Pride by Ibi Zoboi

Shhh…don’t tell Sarah or Carrie or Chanin, but I’ve never read Pride and Prejudice.  And just in case you were wondering, it wasn’t part of our high school curriculum that I “skipped” (looking at you, Great Expectations).  I guess I had just heard too many people complain about Jane Austen and I was too busy reading Andrew Greeley mysteries in my late teens and early 20s to pick up Jane Austen.  Sorry, Jane.

Fast forward to 2020 and my book club goes virtual (you can still drink wine during virtual book club, btw) and chooses Pride by Ibi Zoboi for our monthly selection.  Hailed by Zoboi as “a modern remix of Pride and Prejudice set in Brooklyn’s Bushwick neighborhood,” Zoboi introduces us to Zuri, a spunky teen with very opinionated opinions about the new, rich family that renovated the block house and moved in across the street.  We watch Zuri struggle with her own identity, her own prejudices and eventually find her own definition of love. 

I loved Pride.  I loved Zuri’s intensity of wanting to protect her neighborhood and culture from “strangers.”  But then I loved Zuri’s eventual softness and maturity.  Zuri’s personal growth can be a lesson to all of us no matter our age, race, or individual prejudices.

Where the Crawdads Sing by Delia Owens

We do a gift exchange at Christmas with my husband’s somewhat extended family. It’s always fun and interesting to see what we end up with, especially from those who we don’t know as well or maybe just for as long. This year, my name was drawn by my hubby’s step sister’s daughter in law... and we’ve spent some time together and I like her a lot, but we can’t really say that we know each other well.

She gifted me Where the Crawdads Sing with the aside that it was the only thing that had brought her  real joy last year.

I put it off. I tend to liked the straight romances or mystery. I comforted myself with re-reads during the quarantine, and I’ve never been much for what I would call book club books. While I like to think critically in real world situations , I tend to like simpler entertainment where reality doesn’t much intrude.

I finally picked it up the other day, when stuck at home with a wounded foot. And I read it in a matter of hours. And I’m still thinking about it. Perhaps I need to rethink my book prejudices...

This was beautifully written. Coming of age? Check. Romance? Check. Mystery? Check.

Told in flashbacks, but not too jumpy, Kya is a child of a war vet who has taken refuge in a Carolina marsh. Her family life is problematic, to say the very least. We see her turn from a six year old into a young adult. There is a small town murder thrown in. The heartbreak and beauty of her life is so well written that small phrases will just haunt you.

I don’t want to say a lot more. Just read it. Trust me.

Sex and Vanity by Kevin Kwan

I was lucky enough to get an ARC of Sex and Vanity from Net Galley in exchange for review!

This book is a new offering by the author of Crazy Rich Asians and its follow-ups, and is just as much fun as that series.

Rather than going to Asia, though, we mostly are hanging out in New York (though there's plenty of characters from all over the world.)

The story starts with a flashback to an uber-exclusive wedding on Capri. Lucie Churchill is a descendent of those Churchills, but her mother's heritage is Chinese. At the wedding, Lucie is a young Brown University student, traveling with her incredibly uptight cousin as a chaperone. She meets George, a Crazy Rich Asian from Hong Kong/Sydney/UC Berkeley. He and his mother are kind of odd ducks to the old money NY bunch, but Lucie is oddly drawn to him. There's an incident at the wedding that horrifies the cousin/chaperone, Lucie is whisked away, and we go to NYC five years later.

Lucie is now an up and coming art consultant and gets engaged to an oil money "most eligible bachelor" in a scene straight out of a Hollywood musical adaptation. Her family heads to the Hamptons for the weekend, and who show up but George and his mama?

Lucie is a really likeable character. While the book is a fun romp through Crazy Rich New York, the heart is about Lucie and her family dynamic, and it's well done. Kwan's writing style is enjoyable to me - the kind of poke fun at the insider group dynamic - but I admit that as a solid middle-class non-fashionista, non-society follower, some of the name dropping of both people and brands goes well over my head. The footnotes are funny, as they were in the previous books, but as a suggestion I would recommend a physical book. Reading the footnotes on the Kindle app is a little tedious.Narrative is scattered through with texts, emails, or news items, which keeps the pace moving and the voice of the book feels correct.

