Month: March 2022

For the Love of the Bard by Jessica Martin (Rom-com)

Writing: 4/5 Plot: 3.5/5 Characters: 4.5/5
A delightful rom-com immersed in all things Shakespeare. Miranda Barnes — literary agent and anonymous author of the fantastically popular YA series Elf Shot — heads home to Bard’s Rest to finish her next book amidst fan outrage at the ending of the previous installment. Privacy and quiet do not appear on the horizon, however, as she is roped into directing one play at the annual Shakespeare festival, mentoring a teen director on another, and serving on the well-functioning (ha!) festival steering committee.

While fairly predictable and not terribly realistic (but what rom com is?), it is laugh out loud funny and wins major points for continual snappy banter and quirky gotta-love-them characters. Plenty of enjoyable detail about the town of Bard’s Rest, its Shakespearean themed shops (e.g. Tempest Tossed Pizza), and the sausage making stagecraft involved in simultaneous theater productions.

Requisite LGBQT… characters included.

Very enjoyable read.

Fun quotes (the last one is the best!):
“You put gold leaf on a truffle. You sped past too much hours ago and blew it an air kiss.”

“It’d been a while since I’d seen Bunny, but she still had that look of someone who’s decided that the FDA wasn’t credible when it came to sunscreen. She reminded me of those mango chews that Portia snacked on — orange and leathery and completely dehydrated.”

“She writes a series called Elf Shot — it’s basically a call to arms for the women of this generation to not settle for the status quo and rise up to change it.”

“I was just going to have to pretend like I hadn’t committed outdoor frottage with Adam while I sat here with a pair of teenagers who were bloodhounds at sniffing that kind of thing.”

“Took me forever to suture it because he kept batting me with his paw as if to say, ‘Hurry it up, human. The backyard isn’t going to patrol itself.’”

“My traitorous id emerged from a cave worthy of Grendel to spin visuals involving Adam’s hands.”

“More importantly, I don’t want you dating the emotional equivalent of Splenda because you think that’s all you deserve.”

Thank you to Berkley Publishing Group and NetGalley for providing an advance copy of this book in exchange for my honest review. The book will be published on June 28th, 2022.

A Fierce Radiance by Lauren Belfer (Historical fiction)

Writing: 5/5 Characters: 5/5 Plot: 4.5/5

How have I never read this book? This will definitely be one of my top reads of 2022. Historical fiction immersed in the drive to commercialize the production of penicillin for the troops. Here’s a shocking statistic — over 50% of the deaths in the Civil War were from infection; over 30% in the “Great War.”

The story opens with Claire Shipley — photojournalist for Life magazine — covering the story of early trials on penicillin for humans. 1941 — just days after Pearl Harbor — a man makes an almost miraculous recovery from near death by the injection of penicillin — only to die days later when researchers literally run out of the drug: it is that difficult to produce. Together the U.S. Government, the Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research (a real place — look it up), and reluctantly drafted pharmaceutical companies race to find a process to produce enough of the miracle drug to save the men on the front.

Part love story, part murder mystery, part home front war story, and part industry story, the author does an incredible job of making war-time New York City come to life. New York is a great setting for historical fiction as it is and always has been teeming with people, innovation, and secrets. While the main characters are fictional, the historical characters (e.g. Vannevar Bush, Henry Luce, Claire Booth Luce, Margaret Bourke-White, Margaret Sanger, Jack Reed) are presented realistically (without any fictionalized access to their inner thoughts). Beautiful writing — I highlighted a lot of quotes in the (physical) book but I was too lazy to transcribe them 😦

In addition to the description of the historical setting, what I loved about the book were the characters. Each had his or her own passion, and the author explored the depth of their work, their attraction to it, and the kind of personalities and background that made them so suited to it. The descriptions of Claire and her photos were completely absorbing and beautifully described; Dr. James Staunton leading the research at the Rockefeller Institute; his sister Tia the mycologist, exploring dirt samples from around the world to find other antibacterial “cousins” to penicillin; and Edward Rutherford, one of the very earliest venture capitalists, describing the process of making money from opportunity.

