This Week, I Read… (2019 #34)

#112 – Muse of Nightmares, by Laini Taylor

• Read: 8/14/19 – 8/17/19
• Challenge: Virtual Mount TBR (35/48)
• Rating: 4/5 stars

In the first book, a number of oddities and mysteries were set up, leaving me eager for the rest of the story. I can say the conclusion does pretty much answer all of them, but it takes a weird and twisting path to get there.

I feel like this story, despite having clear goals to accomplish, is ultimately less focused than the first book. Nearly everything there was framed around the relationship between Lazlo and Sarai–even before they met, it was clear they were going to meet, and that was the moment we were hurtling toward in the beginning. (For long enough to make you maybe-forget about the very beginning of the book, when Sarai’s death is laid out neatly as a spoiler, but with absolutely no context.) Other characters occasionally had POV scenes or chapters when the plot demanded it, but on the whole, it was the Lazlo and Sarai Show, with each chapter generally sticking to one or the other.

Muse, on the other hand, jumps between characters and story threads constantly, even to the point where in a single scene where many characters are present, there’s extensive head-hopping. I hate head-hopping. I hate having to readjust my perspective to align with a different character with no warning, especially multiple times on a page. And I get it–when the big stuff goes down and you’ve got Minya and Nova and Sarai and Lazlo all in the same place, all thinking/feeling important things that the reader needs to know, head-hopping is the easiest way to get it all on the page.

But it’s kind of a mess to read, and I didn’t enjoy that part of it. It robbed the climax of some of its thrill and emotional impact, when I constantly had to sort out who I was suddenly supposed to be focused on.

The story is still interesting, and I’m still invested in these characters–mostly. I think I never felt as much sympathy for Minya as I was supposed to? The relevation about her and the Ellens felt flat to me. On the other hand, Thyon got way more sympathetic and fascinating and I honestly wish there had been more time spent on his development, though I don’t know where it would have fit. And I’m thoroughly delighted by the direction of Eril-Fane and Azareen’s subplot. So there’s plenty of good to balance out my frustration with the bad. And the bad is a pretty minor bad, all things considered. But this wasn’t the same ecstatic thrill ride I experienced in the first book.

#113 – Once Upon a Coffee and Once Upon a Setup, by Kait Nolan

• Read: 8/17/19 – 8/18/19
• Challenge: Mount TBR (72/100)
• Rating: both 3/5 stars

Pairing these together as short novellas from Nolan’s Wishful romance series, which I decided was time to “finish,” as in cleaning up what I had left on my Kindle, these two and one more full-length novel.

Once Upon a Coffee is cute and charming and an excellent example of Nolan’s easy-to-read narrative style. I fell right into this short story about a blind date mix-up, and I liked the characters enough to wish we were getting a whole novel out of it–the ever-present danger with short stories and novellas, that they’re good enough to make the reader want more.

And there is plenty more to be had in the Wishful series, though I don’t particularly think this is a good entry point, despite that #0.5 label–it’s set in Wishful, sure, but no major characters make an appearance (which is fine, considering the context) but also these characters, to my memory, don’t show up at all in the three Wishful novels I’ve already read.

So it’s cute and charming, but it’s also isolated and left feeling both hopeful and unfinished.

I enjoyed Once Upon a Setup, but I’m left honestly questioning why it’s a novella and not just the first few chapters of book 4, which is going to finish the romance set up here. I checked, and book 4 doesn’t break 200 pages, so why is the story chopped in two? (My gut says “marketing” but I hope not.)

I have some of the same issues with this story-bit that I had with book 3, because I still haven’t watched White Christmas so I still don’t get the references. I’m really hoping that we’re going to stop beating that horse in book 4. Please.

All that being said, I like Myles. I like him a lot. It can be hard to write the funny-charming guy as a romantic lead, because humor is so personal and not everyone is going to respond. But beyond the funniness, he’s a thoughtful, respectful guy. Piper doesn’t get quite as much time put into her personality here, but I mostly remember her from before, so it’s okay that Myles gets more development, especially when he’s the big draw.

I’m starting book 4 next, so let’s hope it pays this off.

#114 – Just For This Moment, by Kait Nolan

• Read: 8/18/19 – 8/19/19
• Challenge: Mount TBR (73/100)
• Rating: 3/5 stars

I wanted to like this early on so much more than I actually did in the end. It’s a much more plausible fake/quickie marriage setup than I’m used to seeing in my romance novels, and I do appreciate a good setup. I’m even on board with the external obstacles thrown in their way, forcing their plan to adapt in ways neither of them anticipated.

It’s the internal conflicts that piss me off. A character misunderstanding something they overheard eavesdropping, whether intentional or not, is just such a lazy way to introduce conflict. I don’t like it in other romance novels where I’ve encountered it, and I don’t like it here. To the book’s credit, the character does get called on it–when Piper goes to Tucker to hide out in her confusion and upset, Tucker insists she talk to Myles about it. Which is something, at least. But it’s still lazy. And having that bundled together with an unexpected pregnancy, another tired trope that isn’t usually handled well, this really was a let down. Again, it’s not quite as bad as it could be–since the marriage was such a rush job, it’s understandable that they wouldn’t have talked about their desire for or timeline regarding kids, and the birth control thing was just an accident–those do happen. But it leads to an epilogue that’s very “a kid fixes everything” in its attitude, because the best thing to happen to a rushed relationship and marriage is adding a kid to the mix? No, no, I don’t buy it.

So the first 60% of the book, leading up to the wedding itself and events immediately following it, is fantastic, the exact fun and “madcap” romantic romp the blurb promises. That part of the book is five stars. Then the remaining 40% is a mess and a downer–I accept that there are consequences to rushing a marriage like that, even with someone you think you can make it successful with, but it’s just smashed together out of lazy tropes and ends happily with very little reason to.

#115 – Saga, Vol. 8, by Brian K. Vaughan and Fiona Staples

• Read: 8/20/19 – 8/21/19
• Challenge: Virtual Mount TBR (36/48)
• Rating: 4/5 stars

It’s not that I don’t still love this series, because I do, but something about this volume felt off to me, and I didn’t love it as much as most of the earlier volumes. Something about the pacing made this read so fast, it didn’t have as much impact, or I didn’t feel as satisfied at the end.

Still, it’s full of the fun twists we’ve all come to expect in theory without necessarily being able to predict in practice. I did see Petrichor and the Robot Prince getting together, but only a few pages before it actually happened, so it’s not like the pieces weren’t there for me to put together. Ghus is still amazing and I love him. When Squire called Hazel his “fair maiden” I was like, “oh no tell me that’s not where this is headed” but she (as narrator) immediately refers to him as her brother, so good, that’s not where we’re headed. And given the brotherly-love feeling of most of this volume, I look forward to seeing that plot line in the future.