Overall, I thoroughly enjoyed the book. If you liked Crazy Rich Asians, don't hesitate to grab this one!

We Ride Upon Sticks by Quan Barry

I have no idea how to review this book.

Photo by Emily Morter on Unsplash

There were so many things I loved, but it took me several days to finish because I kept putting it down.

So . . . I think I'll give a holistic review first, include a jump break, and then add some content warnings. (Click here is you want to start with the content warnings.)

Chaos Reigning by Jessie Mihalik

Photo by Jeremy Thomas on Unsplash

They had to postpone a rocket launch today because of weather. Which is sad, but, safe.

And I know this because my family loves all things space.  Did you know that NASA allows educators with decent social media followings to be onsite for launches through #NASASocial ?  It's a program that's meant to leverage educators' existing social media audiences to get NASA news and experiences in front of new people. You can read about it here.

I WANT TO DO IT.

(But I need to build up my social presence first.)

In the mean time, I love reading about space and following the Mars Rover on Twitter, and I love a good space opera, too.  

(Think Star Wars and Star Trek with stronger romantic story lines.)

Love the cover of Chaos Reigning

Right now, Jessie Mihalik has three AMAZING space operas for you.  I finished the third one, Chaos Reigning, over the weekend. So, yes, I'm basically recommending a series.  You could start with the first one, Polaris Rising, or jump right in the middle with Aurora Blazing. I think all three stand alone pretty well.  There might be a BIT of the space technology better explained in Polaris Rising, but otherwise you'd be missing too much if you don't have a compulsion to start at the beginning and read in order.

All three books are about a von Hasenberg sister.  Chaos Reigning is about the youngest, Cat.  She's young and bubbly, and she knows that means a lot of people underestimate her.  Which is usually fine, because she's spying on behalf of her family to figure out who was behind an earlier kidnapping of her brother, the heir to House von Hasenberg.  One of her sisters knows what Catarina is up to, so she sends Cat with two bodyguards, Aoife (EE-fa) and the smoking hot Alex.  So that one of the guards is always with her, they pretend that Alex is her new, secret lover when the three leave Earth to go to a house party on Honorius.

(Remember, space opera so there are space ships and intergalactic travel.)

While at the house party, Cat and her friend Ying of House Yamado are both attacked, and it takes Aoife, Alex, Ying's bodyguard Cira, and all of Cat's supersecret abilities to get them both safely away.

Once free, Cat realizes that most of the High Houses have been attacked on Earth, and all the residents are being threatened by The Syndicate, a criminal organization run by the Silva family.  Cat, Ying, Alex, Aoife, and the injured Cira formulate a plan to sneak back to Earth and save the day.

Somewhere along the line, the romance between Cat and Alex becomes more than pretense, and they figure out how to trust each other and be together in this action-packed fight against betrayal and the old guard.

Want to know how it all ends?  You'll need to get your own copy to see.  You won't be disappointed.

Girl Gone Viral by Alisha Rai

Do you remember this when it happened?

A passenger on a plane watched two people in front of her interact and decided this would make a great "meet cute".  (That's a staple in romance novels and movies.). She chronicled her version of the exchange during a plane ride (cross-county, maybe?  I forget.), and the tweet thread garnered serious interest.  The first tweet had over 800,000 likes and 300,000 retweets.

That's a lot. Consider this: when Lin-Manuel Miranda tweeted that Hamilton would stream on Disney+ on July 3, that tweet received 92,300 retweets and 238,000 likes. And he has over 3 MILLION followers on Twitter.

So, again, a LOT.

And many people were swept up in the potential romance of it without considering what an invasion of privacy that really was or that not everyone involved wanted that kind of attention for merely being politely friendly in the forced confines of an airplane.  In fact, the female passenger who was being tweeted about eventually shared a statement through an attorney that pointed out all the not-so-cute elements of the situation.

And, that, my friends, is the set up for Alisha Rai's Girl Gone Viral. Katrina King reluctantly shares her table in a crowded coffee shop with a handsome man.  They have a seemingly benign conversation about cute pets and local pizza places.  When the man turns the conversation into a gambit to ask Katrina out, she turns him down.  He's handsome, but he doesn't make her "zing".  THAT guy, the one that makes all her parts zing is sitting in the cafe, too, working as her bodyguard.

