short and sweet

A Coffee for Two by Renée Gendron

Rating: 3 stars (out of 5)

Genre: romance, novella

Review: In this first installment of Megan the Matchmaker's Brilliant Blind Dates, Megan sends reluctant coworker Arianna on a blind date at a local coffee shop.  When the coffee shop becomes the meeting place for a local improv history group, the two find themselves falling for each other as they lean in to the hilarity surrounding them.  Short, sweet, and funny, this novella is a lovely bite-sized romance.

FTC Disclaimer: I received this e-book from the author in exchange for this review.

why does it have to end?!

Business Casual by B.K. Borison

Rating: 4.5 stars (out of 5)

Genre: romance

Review: I am so glad that I discovered Lovelight Farms and the town of Inglewild, and I hope that Borison changes her mind and writes more stories about other characters in the small town.  Borison's characters grow and change over the four books, but remain true to themselves, even when the focus has moved on to another couple.  My only complaint about this last installment is that Nova and Charlie's story is a bit too similar to Luka and Stella's story, but, again, it's Borison's characterizations that make this story a success.  Even if Nova and Charlie's path is similar to Luka and Stella's, they are very different characters, and that makes all the difference.  Borison has given us another warm and fuzzy (and steamy) love story.  You probably won't want to have to leave Inglewild either.

FTC Disclaimer: I received this book from the publisher in exchange for this review.

in the eye of the beholder

Barely Even Friends by Mae Bennett

Rating: 3.5 stars (out of 5)

Genre: romance

Review: Ok, we've discussed before that plot is not usually the primary element of a romance novel.  But the plot does have to hang together a little bit, or at least a little bit more than it does here.  Bennett certainly leans into her Beauty and the Beast homage, which I support, but I think if I hadn't read the publisher's blurb (and seen the Disney movie more times than I like to think about), I might have been more than a little bit confused about the set-up and the characters' motivations.  Still, it's an enjoyable read, with all the feelings and the Happily Ever After one expects.

FTC Disclaimer: I received this book from the publisher in exchange for this review.

let your sun shine

The Paradise Problem by Christina Lauren

Genre: romance

Rating: 5 stars (out of 5)

Review: Rom-com heroines tend to be a spunky, sassy bunch, but even among her compatriots Anna Green stands out.  She's self-aware, determined to be true to herself, and totally unimpressed with the opulence with which she finds herself surrounded.  Not only is she one of the few willing to speak truth to power, but she's determined to save her partner from his family.  This being a romance novel, it spoils nothing to say that she succeeds quite nicely.  Going along for the journey is a real treat.

FTC Disclaimer: I received this book from the publisher in exchange for this review.

if i could turn back time

Cassandra in Reverse by Holly Smale

Genre: fiction

Rating: 4 stars (out of 5)

Genre: An interesting take on the time travel/live your life again trope, with Cassandra discovering the ability to rewind parts of her life to do again.  Cassandra is a great character, and I immediately sympathized with her and rooted for her.  But, I had a couple of issues with this book:

1. The title is misleading.  Cassandra is not actually living her life in reverse.  Rather, she has the ability to turn back time and relive certain parts of her life.  Cassandra Rewinds might have been a better choice.
2. Are we seriously expected to believe that no-one in Cassandra's life understood that she's on the autism spectrum?  It's books like this that make me wish I were an editor.  If I'd seen the manuscript, I would have suggested some seriously reworking of this point.  To be clear, I'm not objecting to Cassandra being on the autism spectrum, but rather that a major piece of the plot seems to hinge on neither she nor anyone in her life recognizing it.  I would have advised making it part of the plot from the beginning, rather than a mystery that has to be solved for Cassandra's life to make sense.