Completely captivating. This was her second novel, published in 2010. Novels 1,3, and 4 are all excellent as well!

The Younger Wife by Sally Hepworth (audio book)

Once their mother heads to the nursing home with an advanced case of early onset Alzheimers, sisters Tully and Rachel are shocked to find their father planning to marry a (much) younger woman — Heather. That is the basic premise of this family drama, but what starts as one kind of story rapidly turns into something else. Or does it? Rotating narration among the three girls, what emerges is gripping, surprising, and a little insidious. The chapters for each woman are narrated by a different reader, and they are all good (lovely Australian accents for those of us who like that kind of thing).

Good writing, lots of character depth, and plenty of slowly creeping plot twists.

Great for fans of Liane Moriarity.

Thank you to Macmillan Audio and NetGalley for providing an advance copy of this book in exchange for my honest review. The book will be published on April 12th, 2022.

Iona Iverson’s Rules for Commuting by Clare Pooley (Fiction)

A cheerful, happy, just-what-I-needed book. A series of commutes on the Waterloo lines (London) leads to a burgeoning group of friends centered on one larger-than-life Iona Iverson — previously an “It Girl” alongside Bea, the love of her life. Iona is a popular “magazine therapist” (not an Agony Aunt!) plying her trade at a women’s magazine, but her clueless boss is pushing her towards the door due to her advanced age (57). Meanwhile, her unofficial and unpaid break-all-the-norms-of-commuting business is thriving.

Watching the group coalesce, each facing his/her own problems (a teenage girl afraid to show her face at school, a successful banker rapidly losing his money, a husband so dull his wife can’t stand him, and a male nurse without the confidence to approach the bookworm with an overbearing boyfriend) is funny, poignant, and uplifting. Big kudos to the author for actually bringing out the assumptions we make about people we don’t know and showing how wrong we can be. Rather than taking the easy way out and subscribing to the always popular white male bashing, she lets the person who appears to be the “smart but sexist Manspreader,” turn out to be a pretty decent guy (see one of the quotes below). Kudos!

Some fun quotes:
“Sanjay wound the tape back in his head, re-examining it from a different angle. Perhaps Piers hadn’t actually been flaunting anything. Perhaps that was just what he’d wanted to see. Was he just as guilty of stereotyping as everyone else? The thought lodged in his brain like a festering splinter.”

“…peering at him through narrowed eyes, giving him the impression of being scanned by a supermarket checkout machine before being declared an unexpected item in the bagging area.”

“He was like an electrical appliance on standby — still plugged in, but not functioning — and she had no idea where to find the remote control.”

“Emmie, why on earth did you decide to go into advertising if you have such an inflexible conscience?”

“Shakespeare, she’d discovered, never used four words when twenty-six would do. He might be good at the whole play thing, but he’d be useless at writing the emergency evacuation instructions for an airline.”

Thank you to Penguin Group Viking, Pamela Dorman Books and NetGalley for providing an advance copy of this book in exchange for my honest review. The book will be published on June 7th, 2022.

The Doctors Blackwell by Janice P. Nimura (History)

This is the story about Elizabeth and Emily Blackwell — pioneers in the efforts to bring women into medicine — and it was not what I expected (it was so much better!) The well-researched book (which includes many direct excerpts from journals and letters) is a thorough biography of both women from their immigrant childhood in Cincinnati through to the fight to be able to attend medical school (Elizabeth was the first woman in American to receive an MD in 1849) and their continuing efforts to open the field to women.

What I liked about the book is that it was no Hallmark Special. These women were motivated by female accomplishment, not by the more “womanly” desires to help and comfort. In fact, neither one had much in the way of empathy — Elizabeth was disgusted by human bodies and managed to take meticulous notes on patient’s dying agonies while Emily was attracted by the science, but not the humans. Elizabeth was also none too happy with the women’s movement, or with women in general, finding most of them “petty, trifling, priest-ridden, gossiping, stupid, and inane.” You can kind of see her point at times. As an interesting side note, none of the five Blackwell sisters ever married, and two of their brothers married suffragettes.