What Katrina doesn't realize is that a woman sitting nearby is sharing the whole experience (including pictures) on Twitter with a salacious twist.  And like the real world story from the plane, this Twitter thread goes viral.

The woman who tweeted it all out, her husband, and the handsome guy who was sitting with Katrina all lean into the story; they lap up the attention.  

Katrina does NOT, for multiple solid reasons, and she and her zing generator, Jasvinder, the aforementioned bodyguard, take off to hide away on his family farm. While they're there, it becomes clear that Katrina's longing for Jas isn't unrequited.  

But they both have family, professional, and up, up-close-personal issues to deal with with before they can find their happily-for-now together.  Like always, Alisha Rai provides that for her characters through heat, affection, amazing friends and family support.  I basically read this in one sitting--annoyed when I needed to pause to do basic things like eat and answer nature's call.  I want to be part of Katrina's friend group and have her cook for me!

Alisha Rai is a one-click auto-buy for me, and if you like contemporary romance, she'll be one for you, too.

wow, no thank you by Samantha Irby

One of my younger colleagues posted about getting grey hair the other day.

As an official Old (TM), I felt justified to warn her that finding grey in the hair on your head was actually one of the least rude places she was gonna get grey hair.  

I mean, I have them in my eyebrows!  I'm a brunette; there is no way to hide that without make-up or tweezing.  So rude.

The depressing part? Of all the rude places grey hair can show up, eyebrows are actually the least rude.

Aging is not for the weak, and no one can make you laugh about this the way that Samantha Irby can.

So, yes, when I pondered on this very blog what book to read next at the end of April? Yeah, I went with wow, no thank you.

It was a good choice.

Samantha is funny.  

She's 40-ish, and she catalogs the many ways her body continually betrays her (autoimmune disease, heart condition, seborrheic dermatitis, creaky knees, etc.).  She also has an amazing perspective on how her formative years did NOT prepare her for adult things like home maintenance, tax forms, and making friends when you move to a new city.

She's not scared of talking about the topics that make many of us stammer like unreliable bowels and bad credit.

wow, no thank you  is a collection of essays, so it's a great read for those time when you might need to read in chunks.  I think Hello, 911? and A Simple Guide to Home Repair were my favorites--possibly because I could relate so well.

If you like to read semi-autobiographical humor essays, you're not squeamish about topics like Crohn's Disease, and you comfortable with the salty language, treat yourself to wow, no thank you.  

You will thank me.

Deal With The Devil by Kit Rocha

A couple of weeks ago, I had the BEST news from NetGalley--approval for an ARC for a book that I was CRAVING.

In 6 B.C-19*, I wrote my first review of a Kit Rocha story.  You can read it here.  It's fair to say I'm a straight-up Kit Rocha Fan Girl.  So you can imagine my response when I found out that I'd been approved for an ARC of the first book of the new Kit Rocha series, Deal With The Devil, in exchange for a review.

It was VERY dignified. *cough* Very.

Deal With The Devil is a Mercenary Librarians novel, and it's set in the same post-apocalyptic timeline that the O'Kane books are set, but the location is different.  So far, there are no character connections, but everyone is dealing with the same "how do we live now that everything is broken" situation.  (There was a nice Easter egg mention of the whisky from Sector Four from their last series, though.)

The Mercenary Librarians are actually quite more benevolent than their name sounds.  They're not hoarding knowledge and texts (remind me to review Rachel Caine's Great Library series soon, would ya?), but they do need to support themselves and help a few neighbors while they're at it.  So when the leader, Nina, gets an offer to go after a rogue Library of Congress bunker, she gathers up her team and heads out with The Silver Devils--a team of elite soldiers formally employed by the local tech giant--despite the possibility that this offer is too good to be true. She wants to save all the knowledge that's been lost and find a way to make is accessible to the people around her.

Garrett, the leader of the Silver Devils, doesn't have quite that altruistic of a goal in mind.  He's actually setting a trap for Nina; he's desperate to trade Nina for another woman who can stop the Silver Devils from dying. Their former tech giant employer has been augmenting its soldiers for years, and once the Silver Devils left the company they were cut off from the upgrades and necessary maintenance to keep their hearts and brains functioning correctly.

