Review: "Berlin" by Bea Setton

 

Berlin by Bea Setton
US edition published March 2023 via Penguin
★★★★★

Daphne is new in Berlin, spending her days in German classes and her nights trying to reinvent herself—trying, and trying, and desperate to believe that she can outrun herself.

Daphne is both bitingly self-aware and a master of self-delusion. She knows who she wants to be, and sometimes she can stay there for a while—but she also knows, acutely and painfully, who she is. She's not written to be a likable character, exactly; if you find yourself relating to her, you'll likely be unnerved rather than pleased. She can only project health and stability for so long before the cracks start to show. But...it's also really clear that the author understands both Daphne and the sensation of being new in Berlin...and also the sensation of that newness starting to wear off. Hinterhöfe and figuring out recycling rules and Stolpersteine and asparagus pots and leaving glass bottles near trash cans for the homeless to collect; quark and paranoia about WhatsApp security and the difference in comfort between the U-Bahn and the S-Bahn; and on it goes—if you've ever lived in Berlin for even a few months, you'll recognize it. Oh, and the awkwardness of dating in Berlin, of course. I cannot tell you how weird it is to read so accurate and wry a description of being a new Ausländerin in Berlin.

I picked this up for the cover and the contemporary Berlin setting (it is surprisingly hard to find books in English that are set in Germany but that are not set during one war or another). The cover reminds me of Berlin street art—a paste-up, probably, something you'd find on a heavily graffitied and postered wall in an underpass. It's the sort of thing I'd take a picture of, pop on Instagram, and half-imagine that I was living the life of the girl in the picture, a life I'd assume to be more interesting and glamorous than my own. Daphne is perhaps the sort to do the same, minus Instagram, which I find both entertaining and disturbing.

I am not, thank sweet mercy, Daphne. I see more than I'd like of myself in her, but the similarities extend only so far. She's also not somebody I'd like to get to know. But this is basically the exact book I've been looking for since I first visited Berlin in 2016. Sometimes I loved it, sometimes I wanted to beat my head against the wall on Daphne's behalf, and I'm left feeling like this filled a weird little Berlin Ausländerin book–shaped hole in my soul.

Thanks to the author and publisher for providing a review copy through NetGalley.

Review: Short Story: "The Days Before Us" by Sejal Badani

 

The Days Before Us by Sejal Badani
Short story published April 2023 via Amazon Originals

Autumn is on the cusp of something new—if only she can move on from the past. This is part of an Amazon Originals series of short stories on motherhood, and it's worth looking up the rest of the series for the covers alone. (This one in particular reminds me of some of my favorite street art—paste-ups that make you wonder where the woman on the wall comes from and what her story is.)

I don't want to say too much about the plot here (in a short story, there's only so much plot you can share before it's all spoilers), but Autumn's concept of herself as a mother is a new and fragile thing here, and there's a limited amount that we're able to learn about her husband and mother. I'd be curious to see where this would go if developed into a novella or even something longer.

Thanks to the author and publisher for providing a review copy through NetGalley.

Review: "Mystery at Farfield Castle" by Clare Chase

Mystery at Farfield Castle by Clare Chase
Eve Mallow Mysteries #10
Published May 2023 via Bookoture
★★★

Officially, Eve's job is to write obituaries. Unofficially, though, she has a habit of stumbling across dead bodies...and a talent for solving the mystery before the rather inept detectives can. In Mystery at Farfield Castle, Eve has accepted a request to write about something else—there shouldn't be any murders to solve at a new writing retreat set at an old castle, right? ...right? But before long, of course, Eve is right in it (with her silent but trusty sidekick/familiar/doggo, Gus), trying to figure out who killed Kitty Marchant, one of the owners of the retreat.

I went into this cozy relatively blind, which is to say that it's book 10 in a series of which I have not read books 1–9. I'm happy to report that although there are several threads for storylines that clearly span numerous books, this stands alone. The mystery isn't quite a locked-room sort (there are too many random people on the grounds of the castle when Kitty is killed), but it's clear early on that there are only a few viable suspects, some of whom have reason to resent Kitty and her husband's purchase of the castle...and some of whom might have more personal reasons to want Kitty dead. Not a lot of big twists here, but plenty of small clues that add up to keep you guessing until the end. Eve being a reporter, too, gives her the excuse (not just for the other characters, but for the reader) to dig a bit into personal lives—she knows things that the average attendee might not when she shows up, but that makes sense because Eve has done her due diligence.

The real reason I read the book was the setting—a writer's retreat at a castle! I cannot possibly be the only person who daydreams of winning the lottery and setting up exactly that. (In fact, I know I am not, because I have seen many memes to that effect.) To that end, while I knew going in that the murder takes place at the launch party rather than when a bunch of writers are there, I would have liked quite a bit more, well, castle out of this. This is a personal quirk, I think (I live in a studio apartment and wouldn't want to deal with the upkeep of a many-roomed castle, thanks, but I would like to imagine myself in the castle library), but in books set in castles, or manors, or just big, old houses, I tend to want the building to be almost a character in and of itself. Even more specifically, I want to see how another writer imagines a castle-as-writing-retreat to be set up.

I'll have to look elsewhere to get my writing-retreat-castle kicks, then, but as a cozy mystery this was a lot of fun. Hurray for heroines who know enough to call in backup.

Thanks to the author and publisher for providing a review copy via NetGalley.

Review: "The Unbreakable Heart of Oliva Denaro" by Viola Ardone

 

The Unbreakable Heart of Oliva Denaro by Viola Ardone, translated by Clarissa Botsford
Published May 2023 via HarperVia
★★★★★

These are the rules: Keep your eyes down, toe the line, stay home. Wear a white dress to your wedding and a black dress to funerals, hold the rosary beads, repeat the prayers, wait for the rosary to finish. Follow the road, look docile, nod. Don't go out alone, don't wear your skirt above your knee, don't talk directly to a man. Stay away from the boys, don't sing out loud, don't speak with your mouth full. Don't look at a man, don't wear lipstick, don't laugh with your mouth open, don't stand near the window.

Don't, don't, don't.

Oliva has always been good at following the rules. In 1960s Sicily, she knows no other way. The second daughter of a poor farmer, she knows that her lot in life is either to have a second-rate match found for her or to care for her parents in their old age. But the rules of girlhood, of womanhood, run far deeper than that. Here's the passage that made me sit up and take note:

Once, when we were parsing sentences, she [Oliva's teacher] dictated the phrase "A woman is equal to a man and has the same rights." We all bent our heads over our notebooks and started working on the exercise: "woman = feminine singular noun." I didn't like the sound of it.

"Maestra, the exercise must be wrong," I said, plucking up courage. My teacher touched her bouncy red curls that she never tied up.

"What do you mean, Oliva? I don't understand."


"Women is never in the singular," I explained.


She counted on her fingers: "A woman, singular, women, plural. What's the problem?"

But I wasn't satisfied. "A woman is never by herself: when she's home, she's with the kids; when she goes out to market, or church, or to a funeral, she's always with other people. And if there aren't any women to chaperone her, a man has to accompany her."

My teacher raised a finger in the air, the nail varnished bright red, and scrunched up her nose as she always did when she was thinking.