FTC Disclaimer: I received this book from the publisher in exchange for this review.

good on its own

The Circus Train by Amita Parikh

Genre: historical fiction

Rating: 3.5 stars (out of 5)

Review: This book has been hailed as a cross between The Night Circus and Water for Elephants, but I have to say, aside from all being about circuses, they don't have that much in common.  The Circus Train has much to offer, but I can't say it's in the same league as either of the two books to which it is compared.

Considering this book on its own merits, though, is much more flattering.  Beginning before WWII, Parikh weaves a story of a circus that might or might include actual magic, and the illusionist (Theo) and his daughter (Lena), who had polio as a baby and now uses a wheelchair.  There's a lot of build-up and character establishing, but tensions build as WWII heats up, and the story really gets going when things explode between Theo and the circus owner.  Theo and his protégé (Alexandre) are sent to Theresienstadt and forced to perform for the Nazi guards in their guests.  Meanwhile, Lena, believing both to be dead, makes her way to England in the hopes of finding her former governess, at which point the real question becomes, will Lena and her father and Alexandre ever be reunited?

Parikh draws her characters well, and her protagonists will all be found sympathetic and writing brings the setting vividly to life.  And yet, I still felt let-down by the marketing hype.

FTC Disclaimer: I received this book from the publisher in exchange for this review.

a fitting end

Somebody's Fool by Richard Russo

Genre: fiction

Rating: 4.5 stars (out of 5)

Review: Donald "Sully" Sullivan may have died in the 2nd book of the North Bath trilogy, but he proves that he was always larger than life by remaining the driving force in the lives of those he left behind.  However, his death does allow several characters who were on the sidelines before to take center stage, including: Sully's loyal sidekick, Rub; the chief of police, Doug Raymer; Sully's longtime paramour, Ruth, and her daughter and granddaughter; and especially Sully's son, Peter.  Russo writes his characters with warmth, bringing to life their struggles and successes as they navigate a changing world and ultimately find hope as they learn to rely on and help each other.

FTC Disclaimer: I received this book from the publisher in exchange for this review.

stand still

Beyond That, the Sea by Laura Spence-Ash

Genre: historical fiction

Rating: 4 stars (out of 5)

Review: Children who were sent to the British countryside during the Blitz were able to come when it seemed like the nightly airstrikes were over.  Children who were sent to America may have had to stay for the duration of the war.  Some were lucky, like Beatrix, who became a true part of the Gregory family for the five years she lived with them.  This section of the book is engaging and heartwarming.

Unfortunately, once Bea leaves the Gregory family, though, the narrative falters.  Instead of being continuous, the story leaps through the next 30 years, landing only in 1951, 1960-1965, and, in an Epilogue, 1977.  Although this satisfies a reader's desire to find out what happen's next in the life of a good character (which Bea is), the jumping around causes us to lose our connection with Bea.

Still, Spence-Ash's writing is solid and the foundation that is set up in the first part of the book is strong enough to carry us through to a satisfying, if not altogether unexpected ending.

FTC Disclaimer: I received this book from the publisher in exchange for this review.

stick to the fictional

Up With the Sun by Thomas Mallon

Rating: 3 stars (out of 5)

Genre: historical fiction

Review: Mallon, author of such previous gems as Bandbox and Dewey Defeats Truman, seems to be confusing writing with name-dropping lately.  In his loosely connected Republican Apologist trilogy, the names are members of the Nixon, Reagan, and Bush 43 administrations.  Here, the names are from show business in the 1950s-1970s.  And while I appreciate that one of the names he drops is that of my own cousin, The Last of the Red Hot Mamas, Sophie Tucker, I know that most people these days have never heard of her, nor of many of the other players who come and go through this book.

The story centers around the life and murder of Dick Kallman, a never-star of stage and screen, who most people have also never heard of, and, harsh as it sounds to say this, probably won't care much about.  Mallon portrays him as a shallow, callow, unethical, and more to the point for the main character of a novel, uninteresting.

