Review: "Kidnapped!" by Kate William (created by Francine Pascal)

Kidnapped! by Kate William (created by Francine Pascal)
Published 1984
★★

One minute Elizabeth is leaving her volunteer shift at the hospital...and then next she's waking up a prisoner. She's been kidnapped!

I'm not sure if I read this one back in the day, and I'm honestly not sure why I read it now. It's perhaps worth noting that this is only book 13 in a series that ultimately had 140+ books, and already Jessica has run off with any number of Bad Boys, Elizabeth has been in a coma following a motorcycle accident, and a recurring secondary character has been diagnosed with leukemia. I don't think the publisher had heard of pacing themselves...or maybe they just knew from the beginning that this was going to be an absolute soap opera. (I'm still thinking about rereading the miniseries, somewhere deep in the later books, in which an evil lookalike decides to kill Elizabeth and take over her life...)

For all that the book is ostensibly about Elizabeth's kidnap, it's still Jessica who gets...well, if not top billing, prime screentime. It's been fascinating to me to see how aware the writers were of Jessica's...Jessica-ness...even early on in the series. Here's Todd, Elizabeth's boyfriend, thinking about Jessica: While he wouldn't put it past Jessica to engage in a bout of feeling sorry for herself in an attempt to get pity, he wanted to believe she was sincere this time. The only person or thing Jessica truly couldn't live without was her twin, and Todd knew she would fall to pieces if something were to happen to Elizabeth. (42)

Jessica doesn't even like Elizabeth, let alone respect her, half the time, so this feels telling, if not surprising. Later in the book, a boy Jessica has the hots for expresses interest in Elizabeth: There was no way Elizabeth could mistake the look she saw in his eyes, a look that said, "You're the one I want." It made her feel awkward and uncomfortable. She had a strong suspicion that Nicholas hadn't reacted this way with Jessica. And she dreaded what would happen when Jessica found out. (92) And that's it in a nutshell, isn't it? Elizabeth is the only one Jessica really loves...but the limitations run deep. After all, what Jessica wants, Jessica gets...

I originally gave this three stars, but it's not actually better than the first book, just marginally less chaotic.

Review: "The Mango Tree" by Annabelle Tometich

The Mango Tree by Annabelle Tometich
Published April 2024 via Little, Brown and Company
★★★★

Tometich was not prepared to get a call from her mother telling her that her mother was in jail for shooting at someone who had raided her mango tree—but neither was Tometich entirely surprised. When a person has lost so much, what’s a tree? When a person has lost so much, how can they lose anything more? (loc. 5145*)

The mango-tree misadventures bookend the story, but the bulk of the material is about what came before: Tometich’s upbringing in Florida with her American father and Filipina mother, and her mother’s story more generally. Because: it was in many ways not an easy upbringing for Tometich, but neither was it an easy life for her mother.

When I think of my mother, I don’t see her, I feel her. She’s a stake driven deep into the ground, the kind you see tethering newly planted trees and disaster tarps in place. She has kept our family from toppling sideways while punching a hole clean through the middle. (loc. 136)

If Tometich can’t quite reconcile her two understandings of her mother—one, as someone who slowly unraveled over time; two, as someone who won every academic award possible and thrived on a challenge and systematically set out to ensure that both she and her family members had as many advantages as she could give them—it’s because, for all that the things aren’t mutually exclusive, they’re just…still hard to reconcile.

The story is studded with fleshy, sun-ripened mangoes, not just from the tree at the center of Tometich’s mother’s court case but as something more broadly symbolic. A mango farm isn’t like the apple orchards up north, writes Tometich, or even the citrus groves that speckle the Sunshine State’s inland areas. Mango trees need room to breathe. They require space. If you plant them too close together, the humid air gets caught in their overlapped branches and the trees go soggy with rot. Too close together and their growth will be stunted, the trees will never reach their full potential. (loc. 832) Mangoes that her mother cherishes, mangoes that Tometich’s white acquaintances experience as more nuisance than treat, mangoes that come to represent the injustice of being forced to be a perpetual outsider in your home.

I love memoir for letting me into lives and experiences unlike my own, and The Mango Tree does that in more ways than one. 3.5 stars, and it will be interesting to see the discussion around this one.

*Quotes are from an ARC and may not be final.

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

Review: "Showdown at the Mall" by Diana Gallagher

 

Showdown at the Mall by Diana Gallagher
Published 1997
★★★

Picked this up because I thought it was the one in which Sabrina and her aunts get trapped in a magical mall (and I have nostalgic, if vague, feelings about that book), but...nope. Maybe that's book three. (Will have to read further; how sad.)

In Showdown at the Mall, Sabrina and her classmates are given weekend work assignments. Sabrina lucks out and gets her first-choice assignment at a chic store with hilariously awful-sounding clothing, but luck does not stay on her side—among other things, a random cousin of hers is in town and determined to create chaos. It's a test of...well, not epic proportions, but as it turns out, Sabrina has to prove her worth as a witch with a conscience (as opposed to a witch who is happy to wreak havoc in the mortal world, just for the fun of it). Never mind that her cousin, who wants nothing more than to wreak all the havoc and then leave the mortal realms and all the chaos she's created behind, doesn't seem to be held to the same standards...

Anyway, the plot itself is a bit silly and not much to write home about, but the clothing descriptions! It disturbs me that I remember all of this sounding very fashionable when I read it in the 90s/early aughts:

Jenny tugged on her multicolored paisley vest and smoothed her short skirt. (12)

Sabrina sifted through a rack of velour tunic tops and pulled out one in sea-foam green. "This is perfect for you. Especially if you coordinate it with those." Turning abruptly, Sabrina moved down the aisle to get a pair of dark green pants made of a tight stretch knit fabric. (27)

Inspired by the fashions depicted in a recent teen magazine, she had wished up a short, light-brown flared skirt, laced brown shoes with stubby two-inch heels, and a sky-blue Shaker sweater worn over a white knit shirt. (85)

The manager was looking fashionably hot in belted, dark brown, flared pants and a long-sleeved, light green blouse with a dramatically tapered collar. A scarf with a swirling pattern in shades of the same colors was loosely knotted around her neck, and brown platform shoes easily added three inches to her height. (95)

The cheerleader was wearing a stunning, loosely knit beige vest over a stylish light blue blouse tucked into a short, dark blue skirt. (114)

Never mind the plot, that's what I came here for.

Review: "Even if We're Broken" by A.M. Weald

Even if We're Broken by A.M. Weald
Published April 2024
★★★★

In Colorado, Kate is reeling: her long-term, live-in girlfriend has just left without warning or explanation, she's turning to alcohol and pills more and more often in order to sleep, and she still has lingering thoughts of what could have been.

In Norway, Ben too is struggling: his marriage being over is one thing, but his teenage daughter slowly rejecting him is another. Add to that an injured back and a changing body that he hasn't made peace with, and his day-to-day existence feels tenuous.

What connects them: decades earlier, they met on an archeological dig; they've stayed very loosely in touch, but both of them have always wondered: what if that was the one? And now, back together on a dig in Newfoundland, they have the chance to explore that.