"I've never seen 'women' in the singular," I repeated timidly. (loc. 480)

This is beautiful work: Oliva cannot, in this passage, even register the ideas that men and women might be equal and women might have rights—she has not yet learned that a woman can be an individual, can exist outside the whims of others. It's early in the book, well before the more overt parts of the story, but it sets the scene for what Oliva is up against when she eventually defies society, and it sets the scene for a book rich in symbolism and imagery.

The Unbreakable Heart of Oliva Denaro is inspired by the case of Franca Viola, a Sicilian woman who refused to marry her rapist. Under Sicilian law at the time (the 1960s), if a rapist married his victim, his crime would be erased—and her "crime" of being raped would be forgiven. The same laws were used to facilitate elopements, which of course was used against women, or girls, who dared to resist. This isn't a practice unique to Sicily, but in Sicily it was called fuitina. The details are different enough that you can safely read the Wikipedia pages for Franca Viola and for fuitina without spoiling the book, but in any case Oliva Denaro (and her heart, I guess, but I prefer the editions that use just her name as the title) stands on her own.

I have a few reservations, as per usual. In particular, I'm not entirely sold on the way the last chapters are set up, and some of the resolutions are a bit tidy for my liking. I'd say 4.5 stars, which I usually round down, but this is one of the most gripping things I've read so far this year—I would have kept reading and reading to stay in Oliva's world.

Thanks to the author and publisher for providing a review copy through NetGalley. Quotes are taken from an ARC and may not be final.

Review: "A Greek Love" by Zoé Valdés

A Greek Love by Zoé Valdés, translated by David Frye
Published May 2023 via Arcade
★★★

Havana in the 1970s: There is a rhythm to daily life, and a party (or Party) line to follow. For Zé, though, life promises something else—and so it is at the beginning of the book that she finds herself telling her parents that she is pregnant.

That the father is a Greek sailor is, in Havana, scandalous—it would be one thing for Zé to fall for a Soviet, but a Greek? That's something else entirely. And so Zé is sent away to raise her child in a city with fewer prying eyes, and her life changes course. Zé dreams of a different life, sometimes, but it isn't the one you might expect—she doesn't so much dream of escaping to the West as she imagines a life in Cuba in which her father is less volatile, the father of her child is still in Cuba, and the rooms don't all run the risk of being bugged.

This is probably a 3.5-star read for me—a little too much telling in places, a little too much exposition through dialogue. But I have read precious little about life in Cuba, and even less about life in Cuba in the 70s. Zé's life is not an easy one: her family lives in a tenement, her father is abusive, and because this is the status quo, the people around them turn a blind eye. She knows enough to dream of more, but she is also reluctant to see her family broken up, to lose the connection to her father. I love the ambivalence—she knows that, abroad, she'd have more opportunities and likely live a happier life, but she can also see how much she'd be leaving behind, and what it would mean for the people she loves.

The author's Wikipedia page is fairly fascinating in its own right, and I may have to seek out some more of her work, which apparently often pulls from her own life.

Thanks to the author and publisher for providing a review copy through NetGalley.

Review: "Imogen, Obviously" by Becky Albertalli

Imogen, Obviously by Becky Albertalli
Published May 2023 via Balzer + Bray
★★★★

Imogen isn't sure of much, but a few things are certain: the idea of moving away to college is terrifying. Her friend Gretchen, who is a walking definition of outspoken and queer and informed, has it all figured out. Her friend Lili has found her place in college in a way that Imogen is sure won't be possible for herself. And Imogen is straight—textbook straight, in fact. Until, of course, she finds herself in a situation in which everyone is primed to think that Imogen is bisexual...and suddenly she's no longer sure what is fact and what is false.

I admit to some uncertainty at the beginning of the book. I've read so many coming-out stories and am always looking for the elusive YA novels in which the characters are queer, they know they're queer, and it's just...not really a big deal, and they can get on with the rest of the story. (So...Edith's story? Ooh, can we have Edith's story as a sequel? Okay, wait, I'm focusing, I swear.) It's also very apparent very early on which friend Imogen will eventually clash with, who the love interest is, et cetera. No surprises there.

But...then it registered that there's something much more complex going on here than a straightforward coming-out story. Imogen lives in a time and place where she's always known it's okay to come out—Penn Yan might not be a hotbed of queer culture, sure, but she has queer friends and queer family, and nobody's blinked. What she hasn't ever had is the space to question: there are few things of which she's certain, and one of them is that if she were queer, she would just...know. She'd slot neatly into a box, and that would be that.

There's a character—I'll keep it vague—who is really insistent on this narrative, that there's not really room to question, and it struck me that I knew that character once, or a version of her. The one and only time I set foot in the LGBTQ center at my college, another student, who I knew vaguely, all but interrogated me—to see, as far as I could tell, if I was intruding on her safe space. If I was "gay enough" to be there. (All this did, of course, was make it a patently unsafe space for me.) I went to one or two events that the primary LGBTQ org (...who dominated that LGBTQ center...) put on, and the first question was always "What are you, anyway?"—the assumption being that you'd figured it out and were ready to label yourself publicly and posthaste. And then I stopped going to those events, because it was very clear that I needed to be far more certain (of everything) than I actually was to feel comfortable there. Once Imogen starts consciously questioning, she figures it out at warp speed (the book spans nine days), but it took me years (starting, let's be clear, well and truly before little miss this-is-my-safe-space-so-I-get-to-decide-if-it-can-be-yours-too), I think in part because it was clear that I was going to have to keep my questioning internal in order not to raise lots of questions and doubt with others.

That part of Imogen's story, then, resonates in a very specific way that—for all that I still want more books about people who are out already, and it's fine, and here's a story where coming out isn't the point—I don't often see and didn't realize how valuable it is to see. It clicks faster for her, but she has that same odd gray area of needing to slot neatly into a box to be fully accepted. The romance here is adorable, and as (yay) drama-free as it can be under the circumstances, but I'm here for the gray area.

Now. Back to Edith. There's room for a sequel, right? One in which Imogen has gone to college and Edith (who already knows who she is in many ways) is figuring out who she is without her big sister around and maybe just maybe she'll be able to have an offline girlfriend...?

Thanks to the author and publisher for providing a free review copy through NetGalley.

Review: "Underwater Daughter" by Antonia Deignan

Underwater Daughter by Antonia Deignan
Published May 2023 via She Writes Press
★★★★

3.5 stars. Deignan's story is written to pull you under, into the waters of her life, starting with a childhood fraught with risk and shame and then moving along through cities, through traumas and triumphs, through the years.

It's a lot of story—enough so that Deignan could have opted to write it into multiple separate books, had she chosen. But thematically: trauma in body and trauma in mind; unexpected healings; being, through the thick and the thin of it, her mother's daughter to the end. Its scope is sweeping, spanning decades, sometimes diving in deep and sometimes skimming the surface. Dance and body image and sexual violence and career-changing injuries and death, building a spider's web of connections.

"I'm sorry," she never said to me. And out loud in return I never said, "I forgive you." But I did. I forgave her. Fuck. I never told her. Fuck. She never said it. (loc. 504*)

Deignan writes with the sensibilities of someone who has taken a lot of writing classes—this would have fit right in at my MFA program, and at times I wondered whether certain sections had started out as essays and been submitted to lit journals before being folded into Underwater Daughter. It's a style that can be polarizing, I think—this is for readers who like literary fiction, and stories that are not all told at once but rather fragment and twist and circle back to themselves, and a lot of questions without answers to match.

Thanks to the author and publisher for providing a review copy through NetGalley.