The other utterly fascinating thing about the book was the detail on medical practice, hygiene, and general living conditions of the time. The details of how medical schools operated, what kind of medicine was practiced (leeches, patent medicines, and an overuse of mercury based calomel), and the (lack of) hygiene in both medical and living situations was a window into another world — and a world not well represented by historical fiction which always seems to bring a modern sensibility to a few stray details from the past. I’m not a big non-fiction reader, finding most offerings full of tangents, muddied presentation and overly interpreted facts with specific agendas in mind, but this book was well-structured, full of relevant detail, and presented the main characters as real human beings who don’t necessarily match our ideals of individuals now or in the past.

A new (to me) word: valetudinarian — a person who is unduly anxious about their health. Useful!

Quotes:
“The limited goal of woman suffrage — winning the vote for women who were still enslaved by their own ignorance — was, she believed, woefully premature. What good was a vote if one didn’t know how to think independently?”

“The problem was not the tyranny of men, she wrote, but the disappointing weakness of women. ‘Women are feeble, narrow, frivolous at present, ignorant of their own capacities, and undeveloped in thought and feeling,’ she lectured her well-wisher. ‘The exclusion and constraint woman suffers, is not the result of purposed injury or premeditated insult. It has arisen naturally, without violence, simply because woman has desired nothing more.’”

“It was more important to prove the capacities of women and show them the way forward into the light, out of the shadow of their menfolk. For women, just as for the enslaved, the first step must be freedom. ‘The study and practice of medicine is in my thought but one means to a great end,’ Elizabeth wrote. Caring for suffering individuals had never been the engine that drove her. In becoming a doctor, she meant to heal humanity.”

“ ‘As I learnt to realize slavery & hate it, deeply eternally, while living amongst slaves — so I am learning to curse from the bottom of my soul this heathenish society of the nineteenth century, surrounded here by its miserable victims,’ she wrote. The conundrum of woman’s lot had never seemed clearer: women could not rise until the attitudes of their society shifted, but social mores would never change without women’s leadership, ‘so there seems to me, no opening in the circle.’ Even among the educated women of her acquaintance, few seemed formed for noble causes.”

The Key to Deceit by Ashley Weaver (Mystery)

A real palette cleanser — light, fun, non-standard characters, the closure of a good mystery, and some historical context. The second in the Electra McDonnell series (I have not yet read the first), the semi-reformed Ellie (her family was happily living on the wrong side of the law) teams up again with the well-bred and straight-laced Major Ramsey to break up a spy ring in London, 1940. Some very likable thieves and forgers, a pleasant clash or classes, and a background mystery concerning Ellie’s own (long deceased) mother all make this a great read in the cacophonous world of today!

Thank you to Minotaur Books and NetGalley for providing an advance copy of this book in exchange for my honest review. The book will be published on June 21st, 2022.

Vigil Harbor by Julia Glass (Literary Fiction)

Writing: 5/5 Plot: 4/5 Characters: 5/5

Vigil Harbor — an historic town on the Atlantic Seaboard — is a kind of safe harbor for many of its residents. It feels protected from the ever increasing calamities of the broader world — rising oceans, increased acts of terrorism, epidemics. When a spate of divorces and a couple of strangers arrive —each with a hidden agenda — suddenly the problems of the world seem to hit a little closer to home.

Only ten years into the future, many of the characters are understandably living in a constant state of fear, anxiety, and despair. In the world (too well) portrayed by the author, Survival Studies has become a college major, climate change has diminished songbirds and summer fruit almost to extinction, coastal towns have been triaged into oblivion, various groups are hunkering down in survivalist bunkers, and eco-terrorism is on the rise with frequent and deadly bombings. One character suggests that humankind is busy “unbuilding the ark.” Other characters are stubbornly optimistic or simply moving on with their lives, adapting to a constantly changing reality as we humans have been doing for millennia.