I read another novel set at an archeology dig a year or so ago, so my interest was piqued when I saw the similar (well—not all that similar—but related) setting here. Kate and Ben both have extensive experience and a genuine love for their jobs, which I appreciate; there's a fair amount of drama and tension within the book, but (almost) none of it has to do with people behaving badly at work. Instead, the story is largely an exploration of two people who are not really young any more, and bringing some baggage to the table, and both determined that even when they cannot make seek the best for themselves, they can help the other seek more positive things.

There are some places where I'm not sold: the exes get a bit unnecessarily evil (which is always a pity in books that are otherwise aiming for character complexity), the proofreading gets a bit shaky, and I would have loved more archeology scenes and details. But I found the dynamic Kate and Ben develop to be really satisfying—like, they're both very clear on the fact that if it comes down to Ben's daughter or his new romance, Ben will pick his daughter; it should be a obvious thing but is something that I don't see come up all that often in fiction. Or: sex is a part of the book (not a huge part), and one of the points there is that these are not twentysomethings who spend hours at a time on every position imaginable; they are humans with human limitations, and that's okay. Or: there are moments of insecurity here (plenty of them), but never the cheap shots of small misunderstandings that rapidly become gulfs.

I'm not sure how best to categorize this: there are elements of romance, but it feels more like a coming-of-(middle)-age story in a lot of ways. Two people growing up and figuring it out. Either way, it made for a satisfying read.

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

Review: "The Husbands" by Holly Gramazio

The Husbands by Holly Gramazio
Published April 2024 via Doubleday
★★★★

Imagine it: you're living in London in a flat you inherited from your grandmother. You're single, and that's basically fine. And...then you come home one night and find a husband in your flat. A husband you've never met. And when he goes up to the attic for something, a different husband comes down in his place, and the world resets—and again, and again, and again.

That's where Lauren finds herself when this book opens.

I read this for the premise, and oh gosh, it did not disappoint. We've probably all imagined how our lives might have been different if we'd made a different decision here or there, and in The Husbands, Lauren is living it. With each man who clatters down from the attic, not just the husband shifts but also the world around her: different jobs, different friends, different hobbies; sometimes a husband is just fine but in this world her relatives have made different choices that she can't conceive of living with; sometimes she's married into money and sometimes she's deeply in debt. Some things remain basically consistent, but sometimes things are...complicated.

And so the question goes from which husband can I live with for the short term, just until my friend's wedding? to can I live with any of these husbands in the long term? and eventually to which version of my life can I live with?

There's a point at which Lauren's experience with the attic becomes something like Tinder brought to life. This husband is too tall? Send him back. This husband has a hideous moustache? Send him back. Yet another husband wants to watch Mastermind? Send him back. Gramazio keeps things moving, introducing a midway twist or two to keep the book from getting too predictable, but it's worth noting that Lauren's versions of her life are almost all very similar. In some ways the best part of the book is not what happens in it but the impetus to imagine the same version of one's own life. Like, for sensible structural purposes, Lauren's inherited flat keeps her mostly living in London, but I can imagine outcomes of my own life in which I was living in Berkeley or Raleigh or Vancouver or Boston or London or Cologne, to name a few. Oh, or Prague or Eugene or Toronto or...probably some places I've never been in this life. Saskatoon! There's definitely a version of my life in which I moved to Saskatoon.

Three things that I would have liked to see: first, Lauren ends up married to surprisingly few people she knows from real life, and that's kind of odd to me. She never stops to ask herself exactly how far back these possibilities go (is it only about decisions she's made since, say, leaving school, or do decisions her parents made when she was 10 factor in?), and although I don't think that would change things—it's not like she's going back in time—I have to think that there are versions of my own life in which I ended up entangled with someone I first met as a teen.

Second—and I can't actually ding the book for this, because it's clearly an intentional decision, and I understand why—the part of me that enjoys letting my imagination run away with itself wouldn't have minded Lauren's attic being more like Bohai's version of life...though to avoid spoilers, that's all I'll say about that. (But if there's ever a sequel...)

And third, while I again understand that this makes sense within the limitations of what's happening with the attic, I did think it rather a pity that every single outcome here seemed to revolve around which man some version of Lauren has married. And...it would be hard to go from outcome-with-husband to outcome-without-husband and back if sending the husband up to the attic is necessary to reset things, but in that hypothetical sequel, I sort of want to see outcomes (some or all) in which the heroine is living variations on the single life.

But all told, I had a fine old time with this—I loved the concept too much to be plagued by too many questions until I'd finished reading and started thinking more in depth about the what ifs of it all. I'll have to keep an eye out for whatever Gramazio writes next.

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

Review: "The Girls" by Chloe Higgins

The Girls by Chloe Higgins
Published 2019 via Picador Australia
★★★

In 2005, Higgins had a 'normal' life: parents and two sisters, plans for university, day-to-day good and bad. And then the car her father was driving went off the road, and Higgins' sisters—she had stayed home to study—were both killed, and her life's trajectory skidded sharply off course.

In The Girls, Higgins tracks the what came after: the way her father folded into himself with grief and self-blame, and her mother desperately tightened her grip on her one remaining child, and Higgins came unmoored. What interests me most is her commentary on memory and its inconsistencies: this thing happened like this, she'll say, and then she'll check in with a parent or a friend or someone else who was there, and they'll say no, it happened like this. Memory is a fallible thing, made ever more fallible by grief. And then the bigger gaps:

Besides these small details, my mind draws a blank.

I tell my mother about my shame and my lack of memories, and she says, 'But don't you remember? That time Carlie got her foot stuck in the bus door and you helped her and screamed at the bus driver to stop, got the door opened, helped her off and walked her home?'

I nod.

'Don't you remember?'

I don't. (52)

This is one of the things that terrifies me about grief, the idea of forgetting what came before. I worry about memories worn smooth with time, memories that you've turned over so many times in your mind that the sharpness of the details is gone, but also about memories that just slip away from disuse (or, as is perhaps more apt in Higgins' case, trauma) with nobody to remind you of them. The memories you don't know are missing.

The scope of the loss described in The Girls is devastating and the grief messy and raw. I'm still working out what I as a reader am looking for in grief memoirs, which I approach with trepidation, but it's hard not to respect Higgins' willingness to unravel it all and stitch it all up again.

Review: "Moving to Delilah" by Catherine Owen

Moving to Delilah by Catherine Owen
Published April 2024 via Freehand Books
★★★★

As cities get more and more crowded and rents move ever higher, sometimes there's only one thing to do—evacuate to more affordable areas. That's just what Owens did: dreaming of a place of her own, she left Vancouver for Edmonton, moving into a century-old saltbox house. It surely would not, not now, or never, let you down. It surely would not, not now (or never?) let you down. (loc. 72*)

I appreciate (and understand) poetry best when it is rooted in the concrete, and in many ways Moving to Delilah is the epitome of that—a hunt for roots, for permanence, for a foundation.

Inside an empty cupboard we found the permit to build, its back scarred with tack marks, front bearing the contractor's name and a list of tasks to be checked off. None were. Or else the yellowed progression of time had swallowed the ticks that claimed the foundation (yes) had been finished or the frame (yes), the base (yes). We can see the evidence, the proof it was, yet the record is gone.

