Ours to Explore: Privilege, Power, and the Paradox of Voluntourism by Pippa Biddle

 *I received a free e-ARC of this book in exchange for my review.  All opinions are my own.*

I read Ours to Explore over the weekend, and I can NOT stop thinking about it. 

Short version with no context: I'm going to incorporate it into my next post-pandemic travel course. (To Costa Rico or Ecuador, through a travel provider who uses locally owned businesses.)

Slightly longer version with a hint of context: I also can't stop thinking of this episode of Friends.

If you've ever gone on a mission trip or included a service learning project in a travel course, you might want to read this book.  Actually, you SHOULD read this book, but you might not be ready to re-evaluate your choices.

Pippa Biddle looks at the Western history of combining supposed "good works" with travel and finds that many of these trips have historically done as much damage (if not more) as good and shows that even when we have a strong desire to help, we can cause hurt.  

So if you think the only thing that counts is your intention or your calling without looking at the financial and human cost, you should probably skip this book.

Anyone else who wonders how a single week's commitment to a construction project, an orphanage, or a medical center by unskilled and untrained visitors can actually do any good should read on.

If you've ever wondered why you're asking your congregation or community to raise $4000 for a trip where only $400 of the total go toward the people in need because the rest is spend on transportation, lodging, and sightseeing for your neighbor or congregant, this is a great book for you.  After all, if your community will donate $4000, why not just send the whole amount to the local project and your neighbor stays home?

This is the issue of voluntourism--combining vacation, travel, and volunteering--and should not be confused with NGOs like Doctors Without Borders or mission trips by actual tradespeople trained in the work they're traveling to complete.

In 2014, Pippa Biddle wrote an article that highlighted the problems with sending unskilled teenagers for a week of "work" to build a library and volunteer at an orphanage.  She saw the tradesmen her group worked beside undo a days' worth of poor construction efforts by the teenagers and redo it on their own.  She was later told that the volunteers were fed better than the children they were there to aid.  The one "good" that came from the trip is that the volunteers, those untrained teens, felt really good about what they did.

Pippa's article spawned further research on her part (that became this book) as well as other articles that looked at the ethics of sharing pictures of social media of orphans and medical patients without permission or consideration as well as the ethics of volunteering to pad your medical school application. You can see a sampling of that type of article below:

I can't stop thinking about this book because it is a LOT to process, and Pippa doesn't shy away from pointing out the racism, colonialism, and paternalism used to justify many of these efforts.  (Even when, maybe especially when, they're faith-based efforts.)  She also shares some solutions in how to turn our strong desire to help into actual help instead of merely feel-good moments or social media posts.

My only real complaint is that the copy I received used all lower case letters for the acronyms for the volunteer organizations and NGOs that were referenced which made for jarring reading.  Hopefully, that's just a problem with the e-ARC and will be fixed in the final version of the book.  Additionally, because this is a footnote heavy book, the e-book version is a bit awkward; Kindle doesn't handle footnotes well.  This may be easier to read in print.

The Lost Girls of Foxfield Hall by Jessica Thorne

 *I was given a free eARC of this book in exchange for a review. All opinions are my own.

Part ghost story, part WWII intrigue, part time travel, part Arthurian legend, part love story.

The Lost Girls of Foxfield Hall is a bit out of my typical reading habits, because time travel is too fraught for me.  I liked this book and think that anyone who like time travel or historical fiction would probably love this even more than I do.

Megan Taylor is having a rough time, because her brother is missing in action.  To distract herself from her own grief and her parents' inability to cope with the situation, she takes a job renovating and design the old garden at the manor-house-turned-hotel that her best friend manages.

There, Megan meets a pretty hotel trustee who leaves her tonge-tied, but because of Megan's grief over her brother's situation, she thinks she's not in the right mental space find a new girlfriend.  While Megan is out for a night run, she sees green lights in the garden that lead her to the heart of a maze . . . and 1939.

Megan encounters Eleanor Foxfield, the daughter of the previous owner of Foxfield Hall.  Local history shows that Eleanor went missing just a few nights later than the night in 1939 that Megan first visits.  Eleanor gives Megan a corn dollie  as proof to them both that neither was a dream.

Megan makes a second visit to 1939 and warns Eleanor about her limited future, and Eleanor, in turn, gives Megan a book to help her figure out the green lights, the local myth or ghost story of the Green Lady, and, possibly, the nature of Eleanor's disappearance.

All of this is set against Michaelmas and the Harvest Festival in the English countryside.