So the two teams set off toward the rogue bunker, and have some adventures, and get to know each other better.  And Garrett is in a bind.  He likes Nina, and, oh, man, does he want Nina, but he's about to betray Nina.  So there's interpersonal tension to go along with the post-apocalyptic danger, and there's just a lot of really compelling stuff going on.

Which I liked and will probably love on the re-read.

Why didn't I love it the first time through?

Because I HATE hate hate hate books where the inevitable betrayal is baked into the plot.  While I was all *Kermit arms* about getting the ARC, I also speed read the whole thing like this: 

I mean, I trust Kit Rocha to make everything work out in the end, but Garrett was taking TOO LONG to tell Nina what was going on.  And then there was this TWIST that I did not see coming, and, oh, yeah, Garrett was screwed.  It was also pretty unclear how it was going to all work out in the end.

Because, as I said, there was a lot of really compelling stuff going on.

So, if you want to know how it works out for Nina and Garrett, and you're more comfortable with sturm und drang than I am, you should definitely read Deal With The Devil.  Even if you're wimp like I am, you should read it.  It's good, and finishing it just made me greedy for the next one.

*Six year before COVID-19, or 2014.

Choices, choices

Which one should I choose?

Tomorrow is supposed to be one of those "never get out of bed, just curl up with a book" type of weather days.  You know, cooler, grey, and rainy.  

Which means I have big plans for the TBR pile.  I just need to decide where to start.

Here are some recent options that arrived at my house:

wow, no thank you. by samantha irby

From the back cover: Samantha Irby is forty and increasingly uncomfortable in her own skin despite what Inspirational Instagram Infographics have promised her.  This the life of a Hallmark Channel dream.  She goes on bad dates with new friends, spends weeks in Los Angeles talking with TV executives/amateur astrologers while being a cheese fry-eating, slightly damp Midwestern person with neck pain and no cartilage in her knees who still hides past-due bills under her pillow.

The uproarious essays in this collection draw on the raw, hilarious particulars of Irby's new bourgeois life.  Wow, No Thank You. is Irby at her most hysterical, relatable, and unflinching.

[Edited: read, enjoyed, reviewed. Read about it here.]

Girl Gone Viral by Alisha Rai

From the back cover: One minute, Katrina King is enjoying an innocent conversation with a random guy at a coffee shop; the next, a stranger has live-tweeted the entire encounter with a romantic meet-cute spin, and #CafeBae has the world swooning.  Going viral isn't easy for anyone, but Katrina has painstakingly build a private life for herself, far from her traumatic past.  Besides, everyone has it all wrong . . .That #CafeBae bro? He isn't the man she's hungry for.

With the internet on the hunt for the identity of #Cute CafeGirl, Jas Singh, bodyguard and possessor of the most beautiful eyebrow s Katrina's ever seen, offers his family's farm as a refuge.  Being alone with her unrequited crush feels like a recipe for hopeless longing, but Katrina craves the escape.  She's resigned to being just friend with Jas--until they share a single electrifying kiss. Now she can't help but wonder if her crush may not be so unrequited after all . . .

[Edited: read, devoured, reviewed.  Read about it here.]

The Twisted Ones by T. Kingfisher

From the inside cover: When Mouse's dad asks her to clean out her dead grandmother's house, she says yes.  After all, how bad could it be?

Answer: pretty bad.  Grandma was a hoarder, and her house is packed to the gills with useless garbage.  The would be horrors enough, bu there's more.  Mouse stumbles across her step grandfather's journal, which at first seems to be the ravings of a broken mind.

Until she encounters some of the terrifying things he described herself.  Alone in the woods with her dog, Mouse has to confront a series of impossible terrors---because sometimes the things that go bump in the night are real, and they're looking for you.  And if she doesn't face them head-on, she might not survive to tell the tale.
We Ride Upon Sticks by Quan Barry

From the inside cover: Acclaimed novelist Quan Barry delivers a tour de female force in this delightful novel.  Set in the coastal town of Danvers, Massachusetts, where the accusations began that led to the 1692 Salem witch trails, We Ride Upon Sticks follows the 1989 Danvers High 
School Falcons field hockey team, who'll do anything to make it to the state finals--even if it means tapping into some devilishly dark powers.  In chapters dense with 1980s iconography--from Heathers to big hair--Barry expertly weaves together the individual and collective progress of this enchanted team as they storm their way through an unforgettable season.  