The more interesting character is the purely fictional Matt Liannetto, who knew Dick sporadically through his acting career, and who was one of the last people to see him alive.  Through him, we see the both the law and the order aspect of bringing Dick's killers to justice, which is somewhat compelling, in a macabre way.  Matt himself is just a more interesting character, and I wish Mallon had just written a book about him, and made Dick Kallman a footnote to his story.

FTC Disclaimer: I received this book from the publisher in exchange for this review.

viven las niñas

The Night Travelers by Armando Lucas Correa

Rating: 4 stars (out of 5)

Genre: historical fiction

Review: Usually, when I put a book down and pick it up and put it down and pick it up, it means that I'm struggling to get through it.  That was not the case here.  Rather, it meant that I wanted to sit with each few chapters before moving on.  The book somewhat lends itself to this approach, as each chapter is a vignette in a character's life, before jumping several months or years in time.  Most often, we jump forward, but in the first section, the narrative jumps both forward and back to tell the story of a romance and its consequences.  Time moves non-linearly in the last section as well, but in that case, it serves to dish up a few big reveals, and so makes sense.  I couldn't quite figure out the reasoning behind the jumping around in the first section.

This is a compelling story, exploring the bond between mothers and daughters, the sacrifices a mother might make to save her daughter, and a daughter coming to understand those sacrifices as an adult.  Though the writing is uneven in some places, overall the story flows from mother to daughter, from one year to the next, connecting generations through time and space.

FTC Disclaimer: I received this book from the publisher in exchange for this review.

the price of freedom

In the Upper Countryby Kai Thomas

Rating: 3 stars (out of 5)

Genre: historical fiction

Review: One doesn't really enjoy a book like this, dark as it is, but one can say that it's incredibly evocative.  Thomas brings to life the free black people in Canada, and their constant fear of slave catchers coming across the border.  The story centers around Lensinda, a young black journalist tasked with collecting their stories, and Cash, an escaped slave who kills one of the bounty hunters sent to recapture her.

Cash won't reveal her full story unless Lensinda swaps stories of her own.  As the two share stories of slave life and free life, with some mythology mixed in, Lensinda slowly learns that perhaps the answer to why Cash chose to kill the bounty hunter (and it was a choice) isn't the most important thing about Cash's life.  Both tales jump around in time, and can be somewhat hard to follow as there are few textual clues to mark the shifts in time, making this a challenging book to read on an already challenging subject.  For those with the foritude to track the story, though, it's a worthwhile addition to genre.

FTC Disclaimer: I received this book from the publisher in exchange for this review. 

the right way out

The Book of Essie by Meghan MacLean Weir

Rating: 4 stars (out of 5)

Genre: fiction

Review: Essie's preacher father is the head of both his megachurch and his family, but it's Essie's mother who really runs the show.  Literally.  Essie's family stars in "Six for Hicks" a popular reality tv show focusing on their family and ministry.  Essie's life has always come with cameras and production assistants.  But her life isn't what millions of viewers might assume, and when a pregnancy test comes back positive, it's time for Essie to put in motion the plan she's been hatching for years to get herself out of the spotlight.

Essie is a great character.  She's both determined and vulnerable, strong and nervous.  She narrates her own story with a clear and convincing voice.  Roarke, whose help she needs to get out, is also a great character, and his voice helps to make Essie's story fuller and more believable.  On the other hand, Liberty Bell, the reporter to whom Essie entrusts her story, could have been the main character of her own book, but cramming her story into Essie's doesn't quite work, and she reads as more of a plot device than a fully-fleshed out character.  Her presence is necessary, helping to illuminate parts of Essie's story that she couldn't give us on her own, but a simpler character, with less of a backstory might actually have served the novel as a whole better.

Still, with Essie's voice as the driving force of the narrative, this book is a success.  I was rooting for Essie, and then for Essie and Roarke together, and was fully invested in their search to find the "right" path in a challenging situation.

FTC Disclaimer: I received this book from the publisher in exchange for this review.