But there’s not much future left at this point–how could the story possibly end? Maybe that’s where some of my dissatisfaction with this particular volume is coming from, I can’t picture an ending coming from this. The most basic story trajectory has always been obvious and firmly in place–it’s Hazel’s story, from conception and birth through childhood, at least, so far. But when will it end? With only one volume left, at the pace we’re going, she’s not going to die peacefully of old age. I don’t even know that we’re going to see her as an adult, and I sure hope we’re not going to see her kick the bucket as a kid, or at all, really. But I have no basis for predicting how far the story still has to go, even with most of it done. That unmoored feeling of being unable to form expectations about a story never sits well with me, though Saga has been fun, interesting, and inventive enough to distract me from it this whole time. In this volume, perhaps, maybe it didn’t accomplish that as well, and that’s what’s left the faint irritation in my brain that says I should have liked it better.

#116 – Saga, Vol. 9, by Brian K. Vaughan and Fiona Staples

• Read: 8/21/19 – 8/22/19
• Challenge: Virtual Mount TBR (37/48)
• Rating: 4/5 stars

I was under the mistaken impression that this was the end, until I came to Goodreads to be all like WTF JUST HAPPENED and I saw people talking about the hiatus. I was incorrect, but I have to say, reading this volume under the mistaken impression that it’s the final one definitely left me disappointed.

Treating it as the cliffhanger it’s intended to be, instead, I like it better. Unsurprisingly.

So a lot of things happen, as usual, and a lot of them are still unexpected, because this story has a consistent track record of putting together plot twists that make perfect sense in hindsight while being nearly impossible to predict. Lots of characters die in this volume–lots of named, important characters, that is, because the earlier volumes are also filled with character deaths. But this had a far greater impact. (Which was part of me going WTF when I still thought this was the end of the story.)

I’m looking forward to more in the future, but I know I’m going to have to reread everything when the new stuff drops, because there are so many interwoven plot threads, and while there are definitely events I will never forget, there are going to be plenty of references to the story that would leave me scratching my head otherwise. Which means dragging my soul through this meat-grinder of a cliffhanger again, something I can say I’m looking forward to as much.

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Six More Prompts to Develop Your Characters: Employment

Most characters in most settings have to make a living somehow, which generally means they’ve got a job. How important that job is or isn’t to the story is going to depend on the story, but if we’re spending a lot of point-of-view time with that character, we’re likely to see them on the job; even if we don’t, what their work is should have some kind of tangible impact on who they are. I can’t count the number of romances I’ve read where one or both of the leads has a profession but is never seen at work and never mentions it; or they work in such a generic office setting doing such generic tasks (if anything) that I have no idea what the company they work for actually does. And while I’m most familiar with the romance genre, that’s not the only culprit–how many movies have I seen over the years where I couldn’t tell you, after the movie ends, what any of the characters did for a living, despite being set in modern day, with adult characters?

(I can’t find the source again, but years ago I saw a quote about how, for a while, everyone in the movies was an ad executive, because it meant they made good money but had little responsibility. The implication being, they could do whatever or be wherever the plot needed them to do or be, and also, it was blanket permission to be smarmy, like you’d expect a Hollywood ad executive character to be. I really, really wish I remember the quote better so I could find it again and credit it properly.)

On the other end of the spectrum, I’ve just seen a fantastic example of characters with jobs that matter: Steve and Robin slinging ice cream at the mall in Stranger Things 3. Steve needs the job because he’s not going to college. Robin’s reasons aren’t as clearly articulated, but it’s not unusual for kids to have summer jobs, so we can roll with that. Where they work places them both in a position to be involved with the plot as the season unfolds. Same for Nancy and Jonathan interning at the newspaper.

So, with all that in mind, here are some questions to consider when giving your characters a job, or not.

1. If they don’t work, is it by choice, or are they incapable for some reason such as disability, legal status, etc.? How do they support themselves otherwise?

2. Is this job their dream job, a step along the way to it, or completely unrelated? Do they even have a dream job?

3. What’s involved in the day-to-day work? Is it physically demanding? Mentally taxing? How much time does it take out of their day, and how do they feel when they’re done? Does this effect serve the larger story, or work against it?

4. How long have they been at this job? How did they get it? What sorts of privileges come with their position, if any?

5. Are any of the scenes of your story going to take place at that character’s job? If so, how many coworkers are likely to be there, and how many do you intend to utilize? Are they friends with your character, rivals, indifferent? How does their presence mesh with your story’s needs?

6. If nothing story-related is going to happen on the job, how much of the stress (or happiness, or satisfaction) from working does your character bring home at the end of the working day? How does it affect their mood? Does it affect their relationships, like if they work late constantly, are they missing dates or time with friends?

As usual, some or all of these questions, this advice, might not apply to your story. If you’re not working with a real-world setting, you’ve got world-building to do that’s going to include jobs, some of which might not exist yet. Or if you’re working in a historical setting, you’ve got research to do about what sorts of things people did in that place and era, again, jobs that might not exist anymore. In either case, some of my advice will still be relevant, but not everything. Use this as a jumping-off point to think about to make sure your story isn’t two incredibly bland office drones falling in love outside of work while I, your reader, am shouting internally, but what do they actually do all day?

This Week, I Read… (2019 #33)

#107 – Saga, Vol. 6, by Brian K. Vaughan & Fiona Staples

• Read: 8/9/19 – 8/10/19
• Challenge: Virtual Mount TBR (33/48)
• Rating: 5/5 stars

As usual, when I get farther and farther into a series I love, I find it harder and harder to write coherent reviews, as they generally become a list of highlights of my favorite parts. So here’s the list for the sixth volume: Ghus is still the best and I love him. I’m happy to see the reporters come back, even if I’m hesitant about what they’re trying to do because breaking Marko and Alanna’s story could be a triumphant ending or the beginning of everything going horribly wrong–it’s not like I can accurately predict anything ahead of time about a story this wacky, as the brilliance of its plotting is best visible through hindsight, not foresight. I definitely love that this series has always surprised me, and still is–Petrichor being an example, not because of the complexity of her identity, but because surprise! she’s on the ship now, and that’s a new conflict to explore.

What else, what else. I’m liking the kid Hazel is growing up to be so far, it’s charming to see her so trusting, given her unconventional and event-filled upbringing. I can see the beginning of her trajectory from unformed babyhood toward the narrator we’ve been listening to the whole time. And her reunion with Marko is just heart-breakingly adorable.

I love this series.

#108 – Saga, Vol. 7, by Brian K. Vaughan & Fiona Staples

• Read: 8/10/19 – 8/11/19
• Challenge: Virtual Mount TBR (34/48)
• Rating: 5/5 stars

Stop stomping on my heart like this, please. That ending!

Some stuff I like from this volume: Petrichor keeps being interesting. Hazel’s first kiss. The line about unfulfilled relationships being “potential energy,” that hit me right in the gut. Also being punched in the kidneys by the multiple quiet tragedies that comprised the ending. On a lighter note, the cute little furry people of Phang were so adorable, and then, on a heavier note, that just made the ending hurt more.

Seriously, there are only two volumes left, so I knew things had to start going (more) wrong than they had been, but I’m really torn up about this!

#109 – Keys to the Castle, by Donna Ball

• Read: 8/11/19 – 8/12/19
• Challenge: Mount TBR (69/100); The Reading Frenzy’s “Bookish Treasure Hunt” Challenge
• Task: A key in the title or on the cover
• Rating: 2/5 stars

I almost put this down after Chapter 2, when Ash was introduced and I didn’t like him one bit. I didn’t like the way he spoke to his secretary, I didn’t like the way he spoke to his mother. I didn’t like his attitude at all.