*I read an ARC, and quotes may not be final.

Review: Short Story: "The Cat That Winked" by Anna McClure Sholl

The Cat That Winked by Anna McClure Sholl
First published 1908, revised by Reno Fernandez April 2023

This clever little fairytale, published in The Faery Tales of Weir in 1908, has been repackaged on its own with slight updates for the modern reader. I would have thoroughly enjoyed this as a kid, and I enjoy it still now—for the elements of Puss in Boots, but also just for the number of standard fairy tale elements. We have here talking cats and princesses and old ladies in forest cottages and rhymes and a general suspension of disbelief. (Oh, and morals of the story—discussed to some extent at the end of the story but also partly left up to readers to decide.) This cat is decidedly salty—but also devoted to Mother Holly, which I guarantee is something that would spark debate among cat lovers...or dog lovers.

It looks like this is the first in what might become a set of republished fairy tales, and I do like the idea of it getting a renewed audience. The study questions at the end probably won't be useful for the full age range suggested for the book, but I can see this as part of a middle-school language arts unit on fairy tales. Fernandez has broken the story into five chapters, and if I were teaching this in a class I'd definitely assign students to write chapter 6—a continuation of the fairy tale? Or what happens when the fairy tale is over?

Thanks to the author and publisher for providing a review copy through NetGalley.

Review: "Something Wild & Wonderful" by Anita Kelly

Something Wild & Wonderful by Anita Kelly
Published March 2023 via Forever
★★★★

Two men and a long, long trail from Mexico to Canada...what could go wrong?

This feels like the hiking fiction that I've been looking for for years—hiking memoirs are relatively easy to find, but for some reason hiking fiction often devolves into something that focuses exclusively on relationships and forgets that there's a whole world of woods and mountains and desert out there. Don't get me wrong; I went into this knowing full well that it was a romance, and I expected (correctly!) that there would be plenty of interpersonal material here. But it is so satisfying to read a piece of hiking fiction where the characters notice their blisters, and care about the smells and sounds and sights around them, and feel the difference between landscapes. They spend most nights in tents and drink shitty instant coffee in the morning and send bounce boxes up the coast, and I love it.

Add in one hero who is working through trauma/grief, both heroes who are (usually) ready and willing to communicate openly, Alanna as a narrative device, and a lively cast of secondary characters, and this was just about everything I could hope for in a PCT romance.

Review: "Pas de Don't" by Chloe Angyal

 

Pas de Don't by Chloe Angyal
Published May 2023 via Amberjack Publishing
★★★★

When Heather takes a monthlong guest position at the Australian National Ballet, she's only seeking to escape the fallout from the end of her very public relationship with a fellow dancer—and to remind herself that her worth as a dancer isn't tied to her ex. What she doesn't expect is that a dancer at ANB will stir up feelings...or that they won't be able to act on those feelings without falling afoul of the company 'pas de don't' policy: no dating within the company, on penalty of job termination.

I read Angyal's Turning Pointe not too long ago, so I knew immediately when I saw this book that I'd be getting 1) a writer who knows ballet and 2) a writer who knows how poorly the ballet world treats so many, and who wants to see something better. The books aren't written for the same audience, exactly (there's overlap for sure—ahem—but the Venn diagram is not a circle), but Pas de Don't makes many of the same point(e)s, just in romance-novel form: that dancers, and woman dancers in particular, are trained to shut up and obey; that the major dance companies still disproportionately spotlight male choreographers; that men turn a blind eye when other men abuse power; that boys often get special treatment because dance schools are afraid they'll be scared off. (Let me be clear for the romance lovers—there is plenty of romance here, and plenty of, ah, pas de deux. There's just also a lot of smart context going on...and it's funny to boot.)

Angyal pulls some of her material directly from recent events in the ballet world—to avoid spoilers, I won't go into tutu much detail, but...well, this was one case where I thought I was going to be grumbling about the overuse of evil exes in romance, until it started to click that ohhh, there was a point(e) to the evil ex. (So props to Angyal for making me eat my words before I even had a chance to write them down.) There are some other things that I suspect she must have come across as a dancer herself ("stage face" was a new term for me), and I am quietly praying that she got the term "ex-future-mother-in-law" from the song "When It Rains It Pours," just because I would find that hilarious.

I try to be fairly targeted about the romance novels I read—sometimes I'm looking for mindless fluff, but sometimes I'm looking for something smart and up to date, and I'm delighted to have gotten the latter here. Definitely a genre pivot from Turning Pointe, but if Angyal can work within both these genres, I'm very curious about where she'll go next.

Thanks to the author and publisher for providing a review copy through NetGalley.

Review: "The Elephants of Thula Thula" by Françoise Malby-Anthony

The Elephants of Thula Thula by Françoise Malby-Anthony
Published April 2023 via St. Martin's
★★★★

Nothing in my early life had prepared me for the difficult decisions I had to make every day in the bush. I grew up in Paris. I knew my way around the arrondissements and where to get the best pain au chocolat for breakfast. I had no formal training in conservation. Everything I knew, I learnt on the job, from Lawrence or from people around me. (loc. 650*)

Did you know that elephants are right or left tusked (loc. 265), the same way that humans are right or left handed? Mind. Blown.

This is Malby Anthony's second book about the Thula Thula game reserve and the animals on it, and I realized midway through that I actually have two of her late husband's books on my to-read list as well. (I very nearly paused to go read those first, but...there were holds at the library, and I'm not that patient.) I suspect that An Elephant in My Kitchen has somewhat more linear storytelling; The Elephants of Thula Thula> feels a bit like catching up on the lives of distant relatives—the highlights of who's gotten engaged and who divorced, whose son is out of rehab and doing well, and who was caught in flagrante delicto with the neighbor's wife. Except, of course, in this case it's all animals.

When I think about conservation work, I usually think of preserving landscape to limit human encroachment on wild lands, and it's sad and at times shocking to read about the lengths that have to be taken to not only do that but also to deter poachers. Malby-Anthony describes, for example, dehorning the rhinos every 14 or so months—because otherwise the risk that poachers will kill the rhinos for their horns is too high. (I didn't know that rhino horns grow, or grow back—I guess I tend to think of them as something like elephant tusks, when in fact they're more akin to fingernails.) So while the stories sometimes feel a bit scattered, the close focus on animal rather than human drama makes for engrossing material, and there's a lot to learn. It makes me want to read more about elephants in particular (conveniently, The Elephant Whisperer is one of the books on my list).

Late in the book, Malby-Anthony mentions a letter that she received from a reader of her first book—someone who had dreamed of opening her own wildlife reserve but had, since reading the book, refined her vision to visiting a game reserve. That's close to where I land, too—I'm never going to run a wildlife reserve(!) and might well never visit one, but it's always a pleasure to step through the pages of a memoir into someone else's life for a while.

Thanks to the author and publisher for providing a review copy through NetGalley.

*Quotes may not be final.

Sample-Chapter Showdown: Romance II

 

Full Moon Over Freedom by Angelina M. Lopez (Harlequin)
On the Hustle by Adriana Herrera (Carina Press)
Nobody's Princess by Erica Ridley (Forever)

It's time for a sample-chapter showdown!

I took myself on another tour of romance-novel sample chapters, because why not? This set features POC casts, which I'm delighted to see—the romance novel industry has been slow in introducing diversity in books, so I'm always happy to see more options.