Any more details, and we're into spoiler territory, but I will say I loved the characters, their interactions, and the story resolution.  

If you like a little magic with your history or a little romance in your WWII intrigue, I think this is a great a book for you!

The Cornish Midwife by Jo Bartlett

 *I was provided a free eARC of this book in exchange for my review.  All opinions are mine.

In good conscience, I've gotta start by saying I don't usually read women's fiction.  I've read Bridget Jones's Diary and a few Jodi Picault novels.  

(Here's a great article, by the way, that differentiates women's fiction from romance. Main difference? Women's fiction is about a woman's journey, often emotional or spiritual, and growth.  Romance has the romance as the central arc of the characters, and there's a happily-ever-after or a happily-for-now.)

(Side note: do not challenge a romance author on that last point.  It will end poorly for you.  Just change your definition of romance right now.  You'll live longer.)

The Cornish Midwife starts with Ella Mehenick's carefully-planned life being towered. (Think of The Tower from a tarot deck, or just read this.) So she moves back in with her parents and take a job in the small coastal town in Cornwall where she grew up. 

Most of this book is Ella coming to terms with the fact that she needs to rethink her childhood definitions of success.  She catches up with old friends, make news friends, and reconnects with an old love. It is her journey, and that's why I'm categorizing this as women's fiction.

If you like the type of story that has a lot of internal struggle and self-inflicted strife that could be corrected by some straightforward conversation and trust, you'd probably love this book. It will also introduce the typical U.S. reader to some Cornish slang and scenery.

And you should stop reading this review and go pre-order the book now.

If you're more likely to pick a romance than chick lit, keep reading.

I found this character's journey completely annoying. 90% of the way through the book she was making the same mistakes she made in college.

AND SHE HAD TO GET HIT BY A TRANSIT VAN TO SEE THE ERROR OF HER WAYS. 

At the point she's putting her old boyfriend through the same trauma she put him through a decade ago, I actually yelled at the book "Good, you're better off without her."  

And then she got hit by the damn van. (She's fine.  Just a concussion that apparently caused some synapses to fire that had been dormant up to then.  She finally realized that her parents didn't think she needed to be in London to be successful, for example.)

I also felt like the sheer amount of internal struggle meant the reader was cheated out of some interactions between Ella and the supporting characters.  At one point, you're told that she considers her new boss her friend, but you don't really see that friendship develop.  She also falls back with her old boyfriend even though she spend one-third of the book thinking he's a horrible capitalist who needs to take better care of his sister. (Ella is wrong on both accounts.  I really don't know what he sees in HER.)

So, yeah, this book didn't make me fall in love with women's fiction.  That genre and I are not getting a happily-ever-after or even a happily-with-this-book.

Furbidden Fatality: A Catskills Pet Rescue Myserty

 

*I received a free ARC of Furbidden Fatality in exchange for my review.  All opinions are my own.*

Last spring and summer when everyone else was baking bread and comparing sourdough starters under a stay-at-home order, I was bingeing BritBox.  There are 21 seasons of Midsomer Murders, and I watched them all.

But my gateway drug to BritBox was ITV's Agatha Christie's Marple (filmed in the 2000s and starring Geraldine McEwan and Julia McKenzie) which then sent me backtracking to the BBC's Miss Marple series from the 1980s that starred Joan Hickson.

I do love me a good British murder mystery.  (See my much earlier review of Dreaming Spies by Laurie R. King as evidence.)

And while the cozy mystery at hand, Furbidden Fatality by Deborah Blake, is set in the New York Catskills instead of Great Britain, the main character, Kari Stuart (we shall forgive her for misspelling the world's best name) is compared to Miss Marple more than once throughout the story.  While Kari is noticeably younger and significantly less interested in knitting than Miss Marple, she does manage to discover a dead body and solve the murder before the local police.  She also works with one of her former teachers who has Miss Marple's long memory for the residents of the local community and who offers character insight by comparing the characters under suspicion to people she knew long ago.

(I always wondered how Miss Marple's tiny village of St. Mary Mead could fit so many shady characters and still be a tiny village, but I digress.)

When the book begins, Kari is at a crossroads.  She's recently won $5 million on a lottery ticket, and she's trying to decide what to do with her winnings and her life.  Before she can come to any conclusions, she discovers a black kitten near her apartment and tries to to find an animal shelter to take in the stray cat.  Her efforts to find a home for the kitten actually lead to Kari finding her own new home and, maybe, her vocation, when she impulsively buys a failing animal sanctuary and its nearby rundown farmhouse.

