Book 5: Christmas at the Wellands by Liz Jacobs

Note: I know the author of this book socially.

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

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

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

Grade: B

Book 4: The Hero and the Crown by Robin McKinley

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

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

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

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

Grade: B 

Book 3: Sing, Unburied, Sing by Jesmyn Ward

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

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

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

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

Grade: A

Book 2: Take Your Eye Off the Puck by Greg Wyshynski

In the past year or so, I started watching hockey again. It had been a sport I watched with friends in high school (and I played street hockey very badly with the same friends), but last season I started watching it again much more frequently and intensely. At a certain point, I realized that while I knew the basic rules of the game and had a pretty good idea of what was bad vs. what was good, I was missing a lot of the nuance. So I started listening to podcasts and reading articles on tactics and hockey stats, and that was how I heard about this book.

Greg Wyshynski is a hockey sportswriter, and his style is very much of the old school sportswriter genre--there's not a simile in the world he hasn't met and loved. But I found his book to be very well organized and provided a structure for understanding aspects of hockey that I had observed but hadn't necessarily understood just from watching games. I've found myself relying upon how he laid out various points when trying to explain rules or what have you to friends who are new to the sport, and I really like having that sort of vocabulary at hand instead of flailing around for how to describe a thing I understand instinctively but don't have the words for. He's also someone who grew up about thirty miles from where I did and is only a couple of years older than I am, so I get all of his cultural references and in general there's something about him that makes me feel home again in a way that few things have since My Chemical Romance or seeing Clerks for the first time. Most people probably won't have that sort of fondness for him baked in the way I do, but even without that, if you're a newish hockey fan (or even an old hand at hockey who wants a refresher course on certain topics), I really recommend his book.

Grade: A

Book 1: Abroad by Liz Jacobs (Book 1)

Note: I know the author of this book socially and read and provided feedback on an early draft of this novel.

As is probably implied by the above, I am too close to this book to claim objectivity about it. But man, I love this book. It's the story of a college student during his year of studying abroad in London. Nick's family emigrated to the U.S. from Russia when he was young, and he's been an outsider for all of his life. But when he goes to London, he finally finds his people in the form of a queer social circle, which is not the most emotionally comfortable way for him to find belonging, since the idea of being gay terrifies him. That terror isn't enough to kill off his attraction to Dex, though, or to prevent him from opening up for the first time to Izzy, who's having a bit of her own sexual identity crisis.

The story alternates between the POVs of those three characters, so you really get a sense of the entire world of their social circle, and all of the various personalities and emotional entanglements that exist within it. Part of what I love so much about this book is that there's a gay romantic relationship that isn't the only gay thing in the story--Nick and Dex aren't the token queers of their friends group, and it's not comprised solely of gay guys, either. There's an authenticity to both the complications of friendships and sexual relationships in college and the specific realities of queer social circles, and it's so nice to read a story and recognize the people and the conversations and what matters to them.

The same is true of the examination of Dex's experience as a black British gay man, which feels fully integrated into both the character and his emotional arc, and Nick's as a Jewish Russian immigrant who feels out of step no matter where on the globe he is. Following him as he gradually finds a way to inhabit himself fully is very emotionally satisfying. And Izzy's shock at discovering something new and unexpected about herself also rings true, as does the subsequent fallout she has with an unexpected person. 

I'm about halfway through the second part of this story, and I cannot wait to discover what happens to all three of them and the rest of their friends. With a lot of romance writing, gay or straight, you have a pretty good idea of how everything will end up, even if you don't know how they'll get there. I honestly don't have any idea how the story ends in this case, but I have complete confidence I'll be satisfied by it.

Grade: A 

2018 Master List

What's that, you say? It's March? Well, we may be two months into the year but I haven't read any books at all for the first two months, so we're starting this now. Here's my list of books to read this year. It's most of the books that were on this list from last year, plus a bunch of new ones that I've gotten. Last year I managed to read twelve books; this year I would like to read more than that. Let's go.

Book 12: The Half-Drowned King by Linnea Hartsuyker

Note: I know the author of this book socially, and I received an advance reader copy in exchange for a fair and honest review. 

As someone who loves historical fiction, I was extremely excited when a friend of mine started working on a Viking saga many years ago. In a novel which spans many lands and characters, the broader narratives of power and conquest are told primarily through the experiences of a brother and sister, Ragnvald and Svanhild, and how their lives intersect with Solvi, the son of a king. Ragnvald is betrayed within the first chapter by Solvi and then learns that this was the result of a far larger betrayal carried out by his stepfather Olaf and by Solvi's father, one of the many kings of small holdings of land throughout Norway. Ragnvald is determined to take back the land and status he considers to be rightfully his, but he must weigh his desire for revenge against the shifting tides of allegiance among the various rulers of the land. This personal struggle plays out against the larger reality that Harald, one of the kings in question, has far greater ambition than to simply rule a small part of Norway: he wants to rule it all. 

Ragnvald's experience is contrasted with Svanhild's constrained life as a woman, and in particular as a woman with no living father and no brother present to help protect her. She makes brave and often reckless choices in order to avoid an untenable fate for herself, and her decisions result in her being at odds with her own brother at times. I really loved her journey, especially given that at various points Ragnvald bears more than a passing resemblance to Hamlet: he almost always knows what he wants to do, but often his sense of obligation and honor and self-preservation prevents him from taking that action. He is very conscious of what the long-term consequences of his actions might be, and what his place in a world ruled by Harald would be (and what it would be if Harald fails), and he sometimes hesitates when he would be better served to act (and vice versa). Svanhild, on the other hand, doesn't have the luxury of such contemplation, which makes her arc incredibly vibrant and unpredictable as well. 

The POV of this novel also manages to walk a very tricky line of presenting the religious and, at times, supernatural beliefs of the culture as being real to the characters, while not making a judgment for the reader as to the truth of them. I really liked that approach, and I felt it worked extremely well for this particular story and world. It allowed me to simply accept their reality without questioning my own interpretations of events, which never disrupted the flow of the story.   

One of the things I love most about reading historical fiction is the opportunity to learn about various historical periods and cultures that I know very little about. The Half-Drowned King drops you right into the middle of its tale, and the reader is left to swim their way to shore, much like the titular character. That isn't a complaint, by the way; I found the experience of genuinely not having a sense of where the narrative was going to be fascinating. I didn't have a level of familiarity with Viking culture in the 9th century to know what was likely to happen, and I definitely didn't want to google the real life inspirations for many of these characters and events and inadvertently spoil myself. Preventing myself from doing so will be even more difficult as I wait for the second and third novels of the trilogy, but I am positive that my patience will be rewarded in the end.

Grade: A