But I had liked the first chapter, introducing Sara, just fine, so I figured I’d keep reading until the two future lovebirds met, and see if I liked the way Ash spoke to her. It was like he was a different person entirely, and somehow, I read the next two hundred pages in one sitting.

That isn’t to say this is an amazing book, because now that I’m finished, it’s really just a few thin character archetypes in a trench coat. Sara is the weepy but determined American widow, headstrong and occasionally foolish. Ash is the suave, charming British lawyer (as opposed to the rotund, bumbling British lawyer) who is used to getting what he wants and can’t imagine this widow standing in his way. His ex-wife Michele is the worst of the lot, a conniving French viper who has no heart, only machinations. Ash’s mother isn’t all that great, either, an interfering Mother Knows Best woman who takes every opportunity to scold her child, and her future daughter-in-law, into doing her bidding. When the story adds the little girl Alyssa to the mix, she’s entirely too lovable and perfect–her existence is a complication to Sara and Ash’s plans, but not her person itself, whom they both adore.

It’s all so, so slick, especially when this soap-opera worthy plots and lies and schemes are set against a crumbling French ruin in an otherwise idyllic setting. I read it so fast because there was nothing to grab onto to slow me down, nothing that ever gave me pause or made me think too hard.

And while the setting is romantic and there’s tons of tension between the leads, a great deal of that tension ends up being because Ash, both in a professional capacity and a personal one, spends most of the book hiding truths from Sara. Sometimes it’s outright lying to manipulate her (even though I can see, in his twisted lawyer brain, how he believes he was acting in good faith on Alyssa’s behalf) and the rest of the time it’s simply failing to give her relevant information in ways he sees as for her own good.

The conflict between them is so one-sided, and were I Sara, I could never trust him. It’s just not credible to me that she does, let alone falls in love with him. Or maybe I could grant that, for all his charming ways, but loving and trusting aren’t always the same thing, and when presented with the proof of his misdeeds, she forgave him when I would have slammed the door in his face. I’m not on board with that kind of romance.

#110 – Fixed on You, by Laurelin Paige

• Read: 8/12/19 – 8/13/19
• Challenge: Mount TBR (70/100)
• Rating: 1/5 stars

This book came to me as a full-length bonus novel attached to another Paige work that I was surprised how much I enjoyed, so I was on board with reading more, even if it was an entirely different series.

Sadly, I can’t say I enjoyed this one nearly as much.

I like dominant men just fine, but they’re usually found in BDSM novels where there’s context and structure for them, whereas here Hudson just has free reign to be a complete and utter creep. Anyone who comes on that strong, and to his employee, no less, is just disgustingly unattractive no matter what his other qualities. The very fact that he had to say to Alayna on multiple occasions, “No, you don’t work for me, you work for an establishment I own,” just screams impropriety because there’s really no functional difference as far as the story’s concerned.

And then he “hires” her to be his fake girlfriend, but they’re still going at it like rabbits “off-duty.” I mean, there’s compartmentalization, and then there’s this nonsense. He wipes out Alayna’s student loan and credit card debts as payment for her “work” as his fake girlfriend, but somehow that’s not paying for sex, just because the sex isn’t part of the arrangement and they’re doing that separately? No, no, I don’t buy it. Especially when she specifically says “no sex today” on one of their dates, and he comes into her dressing room and screws her anyway. It’s not depicted as rape, but Alayna’s internal monologue states something like “I never said no, but he never asked.” UH YEAH YOU SAID NO WHEN YOU TOLD HIM NO SEX TODAY AND HE AGREED.

So Hudson doesn’t respect clear boundaries, yet that’s okay somehow, because that’s Alayna’s entire character. She’s had therapy for her obsessive relationship issues, so from the very start, it’s a terrible idea for her to get involved with a man she finds attractive and wants to bang but who assures her that he’s not capable of love so they’re never going to have a real relationship. A smart woman would have walked away, but Alayna needed the money, and I feel that (except that the threats from her brother about cutting her off financially never actually materialized later so she never struggled for anything…you know, her entire motivation for agreeing to this scheme.) And, big surprise, over the course of the story she fixates on Hudson and falls in “love” with him. I’m putting that in quotes because even at the very, very end when Hudson realizes that weird feeling he’s feeling must be love, they don’t act like they’re in love, they act like they’re in lust, and anything approaching tenderness instead of passion just falls flat.

It’s a train wreck of a relationship that’s held together with lots of sex and not a lot of anything else.

#111 – The Book of the Unnamed Midwife, by Meg Elison

• Read: 8/12/19 – 8/14/19
• Challenge: Mount TBR (71/100); The Reading Frenzy’s “Bookish Treasure Hunt” Challenge
• Task: A book in the title or on the cover
• Rating: 4/5 stars

One technical issue that I don’t usually need to bring up: I was reading the ebook version, so I have no idea if it carries over the print books, but I had great difficulty reading the font chosen for the journal entries, and they weren’t the majority of the book, but definitely a significant portion. I increased the font size on my reader, which I rarely need to do, but it didn’t really help, because my comprehension problem was with the extreme slant of the font. Eventually I got used to it, but it definitely detracted from my reading enjoyment.

Now, about the story. I dig post-apocalyptic fiction in general, and I enjoyed a lot about this–a PA world viewed entirely through the lens of female sexuality and reproduction? Sign me up! It explores more types of male-female relationship dynamics than just “all men devolve into rapists because of the scarcity of women,” though that is the major dynamic we’re exposed to in the beginning of the story. It’s a grim and frighteningly possible world, but it’s not all bad out there in the wilderness.

What I really want to talk about, though, are the things that kept this great book from being amazing. Font issues aside, the journal entries sometimes didn’t make complete sense to me. The protagonist’s tendency to shorthand with plus and minus signs is perfectly understandable in theory, but I didn’t always follow the meaning of the more esoteric word equations she laid out with them. Then, I had trouble tracking how long the story had been going on, despite the dates given (or guessed at) in the journal, because every few chapters it seemed we were jumping forward in time to hear the end of the story of some side character that was being written out of the main plot. While I enjoyed some of those moments of closure, they did break up the flow of things, and trying to track how long it had been since the plague got confusing. I think the information was there, if I’d been taking notes, but that’s not something I generally feel like I need to do for a book I’m reading for enjoyment.

