Review: "Outofshapeworthlessloser" by Gracie Gold

Outofshapeworthlessloser by Gracie Gold
Published February 2024 via Crown
★★★

First there was Grace Elizabeth—happy on skates, but without skating being her whole life. Then there was Gracie Gold—gold in name and on the ice. And then, perhaps inevitably in the pressure cooker that is a competitive, heavily image-focused sport, there was Outofshapeworthlessloser.

Gold is not here to pull punches—while her primary focus is on skating, and her skating career, she also delves deep into what was going on both in skating culture and within her personal life that impacted that career, for better and often for worse. I don't follow skating, but it sounds like a roller coaster of an experience, both on and off the ice.

Mostly chronological, the book loses some focus near the end as Gold shifts to occasional non-linear chapters. In particular, I wished that the chapters about her current relationship and about her changing chest size had been folded into the rest of the book rather than standing largely alone—the latter in particular makes sense in the context of the book, as skating is ones of those sports where a shifting body can require a lot of adjustments, but setting it as a separate chapter dilutes the impact (we don't see it affecting Gold throughout) and adds to the occasional sense that this is her chance for a manifesto. (Or...a chance to get things off her chest?)

Gold is perhaps at her most interesting when considering how different coaching styles impacted her training—in particular, the focus on (to paraphrase) the way young skaters are often asked to give 110% until they burn out, and her wondering whether there could be a different, more sustainable model that would allow skaters longer, healthier careers. I don't have the background for an informed opinion on what sort of success is possible with a comeback after the rise and (partial) fall of a skating career, but she raises interesting questions about when, and under what circumstances, it is time to call it quits—and when it is worth carrying on.

Skating is still very much Gold's world, in various ways, but I'll be curious to see whether her eventual next steps are in line with that or whether she'll shift directions.

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

Review: "Since She's Been Gone" by Sagit Schwartz

Since She's Been Gone by Sagit Schwartz
Published February 2024 via Crooked Lane Books
★★★

These days, Beatrice—better known as Beans—is a successful psychologist. As a teenager, though, her mother's unexpected death turned her life upside down, and she spent months in treatment for an eating disorder. She recovered, but ED is still by her side when things get tough...and now, her entire world has tilted on its axis. Beans's mother might still be alive.

Since She's Been Gone is a fast-paced read, shifting between past (eating disorder with a side of grief) and present (mystery with a side of eating disorder). The mystery takes place over quite a short time frame, only a few days—this helps keep things moving, though I think I would have preferred a longer time frame to better get to know some of the supporting characters, particularly Eddie,* her boyfriend.

But the book is doing a number of things that are unusual here. This is one of a very, very few books I've read in which the protagonist is an adult who has had and recovered from an eating disorder, and one of even fewer in which the character—and the author—is a therapist and has the language to discuss the disorder with knowledge, nuance, and (yay) a general lack of numbers. (If the author does not have personal history or extensive professional knowledge about eating disorders, I would be quite surprised.) This probably sounds like an odd thing to get hung up on, but take it from someone who has a niche reading interest or two—it's unusual, and it's well done.

The time jumps didn't work quite as well for me. It might be that I read the book all in one go, or that the chapters are relatively short, but the shifts in time, while consistent, always felt a bit choppy to me. Because the book avoids the cliché so well in the present-day mental health narrative, I'm also rather disappointed that it uses one of the bigger clichés in YA eating disorder fiction: no spoilers, but Emily and her storyline could be plucked from (or dropped into) any number of books set in treatment centres, and it would be hard to tell the difference. Not the end of the world in a story, but I'd like to know how Emily could have helped to drive that timeline in a less expected way.

I won't go into the mystery much (by the time I read the book, I had completely forgotten what was in the book description, which is just the way I like my mysteries), but I'll say that it seems inspired by the Sackler family—if that's not a rabbit hole you've ever gone down, have fun with Wikipedia! And then look up Nan Goldin, because while she has nothing to do with this book she's done some effective advocacy work on the subject.