Helmed by good-girl captain Abby Putnam (a descendant of the infamous Salem accuser Ann Putnam) and her co-captain Jen Fiorenza (whose bleached blond "Claw" sees and knows all) the Falcons prove to be wily, original, and bold, flaunting society's stale notions of femininity in order to find their glorious true selves through the crucible of team sport and, more important, friendship.

The Southern Book Club's Guide to Slaying Vampires by Grady Hendrix

From the inside cover: Patricia Campbell's life has never felt smaller.  Her husband is a workaholic, her teenage kids have their own lives, her senile mother-in-law needs constant care, and she's always a step behind on her endless to-do list.  The only thing keeping her sane is her book club, a close-knit group of Charleston women united by their love of true crime.  At these meetings they're as likely to talk about the Manson family as they are about their own families.

One evening after book club, Patricia is viciously attacked by an elderly neighbor, bringing the neighbor's handsome nephew, James Harris, into her life.  James is well traveled and well read, and he makes Patricia feel things she hasn't felt in years.  But when children on the other side of the town go missing, their deaths written off by local police, Patricia has reason to believe Jame Harris is more of a Bundy than a Brad Pitt.  The real problem? James is a monster of a different kind--and Patricia has already invited him in.

Little by little, James will insinuate himself into Patricia's life and try to take everything she took for granted--including the book club--but she won't surrender without a fight in this blood-soaked take of neighborly kindness gone wrong.

Where would you start?  I think The Twisted Ones needs to be read in the full light of day--preferably outside and HOURS before bedtime--so I'll like start with Girl Gone Viral and then jump to wow, no thank you.

The Meg Lanslow series by Donna Andrews

What I think of during every Zoom meeting

Cheers!

Here's to you and getting through another week of a global pandemic.

In Illinois the Governor just announced that the K-12 students will not be returning to in-person learning for this academic year.  I'm sure most Illinois teachers were expected that, but it would still be like a gut punch.  

For me, in the Grades 13-16 sector, we have three more weeks of (online) instruction before finals weeks is here.  And this week, I've been proctoring exams via Zoom.  

On the bright side, I got to chat with all my students that I've haven't seen in over a month.  

On the down side, that's sooooo much Zoom.

So much Zoom.

Soo much.

Anyway, before I got Zoomed out, some of my online friends and I did a great Zoom hangout, and we didn't QUITE have enough of us to re-create The Brady Bunch opening shot when we were gallery view, but we got darn close.  And we had some great conversation and some much needed laughs.

And one of the things that came out of that hangout was a recommendation for mystery author, Donna Andrews.  Two of my friends (Hi, Karen and Deborah!) said they loved Ms. Andrews's books and that she was funny.

Dear book friends, Karen and Deb buried the lede.  Donna Andrews has a mystery series that has 26 books.  26!  TWENTY-SIX!!  

*clutches heart and fans self*

So I read the first one, Murder with Peacocks, and Deborah and Karen were right.  This was funny.  And fun.  And well worth reading.  So I read the second, Murder with Puffins , and I liked it, too. (There's a bird theme with all the Meg Langslow book titles.) 

You know how I love me a good series, and the Meg Langslow series IS a good series.  Meg is a blacksmith surrounded by a full cast of crazy family members.  There's her dad, a retired physician with a love of murder mysteries, a brother who accidentally designed a game called Lawyers From Hell when he should have been studying for the bar, a well-connected and gossip-attuned mother, and a nephew who is followed around by an egg-laying duck.  And THEN there are the assorted crazy cousins and neighbors.  I've read four of them so far, and I'll probably grab the fifth one this weekend.  And even though all the books aren't set in the same town, the cast of crazy characters seems to accompany Meg through out.

This is an amateur sleuth series without any over the top blood or gore, so if police procedurals are too much for you, but you still like a good whodunit, you should try this series out.

Plus there are 26.  TWENTY-SIX.  You know how many pandemic days you can wile away while reading 26 books?  So blessed many.

Building Your Tiny House Dream by Chris Schapdick

Screenshot from tinysiesta.com

I find the concept of tiny houses fascinating.  I love the idea of being to manage with less, and I really love the idea of being decisive enough to choose a minimal list of earthly possessions.  When I visit my parents in Sarasota, FL, I frequently walk by a strip of rental tiny homes, and then I daydream about living in one of my own.