My last quibble is a larger and more personal one, because the unnamed protagonist is clearly bisexual, but we have a case of The Missing B Word. The midwife says to one companion, who asks if she’s a dyke, I mostly dated women but my most serious romantic relationship was with a man, so whatever you want to call that. (I’m probably paraphrasing slightly, I have a terrible time getting quotes verbatim from memory.) She won’t call herself bisexual, when there’s basically no other way to read it. I cringed, waiting for the “I avoid labels” line that media creators use so they won’t have to use the dreaded B word. It didn’t come then, but the attitude behind it comes up again late in the story with a journal entry from a man who ends up paired up with another man, a more effeminate one who doesn’t mind living as a woman in their relationship, but the first man doesn’t feel comfortable calling himself “gay” and writes that the midwife says he doesn’t have to call himself that if he doesn’t want to. Which is true, of course. But there’s a difference between portraying a character that obviously has internal issues with the word “gay” and struggles with self-identification because of those issues, and just breezing right past the issue of explicitly naming the protagonist’s sexuality. Bisexuality gets so little good representation in general, and then even when it’s present, it often goes unnamed, and here I just don’t see the point of pretending it’s ambiguous or defying labels when it’s just not. The midwife has dated men and women. She’s slept with men and women. Since the narrative is never about her struggling with how she feels about her sexuality, how she’s dealing with being bisexual (or not,) I don’t see any reason she shouldn’t call herself bi, and I’m angered by that lack of affirmation, because it’s something my community is so often denied.

 

Let’s Talk about Tropes #11: The Character in the Fridge

I just watched the first episode of The Boys this week.

I have not read the comics, but I’m loosely familiar with Garth Ennis’ style from Preacher; I’ve read the first volume and intend to read the rest, and I watched the first season of the adaptation but lost track of it amidst the ninety million other shows to watch and haven’t continued. I know what kind of headspace his work creates, how gory, brutal, disturbing, and darkly humorous it can be.

I was also forewarned by both my husband (who has read the source material) and a good friend (who binged the entire show before I started) that this story is intended, in basically every way possible, to be upsetting and make the reader/viewer uncomfortable.

Brilliant success, there.

A lot of seemingly good people in this story do a lot of horrible things, but it’s the inciting incident that sets the tone, that grabs you by the stomach and makes you want to puke. So, obligatory warning, spoilers below for the first episode of The Boys.

On the surface, I was thoroughly disgusted by Robin’s death. It’s gore on a level I rarely see, for starters, with the slow-motion blood-drenching. When the camera pans down to show Hughie still holding her dismembered hands, I felt actively sick. And then, as I had time to absorb the implications of what happened, I was sickened by the apparently poor choice of having the white protagonist’s girlfriend be a woman of color and immediately get killed, because that’s a good look. (That being said, I don’t know what her ethnicity was in the source material, and I’m generally pro “colorblind” casting, it never bothers me if a canonically white character is cast as non-white, unless it creates other racially charged issues, as it may have done here. Or may not have.)

And, on a meta level, we all know fridging characters is bad, right? Especially when it’s a woman, especially to spur on the story of a male protagonist.

Yet, here, that’s actually the entire point.

As I watched the rest of the episode and saw that fridging a character was only the very tip of this horrible, horrible iceberg, I realized Robin’s death is emblematic of all the collateral damage the Seven, and superheroes in general, have caused, and that the story probably couldn’t have started any other way. What else would have caused Hughie, slightly neurotic and generally Everyman as he is, to take on the most powerful cadre of superheroes in the world? What else would have so gripped and angered the readers/viewers with its senselessness, its casual cruelty (especially after A-Train’s later scene, joking about Robin’s death,) and the combination of its horror in the moment, and discovering the horror of how very commonplace similar incidents have been?

I spend a lot of time and word count talking about tropes and how not to use them, how to avoid the common pitfalls involved, and before watching The Boys I probably would have said it’s impossible to fridge a character to good purpose. I would have been wrong. Ennis takes the laziness out of this trope by using it quite deliberately to evoke the expected reaction for his own story goals; proof that even the most overused tropes, the ones we consider the worst, the laziest, the least useful, still have their place when carefully thought out.

Have I Read That? The 20 Most Reviewed Books on Amazon

In a recent newsletter, Book Riot sent an article listing the twenty most-reviewed books on Amazon, ever. I don’t read every article, and I don’t click on every list, but I was curious about this one, because “most reviewed” doesn’t necessarily correlate directly with “most popular”–popular books are read more, so could be reviewed more, but they also have to provoke a strong reaction, good or bad.

So I scanned the list and was surprised by how many of the books I’d actually never heard of! I thought I’d take a few minutes to run through the listed works and see a) if I’ve read the book, b) what I thought of it if I did, and c) if I haven’t read it, do I want to?

1. The Hunger Games, by Suzanne Collins: Unread, uninterested. I did watch the first movie when it showed up on Netflix, and it wasn’t terrible, but if I were to read this series, it would only be to understand the deeper references to it in popular culture that I haven’t already figured out through osmosis, and with the state of my TBR, that’s just not a good enough reason to invest the time right now.

2. Orphan Train, by Christina Baker Kline: Never heard of it before, going on my TBR. It’s well-received on Goodreads, and I see it was published in 2013, so it could very well have been one of those “big” books, but before I was paying much attention to popular works. (I didn’t start this blog until 2015 or any reading challenges until 2016.) The story sounds interesting enough, my library has it, and I do enjoy historical fiction when it’s done well, so I’ll give it a try.

3. Divergent, by Veronica Roth: Unread, deeply uninterested. This big YA series started back in 2011, again before my time paying attention to current reading trends, so I didn’t hear about it until it was optioned as a movie and the marketing was EVERYWHERE. It didn’t sound appealing to me then, it still doesn’t now.

4. All the Light We Cannot See, by Anthony Doerr: Already in my TBR. I picked this up at a used book sale–twice, to be honest, because the second time I’d forgotten I bought it several months before and hadn’t read it yet. If I like it, I intend to give the second copy to a family member, and if I don’t, I’ll re-donate it.

5. Gone Girl, by Gillian Flynn: Read, five stars. Finally, one I’ve read!

6. Beneath a Scarlet Sky, by Mark Sullivan: Never heard of it, not really interested. “Based on a true story” war fiction is not generally my thing, and I’ve read so much about WWII over the years that I’m very choosy about books set during it, it’s just so overdone.

7. The Fault in Our Stars, by John Green: Unread, possibly interested. I have yet to read any John Green, but I have two other books by him (Paper Towns and An Abundance of Katherines) waiting for me on my unread shelves. If I like those, I’d definitely consider reading Fault as well.

8. The Boys in the Boat: Nine Americans and Their Epic Quest for Gold at the 1936 Berlin Olympics, by Daniel James Brown: Unread, going on my TBR. I remember my mother reading this and loving it, but despite her recommendation somehow it didn’t make it onto my TBR. I’m fixing that right now.

9. Fifty Shades of Grey, by E.L. James: Unread, nope nope nope. I will never. I read enough of it through Jenny Trout’s brilliant deconstruction/criticism/outrage blog series, and that’s all I need to read.

10. The Husband’s Secret, by Liane Moriarty: Unread, uninterested. I checked on the reviews and ratings from my Goodreads friends who’ve read it, and they’re pretty dismal. The blurb sounds interesting and alarming, but I trust these people, so I’ll give it a pass.

11. Unbroken: A World War II Story of Survival, Resilience, and Redemption, by Laura Hillenbrand: Unread, uninterested. Again with the WWII, just not going to happen.

12. The Martian, by Andy Weir: Read, five stars. Two out of twelve! I’m not completely out of touch!

13. Outlander, by Diana Gabaldon: Read, four stars. Though the books definitely decline in quality and readability as the series goes on, I gave up partway through book eight and I kind of wish I’d given up sooner.