In Full Moon Over Freedom, they were childhood friends, and then they were lovers, and then they didn't talk for years—and now they're back in the same town for the summer, in very different places but very, very much on each other's radar.

Sample takeaways: This preview starts with a (*cough*) not-quite bang that tells me that there is steam aplenty to come in Full Moon Over Freedom, and I'm over the moon (and thus also over Freedom?) to see Mexican-American protagonists in mainstream romance. Gillian—Juliana by birth and to her family—has spent the past decade or more making herself over into someone she thinks of as more palatable to a white East Coast crowd, while Nicky has made a name for himself as a Mexican-American artist, and I'm very curious about how Gillian's identity will evolve over the course of the book.

The full book is out in September, and if the preview is anything to go by it'll be very steamy, with intersectionality and something to learn about Mexican (and Mexican-American) culture—and who can argue with that?

In On the Hustle, he was her boss...and she couldn't stand him, or the way she turned him on. And now that he's not her boss, all he wants is to redefine the relationship.

Sample takeaways: I've said it before and will say it again—I'm thrilled with the turn towards more Latine (and BIPOC more generally) protagonists in mainstream romance. It's beyond high time! What fascinates me here, though, is that these sample chapters have On the Hustle set up to be something of an update on the classic "Greek tycoon" subset of romance novels. (If you're not familiar with the existence of that particular subset—yes. Yes, it is a thing.) Alba is Dominican, and Theo is Dominican-Greek, and it's evident even from these sample chapters that their cultural identities/backgrounds are meant to play a role here.

Even modern-day Greek tycoons are not really my thing, but I'm happy to know that if I ever want to make a comparison between old and new, I know where to look (and I'm intrigued by Alba's business—if you had a room designed around a specific book, which book would you choose?).

In Nobody's Princess, Graham Wynchester dreams of meeting a princess. Unfortunately for him, Kunigunde isn't one...but she is frustrated by convention. Her goal is to work alongside her brothers as a Royal Guard, but as a woman (and a Black woman at that), she's limited in what she's allowed to do. But not to fret...Graham is undeterred by her lack of royal pedigree, and together they're ready to shake things up.

Sample takeaways: Nothing is clearer from the sample than this: Graham is extra. Capital-E Extra, in fact. This is heterosexual romance, but he'd do well as a hero in a m/m romance based in the fashion world, or maybe the drag world. (Not sure he'd be a drag queen himself—he might wreak dapper havoc behind the scenes instead.) He makes for a very entertaining first few chapters—I suspect that, reading the full book, you'd have to suspend your disbelief and also a lot of your knowledge about Regency-era London (on the plus side, I have very little of that knowledge to suspend), but if you're willing to do that it looks like a total romp. Kunigunde is a little harder to read, but I'll always take a heroine who can hold her own over a heroine dead-set on swooning into the hero's arms.

The verdict: If Kunigunde were a princess, I'd probably be all over Nobody's Princess (we all have our reading quirks), despite the doesn't-fit-my-reading-habits Regency setting. As it is, I think I'm most likely to read Full Moon Over Freedom, for the promises of both intersectionality and, uh, full steam ahead.

Thanks to the authors and publishers for providing these samples through NetGalley.

Review: "The Lake House" by Sarah Beth Durst

 

The Lake House by Sarah Beth Durst
Published April 2023 via HarperTeen
★★★★

Three girls arrive at a summer camp deep in the woods in Maine—but nobody's there. The camp is a battered, burnt-out ruin, and the only person they can find is dead. With nobody around to get them out, it's up to them to figure out: who did this? And why? And what will it take for the three of them to survive?

I've read a number of books of late in which it's clear that one of the main characters must have been the perpetrator, and this is basically the opposite: Claire and Mariana and Reyva arrived together, on the same boat—so there are few things of which they are certain, but they know without a doubt that none of them is responsible. They know they can trust each other. As a platonic-friendship story, then, it's fantastic: the girls are all very different, and under normal circumstances they probably wouldn't be friends...but these are not normal circumstances. This is late nights in the woods, in the rain, desperately needing a way to collect water and a way to find food; this is knowing that they aren't alone in the woods, and that nobody is coming to save them, and they'll need to save themselves. Mariana is a girly-girl with a deep love of old cars, and Reyva has gotten used to years of quelling her emotions, and Claire is terrified that her panic attacks will break them apart—and right now, they're all each other has.

I love a mystery that scares me, that makes me afraid that someone is, you know, stalking me through the woods and could slit my throat any minute now. I want to be afraid for the characters, but I want to be so lost in the story that I'm afraid for myself too. And The Lake House gripped me by the throat for the first twenty-one chapters. I was so deep in it that I barely registered the world around me as I walked through my neighborhood with my nose deep in my e-reader, and I jumped every time I caught another person moving in my peripheral vision.

What I didn't love: there's a twist. It's one that will work brilliantly for some readers, and I think it's best to go in not knowing, so I won't get more detailed than that—but it's the sort of twist that neutralizes a lot of the fear for me. I finished the book in a day and slept like a baby, but I sort of wish that I'd read only halfway before calling it a night, and then finished the next day, so that I could have had a bit of that wide-awake-can't-sleep-is-that-something-at-the-window feeling. (I know. It's a personal problem.)

So...not a home run for me, but I can and do happily recommend this for anyone who wants a deep-in-the-woods type of mystery (it's one of my favorite sorts, along with the stuck-in-a-rambling-old-mansion type) with an emphasis on platonic friendship and girls working together.

Thanks to the author and publisher for providing a review copy through NetGalley.

Review: "Cloud Girls" by Lisa Harding

Cloud Girls by Lisa Harding
Published April 2023 via HarperVia
★★★★

My name is Nico. I am thirteen in two weeks and two days. I come from Moldova. My country is shaped like a bunch of grapes and no sea touches it. I shake my head. No. No. No—my name is Natasha Popescu, I am fifteen years old, from a village in Romania whose name I've forgotten. (loc. 2240*)


I don't often start with content warnings, but Cloud Girls calls for one—be aware that this book is about the sexual abuse and exploitation of children.

In Dublin, Sammy is struggling: Her mother is alcoholic and abusive, and her father is physically present but decided a long time ago not to see his wife's illness, or her treatment of Sammy. In Moldova, all Nico wants is to run and play in the trees—but at twelve, her period has come, and she is no longer considered a child.

Here's the difference between them: Sammy thinks she's still in control. Nico knows she isn't.

Cloud Girls slips from small-town Moldova to suburban Ireland, following these two girls as they land in a brothel and their lives become about survival. And it's devastating: once they're in the system, there is precious little they can do to get themselves out of it, and nobody coming to rescue them. For Sammy, that feels like a good thing initially (nobody looking for her means freedom from her mother), but it rapidly becomes apparent to her that she has bitten off far, far more than she can chew, and landed somewhere that she'd never have been able to envision. Nico, too, knows that nobody is coming to rescue her: perhaps her father told himself that he was selling her off to a better life, perhaps he even told himself that he believed that to be true, but...well.