How much we rely
On the writing in the sand
Near a hungry sea. (loc. 170)

A mix of prose poetry and straight verse, Moving to Delilah chronicles those first years of home ownership and putting down roots, sometimes literally (gardening) and sometimes less so (digging into the history of the house and the land). It's an understated story—no big dramas, focused on rootedness rather than restlessness and permanence of place rather than more ephemeral emotions. A satisfying read.

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

*Quotes are from an ARC and may not be final.

Review: "Emily" by Emily Smucker

Emily by Emily Smucker
Published 2009 via HCI
★★★

When she was seventeen, Smucker found herself sick. For Smucker, whose immune system wasn't the strongest at the best of times, this wasn't unusual...but then she didn't get better, and didn't get better, and didn't get better. What her family thought was "Emily flu" turned out to be the West Nile Virus, a mosquito-borne illness with no cure other than rest and time. Months and months of time.

This was contracted as part of a series of what I can only call "teen issue memoirs", and I picked it up after reading Smucker's second book. Some of the series covers relatively unusual subjects as far as teen issue books go (chronic/long-term illness, trichotillomania, murdered parent), and I can see why Smucker's submission (some of which is adapted from her blog) was chosen: even as a teenager she wrote with a certain degree of whimsy and an awareness that readers did not want a dry "here is what happened today", day in and day out.

I am a bit sorry not to see more about West Nile Virus: I know so little (read: nothing) about it, and if you had asked me last week I would not have guessed that it is (thank you, CDC website) "the leading cause of mosquito-borne disease in the continental United States". Most of the symptoms seem to be fairly vague—fever, malaise—but can lay somebody out for quite some time. A couple of things were dropped (what happened with the white blood cells?), but it looks like Smucker has done some low-key revisions for a new version, so maybe that will follow up on those threads.

All told, a quick read that mostly satisfied my curiosity...but if you read this, I'd recommend going for the updated version and also maybe looking up West Nile Virus early on in your read.

Review: "Sabrina the Teenage Witch" by Bobbi Weiss and David Cody Weiss

Sabrina the Teenage Witch by Bobbi Weiss and David Cody Weiss
Published 1997
★★★

Back on the nostalgia reads: I stumbled across a mention of Sabrina the Teenage Witch the other day and thought I’d see how the books have aged. I didn’t watch the show (maybe an episode or two at a friend’s house?), but we had one or two of the books hanging around, and I’m pretty sure the library had more.

In this first book of the series, Sabrina wakes up as a sixteen-year-old…and as a witch. The magic of this particular witchy world is…let’s say it’s a little loosey-goosey. There are technically rules (can’t turn back time without permission!), but for the most part Sabrina can just point, wiggle her fingers, maybe say a few words, and presto chango*! Magic. Accidentally turn someone into a pineapple? No biggie.

I’m guessing the plot points pull from multiple episodes of the show, because the plot is semi-incoherent (various events strung together by magic and little else) and Sabrina is a scatterbrained little ditz whose only interests are Harvey (Harvey Dwight Kinkle, poor kid) and clothing—though she doesn’t seem to have any sense of style beyond “it’s the 90s, gotta have those tan slacks and satin tops!”

Still, the sense of possibility here is kind of fantastic. More recent YA about magic typically comes with all sorts of rules and limitations, but if I had magic…? Give me the sort that Sabrina and her aunts play with, where you can create a temporary date with Man-Doh and the point is more about frivolity than about saving the world.

*I checked the spelling with Merriam-Webster, but surely presto change-o would make more sense?

Review: "Mistress of Life and Death" by Susan Eischeid

Mistress of Life and Death by Susan Eischeid
Published December 2023 via Citadel Press
★★★

When Maria Mandl, an overseer at several Nazi concentration camps, was brought to trial in 1947, the charges against her were vast and chilling. The outcome was perhaps inevitable, and her name has since then been linked with incredible cruelty.

In Mistress of Life and Death, Eischeid—a musician who was intrigued by Mandl's decision to start a concentration-camp orchestra—sets out to tell a more complete story of Mandl's life, from her small-town upbringing to the series of events and choices that put her in positions of power in various concentration camps to her eventual death.

It's...a pretty depressing book. The chapters are very, very short, making it a fast read, but a huge amount of the book is about cruelty. People who grew up with Mandl seem to have agreed that her turn to cruelty was a surprise, that she was "a nice girl from a good family" (18)...but there aren't that many specifics, whether because those who knew Mandl before the war were dead by the time Eischeid did her interviews or because they were unwilling to speak. Consequently, much of the book becomes a litany of abuses that Mandl perpetrated.

In theory, Eischeid also sets out to answer questions along the lines of what caused a nice girl from a good family to become one of the most notorious criminals of the Holocaust? andhow does one reconcile good things about a person with terrible things? In practice, though, so much of the book is about those terrible things that the more complicated questions get buried; Mandl's initial move to work in the concentration camps is written off with a limp explanation that her engagement had just broken up. (Might have been a catalyst, but most people whose engagements break up do not go on to be notorious for their use of torture and murder!) A Holocaust survivor who knew Mandl sums it up as "She was a nobody. Suddenly she was a somebody" (299), and that feels on point, but I would have loved a bit more of a delve into psychology (surely there are volumes upon volumes written about the psychology of the Holocaust). There's brief discussion of some of the other woman guards in the concentration camps—and the fact that they generally did not come from privileged or educated backgrounds—and I wish that had been gone into further. To me, the interesting question is not what atrocities did she commit? (which is basically the question answered in the book) but rather what makes a person do such terrible things, especially when others choose not to? How much might feelings of inferiority, or a first chance to have any kind of power, have played a factor? Or youth? None of this takes away from the crimes, obviously, but they beg for more investigation. Consider, again, a nice girl from a good family—what stands between that and a Nazi concentration camp guard?

An oddity: Mistress of Life and Death was first published in 2023, but when Eischeid talks about the "now" she's generally talking about 2006 or so. Hanna Wysocka, eighty-seven years old in 2006, is a keen, wiry woman... (205). I imagine that this is because most of the research and interviews were done around that time and it took a long time to complete the book, which is fine, but I wish some updates had been done to the language. (2006 was almost twenty years ago! It's no longer "now"!)

I'm glad to have read this, because it's important history, but I think I would have gotten just as much or more out of (e.g.) a more general look at the Holocaust's concentration camp guards.

Review: "Overshadowed" by Eva O'Connor

Overshadowed by Eva O'Connor
Published January 2016 via Methuen Drama
★★★

Overshadowed is a short play chronicling one girl's experience with an eating disorder, which has a voice and a role of its own in the play. What's most interesting to me about this is that I watched the BBC adaptation (available on YouTube) before I read this script. I routinely wonder, when reading plays, how something might actually look on the stage (or, in this case, on the small screen), so it's kind of fascinating to see the differences.

The BBC adaptation is truly that: an adaptation. In the script, Caol (a personification of anorexia) skulks around, snapping out her lines in questionable rhyme; there's really no question that she's something other than a regular character. In the BBC adaptation, not only does the whole story take on a different context (Imogene as a YouTuber and the episodes her vlogs), but Caol is brought in as a full character, and it's meant to take some time before the viewer understands that she's not a person but a personification.