#mashup

The Reading List by Sara Nisha Adams

Rating: 3 stars (out of 5)

Genre: fiction

Review: If you put A Man Called Ove, The Authenticity Project, and any book that purports to tell you about the books you must read before you die into a quantum accelerator and spun them until they became a single book, The Reading List is what you would get.  Except I would definitely recommend just reading the individual books instead.

I can't fault Adams for her book list, as it includes some of my favorites, and I do appreciate how the characters used what they found in the books to improve their own lives and relationships.  But the pace of the book is too slow for the premise, and some of the text-to-life connections to the books seemed a bit forced.

FTC Disclaimer: I received this book from the publisher in exchange for my review.

better a shed than a library

This Time Tomorrow by Emma Straub

Rating: 3.5 stars (out of 5)

Genre: fiction

Review: Approaching her 40th birthday, Alice is devoted to her father, who raised her alone after he mother left.  Alice finds watching her father waste away in the hospital to be unbearable.  So when she discovers a portal that allows her to relive the day of her 16th birthday, she is determined figure out how to change his life so that he doesn't get sick.  What she discovers as she lives though many iterations of the day is that perhaps quality is a lot more important than quantity.

Fans of The Midnight Library will appreciate this more realistic (in terms of human emotions, not in terms of time travel) exploration of choices and consequences and what it means to be happy.

FTC Disclaimer: I received this book from the publisher in exchange for this review.

love and censorship

You Can't Say That!: Writers for Young People Talk About Censorship, Free Expression, and the Stories They Have to Tell edited by Leonard S. Marcus

Rating: 5 stars (out of 5)

Genre: non-fiction

Review: You might think that all writers have a similar response if their book is banned or challenged, and to some extent you'd be right.  For example, nearly all the writers featured in this collection say that they understand that parents who seek to have books removed are doing it out of love and a feeling that they need to protect their children.  I'm not sure I actually agree with that, but I appreciate the impulse behind such a generous interpretation.  Beyond that, the writers' thoughts vary quite a bit.

Through the interviews in this book, Leonard Marcus gives readers insight into not just the writers' responses to having their books banned or challenged, but also into their writing processes.  This book is certainly a must-read for fans of any of the included writers, and for defenders of intellectual freedom, but also for anyone interested in hearing writers' thoughts on their own work.

FTC Disclaimer: I received this book from the publisher in exchange for this review.

love and bees

Mad Honey by Jodi Picoult and Jennifer Finney Boylan

Rating: 4.5 stars (out of 5)

Genre: fiction

Review: On the surface, this is a tried-and-true trope: girl is murdered, boy is accused, mother stands by her son.  But, as one might suspect with a book by Picoult and Boylan, there is a whole lot more going on here.  There are several unexpected twists, not to mention more than a few turns.  Told in alternating chapters, Olivia, Asher's mother, tells the story going forward from Lily's death and Lily herself tells her story going backward from the same time.  Together, the two stories form a brilliant picture of Lily and Asher, together and separately, and of the difference between things that are private and things that are secret.

Are there a few hanging threads here?  Yes.  After making dramatic (re)entrances, both Lily and Asher's fathers sort of disappear.  And there's a lot in here that would, in the hands of lesser writers, be deemed pedantic, as we learn the ins and outs of beekeeping, among other topics.  Instead of feeling like information that isn't really relevant to the plot is being forced on me, as I have in other books, I just found it interesting, like I was just having a nice conversation with an acquaintance.  And I really wish I could have a nice conversation with these characters.  Or their authors.