I have only been in this house three days and three nights and already it seems as if three lifetimes have passed. (loc. 3766)

I am reminded strongly of The Unbreakable Heart of Oliva Denaro, of the ways in which girls have long been treated as disposable. In Oliva Denaro, puberty means that it's time for Oliva to be married off, and rape means it's time for her to be married off to her rapist; in Cloud Girls, puberty means that it's time for Nico to be sold off. Decades have passed, and the countries are different, but Sammy and Nico are not in a better situation than Oliva. And so many people are complicit: Nico's father, who sells her, and the people who buy her; the adults who choose not to believe Sammy when she says that home is not a safe place; the border agents who look closely but opt not to ask; the drivers and madams and other brothel employees; the hotel workers who look the other way; the hotel guests who look the other way; and of course the men paying to abuse these children.

All I could think, as I was watching, was thank God it's not me. Something bad has taken up space inside me, and I want to turn away from it, and me. (loc. 3989)

Harding walks a very careful line here: this is a book with a staggering amount of abuse, and she is very careful about what makes it on the page and what is left to be inferred. Go into it with caution, but she's written it for good reason.

Thanks to the author and publisher for providing a review copy through NetGalley.

*I read an ARC, and quotes may not be final.

Review: "Year of No Garbage" by Eve Schaub

Year of No Garbage by Eve Schaub
Published April 2023 via Skyhorse
★★★

Most trash is, one way or another, plastic.

Most plastic, even if it can be recycled now, will eventually end up in a landfill...

...and plastic is everywhere.

When Schaub started her Year of No Garbage in 2020—following up on her Year of No Sugar and Year of No Clutter—she thought it would be pretty straightforward: shop less at big groceries and more at smaller stores; eschew plastic wrap; experiment with alternatives to mainstream toothpaste (since the tubes aren't recyclable) and with more sustainable period products. But she got more than she bargained for: not only did 2020 turn out to be...2020...but the deeper she dug into the recycling pile, the more she found that "it's recyclable" is not the solution one would hope. As the year wore on, Schaub's goal became less to reduce her unrecyclable trash to an amount that could be stored in a glass jar and more to figure out just where the (washed, sorted) plastic piling up in her kitchen would all end up.

This feels like a much more honest book than many of the no-trash journeys I've read about—because Schaub couldn't reduce her waste to a glass jar, not once she figured out what it does, and doesn't, mean for something to be "recyclable" or "compostable." It forces you to look at your grocery basket (plastic) and everything in it: plastic packaging, plastic stickers, plastic netting. Or to reach out and see what you can touch that has plastic: my computer and e-reader and the cables that connect them; the buttons on my cardigan; my synthetic shirt; a pen and earbuds and the cover of a notebook and wrappings on greeting cards and on a pack of tissues.

I did sort of lose steam around the halfway point, when it was clear that the problem was going to boil down to plastic plastic plastic and there wasn't a way to fix it, just to dig deeper into how big the problem is. (I can only imagine how much faster I would have run out of steam if I'd been actually living it rather than reading it!) Still, this ended up being a better fit for me than Year of No Sugar...and I'm curious to see how long Schaub's promise to her family that this was the last project will last.

Thanks to the author and publisher for providing a review copy through NetGalley.

Review: "Testimony" by Jon Ward

 

Testimony by Jon Ward
Published April 2023 via Brazos Press
★★★

The tumult of the last few years has forced me to reassess what I really believe (a process I've gone through a few times in my life now). I've had to pull myself away from the easy anger of opposition and redouble the search to know what I stand for, not just what I'm against. And of course, beyond the what is the why, a set of questions that require even more work to answer. (loc. 148)

Growing up in Evangelical Christianity, Ward was taught that the answers were all there—if only you listened to the people who had them. Give yourself over to God and you will be blessed, I suppose. Only later did he start to dig into the teachings he'd grown up with and to ask himself whether the American Evangelical Christianity he knew was aligned with what Jesus said and did in the Bible, and with the gospel teachings he aimed to stay true to.

I'll say this up front (or as up front as paragraph 3 can be): it's a rhetoric that I'm familiar with because I read too much and am curious about church cultures like the one Ward grew up in, but it's not one that I have personal experience with. I read religious memoirs, and more broadly books about religion, because they interest me, but I am well aware that I (born and bred liberal, not raised with Christianity) am rarely the target audience. Here, the target audience is almost certainly someone closer in background to Ward—a white man who grew up in a certain brand of conservative religion but has since questioned it, or started to question it. So if that sounds like you, this will probably make for a bang-up read, especially if you're interested in the way religion and politics have dovetailed in the US in recent (and not so recent) years.

Ward has clearly put years of work into unpicking what he grew up blindly believing, and even if I don't share his beliefs I can comfortably get on board with what he believes about his beliefs, if that makes sense. Take this summary of the idea of faith: If we say we know something to be true 100 percent with no doubts, then we don't need faith. It's only when we realize we could be wrong, and we can't know for sure, that we must rely on belief. Easier said than done (loc. 2917). In a time when so much gets polarized, or stripped down to its simplest form (not in the sense of "truest form" but rather in the sense of "child's finger painting vs. finely detailed portrait"), Ward is looking for what is complicated and complete.

There is a lot about recent politics here, far more than I expected. Ward is a journalist with extensive experience covering national American politics, and he ties the rise of Evangelicalism neatly with the rise of (sigh) the things that led to the absolute train wreck of political nightmare that was the 2016 presidential election and presidency that followed—and the political nightmare of a power-grab that, under the guise of religion, continues. It's not entirely what I want to be reading (it's not new material if you read too much news from respectable outlets, and I try to limit my political reading to said news because just that raises my blood pressure as it is), but it's concisely and precisely done and would be useful for those who have closer ties to Evangelical circles.

Thanks to the author and publisher for providing a review copy through NetGalley.

Review: "Hyphen" by Pardis Mahdavi

Hyphen by Pardis Mahdavi
Published 2021 via Bloomsbury Academic
★★★★

It is a tiny little line, the hyphen, and yet...

Mahdavi's take on the hyphen is less one for the punctuation nerds than you might think—I say this as someone who got a fair amount of joy out of reading a book about the semicolon and can be counted among those punctuation nerds. While there's a fair amount of punctuation history here (I would not have guessed the role the hyphen played in the Gutenberg Bible), Mahdavi narrows the kerning around the hyphen ever closer to focus on the role of hyphen in identity.

It took me a moment to get into the flow of Hyphen, as I went in expecting something more journalistic, while the reality is often closer to memoir. Through her own story and those of several others, Mahdavi charts what it can mean to be a "hyphenated American," from Roosevelt's appallingly xenophobic speech on the topic to her present-day reality. I was not familiar with the term "hyphenated American," and if you aren't either, I highly recommend looking it up. As someone with three citizenships and some other identities to boot, I love the framing of one being able to "embrace the space between," as Mahdavi says in the preface, rather than having to pick one or the other. (Identity politics get weirder with every additional place you've lived—I still don't have a simple answer for "where are you from?"—although as a white person the question is rarely addressed to me in accusation, which is not the case for many of the hyphenated Americans in this book.)

Mileage of individual books within this Object Lessons series will vary, but I cannot recommend the series itself enough for fellow nerds.

Review: "Pardalita" by Joana Estrela

Pardalita by Joana Estrela
Translated by Lyn Miller-Lachmann
English edition published March 2023 via Em Querido
★★★★

This quiet story follows Raquel, a teenager, through a season of life in her small Portuguese town. Raquel is on the cusp of everything: of being catapulted out of high school and into whatever is beyond it, of moving beyond her small town where everyone knows everywhere, of figuring out who and what she wants to be. And then there's Pardalita, a girl a year or so older who captures Raquel's attention in ways Raquel can't quite bring herself to admit to.