The animal sanctuary has a couple of strikes against it. One of its resident pit bulls has been accused of escaping his kennel and biting someone, and the local dog warden seems determined to shut the sanctuary down. 

The situation only gets worse when Kari discovers a dead body in the fenced-in dog run.

Kari must work to try and save the pittie from being euthanized, save the sanctuary from a cease-and-desist order, and save herself from suspicion of murder.  Happily she has good staff at the sanctuary, good friends in town, and a new black kitten with an eye (or paw, perhaps) for finding clues.

This is a fun and entertaining read that is exactly like what cozy mysteries are supposed to be--an amateur sleuth trying to unravel a conundrum without direct police access and absent a lot of gore. I am SO glad I read it. Cozy mysteries (like the books of Ngaio Marsh, Agatha Christie, Donna Andrews, and Diane Mott Davidson) should not be confused with police procedurals or crime dramas (like the books of Patricia Cornwell or Kathy Reichs).  

And after the year we've had, I think everyone should cuddle up with a cozy mystery.  You've earned some entertainment that challenges the mind and provides characters to root for without making your heart ache.

This is also a great book for animal lovers.  I'm not personally a fan of animal stories per se. Please keep your Call of the Wild and Black Beauty far from me.  But . . . I do love Donna Andrews' Meg Langslow books which always feature a variety animals. And, at one point, I had read most of the Sneaky Pie Brown mysteries where the main character, Mrs. Murphy, is a cat.  So Kari's new kitten, Queenie, fits  in a long tradition of clever animals in cozy mysteries, and if your heart warms at the idea of a heroine who is saving animals while she's saving herself, this is a must-read for you.

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?

Lincoln in the Bardo by George Saunders

If you're confused about me posting a book review, take heart.  You're not alone.  I, too, am equally confused as to how I managed to finish a novel AND feel compelled to write a review.  It's been so long, I'm not sure I'm actually doing it right.  What are these buttons before me?  Hark!  Lo, I tap one a letter doth blink into existence on the screen before me!  What magical wizardry exists in this place.

(cough) Anyway, moving along.  There are times in which I fall in love with an author.  I lament the end of a particular book and it causes me to search out all their published works.  I did that with Christopher Moore, Stephen King, David Sedaris, Toni Morrison, Douglas Addams, and Alice Walker.  Hmmm.  My Fantasy Author Team is going to be quite the eclectic mix.  However, the opposite of sorts is true with Lincoln in the Bardo.  I have read other pieces by George Saunders before reading this particular book.  And while I believe him to be masterful with the turn of a phrase, I found his tone a bit off-putting.  PLEASE NOTE! I AM FULLY AWARE THAT IT IS NOT HIM, IT IS ME.  So please save any comments of the "Well, don't you just think you're the greatest and who are you to put down a great American literary genius?!" ilk in the have-not-hit-SEND ether.  Mmmmkay?! I'm just saying the first thing written by Mr. Saunders that I encountered made me think of snooty literati and self-congratulatory academics.  Therefore, I was not interested in reading more.  Today I am here to say I was wrong.  If my husband is reading this (he's not: he's all non-fiction all the time), I'm going to give him a moment to pick himself up off the floor before explaining.

Yes, I was wrong.  This novel is moving and weird and sad and tragic and lovely and hard to put down though it's not always easy to read.  It's got a permanent spot in my "willing to re-read" rotation, and I am so glad I read the description before I noticed the author.  If I had done it the other way around, I might have missed out of this great book.  The central story belongs to that of Willie Lincoln, son of Abraham and Mary Todd, recently deceased of typhoid.  But he is not alone, the cemetery in which his remains reside is its own community existing on the fringes of time and leftover emotion.  The spirits there have all made the decision to Stay rather than Go, and have actually had to work at it from time to time.  Not everything is initially revealed to the reader though, and you will need to figure out narrative voices as the story moves with and through the different spirits in this cemetery.  This is where the term bardo comes in.  For anyone not in Religious Studies 134 with me at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in the year 1998, bardo is the place between two existences.  For those believing in reincarnation, bardo is the state that one finds after death and while waiting for rebirth.  Willie and the other spirits are in the bardo as they either confront or avoid the thing that makes them decide to Stay or Go.  It is a hard decision to make.  All that they ever knew before has a solid connection to this place where their bodies remain.  Their families, friends, living humans in general, validate their former existences when they visiting and that's difficult to leave behind.  But eternity is a long time to just hang out, and the lightness that one becomes after being so solid in life is a disconcerting state in which to exist for all of time.