A set of deeply drawn characters — a despairing biologist who believes he works in “marine hospice”; a retired English high school teacher bent on revenge; an optimistic architect who considers himself “an architect for the future, not the apocalypse”; a college drop out back home after a narrow escape; a brilliant landscaper still terrified of possible deportation after 40 years in the country; and others — all wind around each other while living, reflecting, worrying, and hoping. They are having children and consciously considering what it means to parent in a rapidly deteriorating landscape. They are creating art, appreciating beauty, and finding people and places to love. They are finding ways to define and follow their passions to try to make the world a better place (for some definition of better and some definition of place).

Julia Glass is one of my favorite writers — as in the actual use of words to describe, set a mood, bring to life. Her vocabulary is both large and up-to-date (it’s possible that she made up several of the more modern slang words). She creates these amazing turns of phrase — the words literally turning / tumbling around in the phrase — and so many of her sentences are gorgeous little nuggets that I grew tired of underlining. She does a pretty interesting job of describing nature, pieces of art, and different architectures. I say “interesting” because I typically don’t enjoy descriptions — I don’t visualize from words well — but her descriptions touch on more than just the visual, and I find myself reading slowly, rapt. Her depiction of technology evolution and the resulting shifts in human behavior over the next ten years was seamlessly and utterly believably done.

I valued the personal reflections, discussions, and general interactions between characters — each with sometimes wildly different perceptions of reality — what was happening, what was important, what could be done, who to blame. I appreciated the sometimes subtle differences between generations, culminating in a last few pages describing the thought processes of a young (middle school age) boy whose worldview had obviously been molded by the events of his short life.

Overall, a book that made me think, made me understand other people a little better, and gave me a set of characters that I would enjoy knowing better. I did stick to reading during the day because I am easily anxietified (my word) and wanted to be able to sleep.

Some good quotes:
“The slivers of grief in your flesh dissolve or work their way out. One day they’re gone, even if they leave you with tiny, whisper-thin scars.”

“Celestino is not a man who thinks that thorough knowledge of a person’s history, much less his or her emotional “journey,” equates with greater trust or deeper love.”

“The art she made was the obsession reaching for a language.”

“Did all intelligent, creative people need to be tangled up in thickets of neurosis, their psyches riddled with the stigmata of previous heartache?”

“She was living on less than a shoestring; she was living on a filament of fishing line.”

“I am a living redundancy. I realize: the wife not so much replaced as deleted, just as I might take my green pen … and blithely score through a student’s unnecessary adverb when the verb can stand on its philandering own.”

“Time will tell,” said Margo. “As it alway does, the fucker.”

“Is this the beginning of old age, this irrepressible pull of futility? My own father lapsed into a storm cloud of silence once he retired.”

“But that was one of my worst faults: fretting over past choices when they have been chiseled into history.”

“His step father refers to his generation as Generation F: failure, fuckup, fatalist; take your pick.”

This book will be published on May 3, 2022. Many thanks to the author for giving me an early reader copy

Last Summer on State Street by Toya Wolfe (Fiction — Audio book)

Summer 1999 — the Robert Taylor Homes (aka the Projects) on State Street on the South Side of Chicago. 12-year old Felicia (Fefe) is happy jumping rope on the third floor porch with her three friends: Precious, the daughter of a pastor; Stacia, member of the notorious, gang-affiliated, Buchanan family; and newcomer Tanya, the ultra-timid, obviously neglected daughter of a crackhead on the 10th floor. Everything changes during this fateful summer: The Chicago Housing Authority is demolishing all of the Project buildings on State Street, and theirs is slated to go next; her brother, Meechee, is taken by the police in the middle of the night in a warrantless raid; random gunfire becomes more frequent; and Stacia begins to favor the family business over jumping rope.