My favorite thing about this is, far and away, the mixed use of art and prose here. Sometimes the book takes the shape of a graphic novel, with fairly simple, straightforward black-and-white drawings, but just as often it falls into a page or two of prose, or prose poetry, as Raquel ruminates on either the current world around her or little vignettes from childhood that influence how she thinks about the world now. The art's not my go-to style (for preference, I guess I lean toward something more lush), but it's clean in a way that makes me twitch to pick up a pen and try to imitate it (I can't draw worth beans, but sometimes, if a drawing is straightforward enough, I can make a reasonable facsimile—if I could draw well enough to make comics, I'd be over the moon).

I suspect this will be fairly hit or miss with readers: it's a quiet story, understated, without a lot of dramatics. I'd have loved to know a bit more about Pardalita and what Raquel sees in her, because to me she's sort of...anywoman? anygirl? And yet I know exactly what Raquel means when she can't help but want to be near Pardalita all the time, when it's almost a relief that Pardalita will be leaving for Lisbon in a few months, because proximity makes the pull that much stronger.

This is one of several graphic novels translated into English that I've read recently, and I'm loving the differences—sometimes just small things, like the shape of the buildings in the background, but also perhaps a difference in the way the story is put together compared to the bulk of the (American) graphic novels I've read. 3.5 stars and would happily read more.

Thanks to the author and publisher for providing a free review copy through NetGalley.

Review: "Sizzle Reel" by Carlyn Greenwald

Sizzle Reel by Carlyn Greenwald
Published April 2023 via Vintage
★★★

Things aren't quite going Luna's way: she's an assistant in a dead-end job rather than a rising star in the cinematography world, she's just barely come out to herself as bi and can't imagine coming out more broadly, and to add insult to injury she's convinced that she's the only virgin left in the world. Enter Valeria, one of Hollywood's new It girls...who happens to have a new project, and who is also tripping Luna's fledgling sense of gaydar.

Val is a highlight of the book—confident and funny and thoughtful. She's good at what she does, and she knows that she's good at what she does, but she's not precious about it. I also love that although there's a love triangle in the book, between Luna and Val and Luna's friend Romy, there's no bad guy here. So many love triangles in books end in "but actually, the wrong person is a terrible person!" which always feels to me like an unrealistic cop-out. And it's genuinely interesting to see Luna frame the world through the lens of a cinematographer: she looks at a moment and imagines it as a scene in a film, thinking about what she'd do with light and camera angles and focus.

In a lot of ways I think Sizzle Reel works best if you read it as being set not in the present day but a decade or so back. In the present day, we have Luna, who 1) is a raised-in-Cali liberal, 2) went to film school, again in California, 3) works in Hollywood, and 4) has a network of queer friends, including 5) her best friend and roommate, with whom she is used to discussing sex and romance. And in that context, I found it surprising that she has so little idea of how two women (or otherwise people without a certain piece of anatomy—they say "sapphics" a lot, perhaps to account for Romy being nonbinary) can have sex. It's more than ignorance, though; it's a real resistance to the numerous people who tell Luna throughout the book that there are more ways to have sex than Tab A into Slot B.

Obviously there's nothing wrong with being a twenty-something (or older!) in 2023 still trying to figure it out. (A man once told me that it wasn't sex if there wasn't the possibility of someone getting pregnant, which is wrong on so many levels that I still can't even begin to sort them out. I asked what that meant about the multiple years I had spent in a live-in relationship with another woman, and he concluded that sex had not been possible. That was in 2019, so I think it's safe to say that more education is needed.) But...it felt like so much of Sizzle Reel keeps circling back to "Okay, now I've done this and this and this and this and this, but none of that counts because it wasn't Tab A into Slot B, and I'm so inexperienced!"

So I'm left with something that is interesting but frustrating. Again, maybe best read as though it takes place a decade earlier, or as though the characters are—in a non-creepy, of-age-to-consent, smaller-age-gap-than-exists-in-the-book way—rather younger.

Thanks to the author and publisher for providing a review copy through NetGalley.

Review: "Hot Dutch Daydream" by Kristy Boyce

Hot Dutch Daydream by Kirsty Boyce
Published April 2023 via HarperTeen
★★★★

If Sage can keep her plans on track, she has it made—a summer in Amsterdam, a prestigious internship, and a bright academic future. And Sage is nothing if not good at keeping her plans on track. But there are complications: first, the internship is a side dish alongside a main of nannying...and second, there's a certain redhead occupying more of Sage's thoughts than she's allowed for, and he's the last person she should be dating.

Hot Dutch Daydream is a follow-up to Hot British Boyfriend, with some overlapping characters and another city to visit. I have an enduring love for YA travel lit, and neither this nor Hot British Boyfriend disappointed. Setting-wise, I'm thrilled that this takes place in a less-traveled place—so much American travel YA takes place in England, France, and Italy, with occasional side trips to Spain or Greece or South Korea. Amsterdam is hardly a backwater place (as the book itself notes, it's a major European city), but it's comparatively rare to see American YA set there. (It is now my fervent wish that Boyce will continue this series with books set in even farther-flung places—how about Warsaw, or Lima, or Ulaanbaatar? You have no idea what I would give for a well-written YA novel set in Ulaanbaatar.)

And character-wise: Sage is a completely different character than Ellie (of "Hot British Boyfriend"), which I also love. Ellie grew on me, but Sage is so wonderfully determined and confident from the get-go—in a way that my teenage self would never have been able to relate to, but my adult self applauds. Also, the loss backstory (Sage had a death in the family a few years prior to the book) is painfully on-point.

I have quibbles, because I always have quibbles: first, although the romance is sweet, I wished we could see a bit more of Sage developing platonic friendships. (If I always have quibbles...I always, always want less romance and more platonic friendship in YA.) And second—although this is such a minor thing—it was kind of surprising that Ryland had never been to Berlin and was worried about the cost of a flight. Travel in Europe is a lot easier, and cheaper, than in the US, and while a bus from Amsterdam to Berlin is not the most fun road trip ever, it's certainly doable (about thirty euros, one-way). Ryland doesn't seem like someone to let a mid-length bus trip deter him from seeing a city that has long been friendly to artists.

Someday I'll learn to pace myself when reading light and very entertaining fiction, but that day is not today. An excellent read for a dreary winter day when I was wishing for summer.

Thanks to the author and publisher for providing a free review copy through NetGalley.

Review: "Shadow of the West" by Sarah Brotherhood Chapman

Shadow of the West by Sarah Brotherhood Chapman
Published April 2023 via Black Rose Writing
★★★

West Berlin, 1977: The daughter of a diplomat, Kate is starting over in yet another school and yet another country. In West Berlin, though, she can't exactly stroll carelessly out of town for a day trip—West Berlin is an enclave, surrounded by layers of wall and death strip and gun-toting soldiers.

East Berlin, 1977: Anika and Michael are scraping by, barely. They are not fans of the communist regime—and the communist regime is not a fan of their family.

With the Wall, never the twain should meet—but Kate is desperately curious about life on the other side, and Anika and Michael have good reason to seek out connections with the West...and to seek out reasons for hope.