I enjoyed the adaptation more than the original, although it's worth noting that the adaptation is made for YouTube and would be very hard to stage—there are advantages to playing with your format and intended audience! As ever, it would also be interesting to see this staged as written.

Review: "The Perfect Guy Doesn't Exist" by Sophie Gonzales

The Perfect Guy Doesn't Exist by Sophie Gonzales
Published March 2024 via Wednesday Books
★★★★

Ivy's looking forward to a few things when her parents go out of town—eating all the junk food she wants, watching her favorite show with her best friend...and maybe writing a bit more fanfiction about that same show. What she doesn't expect, though, is to wake up with a lead character from that show in her bed. Not the actor—the character. And it's both exactly what she had imagined and not what she wants at all...

If you were ever big into fanfiction—or if you read the entirety of the Protectors of the Plot Continuum more than once—this one is for you. It's obvious throughout that Gonzales has a lot of love and respect for fanfiction, and I'm here for that, but my favorite thing about the book, hands down, is how unabashedly terrible Ivy's own fanfiction is:

He was so hot! His windswept, ice-blue waves were messy, like they'd been styled by the wind. His beautiful glowing orbs were extraordinarily wide and soulful. His biceps were visible through the thin cotton of his shirt.

"Weston!" Ivy cried, her heart coming to a shuddering halt. "Is it really you?" (loc. 373*)

I've read so many novels about incredibly talented teenagers who are winning contests and scoring book deals and so on and so forth—and it is just deeply refreshing to read about someone who is doing something she loves, mostly getting comments to the tune of 'please work on your spelling and grammar', and carrying on anyway.

Weston scooped her up into a hug, and it was easy for him, like she was a doll he could toss around. But of course, Weston wouldn't do that, because he knew she was a human who needed to be cherished. But he could toss her if he wanted to. But he didn't want to. (loc. 382)

The trouble, Ivy finds, is that what is so romantic and swoon-worthy in her head does not always, ah, translate to real life. I find it hilarious that there's still so much of her manifested Weston that she finds romantic throughout the book—with time and experience and so on, Ivy might turn into a more critical viewer and writer, but for the time being she's a teenager and enjoying herself and that's enough. It makes for an entertaining, tongue-in-cheek read, and I'm here for it.

Thanks to the author and publisher for inviting me to read a review copy through NetGalley.

*Quotes are from an ARC and may not be final.

Review: "Double Love" by Kate William (created by Francine Pascal)

Double Love by Kate William (created by Francine Pascal)
First published 1983
★★

The terrible twosome has somehow survived until high school, I have somehow survived rereading more than one of these, and...here we go. Double Love is the book that kicked the Sweet Valley franchise off—the related series taking place in elementary school and middle school launched several years after the Sweet Valley High books—and it is absolutely chaos soup. I can see why so many teens were hooked.

The book starts us off with some good old fat-shaming mixed with reminders that Elizabeth and Jessica are, as thin blondes, the most adorable, most dazzling sixteen-year-old girl[s] imaginable (3). (Perfection, folks! It only comes in skinny blonde format!) From there we get our intro to Jessica-as-psychopath: when she's not busy being a terrible person ("How can you be best friends with somebody as blah as [Enid] Rollins? I don't want you to go over there. Somebody might think it was me talking to her." [15]), she's...busy being a terrible person. Here's Jessica supporting her sister when Elizabeth's membership in the best high school sorority is announced:

Jessica was tugging on her sleeve, trying to stop her as she was about to make her way to the front of the room. "What about me?" Jessica hissed. "Why haven't they called my name?" (20)

This is, of course, after Jessica throws a fit at Elizabeth because Jessica's not currently allowed to drive the family car, and after she steals the keys and almost runs Elizabeth and Enid over to impress a boy, but before she steals Elizabeth's crush out from under her nose and drives him home, leaving Elizabeth to walk. Oh, and then she gaslights Elizabeth into believing that it was an accident. At that point the car plot is basically forgotten, because there are other things to worry about: the lease for the school football field has expired, and one wealthy man wants to buy the lot and build a factory, while another wealthy man wants to turn it into formal gardens—whatever will the poor football team do? (It's not lost on me that in a contemporary book this could just as easily be a rich dude wanting to raze some gardens to build a football field...)

Anyway, the main focus of the book is twofold: first, Jessica goes out with a Bad Boy, it doesn't go well, and she comes home in a police car...and then lets everyone think it was Elizabeth. For some inexplicable reason, the entire school is absolutely convinced that Elizabeth would in fact go out with a Bad Boy and be brought home in a police car, and that there's no possible way that there could be another explanation. Like, say, her impulsive, chaotic, sociopathic identical twin sister...? Noooo. Never. Further, they're convinced that because "Elizabeth" made the decision to go out with the Bad Boy, she deserves everything she gets, and she can never be forgiven for it. Even Good Boy Todd Wilkins, who has the hots for Elizabeth (hoo boy, more on that in a moment), cannot fathom of the idea that Jessica might have been responsible...even when Jessica confesses. (Elizabeth has gone along with Jessica's lie so as not to hurt Jessica's reputation, when in fact we all know that nothing can damage Jessica's reputation, while Elizabeth's is so squeaky-clean that the slightest ding sends the entirety of Sweet Valley into shock.)

And second, Todd Wilkins has the hots for Elizabeth, and Elizabeth has the hots for Todd...and Jessica is deeply offended that Todd doesn't have the hots for her, so she decides to go after him. (The German title for this book is Küß nicht immer meinen Zwilling, which translates confusingly to Don't Always Kiss My Twin...) She sweeps him away from Elizabeth at every opportunity, lies to Elizabeth about Todd, continues to get upset when any boy she deems attractive shows interest in Elizabeth rather than herself, and then gets so offended that Todd doesn't fall all over himself to woo Jessica that she decides to "get even" with him by telling Elizabeth that he's a cad who basically sexually assaulted her. (Naturally, Elizabeth cannot imagine that Jessica might be telling anything other than the truth.)

My gosh. This is book one, folks.

Review: "The Woman They Wanted" by Shannon Harris

The Woman They Wanted by Shannon Harris
Published August 2023 via Broadleaf Books
★★★

Harris held, for years, a very specific role within conservative Christiandom: she was the wife of Joshua Harris, who rose to prominence with his book I Kissed Dating Goodbye and was groomed to lead a powerful church himself. He'd grown up within that structure, and Shannon Harris had not, but when they met and mutual interest was apparent, a match was quickly made—because, having literally written the book on chaste courtship, Joshua Harris was under a fair amount of pressure to do everything by that book, avoid even a hint of crossing the strict boundaries he'd laid out for a generation of followers, and marry quickly to prove that it worked.

But all that came at a cost—one that Shannon Harris, not Joshua Harris, paid the bulk of. That she didn't grow up within this particular subculture fascinates me; I suspect that within the church there was a fair amount of trepidation about that (e.g., was she sufficiently indoctrinated to live up to the role?), but she seemed to fit the bill well enough. Since then, though, Shannon Harris has walked away from it all, and Joshua Harris has walked back his convictions and tried to rebrand himself as someone who, having been the fuel for that generation of young conservative Christians to follow his lead, can now help them deconstruct. (Reactions have been mixed.)