FTC Disclaimer: I received this book from the publisher in exchange for this review.

unnecessary baggage

The Lost Book of Eleanor Dare by Kimberly Brock

Rating: 3.5 stars (out of 5)

Genre: historical fiction

Review: If this book had just stuck to the story of Alice, and her daughter, Penn, it would have been much stronger.  Instead, Brock chose to make it more convoluted by throwing in their family history: they are descended from Eleanor Dare, the only survivor of the lost colony of Roanoake.  And supposedly, Eleanor left behind a book that has been passed down through all the generations of female Dare descendents since 1585 through to 1945, when the book takes place.  Or maybe the book was just the invention of Eleanor's mother?  And there's a stone that she carved soemthing on, that was lost, but then found, but then lost again?  This is where a started to get bogged down, and ultimately, I found that I just didn't care enough about this part of the story.

I liked Penn and Alice as characters, though, and was interested enough to want to know what happened to them.  Did Alice ever come to terms with her mother's mental illness and death?  Was Penn able to get a fresh start and make friends?  Were they able to come to terms with each other in the wake of Penn's father's death?  There's more than enough there for a good story without the intrigue.

FTC Disclaimer: I received this book from the publisher in exchange for this review.

what's it really about?

Fire Island: A Century in the Life of an American Paradise by Jack Parlett

Rating: 3 stars (out of 5)

Genre: non-fiction

Review: Despite its title, this book is less a history of Fire Island, although it is that to a degree, and more a series of mini-biographies of the love lives of both well- and lesser-known literary and artistic figures as they happened wholly or partially on Fire Island.  There is interesting material about the development of Cherry Grove and the Pines as separate and distinct from other Fire Island communities, and how they fit into the larger development of the modern queer community, but those parts seem minimal in comparison to the many paragraphs of who was living with whom, and who came to visit, etc.

Unfortunately, the author although chooses to intersperse his material on Fire Island with his own musings on this troubled relationships with his own sexuality, body image, and alcohol, sometimes managing to link his own life back to the history of Fire Island or someone who was there, but often not, making these parts an uncomfortable break in the narrative.

If you think of this book as telling a part of LGBTQ+ history, then it's a treasure trove.  If you're looking for a full history of Fire Island, you'll find much less to appreciate, as there is more to Fire Island than Cherry Grove and the Pines.  A more specific title would go a long way to manage expectations.

FTC Disclaimer: I received this book from the publisher in exchange for this review.

how they met each other

The Mutual Friend by Carter Bays

Rating: 4.5 stars (out of 5)

Genre: fiction

Review: I think I just read the start of Carter Bays's new tv show, and it's going to be great.  Instead of focusing on a group of friends, here he spreads the attention among several New Yorkers who are interconnected in ways they don't even know about.  Most of the characters are in their 20s or 30s and are quite attached to social media, which becomes one of the ways that they find and lose each other.

Is it possible that one too many storylines were included here?  Yes, probably.  I feel like there were a couple that could have been minimized, if not eliminated, without damaging the overall thrust of the book.  However, even those characters added to overall gestalt of the book in a positive way.

Bays has a deft hand with dialogue and scene setting and all the things that go into a successful TV show.  It turns out he's also pretty good with narrative flow, and puts it all together to make a pretty darn good book.

FTC Disclaimer: I received this book from the publisher in exchange for this review.

until we're all free

The Woman They Could Not Silence: One Woman, Her Incredible Fight For Freedom, and the Men Who Tried to Make Her Disappear by Kate Moore

Rating: 4.5 stars (out of 5)

Genre: history

Review: It's a good thing that Kate Moore stated plainly at the beginning of her book that all quotes came directly from letter, diary entries, the public record, or the like, because otherwise one could think that this is a work of fiction.  That's a testament both to the quality of the writing and to the nearly unbelievable nature of the story.  The intersection of the lack of married womens' rights and conditions in mental institutions in the 1860s was, to put it mildly, a horror show.  Through meticulous and thorough research, Moore brings us the story of Elizabeth Packard, one woman determined not to let either stop her in her struggle for her independence and that of the woman around her.  She is to be lauded for the masterful way in which she's brought Elizabeth Packard's voice and fight both to life and to light.

FTC Disclaimer: I received this book from the publisher in exchange for this review.