I jumped at the chance to read this, because so much YA set in Germany is about WWII, and I'm curious about times since then. The Cold War makes for such a rich setting, and a divided Berlin is particularly illustrative—one side literally walled in, yet with freedoms and excesses, and the other side with...none of that, at least not for the common people. (I know Berlin very well but still have trouble wrapping my head around the way the Wall, and in particular West Berlin, worked.) Here, as a Westerner, Kate can go back and forth more or less at will, and an unexpected connection with Michael makes her far more curious than most of her classmates.

There are some really smart choices here, some of which may be reflective of the author's own experience as a diplomat's child who lived in West Berlin as a teenager: Kate already speaks some German, which makes it easier for her to communicate in the East. (I suspect her command of German is higher than is realistic for her situation, but it serves the story well.) She makes some rather teenaged choices, but she's also been around the block before—she knows from time in Moscow what it means to live in a communist state, and how to cover conversations and sometimes tracks if you don't want the government listening in, and how far she can safely push the envelope. (She also knows, crucially, that as an American with a diplomatic passport, she is at far less risk in East Berlin than anyone she might interact with.) Details add to the story—on the train from Berlin to Frankfurt, for example, Kate and her classmates aren't allowed to open the window blinds. Can't have the Westerners seeing, or making eye contact with, people from East Germany while they're on their way from a Western enclave to the open West. (I'd have loved more direct contrast of the living situations—a comparison of Kate's room in the West and Anika's in the East, maybe, or about the groceries that Anika and Michael can and cannot get. How close are they to hunger? When Kate brings cookies, how usual or unusual would that feel?) The romance is also appropriately complicated, as there's never really a question of whether or not an East-West relationship can work.

The ending (vagueness to avoid spoilers!) is not my favorite. You can see the outline of the end coming from quite some distance, but it would have felt more realistic to me for the original plan to work out. Evil villains who are evil are also not my favorite, and the one here is a guy that Kate literally describes as looking "like a comic-book villain" (loc. 3625) the first time she sees him; he sneers and jeers and laughs sardonically, among...well, a lot of other things. To be fair, the villains of the USSR seem to have operated with a level of power that allowed them blatancy, but villains so slimy they leave tracks will never be my choice in books.

Overall, a fascinating look at a place and time that both are singular and bear resemblance to current situations—think of the way North Koreans are blocked off from the rest of the world, or the way Putin has tried to isolate Ukraine. 3.5 stars, and I'll look with interest for any future books Chapman writes.

Thanks to the author and publisher for providing a review copy through NetGalley.

Review: "The Fiancée Farce" by Alexandria Bellefleur

 

The Fiancée Farce by Alexandria Bellefleur
Published April 2023 via Avon
★★★★

A classic romance trope meets a queer love story in this fast-paced read for fans of Ashley Herring Blake.

Tansy is more comfortable with her books than with people—and inventing a girlfriend based on a romance novel cover didn't seem too risky. For better or for worse, though, that romance novel cover model is a real person...with a very good reason to want a fake girlfriend, and a real fiancée, of her own. Shenanigans (need I say it?) ensue.

Now—I read this 90% for the cover, 5% for the fact that one heroine works in a bookstore and the other works in publishing, and 5% for it being a contemporary queer romance novel. And take heart, readers: the cover is ripped directly from the contents of the book. (I'm less thrilled by the fact that the cover artist has removed Tansy's curves, but the dresses are well and truly in there.)

What intrigued me so much upon reading this, though, was just how much of a classic trope this is—engagement/marriage of convenience based on a little white lie—but updated for the present day. The conflict with Tansy's stepfamily is reminiscent of Delilah Green Doesn't Care, sure, but fake-engagement-turned-real setup is straight out of Turbulent Covenant, published in 1980. Turbulent Covenant remains the worst romance novel that I've ever read, but not because of the trope; it's so terrible because the hero is a would-be rapist who chokes the terrified heroine, leaves bruises, etc., and gets away with it all because love...and because of their marriage of convenience. The Fiancée Farce, thank sweet mercy, takes one look at that sort of predecessor, says fuck no, and proceeds to get on with the heroines both being complicated, imperfect human beings who—and I cannot overstate the importance of this—genuinely care about consent and long-term emotional impact and so on. Could one heroine probably use a long chat with her therapist somewhere between chapter 25 and the epilogue? Definitely. Would the other heroine benefit from trying dry January? Most likely. But they're not compounding each other's stresses.

The other thing I love about this book: Tansy and Gemma talk to each other. Again, I cannot overemphasize this: there are so many moments when there's a misunderstanding, or room for a misunderstanding, and the classic thing to do is to spin it out into a she-said-she-said (hah) drama for twenty or fifty or two hundred pages (the old "you mean she's your sister?" thing). Instead, Tansy and Gemma make a point to seek each other out, to say, "Hey, I heard this thing, but I want to hear your side of it. Can you elaborate?" It makes their budding relationship so much healthier and more functional, and it means that very little of the overarching conflict is the sort of thing that could have been solved with an honest conversation anywhere in the past hundred and fifty pages. It warms the cockles of my cold little heart.

3.5 stars, rounded up to 4 because there are bookstore cats called Mills and Boon.

Thanks to the author and publisher for providing a free review copy through NetGalley.

Review: "Questionnaire" by Evan Kindley

Questionnaire by Evan Kindley
Published 2016 via Bloomsbury Academic
★★★

The humble questionnaire: whether at the doctor's office or while wasting time on Buzzfeed, we've all been subject to our fair share. Here, although he discusses a range of questionnaires, Kindley zeroes in on those designed to look at personality...for various reasons, and with various results.

This is part of Objects Lessons, a Bloomsbury Academic series investigating the lives and histories of ordinary objects. The first I read from the series, Pregnancy Test, was largely straightforward—history plus cultural context—and this is largely similar in setup (...history plus cultural context...) but ends up feeling as though it has had to take a more targeted direction. These are short books, and there's a limit to how many types of questionnaire, and how many of the surrounding concerns and things to think about, Kindley could cover.

By and large, I found the first half of this book more interesting than the second, as the development of different questionnaires and what scientists have made of the results is...engaging, to say the least. (Let's just say that the idea of scientific rigour has changed over the years.) Towards the end, Kindley dates the book badly by zeroing in on Buzzfeed quizzes and privacy concerns—privacy concerns are definitely not a dated concept, and Buzzfeed is still alive and kicking, but it's also taken a kicking or two since this book was published. There are some terrifically funny details throughout the book (apparently, on OkCupid, "the answer to the question 'Do you like the taste of beer?' is more predictive than any other of whether you're willing to have sex on a first date" (94)—god, the data people at OkCupid must be able to run such weird and interesting data through all sorts of things), but I found myself wishing that I'd read this when Buzzfeed still felt current.

Review: "The Forgotten Girls" by Monica Potts

 

The Forgotten Girls by Monica Potts
Published April 2023 via Random House
★★★★

In Clinton, Arkansas, where Potts grew up, options were slim. "In high school," she writes, "I feared I only had two paths forward in life. One was to get stuck in Clinton and start having babies as soon as possible. The other was to go away to college. I didn't know many people, let alone daughters of plumbers, who went to college, stayed for four years, and graduated with a degree, except for my teachers. But I imagined college was my safest exit from Clinton" (loc.1358*). Potts and her best friend, Darci, were both poor, but they had the drive to get out, and they had the grades, and they knew that Clinton wouldn't be their forever place—they'd go to college, they'd make something of themselves. And Potts did just that: went to Bryn Mawr, found stability and a career path and the American Dream, if you will.