This was a heavily anticipated book for me, because although it has very little to do with my own life it is right in line with some of my more specific reading interests. The outcome felt somewhat hit and miss for me, though. Harris does a fantastic job of expressing how she now views her time in this conservative, restrictive church. But I had a much harder time grasping how she felt about it then: what drew in, and what convinced her to stay so long, especially when it went against so much that she'd been raised with? She can see the holes in the stories now, and for her sake I'm glad of that, but I struggled to see the journey she went through rather than just where it has, in the end, taken her.

As an aside—Harris is now going by Shannon Bonne and pursuing the things she was told she couldn't do as the wife of a Christian celebrity. I wonder how frustrating it must be to need to, for publicity purposes, continue to go by a name that is so tied to a life you're trying to leave behind.

Review: "Where Rivers Part" by Kao Kalia Yang

Where Rivers Part by Kao Kalia Yang
Published March 2024 via Atria
★★★★

Yang was six when she came with her family to the US. Born in a refugee camp in Thailand—where her parents lived for almost a decade—she did not know her family's native Laos, but she is clearly determined to not let her family's Hmong history be forgotten. She's previously told her father's story and more broadly her family's (as well as other books about refugee and immigrant life); now, in Where Rivers Part, Yang turns her lens to her mother, Tswb's, story.

My mom is afraid that no one will be interested in a story about her life. She and my father tell me that just because they have lived hard lives doesn't mean they are incredible; they both remind me that the hardness in their lives is nothing more than the sorrow they share with those who have been through wars, who know poverty, who understand what it's like to live without power or belonging on your side. My mom is afraid that I have wasted my time in writing the story of her life. (loc. 28*)

And, well. I'm glad Yang didn't listen. Her mother's story might be similar to that of other refugees, but if anything that makes it more powerful rather than less. It's a hell of a book, with a hell of a through-line: in the wilds of Laos, fleeing the violence that had turned their quiet lives upside-down, Tswb made the decision to marry, to leave her family for another. The act of leaving her mother would haunt her for decades to come.

By the light of the moon, I [Tswb] dug a hole big enough to bury the photographs I had kept with me of my mother, my father, myself, my sisters, and my brothers. I wished I had a plastic bag to keep the photographs in. One day, I wanted to return for the photographs, old black-and-white images that blossomed and bloomed with color in my memories of what we had shared. (loc. 1679)

Either Yang and her mother had some incredibly detailed conversations and interviews about Tswb's life, or Yang has an incredibly empathetic imagination; either way, the complexity of emotion and experience that Tswb goes through in the course of this book is devastating. (I'd love to know more about the process of writing the book, because even if Tswb didn't think her story worth telling, she clearly trusted her daughter to do it right.) It's not just the obvious losses—home and homeland, deaths, loss of a known or at least expected future—but things like having to leave behind the graves of loved ones; having to leave behind the only pictures you have of those loved ones; not knowing when or if you'll ever see any of those people and things again. And: the moment Twsb says I had known your [her children's] father's mother for longer than I had known mine. (loc. 3575) There are moments of beauty in here too, and of joy, but it's the wrestling with loss and grief that hits the hardest.

The Latehomecomer was already on my TBR, but I'm even more eager to read it now...and then I may have to add The Song Poet to the mix as well.

*Quotes are from an ARC and may not be final.

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

Review: "How to Make Herself Agreeable to Everyone" by Cameron Russell

How to Make Herself Agreeable to Everyone by Cameron Russell
Published March 2024 via Random House
★★★★

Russell had the sort of trajectory that aspiring models dream of—fast, meteoric. But it was a career that she stumbled into rather than one that she sought out, and the longer she spent in front of cameras and in modelling agencies—to say nothing of being in bars with men twice her age, or in photographers' cars, or generally at the whim of men with some degree of power—the better she understood the unspoken costs and imbalances, and the more complicit she started to feel.

On the surface this is a book about modelling, but dig down a very thin layer and it becomes something about power, and abuse of power, and an industry—and society—hell-bent on keeping that power in the hands of White men. Throughout the book, as Russell learns more and more about the industry in which she has found herself, she is taught that innocence is so sexy that it must be destroyed, and she might be getting paid tens of thousands of dollars but her worth is such that she can be thrown away at any moment, and that the only things about her that matters are the ideals that men project upon her. And: that if you're successful enough, and smart enough, and keep your eyes open enough, you might be able to open some other eyes as well.

Russell has made waves before, and this book feels like something that will reverberate. She doesn't name names (although in some cases it's very easy to go run a quick search or two), but she's not pulling punches, either. Photographers call me jailbait. One invites me to drinks. Eventually, I find my body in a bed next to him. Not myself: A lot of myself will be surprisingly gone by then. (loc. 112*) She employs a number of structural choices that can easily fall flat (lists, sections addressed to certain real-life people), but she's more than enough of a writer to pull them off. I expect to hear this one talked about, to see it on a lot of lists this year.

*Quotes are from an ARC and may not be final.

Thanks to the author and publisher for inviting me to read an advance copy through NetGalley.

Review: Short story: "The Havana Run" by Ace Atkins

The Havana Run by Ace Atkins
Published March 2024 via Amazon Original Stories

In Florida, George and Jay have been given a task: fly down to Cuba and recover a buried treasure. They'll get some cash and an adventure out of the deal, and their sense of self-importance will get the sort of bump they haven't had since losing their jobs.

That is, of course, if everything goes to plan. And it should go without saying that there are red flags from the beginning...

This was a quick read, and it's always interesting to see something about Cuba. It felt rather pulpy to me, though (e.g., the only female character is a sexpot who does not keep all her clothes on, and George and Jay are awfully blasé about the possibility that they'll end up dead in a ditch somewhere). It's not a genre that I read a lot of, but I'm left with the impression that the author had considered this premise as the plot for a full-length book but couldn't quite make it ackle. Very much plot-based rather than character-based, and I struggled to stay invested in the external lives of these men when they don't seem to have all that much inner life going on, and don't seem to give that much thought to who else might be affected by their actions.

Will probably hit with a particular demographic, but not really my thing.

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

Review: "The Exvangelicals" by Sarah McCammon

The Exvangelicals by Sarah McCammon
Published March 2024 via St. Martin's Press
★★★★

It's difficult to save a world you're taught to fear and are carefully sheltered from. (loc. 314*)

Growing up, McCammon was one of a large number of American evangelical Christians—deeply religious, deeply conservative, inflexible in views and closely focused on things like purity and politics. Only as she grew older did McCammon begin to understand just how deep and complex the roots ran, and just how twisted. And later, she became one of a growing number of American exvangelicals, a term coined by Blake Christian to describe the droves of disillusioned former churchgoers moving on to other things.

My (liberal, nonreligious) background is quite different from McCammon's, but I did grow up (partially) in the American Midwest, and so hers is one that I recognize instantly. Here, she tells not just her own story of disillusionment and deconstruction and, yes, exvangelicalism, but some of the many, many stories of people who grew up with backgrounds similar to hers. I've done a fair amount of reading in this general vein, so some of the names she discusses are familiar to me, but McCammon writes with not only the thoughtfulness of experience but the precision of her journalistic background.