Willie Lincoln is no exception.  His short life and his father's palpable grief make it seem like remaining in the bardo is the best option.  The ill-fated president makes an appearance at the cemetery in the dark of night and in the depths of loss.  At a time when there are only gaps and divides, the weight of all that strife and loss under the helm of a wayward national spirit, weighs heavily on a man who has to mourn the loss of a son in stride.  As a lover and teacher of history, the inclusion of primary sources (so many of which were contradictory and therefore perfectly matched to a divided nation) was a wonderful choice.  As a parent, the inclusion of Lincoln's thoughts as he remembers his beloved son in full animation rather than the eternal sleep of death was heart-breaking.  I won't tell you what happens, but I will say that I didn't think ahead while reading.  I was perfectly content in the language and imagery of the moment, and that's high praise from me as I tend to ruin all the endings.  I owe George Saunders an apology and now I owe Amazon for his other books which I'm about to order.  Read it!  And hug all your loved ones!  And try not to contract typhoid!

Twice as Wicked by Elizabeth Bright

I was offered Twice as Wicked in e-reader format by NetGalley in exchange for a review. I chose it because of my long-lasting, slightly-loath-to-admit love for Regency romances. ;)

This is a nice and easy rendition of the classic Regency. Alice is a twin, whose sister has passed away, sent away in shame to give birth out of wedlock. Her sister refused to name the father, and Alice spends a while in mourning. When she finally decides to go through her sister's things, she finds a clue to the identity of the father and decides to find him and exact revenge for her sister's abandonment and subsequent death.

However, when she finally meets and finds the seeming culprit, Nathaniel Eastwood, a peer (of course), she is confused. He doesn't seem like a heartless rake, and she rather enjoys his company. He has his own troubles - it seems quite clear that someone is trying to murder him, and he suspects that Alice is part of that plot.

General romance book confusion ensues, along with the need to figure out who's really got murder in mind, but it's well-written and the characters are pretty well developed. Alice winds up doing a lot of soul-searching on how to be a twin without a sibling, and Nathaniel's relationship with his family is a growth experience. I enjoyed the plot, though the ending seemed a bit rushed, and I was wrong about something I suspected would occur, which was disappointing.

In a quick search, it seems like it's this author's first book, but I notice that the cover reads "Wicked Secrets Series" so there may be more on the way. If there are more, I'll keep reading.

The book will be released on Monday, 10/9/17, and it looks like amazon.com will offer it on Kindle for $.99, which is a great deal - it doesn't feel like a "cheap" read.

Fans of historical romance should like this one.

How I'm Spending my Afterlife by Spencer Fleury

I was afforded the opportunity to read this book with an Advanced Reader Copy from NetGalley, prior to its publication on October 3rd.

The description intrigued me - a lawyer who is under investigation by the FBI has decided the best way to escape is to fake his death. He's got some money stowed away, he has some set aside for the wife and daughter he's leaving behind, and he's got a plan to head to Costa Rica. But even from the get-go, the reader realizes he's kind of an ass.

We've all probably at some moment or another wondered what our own funeral will be like. Alton gets the chance to actually see his, and what he finds is not at all what he expected. Because of this, he just can't quite seem to get gone.

Told as if he and his wife, Nicole, are being interviewed - either by the same therapist or possibly a therapist for her and an investigator for him? - the narrative switches between their first-person viewpoints.

I feel that this is meant to be a comedic take on the unreliable narrator trend that started with Gone Girl. Alton starts off seeming pretty normal, if a bit of a jerk, but as he goes along, you find yourself in disbelief that this guy graduated law school. Stupidity barely seems to cover it. Nicole definitely seemed like a more sympathetic character at first, but she also isn't close to perfect.

I personally didn't much like this book. While funny at times, I found both narrators to be so unsympathetic that I almost didn't care enough to finish. The problem, of course, of knowing that they're telling the story as past tense (and Alton gives away pretty early on that people find out he's faked his death, so there's no premise that he may get away with it) is that, well, you know he doesn't get away with it. That took away any kind of urgency I had to get to the end of the story.

The only person I really liked in the story was the four-year-old daughter, and we don't ever get to read her thoughts...

I was a little afraid that I was judging harshly, so I read a couple of reviews on other sites, just to get a sense of what other readers are saying. The reviews I read seemed to be overwhelmingly written by guys who thought the book was really funny... I don't normally think of myself as having too much of a girly personality or someone who doesn't appreciate what men like (I'm surrounded by males in my everyday life) but just maybe this is one of those stories that appeals more to guys, because women would want to smack him every step of the way. ;)

Unfortunately, I can't recommend this one.