*Not to be confused with ED

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

Review: "Tears of Gold" by Hannah Rose Thomas

Tears of Gold by Hannah Rose Thomas
Published February 2024 via Plough Publishing House
★★★★

Women are so rarely the instigators of war, and so often the ones who suffer the consequences. In Tears of Gold, Thomas pairs portraits of women who have lived through—and still bear physical and/or emotional scars of—war with their own words and, sometimes, self-portraits.

"I want the whole world to know that I have pain," Aisha says. "I have gone through a lot, and many other women in my village are going through a lot." (69*)

Thomas sticks to simple themes here: though she draws on techniques and traditions from religious art in particular, the women in her portraits are always the focus, with their faces rendered in the most precise detail of any part of the painting. There are portraits of Yazidi, Rohingya, and Nigerian women, along with a few portraits from other conflicts (Afghan, Ukrainian, Uyghur, and Palestinian women). I love Thomas's choice to maintain a particular style for each region—they're beautiful portraits individually, but grouped together (pages 76–77) you can really see the care individuality she's given each piece.

I read the text mostly on my e-reader but viewed the images on my computer, and I would strongly recommend reading this in a form that allows you to see the pictures in full color—I imagine that, in person, with the gold leaf and the richness of the lapis lazuli at its full power, these are even more striking.

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

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

Review: "A Woman in the Polar Night" by Christiane Ritter

A Woman in the Polar Night by Christiane Ritter
Translated by Jane Degras
First published 1938; reprint published February 2024 via Pushkin Press Classics
★★★★★

What marvellous fun. I've been meaning to read this for years (I love me a good off-into-the-frozen-wilds real-life adventure story), but I'd been putting it off because I'd gotten it in my head that it would be a serious, grim account of survival in those frozen wilds, and instead it's...well, the words that kept coming to mind as I read were things like marvellous, delightful, plucky, and smart.

Ritter was an Austrian painter, and this is her only book—an account of the year she spent with her husband on the island of Spitsbergen, which is far, far, far north in Norway. It was the 1930s, and this was the sort of adventure that was acceptable for men (her husband had been in Norway for several years at that point) but not for women. Pretty much everyone she knew advised her against going, but her own expectations were perhaps a bit...rosy:

The little winter hut appeared to me in a more and more friendly light. As housewife I would not have to accompany him on the dangerous winter excursions. I could stay by the warm stove in the hut, knit socks, paint from the window, read thick books in the remote quiet, and, not least, sleep to my heart's content. (loc. 145)

Her husband writes, devoid of irony:

It won't be too lonely for you because at the northeast corner of the coast, about sixty miles from here, there is another hunter living, an old Swede. We can visit him in the spring when it's light again and the sea and fjords are frozen over. (loc. 153)

And so off to Norway she goes, and is swiftly disabused of her original romantic notions.

I look round for a bed. I am seized by a secret horror of the two bunks with their hard straw mattresses. Who knows what wild hunters last slept there.

"Where is the boudoir you promised me in your letter?" I ask my husband.

"It's not built yet," he replies. "First we have to find planks. The sea sometimes throws them up." (loc. 454)

But for every moment of well-bred horror that she has, she finds many more moments of beauty and awe. There's the fortnight when she's left alone in the hut and the first big storm comes, and she finds herself digging the hut out day after day, hoping that her husband is safe and trying not to think too much about the alternative—and she gets on with it, because what else can she do? There are the mildewed clothes that she finds under a mattress and, after investigating their provenance, chucks into the sea. There are the months of unending darkness, and the weeks when they wait and hope for the ice conditions to change to improve hunting. If she despairs, she rarely lingers in it, and instead dives back into new experiences and new lessons and the beauty of their frozen isolation.

It's worth noting that one of the major points of this Arctic adventure was to trap and hunt for fur—something that has fortunately gone out of fashion. I've been vegetarian since I was four and cannot imagine hunting, especially for something under so much threat as polar bears; the attitudes toward hunting have to be taken within the context of the book's time. But it says something about Ritter's writing that by the end of the book even I (well, part of me) was hoping(!) for a polar bear for Ritter and her husband.

The book has never been out of print in Germany, and someday I'd like to try a reread in the original German. 4.5 stars.