I particularly appreciate that McCammon works to separate out things that are wrong with...let's call it the application of conservative religion in general...and things that feel specific to white American churches; McCammon covered the 2016 election, and when large swaths of white Christians were backing openly racist and xenophobic (among other things) candidates—and using the power of their religious platforms to do so—it becomes impossible to look at any one of those things in a void.

This is not a book about religion: it's a book about the ways in which people use and abuse religion to in turn use and abuse people, politics, and power. This is something of a theme in books about religion I've read lately, and if this is material that's of interest to you, you're in luck because there's a lot out there—an entire generation growing up to realize that, whatever they do or don't believe now, many of the teachings they grew up with were damaging at best. (Sarah Stankorb's Disobedient Women and Jon Ward's Testimony are not bad places to start for further reading.)

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

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

Review: "The Twins Hit Hollywood" by Jamie Suzanne (created by Francine Pascal)

The Twins Hit Hollywood by Jamie Suzanne (created by Francine Pascal)
First published 1997
★★★

We had a copy of this in the house well into my teenage years, so I remember it better than most of the series. In The Twins Hit Hollywood, Elizabeth and Jessica have the chance to audition for a role that could catapult them into stardom—if they can avoid total sabotage by the other twelve-year-olds in contention.

Jessica is maybe less sociopathic than usual in this one, mostly because the other twins are even worse. The book builds on Breakfast of Enemies, although it manages to get the few Breakfast details it mentions wrong. I have to imagine that the books were being written roughly at the same time, and by the time someone on the editorial team noticed (if ever they did) it was too late.

The filming ends up being a nightmare, and that's the end of the twins' acting careers—but not to fret! They get white velvet sailor suits out of the deal, and yes, I absolutely was obsessed with the idea of this when I read this as a kid. I wasn't sure what a sailor suit was, but I knew that I wanted one, and I wanted it to be velvet. (Shockingly, this never transpired.)

I don't think the Sweet Valley High books ever went the Twins Hit Hollywood Again route, which is sort of too bad—imagine Jessica old enough to be an actual terror on set! But maybe it's just as well. Because...Jessica as a terror on set.

Review: "Ghost Town Living" by Brent Underwood

Ghost Town Living by Brent Underwood
Published March 2024 via Harmony
★★★

In 2018, Underwood bought Cerro Gordo, an abandoned mining town high in the California desert. In 2020, he moved there more or less permanently to start restoration and exploration. (He also started a YouTube channel, which is what led to the traction for this book.) I've been looking forward to this book since well before it was announced; it's a hell of a story, no matter which way you slice it, and I was pretty sure it was only a matter of time.

Underwood writes much as he talks—if you watch his videos, you'll recognize the rhythms and generally be able to hear the book as you read. As much as I enjoy the videos, though, I'm not entirely sold on the book structure. Underwood is a good storyteller, but the book is structured more as connected essays than as a chronological memoir, and there are some strange gaps.

Underwood is passionate about this town and its history, and that passion comes through loud and clear, whether he's talking about rebuilding after a fire or the history of water access in the town. (Why water access? Because it's an isolated desert town, and whether in the 1800s or now, accessing it requires feats of logistics and/or engineering.) But...there's never a basic walkthrough of the town. Never a description of a day in the life in an abandoned mining town—or a day in the life of someone working in that town more than a century ago. A fire is mentioned in passing in early chapters, but it's not until chapter nine, which details that fire, that Underwood talks about the importance of the (main) building that was lost. Readers don't have a chance to feel the weight of that loss in the way that Underwood did—to the reader, it might as well be a random old building that wasn't important enough to describe for the first half of the book, or important enough to include in the map at the beginning.

To an extent I get it—the fire is set up (rightly) as a catalyst, and it's easily the most dramatic moment of the book. A chronological structure would have placed it early in the book (just a few months after Underwood moved permanently to the town), leaving little time to build up to it...but as it stands, there aren't really enough details in the first half of the book to build up to it anyway. Even knowing the overall trajectory I think I would have preferred something more linear (and with fewer oblique comments about things that don't get full stories, like relationships that ended badly).

Because of this I struggled to figure out the ideal reader for this. Make no mistake; there are a lot of people who will enjoy this. But is the ideal reader someone who (like me) has already been following along and can fill in the mental gaps—but already knows the general story? (This may be the reason for the non-linear structure...) Or is the ideal reader someone who has seen one or two articles or YouTube videos and doesn't have preconceived notions—but will have to look up the salt tram to be able to understand its isolation, or the American Hotel to understand what it once was?

Probably the answer is somewhere in between. I imagine this book will do well (and that it will be popular among those already familiar with the story), in any case—it's a place and a story to attract dreamers.

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

Review: "Breakfast of Enemies" by Jamie Suzanne (created by Francine Pascal)

Breakfast of Enemies by Jamie Suzanne (created by Francine Pascal)
First published 1997
★★★

Jessica's going to be a star...the only problem is that because of child labor laws the studio wants twins, not a lone girl. Jessica has a twin, but sharing the spotlight? Nuh-uh.

I only had the vaguest of memories of this one, related mostly to the fact that our copy of The Twins Hit Hollywood, which comes right after this one, stuck around way longer than it had any right to, so I read it multiple times. No big surprises, though: Jessica is completely exhausting, Elizabeth can't act, and it all works out in the end. I suppose the real surprise is that they're hired after their lackluster audition, but then...if anything, I appreciate the lackluster audition, because these are just kids, not professional actors, and I suppose it carries the story along.

Worth noting that the twins spend about half the book getting parental permission to audition for the role and the rest of the book hanging on to the role by the skin of their teeth—the stipulation for auditioning is that they have to get along, which they interpret as "express fervent admiration for everything they hate about each other" and "get their older brother to be mean so that they can defend each other". One can guess from how well this goes just how well their acting careers are going to go...

Review: "Jessica's Cookie Disaster" by Jamie Suzanne (created by Francine Pascal)

Jessica's Cookie Disaster by Jamie Suzanne (created by Francine Pascal)
First published 1995
★★

Jessica's infallible luck strikes again: In Jessica's Cookie Disaster, Jessica accidentally makes cookies so good that she's invited to be on a television show...except, oops, she has no idea how she's done it. Will she come out on top, or will her cookies be a flop?

(Spoiler alert: Jessica always comes out on top.)

Now, the way Jessica goes about trying to recreate these miracle cookies is a bit...questionable...because I guess it doesn't occur to anyone that there wasn't even a hint of pineapple or liquorice in the miracle cookies, or that those things were unlikely to have been at Jessica's cooking station when she had her successful disaster. Also questionable: the fact that the secret ingredients turn out to be (spoiler!) variations on vanilla and almond, and everyone involved acts like they have never had a cookie with these things before. Now, granted, this is Sweet Valley, one of the whitest and most middle-class places known to 80s America, so it's possible...but oh dear. Someone get these people some flavor in their lives.

Perhaps more notable: Jessica makes the honor roll for the first and perhaps last time in her life, so her parents all but throw her a party. Elizabeth sighed again—she couldn't help it. Since Elizabeth was always on the honor roll, no one made a big deal of it anymore. She'd been on the honor roll since second grade, so she didn't get taken to dinner at La Maison Jacques. (31) Elizabeth really gets shafted in these books, doesn't she? She feels guilty if she does anything than be her goody-two-shoes-honor-roll self, but Jessica gets all the attention whether she's creating chaos or toeing the line.

