, or unable to see it. But she takes the larger view of that kind of term, and contextualizes it as the exclusionary concept that it is. There is an understood definition of beauty in this culture, and if you are outside of it (and specifically, if you are dark-skinned), then you will never truly reach it. There's no pithy answer to this, either; the lesson is not that our beauty is inside us, or that it's only through not participating that you can be free. It is simply an acknowledgement of something that culture spends a lot of time denying exists at all.

Most of the essays have this clarity of vision between the societal and the personal, and it made me remember why I loved my sociology courses in college, and wish very much that I could take a class taught by her. It's wonderful writing and her point of view is sharp and clear and I am grateful for it.

Grade: A

Book 16: The Body by Bill Bryson

This is another one of Bryson's broad book of information, this time about the human body, from both a scientific and historical point of view. He is a very strong history of science writer, exploring how and when we learned various scientific information, and is able to contextualize that information in interesting and often funny ways.

I have to say that I'm very glad I read this book in February, before the world exploded, because reading about how fragile and frankly insane our bodies are and how little keeps them working properly was at time anxiety-producing when I wasn't living through a global pandemic, and well. We all know what happened next. But it was an entertaining read, and a good companion book to the Sawbones podcast, which does much the same thing only with medical history rather than simply anatomical history.

Grade: A 

Book 15: A Curse so Dark and Lonely by Brigid Kemmerer

This is a YA fantasy that has a premise designed for an elevator pitch: it's a modern portal fantasy retelling of Beauty and the Beast, where the beauty in question is pulled from our reality and brought back to a vaguely European-based fantasy world and imprisoned by a prince who turns into a monster. But only her love can release him from his curse.

From the jump the book is clear on which various tropes the novel is intending to upend: Harper, the beauty, has cerebral palsy and was kidnapped while trying to rescue the stereotypically beautiful woman the prince's right hand man was trying to bring back to break the curse. This of course upends everything, and she begins to work to break the curse in a different way than assumed. There's a tension between her, the Prince Rhen, his guardsman Grey and the enchantress at the root of it all, and it's an interesting retelling, although not one that fully drew me into the world. That may in part have been because Harper had a complicated home life the likes of which is only ever found in this kind of YA novel, and until the very end of the book I didn't care about that subplot at all. It's a good first book to a series, though, and I liked the second one a lot.

Grade: B

Book 14: A Prince on Paper by Alyssa Cole

Sometimes you read a book and it's one that you understand why other people love, but it doesn't work for you, no matter how hard you try to bridge that divide. A romance novel about fake royalty from fake countries, one of whom is shy and has dealt with betrayal, the other a playboy whose exploits mask Secret Pain--this should be right up my alley, and for whatever reason, this particular version of it left me cold. I really wish it hadn't! I think I'm going to try the author's historical romances next, because it may just be that the setting wasn't the right fit for me.

Grade: C

Book 13: The Beautiful by Renée Ahdieh

I borrowed this book from the library after seeing a description of it somewhere, because I am an easy sell for a book about vampires in late nineteenth century New Orleans. But man, I gotta say that I was pretty bored by this book. It's hard to know for sure what I would have thought of it had I read it when I was a teenager, something I always try to keep in mind when I read paranormal YA romance - it is entirely plausible that I would have been swept up by the tropes and setting and all that. But at least as an adult, nothing in the book stuck with me long enough to leave a lasting impression.

Grade: C

Book 12: Ayesha at Last by Uzma Jalaluddin

This book was on the New York Public Library end of the year list of recommended romances, and I'm really glad I picked it up! It's a modern day retelling of Pride and Prejudice, but what really drew me to it is the specific setting - it takes place in a Southeast Asian, Muslim immigrant community in Canada in/near Toronto, and it centers around the matchmaking and arranged marriages common there. I really loved the depictions of the families and how interconnected they all are, and how complicated a relationship the characters had with white Canadians, and the appeal and drawbacks of integration, and how complex every choice became. Ayesha is a wonderful modern-day Elizabeth, working so hard to create the right life for her, not for others, and Khalid is a really fascinating take on a contemporary Darcy--a man attempting to live his life by rigid rules, only to discover that some things are more flexible than others. My main critique of the book is that there were times when I wished the story didn't need to adhere quite so strictly to the plot points of Pride and Prejudice--toward the end, some of the events of the novel felt less natural and more like they had to be included. Overall thought I enjoyed it quite a lot.

Grade: B

Book 11: The Binding by Bridget Collins

This is a really lovely gothic novel that uses point of view and unreliable narrator in a really effective way to tell a story. I don't actually want to say too much about it - the set up is that after suffering from a mysterious illness, a young man named Emmett Farmer is sent away from his family farm to be an apprentice for a book binder. Books hold a different power in this universe than they do in reality, but we learn what that power is in bits and pieces, and the binder Seredith feels more like a witch than strictly an artisan. And then a whole bunch of other things happen! It is a book that's well worth reading, but I also don't want to share too much, because it is a book that I think benefits from being read with only a single beam of light illuminating the way. I came away from it wanting more, but not necessarily a sequel: just that it ends with a new beginning that the characters work so hard to achieve.

