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