on repeat, but lovely

Love in Plane Sight by Lauren Connolly

Rating: 4.5 stars (out of 5)

Genre: romance

Review: Lauren Connolly knows how to write a romance that a reader can root for.  Watching Beth and George fall in love and overcome obstacles was absolutely lovely.  Though Beth's is slightly fuller, both have well-drawn backstories that make the road they're on together very real.

Unfortunately, I'm not sure that Connolly would agree that she's given us excellent backstories, because she feels the need to repeat Beth's several times.  We get it.  We understand why Beth accepts George's offer of free flying lessons but is afraid to act on her attraction to him.  We get that she's worried about money but doesn't want to cause her mother any stress.  We get it.  Let's move on.

I have to say, though, that my favorite parts of this book involve Beth's book club with her brother, especially the scene where she tries to win an argument by standing on his coffee table and shouting.  Except they really resolve their literary disputes over a deck of cards and shots of tequila.  It's absolutely marvelously written.

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

flying over Ethiopia

Black Dove White Raven by Elizabeth Wein

Rating: 4.5 stars (out of 5)

Genre: historical fiction, YA

Review: If you're like me, and really had no idea that the Italians took over Ethiopia in the 1930s, and maybe had only a vague idea that Haile Selassi was the emporer of Ethiopia at some point, but no real clue about when or why he was important or anything else, this book is a great place to start.  It's not really about Haile Selassi or the Italo-Ethiopian war, but you'll learn a lot about both as you read.

This book is really about flying, and family, and bravery, and loyalty, with a lot of imagination and quick-thinking thrown in.  Emilia and Teo are being raised as siblings by their mothers, who are barnstorming pilots.  Delia (Teo's mom) does the flying, and Rhoda (Em's mom) is a wingwalker.  When Delia is killed by a bird strike, Rhoda takes Emilia and Teo back to her home in Pennsylvania.  But Rhoda and Em are white, and Teo is black, and they must figure out to be a mixed-race family in the 1920s.  To escape the racism that faces them in the US, they travel to Ethiopia, following Delia's dream.  That's where Haile Selassi and the war come in, but the story stays tightly focused on Emilia and Teo's experiences.

Emilia and Teo's voices are a joy to read.  Wein beautifully captures their relationship, their wonder at their new life in Ethiopia, their terror at what the threat of war means to their adopted country, and their trepidation as they learn to fly.  There are so many reasons to read this book.

king of the run-on sentence

Aloft by Chang-Rae Lee
Rating: 2.5 stars (out of 5)
Genre: fiction
Challenge: A-Z (title)
Review: I guess the point of this book is that it's kind of apathetic and just sort of drifts along with no particular direction. Which is all well and good, except that it doesn't make for a very good read. It's sort of boring and annoying. In this book, all the characters are flat, and rather unlikeable. Due to the first-person narrator, we don't even get much of a sense of the other characters; they're just sort of background-noise to the non-story being told. The effect is that we never really feel connected to the story, and don't really care about any of the characters. Also, our first-person narrator has an extreme tendency to ramble in run-on sentences. As a literary technique, I don't mind this too much, but when the character himself is boring, any little quirk in his voice becomes grating.