But this book isn't really about Potts's path. Instead it's an investigation into Darci's life—into how, when Potts was getting degrees and white-collar jobs, Darci ended up spiralling further and further through addiction and prison and homelessness and on it goes. Potts wrote this with Darci's full knowledge, and so she was able to interview both Darci and many people in Darci's life, and to use years of Darci's diaries and sometimes paperwork to fill in gaps.

I thought a lot about Venn diagrams when reading this. At first I thought Darci's circumstances could be illustrated by a fairly simple Venn diagram, with perhaps four circles—poverty, addiction, abuse, maybe lack of education. They can all feed into each other, meaning that more overlaps can make it harder to take even one thing out of the equation...but even if you can take one thing out of the equation, there are still the rest to contend with, and there's no guarantee that things won't get worse rather than better. But to really grasp the extent of Darci's situation, you'd have to expand the diagram: poverty, addiction, abuse, lack of education; then also incarceration (and other run-ins with the law), dysfunctional family life, lack of opportunities, parenting without resources, a societal tendency to view poverty and addiction as moral failings, a simple lack of expectation from others that she would, or could, be more. (We're gonna need a bigger diagram.)

There aren't easy answers here, or an easy conclusion. For the sake of spoilers, I'll avoid details about Darci as the book moves into the present day, but the Clinton of the end of the book is much like the Clinton of the beginning of the book, except poorer and with fewer opportunities and with a much bigger meth problem. But Potts isn't really trying to answer the question of "What will fix this?"—she's saying, instead, "these are some of the many, many ways in which life can be incredibly hard for women in these poor, rural towns." It feels like a cliché to say so, but the book is both compassionate and unflinching.

Readers interested in the experiences of women in the small-town South may also like Hill Women, Kin, and Cottonmouths.

Thanks to the author and publisher for providing a review copy through NetGalley.

*I read a review copy, so quotes may not be final.

Review: "Jackal" by Erin E. Adams

Jackal by Erin E. Adams
Published October 2022 via Bantam
★★★

Every year, a Black girl goes missing in Johnstown. Sometimes her body turns up later; sometimes she's never found. The police do nothing. Liz has been aware of some of the dangers for years, but she's also long since moved away—and it's not until Liz returns for a wedding and her best friend's daughter is taken that she starts to understand the scope of the problem, and how little the people around her choose to care.

Conceptually, I love this: here is an author tackling the deaths that don't get media attention, the voices that don't get heard—in this small town, the police are ready and willing to declare each death an accident, or to blame it on animals, or to otherwise look the other way, because as far as society is concerned these are not girls who count.

In practice, I was looking for something else. I love a classic psychological thriller—one that keeps me awake at night, scared that there is someone outside the window. I want to be afraid for the protagonist, and I want to see her work to figure out who is responsible and how to keep them from doing more harm. Jackal turned out to have something of a supernatural bent, and while it works on a metaphorical/allegorical level, very little of Liz's time seemed to be spent on, you know, desperately seeking her friend's beloved daughter, and only towards the end did there seem to be any real risk to Liz. (Does this sound kind of callous? It's not meant to be–I want a thriller to properly scare me, which this one didn't; I also want to care about the characters enough to worry about them, and here, when a character is murdered, it makes little impact.)

There's still a really valuable story in here—one of violence that goes unchecked because the authorities value some people more than others, and of characters like Liz unlearning the lesson that they have to fit themselves into certain boxes. Jackal wasn't quite the plot/style I was hoping for, but I'll keep my eyes peeled for something similar without the supernatural elements.

Review: "Good Girls" by Hadley Freeman

Good Girls by Hadley Freeman
Published April 2023 via Simon & Schuster
★★★★

Freeman was barely a teenager when she developed anorexia, and she spent the next few years in and out of—mostly in—hospital. She recovered, but for decades afterward it was a tenuous version of recovery, holding just steady enough to avoid another cycle of downward spirals. In Good Girls, she draws on that experience to both tell her own story and dig a bit deeper into the cultural context and understanding of anorexia, then and now.

I'm particularly interested in Freeman's discussion of the intersections between autism, gender dysphoria, and eating disorders—she's not the first to make the connections, but they're new enough connections that I am only now starting to see some of them in books. Freeman clarifies early on that she neither has questioned her gender nor is on the autism spectrum, but it's still one of the deeper looks at the connections that I've seen in book form, and it makes me wonder whether she has written (or researched) an article or two on the subject.

By and large, Good Girls is not a huge departure from other eating-disorder memoirs. That's less a criticism than an observation that there's a limit to how different stories of repeat hospitalizations can be; if you've read one well-written book on the experience there are probably quite a lot of others you can scratch off the list. (Good thing I'm not good at scratching unread books off the list, I suppose.) I would note that this is definitely not a healthy book for anyone not already healthy or securely in recovery; Freeman makes an effort to step away from specifics, but eating disorders are masters at fostering competition, and even without specific numbers there's quite a lot of competitive material in here.

Freeman's descriptions of the treatment she received as a teenager can be incisive; it is of course impossible to say how things might have been different had she been treated under a different model, but the descriptions of her treatment in the 90s are largely bleak. Much has changed (late in the book she reports visiting one of the hospitals where she spent time and noting markers of more individualized treatment, such as different meal plans), but it will be interesting to see how current treatment is viewed in another ten or twenty years.

Thanks to the author and publisher for providing a review copy through NetGalley.

Review: "The Only Daughter" by A.B. Yehoshua

The Only Daughter by A.B. Yehoshua
Translated by Stuart Schoffman
English translation published April 2023 via HarperVia
★★★

Rachele is eleven, almost twelve, with a precocious intelligence and a certain naïveté. In Padua, where she lives, her family are oddities of a sort, Jews in a Catholic country. But Rachele is not quite in a place, yet, to worry about the differences in the beliefs of different religions—her concern is more that her non-Jewish grandmother might be hurt by a Hebrew prayer that puts Jews first. With her father unwell (growing an appendage, as Rachele understands it), Rachele seeks to better understand her place in the world in this character-driven book.

Religion and family are the thickest of themes throughout the book, though neither of them is treated too heavily—every character treats their religion, whether Jewish or Christian or atheist, slightly differently; Rachele loves her family with the uncomplicated passion of a child, and is forced for the first time to consider that her parents might not be invincible, but if I had to pick a singular thing to answer the question of "what is this book about," I wouldn't say illness or religion but rather a girl on the cusp of growing up.

I'm very curious about the inspiration for this novel—Yehoshua was Israeli and lived almost his entire life in Israel; as far as I can tell neither he nor his family ever lived in Italy. It's hard to know what to make, then, of this story of a girl, in so many skins that the did not wear—religious outsider, girl, Italian. (Especially curious to me when Yehoshua wrote and spoke so passionately about his Israeli identity.) It would be interesting to see what a female author might do with this same subject—some parts of this book (e.g., a priest's treated-as-well-intentioned wish that a pretty, lively eleven-year-old were ten years older so that he might marry her) could only have been written by a man, and...I suppose I'd like to hear from a woman who was once eleven and Jewish in Italy what that was like for her.

It's been so interesting to delve a bit more into translated fiction this year—such different styles! Hard to know how much of that is cultural and how much is just a given author's styles...I suppose I'll have to keep reading more books by more people from far-flung places to gather more data.

Thanks to the publisher for providing a review copy through NetGalley.