14. Sycamore Row, by John Grisham: Never heard of this particular book but I certainly know the author, not interested. I think I read The Client way back when as a teenager, and I haven’t felt the need to pick up any Grisham works since, so why start now?

15. The Goldfinch, by Donna Tartt: Read, two stars. Such a disappointment after how much I loved The Secret History.

16. The Nightingale, by Kristin Hannah: Read, five stars. Loved it to pieces.

17. The Book Thief, by Markus Zusak: Read, four stars. This puts me at six of seventeen, that’s getting better.

18. Inferno, by Dan Brown: Unread, uninterested. Though I could probably build a house out of all of the used copies of Dan Brown books I’ve seen available over the years, I have never felt the slightest inclination to give him a try.

19. The Girl on the Train, by Paula Hawkins: Read, three stars. I think this was my first “popular” book I read after I started my reading challenges, and it wasn’t terrible, but I definitely didn’t see why it was a runaway hit like it was.

20. Mockingjay, by Suzanne Collins: Unread, still uninterested. I suppose it says something that the series was so popular (and contentious) that it’s got two of the top twenty spots, but that doesn’t change my mind. I can survive just fine without knowing more than I do.

This Week, I Read… (2019 #32)

#101 – Blackout, by Mira Grant

• Read: 7/29/19 – 8/2/19
• Challenge: Virtual Mount TBR (31/48)
• Rating: 2/5 stars

[SPOILER-HEAVY. HEAVIER THAN USUAL, ANYWAY. READ AT YOUR OWN RISK.]

You’d think, when one of my major complaints about Deadline was that I didn’t care for Shaun’s narration, the reintroduction of Georgia to the mix would make this a better book, and it does in some ways. But not enough. While this does fix some of my issues with the second book, there are enough new problems that on the whole, I’m pretty damn disappointed.

The narrative style, no matter who’s talking, remains incredibly repetitive. Now, I’m not saying it wasn’t in Feed, only that I probably didn’t notice it as much because I was so drawn in by the shiny new world-building so I gulped down every word without complaint. But there’s nothing new here in that regard. Some of the rules of the world have changed over the course of the story, because medical research keeps dropping in their laps at every turn, but I didn’t find any of it as fascinating at the original setup. This book isn’t about zombies, it’s about the world that living with zombies created, and the political conspiracies surrounding that, and that just got old after a while.

Let me break that down a bit.

I was impressed, back in Feed, with Grant’s extrapolation of what American government would become in response to the crisis. I saw parallels to the non-zombie surveillance state we’re approaching (or are already in, depending on where in the country you live, how much technology you’re surrounded by, and how paranoid your perception of your environment is. That’s not a argument I want to have through this review, though.) I was impressed.

By the end of that book, it’s clear that, as with most zombie-based media, the zombies aren’t the point. They’re a condition of the world that causes other things to happen, and they get progressively less interesting and less important as the story goes on. Blackout doesn’t do this differently. The entire plot is a lather, rinse, repeat cycle of Something Important Happens which then gives our heroes information the government doesn’t want them to have or share, then the conspiracy engineers a zombie outbreak to put our heroes in harm’s way so hopefully they get killed, either by the zombies or by the cleanup to suppress the zombies. Sometimes the outbreak is just a few scientists in a lab, sometimes it takes out a city, sometimes it takes out Florida, because why not? Why not destroy an entire state to prove just how serious this conspiracy is? (Yeah, so that was a mistake in planning on the conspiracy’s part, but not on the author’s. If the stakes are that huge, why did I not feel more invested, like I did back in Feed?)

I won’t say the conspiracy itself was fully predictable, though I’d guessed some of its parameters. But the plot structure was incredibly predictable. Coupled with the insane amounts of repetition (Shaun still has to constantly remark on his craziness, the cans of Coke, every blood test has to be shown and always uses the same language to describe it, and so forth) I found myself skimming a lot of the non-dialogue, especially in the second half of the book, especially in Shaun’s chapters. If I ever ran into anything that confused me, I paged back until I found what explained it, but I feel like I have a good handle on the story now that I’ve finished.

And I’m just not particularly impressed with the payoff. It felt anticlimactic, honestly. It shouldn’t–I understand the importance of the themes involved and the choices made, and in summary, it’s a great ending. But I didn’t feel it while I was reading. It took too long to get here, and I had to wade through too much crap on the way. I didn’t feel much when a character died near the end, because developing side characters has never been a strength of this series, it’s all the Shaun and Georgia show. I can appreciate seeing the return of key figures we haven’t seen much of since Feed–the Masons, Rick, Ryman–but they’re still essentially bit players, and the moral conflicts their appearances create are brushed past really, really quickly.

The best parts of the book, to me, were Georgia’s chapters in the first half, before her escape from captivity, only I didn’t fully appreciate that at the time because I was so impatient for her reunion with Shaun. Which led to the plot twist that I hadn’t predicted, because who goes there? Even though I know, intellectually, that it’s not incest, and that it explains so much, I couldn’t find myself fully on board with them being a couple. Not because of the faux-incest moral quandary I might have been suffering, but because of those very anomalies in their relationship that the story has spent two and a half books skirting around. We’ve had the pleasure of living inside both Shaun and Georgia’s heads for over a thousand pages at that point, and neither of them ever thought about this until now? It’s simply not creditable. Yes, they were keeping their relationship secret from those around them. Yes, they never wrote anything pertaining to it down. BUT WE THE READERS HAD ACCESS TO THEIR INNER LIVES AND WE STILL WEREN’T EVER TOLD? Sitting on that for two and a half books just to make it a big reveal was ridiculous. The first book had so little relating to romance or sex in it, I was wondering if Shaun, Georgia, or both weren’t intended to be read as asexual (or aromantic, or both.) Shaun’s one-night stand with Becks in the second book made me wonder where on earth he’d gotten any sexual experience at all, because as far as I knew he was a virgin, since the narrative had never taken the time to explain that he might have been having casual sex with random women in his younger years or anything similar, but also never hinted he was sleeping with his “sister.”

Hindsight now shows me all those anomalies were leading to this revelation, but when I look at them together, my brain doesn’t go “okay, so it’s incest,” it still says “these two simply aren’t interested in romantic or sexual relationships because their unusual upbringing pair-bonded them as co-dependent siblings instead” and I think I can be forgiven for not spinning that myself into the faux-incest, what Georgia later claims is close to an obvious taboo, when she reflects on how almost no one figured it out.

I HAD ACCESS TO YOUR INNER LIVES FOR A THOUSAND PAGES AND I DIDN’T FIGURE IT OUT. HOW COULD YOUR FRIENDS AND COLLEAGUES POSSIBLY HAVE DONE IT?

I honestly think this twist is a real failure of storytelling. Even though I didn’t figure it out beforehand, when it was revealed, I didn’t smack my forehead and go “Of course!” I was still pretty much, “huh?” about it, and if that’s honestly the lay of the land, the story Grant wanted to tell, I would have been much more interested in knowing from the start and watching the two of them struggle to find time for each other while both keeping it a secret under dire circumstances and also trying to save the world from the zombie-government conspiracy. I truly think that would have been a much more engaging story, with another layer of conflict that would make the stakes more personal.