(Actually, when I was in junior high, I remember my parents being really enthusiastic about my sister's four-Bs-and-two-As report card, while sort of shrugging at my two-Bs-and-four-As report card. I didn't learn until much, much later that my sister—who was generally a very rule-abiding, non-boundary-pushing kid—had gone through a phase, at that time, of arguing against homework. Possibly this report card represented a perking up of her grades and they were pleased about it. As an adult I get it, but as a tween I remember feeling quite insulted.)

Elizabeth saves the day, of course, which means that Jessica gets to shine (of course). If I remember correctly, somewhere in the universe—in the Sweet Valley High series, I think—there's a book in which Elizabeth wishes that she'd never been born, and then she sees a sort of alternate-universe version of Sweet Valley in which Steven is deep in trouble, and maybe her parents have split up, and so on and so forth, and it's all because they desperately needed an Elizabeth to save the day...and I guess it all started with things like cookies.

Review: "Unstoppable!" by Maggie Nichols

Unstoppable! by Maggie Nichols
Published January 2024 via Roaring Brook Press
★★★

Nichols is a gymnast, and by the time she was a teenager she was used to exceeding expectations—and then exceeding them again, and again. She had good reason to hope for a spot at the 2016 Olympics. Instead, she became Athlete A in the case against Larry Nasser...and was frozen out of USA Gymnastics, the (now scandal-ridden) governing body for the sport in the US.

As a story, I appreciate this—Nichols is not shy in calling out the many, many people who were complicit in Nasser's actions, from ignoring reports of abuse to explicitly working to discredit victims and protect their abuser. This is one of numerous recent gymnastics memoirs that talks about Nasser's abuses, and the scope is breathtaking. I also hasten to note that Nichols' primary focus is on her life in gymnastics, not on the actions of adults who perpetuated and enabled abuse; Nasser is not (and should not ever be) the beginning or end of her story.

As a book, it's not great. Nichols is well educated and clearly intelligent, but I think her expression comes across better in the gym than on the page. I was so full of emotion. (loc. 1055) It was just so awesome. (loc. 1059) We all stuck our bar dismounts, and it was just like the craziest feeling ever. (loc. 1597) It was just magical. (loc. 1603) I was ecstatic. It was just so super exciting. I was so happy. (loc. 1808) There's a ghostwriter credited on the book, but this might be a case of hewing a little too closely to how a young twentysomething speaks. An okay read for teenage gymnastics fans, but there's quite a lot out there in terms of both gymnastics generally and recent scandals more specifically, and this wouldn't be one of the first books I recommended for those interested in either of those things.

Nichols went on to have an extremely successful college gymnastics career, and it's sort of nice to think that her continued success—and the doors open to her—is a middle finger in the face of USA Gymnastics.

Review: "Cloistered" by Catherine Coldstream

Cloistered by Catherine Coldstream
Published March 2024 via St. Martin's Press
★★★★

On my second afternoon, writes Coldstream of a visit to the priory where she would later take vows, there was a thunderstorm, and the women I saw from my window, flitting across courtyards in their long brown robes, were like ghosts. They barely spoke and their pale faces were as inscrutable as distant moons. I saw them as brave, extraordinary, martyr figures. They belonged to the same forgotten world as the moss growing out of the ancient enclosure wall, and as the ferns that grew, unchecked, at its base, and the dandelions and smaller flowers peeping from its crevices. They belonged to the fields and forests. Above all, they belonged to the silence, and to God. I opened the window. The smell of damp earth rose, reeking of something half forgotten, mixed with spring. (loc. 885*)

Coldstream was perhaps an unusual choice to be a nun: raised in an artistic and academic, non-Catholic household, she took to Catholicism only after her father died and her world upended itself. But when she went in, it was all or nothing: not just Catholicism but a nun, not just a nun but one in a cloistered, largely silent community. And she loved it—loved the silence, loved the isolation, loved the intense focus on religion, loved the honeymoon phase and weathered the loss of that same phase.

Time passes in the monastery like ghosts that move through walls; it seeps through cell doors and stony archways, through bone and marrow, imprinting patience and endurance at every touch. With the shifting of the seasons, and by our second dusky-coloured autumn, we'd turned from eager novices, excited by the novelty of monasticism, to heavy labourers, hands chapped from toil, lips cracked with cold, and faces raw. (loc. 1298)

But nuns, too, are only human, and eventually those cracks spread outward, and outward still, and gradually things changed.

Coldstream is at her best when writing about those early years, and the beauty she found in the bareness and silence of the monastery. She mentions few of the early red flags that many ex-nuns who lived in particularly restrictive (or just pre–Vatican II) describe, and a sense of longing and what if remains: what if this had happened within the community, or that, or if this sister had been given more leeway or that sister less, or if she had begun her journey in a different convent or chosen a less closed order to begin with—would she still be there? Without going into too much detail, I think it's fair to say that it was the bare humanity of isolated religious life that made questions start to grow, and then to proliferate.

Coldstream took a series of vows en route to becoming a fully professed nun, and it left me thinking about the strange way that the Catholic church (or at least some streams of it) makes convent life into a marriage, with each nun in her marital cell and Jesus as the ultimate bigamist...Coldstream didn't go down the aisle in a white gown, as used to be more common, but even if she had that would not have been anywhere near the most final of her vows—which is not the way the church treats a more conventional marriage, leaving me puzzled about why they would put the marriage-to-Jesus bit relatively early in the process. Not for the first time, I find myself thinking that the Catholic church might do better to encourage temporary vows (much the way there are so many short-term Buddhist monks) rather than, as Coldstream describes, making the process a long one but one that nearly always has a goal of permanence. Because—how might Coldstream's journey, or those of any of the women she lived in community with, have been different with the doors still open?

Not always a happy story, but a beautifully written one.

*Quotes are from an ARC and may not be final.

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

Review: "Free Houses in Japan" by Anton Wörmann

Free Houses in Japan by Anton Wörmann
Published November 2023 via Anton in Japan Media
★★★

When Wörmann first visited Japan on a modelling contract, he started dreaming—and when he learned of Japan's surplus of akiya, or abandoned houses, that could be bought for a song, he started scheming. What followed was a new sort of adventure: a day job as a model and a passion-project-turned-profitable buying and renovating properties to rent out.

Now, the title is intentionally misleading. The houses aren't free, but they can be very, very cheap (think tens of thousands of dollars rather than hundreds of thousands of dollars), largely because there isn't cultural value for old houses, so they depreciate quickly, and the value is perceived to be in the land. In choosing to renovate rather than tear down and rebuild, Wörmann was going against the Japanese grain, but it paid off for him.

This is not a memoir: it's structured as something of a how-to guide, with the premise that the reader might be interested in buying and renovating their own akiya in Japan. My preference would have been for memoir, because Wormann's story is genuinely interesting, and I have no plans to renovate a house anywhere, let alone in Japan; I love house-restoration memoirs because they let me live vicariously through people who take on that challenge. If you read this, be aware that Wörmann only really gives details of one of the three places he has so far renovated, and even those details are pretty scattered. The focus is much more on challenges that you might not know to expect when buying and renovating a house.