Sisterland by Curtis Sittenfeld

This is not a new book, but I finished it yesterday afternoon and I'm still thinking about it today.

I was browsing at the library the other day, and ran across a book named Eligible by the same author, which is supposed to be a modern retelling of Pride and Prejudice, one of my all time faves. But I hesitate to read re-tellings of actual books sometimes - I think I've mentioned that I like re-tellings/re-imaginings of fairy tails, though I'm not sure why it's different - because what if it ruins the original? So I saw that the author (I was assuming it was a "he" at that point - oops) had a few other books, and I took to the shelves. Once there, I realized that a) she's a she, and b) I had read her American Wife many years ago when it was first published, and I remembered liking it. After reading a few dust jackets, I decided that Sisterland looked to be the most intriguing.

Violet and Daisy are identical twins growing up in St. Louis in the 80's - I think we find out at some point that they'd fall in about 3 years younger than I am - which was a pull in the first place, since St. Louis is one of my favorite places. Their home life isn't awful, but it's not ideal, either - they conspire to help their very unnaffectionate (though not abusive) mother hide her depression from their somewhat cold father. They aren't well-off, but they're not poor. Vi and Daisy are very insular - the book is narrated in first-person by Daisy, and she mentions that she wouldn't have thought of Vi as her best friend, necesssarily, just that they didn't have or even want anyone else.

The most unusual thing is that Vi and Daisy both seem to have a form of ESP. Daisy dreams of tragedies before they happen. We don't know much about Vi's abilities as they are growing up, but at one point, Daisy is befriended by the cool girl clique and opens herself up to using a Ouija board. She senses a "dark presence" that does help her know things. Being teenage girls, they mostly find out about the ringleader's love life, but she also has some darker knowledge.  Being teenage girls, they have a falling out, and Daisy's social life is somewhat ruined as they are outed as "witches." Daisy, however, tries her best and eventually is mostly treated as "normal" and really downplays her "senses", while Vi embraces the weird and notoriety.

Daisy can't wait to get out of St. Louis. When the time comes, she goes to Mizzou and Vi heads to the west coast to a small private college.Vi isn't gone long, though, before she drops out/becomes too socially awkward/fails? and crashes Daisy's life (who is now going by her middle name, Kate) . They have a fairly major falling out, and the rest of the story often deals with their contentious relationship, along with Kate's marital life.

The story is told jumping around from the "now" - the fall of 2009-  to childhood, to college, often as a backstory to something going on in the present. That part is handled well - the timeline and pacing didn't suffer by being too chopped up.

The storyline - though the book is truly a novel about relationships more than anything else - is that Vi, now making her rather meager living as a psychic, has predicted a major earthquake, and the story is picked up by the national (then international) media. Kate, despite trying to disregard and even destroy her senses, also gets a feeling about a particular date. Kate is married to a professor, a scientist who has always said he believed her about her premonitions, but doesn't really REALLY believe. Kate is exasperated by Vi's willingness to share the "weird" and concerned for Jeremy's career when her husband's closest colleague is tapped to be the "anti-Vi" on TV - made worse by the fact that she lives a half a block away, and their families are absolute best friends.

Will the earthquake happen? Will her husband believe her or drive her to a stubborn impasse? Will Vi embarrass the heck out of Kate and ruin Jeremy's career?

But again, this is really just a novel about relationships. How can two people who truly were once one egg want such opposite things? Kate's relationship with her husband is tested and explored. Her relationship with her parents is examined. As a mother of two young children, she worries about what her children will think of her, given what she thinks of her own parents, and Vi's rather sour outlook on her perfect suburban life does ring a bell or two for her, even as she's usually happy.

For me, the book was very well written. I liked Kate as a character and understood why she took a lot of her actions, even as I disagreed strongly with several of her decisions. Disagreeing with her made me feel almost guilty about liking her, but then, that can happen in life, too. Most other characters were well developed - I didn't get a great sense of the wife of the other couple and her motivations - but mostly you got enough to be invested and to care. The pacing was good and kept me interested.

I read some reviews last night, and if you're expecting a book purely about psychic twins, this won't satisfy you. If you're looking for a thriller about earthquakes, also not the right book. But if you enjoy books that explore human relationships, this was a good one. The line that keeps resonating with me today is one where Kate thinks "how shocking it still is to realize that someone else doesn't want what you want, or wants what you desperately don't." It just reminds me that, no matter what we have in common or how well we know a person, we don't all think or dream the same, and a step back to see another perspective might not be all bad.