#102 – All the Birds in the Sky, by Charlie Jane Anders

• Read: 8/2/19 – 8/3/19
• Challenge: Mount TBR (66/100); The Reading Frenzy’s “Bookish Treasure Hunt” Challenge
• Task: A bird in the title or on the cover
• Rating: 1/5 stars

All book reviews come with personal bias attached–as much as many reviewers (myself often included) like to think we are working from some hypothetically universal standard of “good” writing, we can’t always agree on what those standards are and how to apply them fairly across all books. I say this now, because I’m about to write a negative review for this book, but for once, I recognize that my intense dislike is coming from a deeply personal place, and that my experience with it isn’t necessarily a good sign post for whether or not this book is worth reading. I often write bad reviews for books because of things that I don’t think other people want to be reading–unchallenged racism, sexism, homophobia, or pedophilia being the big ones, and I stand by those. I will continue to do my part warning people away from books that promote harmful ideologies, whenever I can.

That isn’t the case here. I can’t stand this book because it reminds me too much of how I wrote when I was a teenager, and of all of the people who read my work then and told me how terrible it was.

Yeah, it’s personal.

So, I didn’t finish. I read the first hundred pages, and I gave up. I couldn’t stand the constant misery, and I mean that quite seriously. Laurence and Patricia don’t have much more personality than “I’m so weird and nonconformist that everyone bullies me.” Laurence is science-flavored on top of that, Patricia witch-flavored. But they’re such thin characters, and they simply can’t support a story solely about the two of them without more development. To pile on extra misery, all of the members of both families are also horrible people who also mistreat them in some way. In that sort of environment I’d expect the two of them to become close friends, to be the only spot of good in each other’s awful lives–but despite the overall narrative the blurb is trying to sell me, I’m not at all convinced these two are friends at all–they tolerate each other at best, and at worst they spend weeks not speaking to each other–and this setup does not have me confident that they’re going to eventually fall in love. I’d be laughing at the reviews that call this book “romantic” if I weren’t so disappointed, because I adore real romance, and I don’t feel like I’m going to get that here.

Let’s go back to that science vs. witchcraft characterization. Because at a hundred pages in, I had only just gotten what looked like a plot, rather than chapter upon chapter of “look at how miserable and bullied these two kids are, don’t you feel for them?” Theodolphus Rose, master assassin posing as a school counselor, tells Patricia that Laurence is an enemy of nature and must be killed. That’s the conflict, and in other circumstances I might be interested–pitting kids against each other isn’t new at all, but done well, it can certainly be compelling. Pitting potential romantic partners against each other can be awesome, whatever age group. So I’m not opposed to this basic plot. I am opposed to it taking almost one hundred pages to show up, and I’m opposed to the flimsy world-building that has done nothing to define the relative power of science and witchcraft. At first (in the very first chapter when I still thought I might like this book, it looked like my kind of weird,) I was enchanted by Patricia’s magic and her talking to birds and going to the forest to see the Parliament. But there’s no rules to anything related to magic, and without any sort of standards or explanations, there’s really no upper limit on what magic can do in a story, whereas the real world has definite limits on science. Without the author setting up a system deliberately to make science and magic balanced, I find myself assuming magic can be more powerful (if Patricia ever gets access to it again, if not, this will be a dull story I didn’t finish) so magic will obviously win. And that’s just not interesting, if there’s an obvious winner before the battle is even fought. Now, there are ways to subvert that expectation, and there are ways to move forward from the point where I stopped reading that might result in a better book than I expect it to be. But that low bar I have set in my mind is a result of that slapdash, flimsy world-building that amounts to “this is basically contemporary fiction but I want to put whatever I want into it and call it sci-fi and magical realism at the same time.”

I don’t have a problem with genre-mixing. I’d be a giant hypocrite if I did. But a work doesn’t get a free pass on mixing genres sloppily because it’s quirky.

It’s the “quirky” thing that really gets me. I love absurdist humor, and there are elements of it here. Theodolphus’ introduction at the mall almost had me laughing, it was so over the top and ridiculous, in just the way I like. I can’t take it seriously in context, because it’s so off-tone from everything else I read surrounding it, but in isolation it was hilarious and I loved it. For a brief moment, I felt like the author was channeling Terry Pratchett or Douglas Adams, and I was on board. But if the whole book is meant to be absurdist, it doesn’t go far enough, and absurdity for its own sake is exactly what my teenage writing (yeah, we’re back to the personal part) was mocked by my peers for. And occasionally my teachers as well.

I was a weird kid. I have no problem admitting that, though I was never bullied anything like Laurence and Patricia are shown to be. I had friends–it’s not impossible to be weird and also have friends. I was also often an unhappy kid–teenagerhood was not particularly a good time for me–and writing was a thing I did to cope. I wrote escapist fantasy. I wrote about magic. I wrote about absurdity. I wrote about depression and misery.

I wrote things in high school that were very like this story, both in tone and overall quality. The nearly universal response to these stories, when I was brave enough to let my friends read them or turn them in for writing assignments, was basically derision and ridicule. “It’s too weird.” “I don’t get it.” “What’s the point?” “I don’t like how strange it is.” “It doesn’t make sense.” No matter how many times I tried to defend some of the most “weird” pieces by explaining that the absurdity of it was the whole point, the overall reaction was “stop being so childish and write things that make sense.”

I do, now. I’ve found ways to channel my love of the absurd in more palatable directions. I’ve studied my craft and “grown up,” so to speak. I take great pains to make my worlds, no matter how “strange” they are, internally consistent and understandable.

So here’s the incredibly, undeniably personal part that you absolutely shouldn’t apply to yourself and whether or not you want to read this book: I am (mildly) professionally envious and angry that this book is so praised when it reads exactly like the stuff I churning out by the notebook-full at fifteen that everyone hated. It stings. I cringed constantly with second-hand embarrassment while I was reading this, as if all of my flaws had come back to haunt me. Thin world-building because I wanted it the way I wanted it and I didn’t do the work making it cohesive. Awkward and stilted dialogue. An “me against them” mentality in my main characters. No plot to speak of for ages because I was more interested in making my world weird than having a story take place in it.

Objectively speaking–as objectively as possible for me, at this point–I don’t think this is a good book, but obviously its weirdness resonates with a lot of people, and you might enjoy it. If you think it sounds good, then maybe for you, it will be.

Speaking with extreme and noted bias, this book is bad, and I can’t stand it, and I will never finish it and wish I hadn’t spent the few hours I already did attempting to read it. I want that time back.

**After I spent a solid hour writing, rewriting, and editing this review, I wondered if I should even post it in full. After all, it is highly biased and not particularly applicable to other people in many places. I thought about it a lot. I considered where I could cut the stuff that shouldn’t matter to anyone else, the stuff that revealed too much of me, the things that might do more harm than good. But I’ve always written honest reactions to books, because I think reviews are only useful and helpful when they’re honest. So I’m posting the whole thing, because I worked hard putting my thoughts and feelings in order and being up front about my biases. Whether or not this is a helpful, useful review is only part of the point. It was cathartic to write, and if another writer sees this and feels understood, then it’s worth it.