The material is still fascinating, partly because for all the house-restoration memoirs I've read, they've almost all taken place in the west (with, if I remember correctly, the occasional detour to Morocco). The writing is something of a letdown; it's a 300-page book but with perhaps 150 pages of material, because almost every piece of information is delivered at least twice. As an example, when talking about different investment strategies involving akiya, Wormann says: How it works: find and buy an abandoned house in a central urban area, renovate it, and turn it into an Airbnb. ... This strategy works by buying an abandoned house in a central urban area, then renovating it and turning it into an Airbnb (loc. 783). One of the next 'investment strategies' is about manshons, or flats, rather than houses: How it works: find and buy an old condo in a central location, renovate it, and rent it to a long-term tenant without excessive fees (loc. 829). Repeat for buying an abandoned house and renting it out long-term, etc., etc. While it's interesting to think about the pros and cons of long-term rentals vs. Airbnb, and houses vs. flats (e.g., in Japan it's very hard to set up a flat as an Airbnb, because you need permission from everyone in the building), the structure of the book is extremely repetitive. I wish that this had gone through further editing to eliminate the repetition and leave space for more story: to walk us through each of the properties step by step rather than dribbling out scattershot bits of story, to tell us what it actually means to need to retrofit older properties for contemporary earthquake-resistant building standards, to take us through a day or a week in the life.

Recommended if you have insatiable curiosity about house renovation (that's me!) or living in far-off places (also me!) and are a fast reader who can skim through some of the repetition (...also me), but otherwise you might get more satisfaction from just watching a few of Wörmann's YouTube videos.

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

Review: "Elizabeth's New Hero" by Jamie Suzanne (created by Francine Pascal)

 

Elizabeth's New Hero by Jamie Suzanne (created by Francine Pascal)
First published 1989
★★

I don't think I read this one as a kid, but as an adult I'm curious about portrayals of East Germany, so...here we go. In Elizabeth's New Hero, an East German gymnastics team is in town to visit—and the Wakefields are hosting one of the students! What fun. Despite the title, Elizabeth doesn't have much more of a role here than Jessica (Elizabeth wants to interview Christoph for the sixth-grade newspaper; Jessica wants to invite him to hang out with the Unicorns), and she certainly doesn't have any better an understanding of East Germany than...well, Jessica. I guess someone in the editorial team wanted to maintain the perception that Elizabeth is as important to the series as Jessica.

To be fair...this was published in 1989, presumably shortly before the Berlin Wall came down, and the author clearly had zero idea about East Germany either. Christophe is enamoured with American life, enough so that he declares his intent to defect. But...what concerns him is not the lack of freedoms in the East German state, or the Stasi, or the lack of individual freedoms, or the excellent chance that some of his teammates will be reporting back on his behaviour when they return to East Germany. No, what concerns him is that his father puts too much emphasis on Christophe's gymnastics, and he'd rather learn to play the drums.

That's it, folks. That's Christophe's great concern about East Germany.

So Christophe's mother calls him in California, because there were never any issues with calling the West. And the conversation goes like this, because there was definitely no wire-tapping or Stasi hanging around to make arrests:

"Hello?" said Christophe.

Jessica heard Christophe's mother speaking German, but Christophe quickly interrupted her.

"I'm sorry, but I am going to be an American now," he said sternly. "You must speak to me in English!"

"Christophe, I was so worried when I found out you didn't return home," his mother said, speaking in English now. "I hope you are feeling better. Are you being well taken care of?"

"There is no need to worry about me," Christophe said. "I can take care of myself. I don't ever want to return to East Germany. This is my home now. I will be able to do all the things I have dreamed of." (86–87)

...because that sort of attitude would be nooooo problem for his family even if Christophe were to stay in the US and be (at least theoretically) outside the reach of the Stasi...

I mean, I guess it's also possible that Christophe's family are the Stasi? But although I know that communication barriers eased over time, and this book was published right before the Wall fell, it's hard to imagine that a kid raised in East Germany would be so ready to shout his intentions to defect over a phone line that was almost certainly monitored. (Then again, Christophe doesn't seem to have any issues with East Germany, just with his father being strict, so...)

Not clear whether the publisher wanted to avoid anything with a political bent or if the outliner/writer really just didn't know much about the situation and didn't care to learn, but it ends up feeling like a filler book to give Jessica some time to cook up her next scheme and Elizabeth some time to, IDK, polish her GPA.

Review: "The Music and the Mirror" by Lola Keeley

The Music and the Mirror by Lola Keeley
Published April 2018 via Ylva
★★★

In New York, Anna is thrilled—she's the newest corps member of the Metropolitan Ballet, and she's eager to prove her worth and maybe work her way up the ladder. The last thing she expects is to be catapulted up the ladder by the artistic director, who sees unlimited potential...on the stage, and maybe in the bedroom.

I have a soft spot for ballet books, to say nothing of queer ballet books. It's interested to see the power dynamics here, because usually in a boss/employee romance or an age-gap romance, the older and/or more powerful person will be a man, and the younger and/or less powerful person will be a woman. Here we have two women, which changes the dynamic somewhat: Victoria isn't afraid to throw her weight and power around (she spends a fair amount of time firing people, actually), but—perhaps because the author or editor was concerned about relationship ethics?—she manages to quell her inner asshole enough that there's never a point where Anna worries that if the relationship goes south, so will Anna's position in the company. (Anna should worry about this. She's quite naïve at times, in ways that are unlikely to serve her well in the long run. But at least Victoria is aware of the pitfalls.)

Victoria's meant to be an ice queen, which is not my favorite ever trope but I know is popular. She does get a bit easily impressed for someone who is supposed to be so hardened, though: a quick search for the word "impressed" tells me that Victoria is impressed when: Anna mentions that she was accepted to good art schools; Anna mentions that she's been to another dancer's home; another dancer shows loyalty by offering to report back after meeting someone; Anna picks herself up quickly after some sabotage; Anna has a half-full bottle of vodka rather than a full one; Victoria tells Anna who was behind the sabotage and Anna doesn't react much; Anna knows the difference between traditional and classical; Anna can handle a lift; Anna continues to do well with lifts; the costume designer comes up with something Victoria likes.

There's a lot going on—Anna's sudden promotion from least-experienced corps member to principal, Anna's tragic backstory, Victoria's tragic backstory, a secret aunt(!), glass in pointe shoes, an injury for Anna, an injury for another dancer, Victoria's likely alcohol addiction, another dancer's likely addiction to god knows what, and on and on it goes. At a bare minimum I'd have liked to see the secret aunt plot cut, and maybe also the glass-in-pointe-shoes bit (which just feels a bit clichéd). And then let the characters learn more from each other, maybe, or explore those addictions rather than leaving them hanging, with more than one woman in the book unable to sleep without a hefty dose of substance of choice. Honestly, I'd have been curious about where this might have gone without the romance; Victoria's substance use alone makes me think that she's not in a great place to start something, and I never really got any chemistry between her and Anna. Could have been interesting to see the two of them get to flex their characters a bit without worrying about making them compatible or necessarily even interested in each other as people. But since this is a romance, it's probably one best suited to readers who are into ice queens and age gaps.

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