Labeled a novel, the story reads like a memoir, and it would be easy to believe that much of the story comes from the author’s personal experience as she was raised in the Robert Taylor Homes in this time period. The writing is excellent (I have no quotes as I listened to it on audio), and the reader is absolutely excellent — perfect pacing, differentiated and consistent voices for the multiple characters, and beautifully timbre in her voice. Told in the first person from Fefe’s perspective, we follow her through that summer and then on through her life for the next twenty years, giving her an opportunity to revisit the turning point that summer was and to get closure on some of the events. It’s a gritty and truthful telling with added introspective commentary as Fefe comes of age in the midst of gangs, police crackdowns, drugs, single mothers on the one hand, and a strong community, loving family, and supportive clergy, teachers, and neighbors on the other. I love the advice she is given, the wide array of people from whom she gets it, and what she does with it. Fefe is a success story — she gets out of the Projects and finds her vocation in helping others — unlike some of the friends she had who do not have some of the same advantages offseting the meanness, cruelty, and unfairness of the environment.

This is a coming-of-age story, not a political treatise. Her conclusion near the very end is that “We are not the originator of our misfortunes — we are all the victims of it.” Her point: people do what they have to do to survive. I would have been a little happier with some ideas on what creates these misfortunes and how everyone — including those who live amidst it — could contribute to making it better.

Thank you to Harper Audio and NetGalley for providing an advance copy of this book in exchange for my honest review. The book will be published on June 14th, 2022.

Jennifer Chan is Missing by Tae Keller (Middle School)

12-year old Mallory Moss is a worrier. She knows that people are really “just a collection of what other people think about us.” So although she thinks her own opinion matters, she is sure that what others think matters even more. And this becomes a problem when she meets Jennifer — the intriguing new girl who enthusiastically and loudly believes in aliens and is never going to fit in with the kids at school.

This is a coming of age story both about an outsider (based on beliefs, not color or ethnicity) and a girl who is intent on always fitting in, even in the face of unfairness, meanness, and outright bullying of others. Excellent writing, good messaging with a variety of sources: parents, religion(s), and introspection.

Some good quotes:
“At services tonight, the rabbi talked about forgiveness, how it’s not only between you and God. He said God exists in the relationships between people, so forgiveness is between you and the person you hurt.”

“Why are people so afraid to believe? Well, Jennifer, maybe because it’s impossibly embarrassing to be proven wrong.”

“It’s so easy to talk bad about someone. It’s so easy to bond over hating someone else. It’s almost scary how naturally it comes.”

“Maybe. But sometimes I think complicated is the word people use when they don’t want to think too hard.”

“Confession isn’t about telling our secrets to God. God already knows. It’s about revealing our true hearts to ourselves, because we can’t know who we are when we’re hiding from who we’ve been.”

“I had to make her understand that this mattered — what people thought had everything to do with who she was. Because how do we know who we are without knowing our place in the world?”

Thank you to Random House Children’s and NetGalley for providing an advance copy of this book in exchange for my honest review. The book will be published on May 26th, 2022.

Racing the Light by Robert Crais (Action / Mystery)

Elvis is back! Well, Elvis Cole that is — sorry — couldn’t help myself! Cole and his quiet (but definitely-the-guy-you-want-to-have-your-back) partner, Joe Pike, help an old woman find her missing adult son, Josh. But it’s not just any old woman and not just any missing son. Adele Schumacher pays in cash, doesn’t trust phones, and talks about conspiracies and aliens as obvious facts. She has a couple of very buff “helpers” who follow her everywhere. And Josh is the controversial podcaster of In Your Face with Josh Shoe (with a listenership of approximately 20 people).

Laugh out loud funny, with plenty of action (the good kind where a lot happens and it happens quickly but we don’t have to suffer through long car chases or drawn out battles — ugh) and plenty of colorful characters. A fast and thoroughly enjoyable read. This is book 19 but you can really start anywhere — a few references to previous cases but nothing problematic.

Thank you to G.P Putnam’s Sons and NetGalley for providing an advance copy of this book in exchange for my honest review. The book will be published on Nov 1st, 2022.