#103 – Saga, Vol. 5, by Brian K. Vaughan & Fiona Staples

• Read: 8/4/19
• Challenge: Virtual Mount TBR (32/48)
• Rating: 5/5 stars

By opening with a short meditation on the reasons people become soldiers, the progression of war from an immediate and visceral concern to a mere background noise to daily life, Volume 5 has jumped back up to five stars, where the series had dipped slightly for me in the middle.

This felt grounded, which is a weird thing to say about a work that thrives on covering serious issues through ludicrous situations. This series is almost nothing but high drama and action, yet it’s constructed on a firm thematic base that supports it, that reminds you the story might look insane on the surface, but it has something to say.

In this volume, particularly, I appreciate Hazel’s occasional spoilers in narration, how unflappably awesome Ghus is at all turns (new favorite side character? quite possibly!), the relatively nuanced look at drug usage (for the short span given to it, anyway,) and the effective use of dreams/nightmares/drug trips to convey the personal history of a few characters. I’m just freaking impressed, because I’ve got a thing about dreams as a trope, they’re almost never as good on the page as the author wants them to be, but here? Fantastic.

Looking forward to the next volume, already got it checked out on Hoopla.

#104 – Justice Calling, by Annie Bellet

• Read: 8/4/19 – 8/5/19
• Challenge: Mount TBR (67/100); The Reading Frenzy’s “Bookish Treasure Hunt” Challenge
• Task: A moon in the title or on the cover
• Rating: 1/5 stars

I almost gave this a second star to reflect that fact that I’m a gamer nerd and got every single reference–but in the end, the author’s gamer cred doesn’t actually make me like the book better, its flaws are so serious.

1. It’s too short. That’s the overarching problem that all the other problems could be considered children of. As I have the digital omnibus of the first three books, and as I had no clear idea how long each one was, I expected to hit the end of the first book in the neighborhood of 30-35% read; it actually came at 24%. It’s not a bad thing that the other two books are apparently longer, but now that I see the first one is barely a hundred pages, that’s not a book, it’s a novella, and it’s trying to fit a book-sized plot into it.

2. Squeezing that much plot in leaves no room for character development. Jade is a bundle of Native American sass, heavy on the sass and suspiciously light on literally anything I would hope to see in a Native narrator. Anything about her background that isn’t directly related to her magic or her tragic backstory is absent, so being Native is just a label–it’s jarring that the only time it comes up is when she lashes out at a dude by calling him “white man.” It was honestly easy to forget her heritage until that point because it had no bearing on her characterization or history. The side characters, Jade’s friends, don’t even fare that well–they get brief physical descriptions when they’re introduced, two of them get clear sexual orientations (either one didn’t, or I missed it in the rush of how fast this story moves), and none of them get anything approaching a personality. They’re just names on a page and physical bodies to be hurt so that Jade has motivation for things.

3. Most of this story is devoted to action, snarkiness, and world-building. The world-building isn’t terribly robust–there’s barely time for it even when it’s clearly important to the story–but what was there was interesting enough that, had this been a full-length novel instead of this bite-sized cliffhanger romance, I might be giving the book a vastly different rating right now. The world has potential, at least. But this is so Action-Packed that the pace crowds out pretty much everything else.

4. This is a romance? What? It’s instant lust, okay, fair, that’s a real thing and I have no problem with romances starting there. But Jade and Alek don’t develop enough of a bond, any kind of bond, to make me believe they’re interested in more than some hot sex, and then we don’t even get to see the hot sex, because the book ends immediately before they jump into bed. (Though without starting the next book, I don’t know if that happens, or it’s just a teaser before some horrible thing occurs to keep them apart for a while longer.) There’s no emotion, there’s no relationship, there’s only unfulfilled lust, and that’s not a romance at all. Again, because THERE’S NO TIME FOR IT.

This book really needs to be twice as long to tell the story it wants to tell. In the final chapters, especially, events that could have been whole scenes on their own, scenes I would have wanted to read, are summarized in a few chapters so we can get to the ending faster. Everything is just woefully underdeveloped.

#105 – Moloka’i, by Alan Brennert

• Read: 8/5/19 – 8/7/19
• Challenge: Mount TBR (68/100); The Reading Frenzy’s “Bookish Treasure Hunt” Challenge
• Task: A flower in the title or on the cover
• Rating: 2/5 stars

A pretty typical structure of “this is a woman’s life under these historical conditions,” complicated by leprosy. If you choose to look at it from an inspirational viewpoint, it’s quite “having a disease, even one this serious, isn’t necessary the end of your life.” I generally find that sort of narrative bland, and eventually, I did here.

The first hundred pages or so kept my attention, with lots of historical detail and a firmly woven plot introducing Rachel and her family, and their complicated situation. The worst flaw I could pin on the first section of the book was constant head-hopping, a style of writing I find irritating at best and unreadable at worst, but this had a flow to it that wasn’t as disruptive as most cases I’ve read before. So I soldiered on.

Aging Rachel over a section break from seven to seventeen was fine, and I was interested to see how she’d progressed after ten years living on Moloka’i. Slightly disappointed that she was the “special” one of her peers whose leprosy wasn’t actually that bad, that she was basically able-bodied despite the disease. Obviously if she was going to die young, the rest of the book wouldn’t happen, so she couldn’t be at death’s door, but for a story about a woman living with leprosy, it was far more about how the disease shaped the external trappings of her life, rather than her actual body. Both are valuable to the story, of course, but it felt imbalanced, that she was basically healthy compared to everyone else.

The rest of the book rushed through major life events at a speed that left me bewildered. If you’re going to spend the first half of the book painstakingly detailing her childhood and adolescence, then why is her entire adulthood and death in old age rushed through in the second? Serious pacing issues. It felt like I spent the same amount of page time on Rachel’s plight about wanting to live with her uncle instead of the girls’ home, as we did on the birth and giving up for adoption of her daughter. Skip a few pages and you’d miss it entirely! I understand if the author didn’t want to make this a six-hundred page book instead of four hundred, but speeding her adulthood along like that (while also managing to spend a lot of page time worried about the logistics of her travel arrangements) didn’t make me like this book or enjoy its ending. Given the high level of narrative focus and detail in the first half, the second half just felt lazy and flat.

#106 – The Right Swipe, by Alisha Rai

• Read: 8/7/19 – 8/9/19
• Rating: 3/5 stars

It’s rare, but every once in a while I stumble across a romance novel where the characters who are supposed to be falling in love are too busy have fantastic arcs of personal growth that they don’t actually have time for a romance. That’s what’s happened here.

Samson is wonderful and adorable, but his story line is far more focused on his football legacy (which encompasses the controversy about long-term concussion damage to players,) his family issues, and overcoming the grudges of his past than it is on his courtship with Rhiannon. Rhiannon’s story line is more about her business goals, her traumatic former relationship, and overcoming her fear of showing weakness and vulnerability than it is about her courtship with Samson.

Stuffed into all the small spaces in between these huge, life-changing issues are many lesser bits of social consciousness, especially concerning the struggles of those with mental illnesses. And don’t get me wrong, I want my romances to be progressive and socially conscious: I just don’t want them to be so concerned with the big social justice issues that there’s no room left for the romance.

