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