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