And that’s what’s happened here.

Do I get the sense that Samson and Rhiannon like each other? Absolutely. Want to fall into bed with each other, sometimes despite their better judgment, as often as possible? Hell yes. But do I feel like they’re falling in love? No, not really. Ultimately, I don’t want the romance to be the subplot of the “romance” novel I’m reading, and the romance is really the least important thing in this story. Yes, each of them is the catalyst of change and growth for the other, and that’s fantastic, but there’s very little feeling evident in it–probably more so on Rhiannon’s part than Samson’s, he’s a bit more open.

I will say, on a much more positive note, as this is the first in a new series, I can’t immediately tell from this story who the next romance will focus on. Sometimes in romance series it’s brutally, painfully obvious where the setup for the next book lies, and it’s not at all organic to the story. Here, both Rhiannon’s and Samson’s friends and colleagues are integral parts of their lives, not thrown in to tick off boxes or obviously set up future stories. I’m kind of hoping it’s Katrina, or at least that she’ll get a story eventually if not next, because she was interesting, and the narrative was incredibly sensitive to her deep anxiety (agoraphobia? It’s never stated explicitly, but there are strong elements of both.) As someone who struggles with anxiety myself, I always love to see good portrayals of it in media, something that doesn’t happen nearly enough.

Down the TBR Hole #21

Down the TBR Hole is a (very) bookish meme, originally created by Lia @ Lost In A Story. She has since combed through all of her TBR (very impressive) and diminished it by quite a bit, but the meme is still open to others! How to participate:

• Go to your Goodreads to-read shelf
• Order by Ascending Date Added
• Take the first 5 (or 10 if you’re feeling adventurous) books. Of course if you do this weekly, you start where you left off the last time.
• Read the synopses of the books
• Decide: keep it or let it go?

My TBR has been creeping steadily downwards as I read stuff, and honestly I didn’t add that much to it in July. But I’m still well over 700, and while I own a lot of unread books, I don’t own them all! They don’t all have to stay on the list! So it’s time to put the next ten on the chopping block.

#1 – All the Crooked Saints, by Maggie Stiefvater

Since Stiefvater is one of my recent additions to my favorite authors list, this seems like a no-brainer, and I was tempted to skip it because there was no chance I’d cut it. But it’s worth a second look, because I really wasn’t that excited about it when it released, and the reviews I’ve seen of it are as much negative as positive. And I’m much, much more excited about the forthcoming Call Down the Hawk, which starts a new trilogy about Ronan, my second favorite character from The Raven Cycle books. So, honestly, do I need to read this? I think it’s actually going to go. I’m not obligated to read every book by an author I love, if the book itself doesn’t do much to make me want to read it.

#2 – Bound to Be a Groom, by Megan Mulry

Okay, yeah, it’s a polyamorous Regency BDSM erotica. That was definitely outside-the-box enough to put it on my list, and when I found it (however that was) I saw that there’s a prequel novella that was free, so I have that. This can stay, provisionally, just because it’s such a novel concept, but I’ll read the novella first and if anything about it doesn’t wow me, I’ll come back and scratch this off the list.

 

 

 

#3 – Dead Ringer, by Heidi Belleau and Sam Schooler

I’m positive this came off a queer romance rec list at some point, but I must have been picking the best of a bad lot when I added it, because now I’m questioning myself. If one of the characters is a celebrity fan boy, well, that’s just not my thing, and I got uncomfortable reading the blurb about this setup. Also, while the good reviews are telling me this is the best M/M romance since sliced bread, the bad ones are throwing up all sorts of flags that I care about–bad pacing, relying on misunderstandings to create conflict, etc. This goes. It just doesn’t look like it’s for me, and I’d rather figure that out now than after I start reading it.

 

#4 – The Sun is Also a Star, by Nicola Yoon

I knew about this book long before it made it on to my TBR, and I ignored the hype surrounding it because I didn’t think I would like it. I’m reasonably sure a friend recommended this specifically to me after reading my review of a similar YA title (though I forget which one) so on the list it went, because maybe I was wrong? But looking at it now, my Goodreads friends’ ratings are all over the place, and the selling point of the blurb seems to be instalove, which is a trope I can’t stand. So I think it’s time this came back off the list, because life’s too short for yet another YA romance I probably won’t love.

 

#5 – The Lawrence Browne Affair, by Cat Sebastian

This is a case where I hear an author recommended over and over again, and this is the book that I finally put on the list to try them out. Historical M/M romance is a thing I haven’t really tried yet, and Sebastian is reputedly one of the best, so here we are. The story itself does sound intriguing–con man and scientist/earl at odds with each other–so I’ve got no complaints there. It stays.

 

 

 

#6 – Him, by Sarina Bowen and Elle Kennedy

Bowen is one of the few romance authors I’ve found by picking up a random free book of theirs and then genuinely liking it, as opposed to the multitudes that turned out on the scale from “meh” to “terrible.” So when I did some digging and found an M/M romance co-authored by her, that was enough to put it on the list. I reread the blurb, it still sounds like a fun time, it can stay.

 

 

 

#7 – Pairing Off, by Elizabeth Harmon

I know precisely where this came from, a sports-romance rec list that was going around during the 2018 Olympics because of a certain shippable ice dancing pair. (Not that I approve of shipping real people, because I don’t–this list was a “so you want romances about figure skaters and other Olympic-type athletes, huh?” reaction to that hubbub.) This one in particular references The Cutting Edge as an inspiration/template–a movie I adore the hell out of. There was no question I wanted to read it then, and I still want to read it now. It stays.

 

#8 – Letters to Nowhere, by Julie Cross

From that same list came this YA gymnastics romance, and I think I’m less excited by this now as I was then. Also there’s no ebook edition currently (though it appears there used to be), it’s not available at my library, and I don’t think I’m invested enough to invest in the paperback edition? Like, it still sounds cute, but again, life’s too short for another YA romance I’m not terribly excited about. It goes.

 

 

 

#9 – #11 The Iron Seas series, books 2-4, by Meljean Brook

I read The Iron Duke back in 2017 and loved it. Adored it. Fantastic. So I added the rest of the series to my TBR (minus the huge collection of novellas, though I did read Mina Wentworth and the Invisible City because it was included as a bonus in my paperback.) But a) I haven’t really thought about that book or this series since, and b) reviews for book 2, especially, but in general all the remaining books, seem to indicate a significant drop in quality. Now, The Iron Duke was pretty damn amazing, so I’d understand if the other books were good, but not as great–but I have one Goodreads friend in particular whose romance tastes seem to mostly line up with mine, and they’re not impressed. And I’m just not invested. They can all go. If I ever happen to find one of these at a used book sale, I’ll maybe pick it up and give it a try, but in the meantime I will just consider Duke a standalone that wowed me.

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This month I cut seven of eleven. Feels good. Feels like progress. Cleaning house is such a positive thing, whether it’s your actual living space or your virtual bookshelves. But as always, if you’ve read anything on this list and want to make a case for changing my mind (in either direction) leave a comment and we’ll talk about it!