Grade: A

Book 10: How We Fight For Our Lives by Saeed Jones

When I put this book on hold at the library, it was with the optimistic belief that at some point in the future, I would be up for reading a memoir that deals with growing up in the south as a gay black boy being raised by a single mother with a heart condition. I had read Jones's work before, so I knew it would be written well, but also that is a lot to handle! But his light touch in exploring his past and his memories and what he did and what was done to him made it so easy to read, until it suddenly punched you right in the gut. It seemed to float until it landed, and you realized it had been on that trajectory the entire time, and you just didn't know.

So much of his experience discovering who he was as a queer man felt familiar to me, and part of that is in reading about someone coming of age when I did, too - the '90s are now a decade of self-reflection, of origin stories, and that lodged in my chest in a particular way. But of course, so many of his experiences don't reflect my own, and he teases them out and holds up a mirror to them all. I loved it.

Grade: A

Book 9: Fleishman is in Trouble by Taffy Brodesser-Akner

I feel like I have read this book instead of all of the mid-century books written by men about their terrible marriages to women, and I think that is the correct choice. But I'm still not entirely sure what I think about this book.

It is a classic book where the people feel real and yet I don't actually like any of them, or perhaps that's why they're so unlikable, because of how real they are. Toby is a 40 year old doctor separated from his wife Rachel, and it's a shock to the system to be reading books about 40 year olds getting divorced, because I am forty! These people are me, or could be! And yet they are not - they are people I know, though, and they are people who I could have become, and this is the sort of book, the sort of story, that makes me say oh thank god. Thank god I didn't decide to marry a man.

And yet, it's also a book that makes me grapple with how I have deliberately opted out of some things, without actually making a choice to opt in to others. The narrator for most of this book isn't Toby, or Rachel, it's one of Toby's oldest friends Elizabeth, who is also going through her own marriage and life struggles, the struggle of who she once was and who she is now and what she gave up along the way. And so we're getting the tale of Toby and Rachel's marriage from an outsider, but one who fundamentally sides with Toby, except for when she doesn't, when the narrator herself becomes a part of the story in a completely different way.

It's an impressive book, one that navigates these perspectives in ways that I both admire and was affected by, and by the end of the book, when we finally meet Rachel, it is like a shock to the system. And yet, while I recognize everyone in this book, I don't know that this is the story I want to be reading, or that I need to be reading. It is true without necessarily being right. And yet I've been thinking about it for a month. So maybe it was, after after.

Grade: B 

Book 8: Family of Origin by CJ Hauser

I read this book because I had read and loved an essay written by the author called The Crane Wife. This was the book that she had been researching as part of the trip described in the essay, and while I don't know what I was anticipating from the novel, it definitely wasn't what it was? But I still really enjoyed it.

It's hard to know how to describe the book - it's probably closest to magical realism, but it's also a book about family secrets, and about what secrets do to people, and about the taboos that people want desperately to violate, just to see that we can. It's also about a cult on a small island off the Gulf Coast of the U.S., and the sense of a world that has stopped moving forward and is instead falling backwards, and the appeal of an escape to a new world. It's about a woman whose father has died, a scientist who threw his life away after moving to this small island to do research, and who either killed himself or died in an accident, and the research he left behind. She goes there, extremely unwillingly, with her younger half-brother, someone she hadn't seen in ten years.

There's a tension in the writing between what the characters know, and what the reader does, and also what the characters don't know, and the reader suspects but cannot prove. I read the whole book on a train ride from Boston to New York, and I think it's a book that probably benefits from being read in one sitting: I felt contained by it, like the reality of the story was the only reality that was real, and yet completely impossible to understand.

Grade: B

Book 7: Know My Name by Chanel Miller

I didn't know if I was going to be able to read this. It's a memoir written by the woman who was sexually assaulted by Brock Turner, the Stanford swimmer who got six months of jail time by a judge who didn't think he should be punished for a 'mistake.' I hadn't read the buzzfeed publication of her sentencing letter to the court, or looked for much information on the case beyond celebrating when the judge in the case was successfully removed by the voters in his county. But I felt like it was something that I wanted to read, if I was able to, and I'm so glad that I could.

The writing is beautiful, and painful, and shows how wide the gulf is between what you know before you're in the middle of a sexual assault trial, and what you know after: what you know about how the justice system works, and doesn't, and what you know about public opinion, and about having a voice, and living a life that's yours. It's the power of the repetition of how unfair our culture's expectations are for women, and their pasts, and what can be blamed on them, and the hypothetical future of the men, whose ruined futures are always referred to in a passive tense - his future was ruined - rather than an active - he ruined his future. A woman is raped, rather than a man raped someone.

It is a hard book to recommend, except that it's not, because it is beautiful and real and fairly devastating, and I hope very much to be able to read works by this author in the future. If there are other stories she wishes to tell, I want to hear them.

Grade: A