But I basically need a clothes and shoe closet the size of most tiny houses, so a tiny house lifestyle really just isn't for me.

I could probably make a tiny house vacation work. I'm getting really excited about the idea of seeing some national parks, and I follow some people on social media who convert vans to houses on wheels for their travels. (Check out this video! So cool.)  So the idea of converting a van and taking that to see the national parks?  Let's just call that an awesome daydream while we're all grounded during this pandemic.

With that daydream in mind, I requested a copy of Building Your Tiny House Dream by Chris Schapdick from Net Galley.  I was given a free advanced reader copy of this book in exchange for my review. (Here's a link to a review of his first book The Joy of Tiny House Living.) Chris is the owner of a tiny home manufacturing company.  And the pictures of his builds look so cool.

One of the author's builds.  Pic from: https://www.tinyindustrial.com/i-build-stuff.html

Chris's first book focuses on how to decide if a tiny house is for you.  As the title suggests, this second book is about how to build one. Overall, I found the book to be very thorough. Possibly even too thorough for me as it contains basic information on nominal sizes of lumber and safety tips that I'm already familiar with.

The book has step-by-step instructions with clear pictures included, but I did think that that occasional illustration or an annotated picture would have served the author's purpose better.  The book is meant to be accompanied by a code that will give the reader access to video tutorials, and I think those are going to be amazingly helpful. 

(I assume.  I haven't seen them.)

(Also worth noting--advance reader copies frequently have formatting errors that get corrected before the books go to press, and many, many of the pictures in the book loaded upside-down in the copy I downloaded which was super frustrating. I assume that will be corrected when the book goes to print.)

For me, because I'm so interested in camper van builds, the sections on electrical and plumbing were the most helpful.  The author has great descriptions of sink and toilet options.  (Who knew I'd every type that sentence?). I also liked the finishes (walls and floors) that the author chose, and I appreciated the information about how to choose good, lightweight options.

Overall, if you're fascinated with tiny houses and consider yourself a bit of a DIY-er, I think you'd enjoy this book.

The Boyfriend Project by Farrah Rochon (Extended Preview)

Photo by Brett Jordan on Unsplash

I figure pandemic is a little like this.  Some things make us sad (cancelled plans), some things make us smile (kindnesses between neighbors), and some things break us open.  What we do after the break--how we change the way we see and the way we act--is what defines us.

We can't avoid the breaks of a pandemic (or any other trauma), but we can control how we live with the soft parts exposed and no hard shell to cover us.

My wish for us all is that after the break we know empathy and compassion.
And that we practice them both.

In the mean time, look what pandemic has done to me.  It has me blogging again.  I've been posting on my work site (gotta keep those college students organized and motivated), and I hacked back into my NetGalley account to get the advanced reader copy of the extended preview of The Boyfriend Project by Farrah Rochon.

I was given a free copy of this preview in exchange for my review.  (The short version of my review? I NEED MORE.  The preview is just a tease, and I MUST know what happens next.  Must. Soon. PLEASE. Sooner.  Soonest.  Please, oh, please!)

The Boyfriend Project opens with Samiah Brooks having her own traumatic event.  She confronts her no-good, three (or more!)-timing boyfriend at a restaurant, and video of the incident goes viral.  Ouch.

How gorgeous is this cover?

Samiah responds with empathy; she befriends the other "other" women.
She also responds with determination.  She's going to focus on herself and her work.

And the very first person to responds to her with compassion?  The new hottie at work, Daniel Collins.  Everyone else has jokes and advice and questions.  But Daniel treats Samiah like a person instead of a news sensation, and that just takes Samiah's breath away. 

Well, the compassion and the cuteness.

And that's about where this preview ends.  We know that Daniel is on a mission, but we don't know what that is.  We know that Samiah has an annoying, troublesome work colleague who is BOUND to create trouble down the line, and we know that Samiah's new friends (the other wronged women) are sure to play a part in this tale.

Oh, and we KNOW WE NEED TO PRE-ORDER THIS BOOK. (Link here.)

So where are you these days?  Where are your sads, and your smiles, and your breaks?  Where are you employing your empathy and compassion?  And what are you reading?