How varied are the experiences one lives through in the Arctic. One can murder and devour, calculate and measure, one can go out of one's mind from loneliness and terror, and one can certainly also go mad with enthusiasm for the all-too-overwhelming beauty. But it is also true that one will never experience in the Arctic anything that one has not oneself brought there. (loc. 1297)

Thanks to the publisher for providing a review copy through NetGalley. Quotes are from an ARC.

Review: "The Gymnast" by Joanne Slazyk

The Gymnast by Joanne Slazyk
Published 2023 via Joanne Crymble Publishing LLC
★★★

This is a quick gymnastics read for the middle grade crowd, and if I'm honest I wasn't expecting all too much. But The Gymnast was a pleasant surprise: in it, Riley—a talented gymnast—has to switch gyms when a change in circumstances means that her parents can no longer pay her gym fees. The new gym is an adjustment, to say the least. But...what I like best is that Riley ends up focusing just as much on Nia, a younger gymnast whose parents struggle even more financially than Riley's, as she does on her own gym circumstances.

A lot of the conflict does come from a "mean girl" plot, which I'm never thrilled about—it's a popular plotline for a reason, but I think it's overdone. The mean girl is afforded some complexity, but the other "bad" character is not, and I'd just much rather see fully realized characters with the good and the bad worked in. I'd also have liked to see more of Riley's teammates, old and new; there's a minor plotline involving the new teammates, but they just don't have enough time to get fleshed out.

With all that in mind—a solid read. I will not be reading the next book in the series (because it is about golf), but I can see this one at least being a very good fit for tweenagers or thereabouts.

Sample-Chapter Showdown: Romance IV

The Gentleman's Book of Vices by Jess Everlee (Carina Adores)
Escape to the Swiss Chalet by Carrie Walker (Aria)
Midnight Ruin by Katee Robert (Sourcebooks Casablanca)

It's time for a sample-chapter showdown! Three romance novels enter the ring, and only one will exit...or more than one. Or—we'll see how it goes, shall we?

The Gentleman's Book of Vices:
They said every copy should be rooted out and burned. Said that they should bring back hanging for sodomites and smut peddlers just for Cox alone. They said all that, and sales had boomed so spectacularly that Miles was still earning on the scandal. (loc. 343)

On the surface, Charlie and Miles don't have too much in common. The one has family wealth and shows it, with the ability to cater to his own whimsy in the weeks before his wedding. The other writes smutty novels to keep his shop afloat. But as it turns out, they share some of the same...whimsical...tastes in books—and other things—and before long things get complicated...

If anything is clear from this preview, it's that the book will be lively and entertaining, with no shortage of wit (and of course no shortage of complication). The late 1800s mean that difference can be risky, and these are characters who have, to varying extents and in various ways, decided to live with some level of risk rather than stuff themselves into the shape expectation demands. I'm very curious about the role of Alma, Charlie's fiancée, in this book, because she's been set up to perhaps have a backbone of steel under that genteel exterior.

If you find The Gentleman's Book of Vices to be a good fit, take heart: it's the first in a series, with book two already out and book three to follow soon.

Escape to the Swiss Chalet:
Wedding bells are ringing, and August is ready...until it all comes crashing down. Forsaking the heat of her namesake, she heads to the Alps for a new adventure...

These two sample chapters don't get into the meat of it—by the end, August is still ready and eager to marry George, and the details of what goes wrong are still a mystery. The seeds of something wrong are there, though: a romantic partner who ridicules the heroine's job and (probably more crucially) hates her cat is only ever going to be a villain. August's voice is strong, though, and these chapters give hope that this will be on the smarter end of romance novels. I'm curious to see where this will go—what will go wrong with George, just how she ends up in the Alps, and what shape her work and private lives take when everything is upended.

Just in time for winter!

Midnight Ruin:
The Greek gods have never been this steamy—or, actually, I rather think they were (the Greek gods were not exactly known for their lack of decadence), but Midnight Ruin puts a whole new spin on it. Here we have Eurydice, who is happily entangled with Charon...but can't quite get Orpheus out of her mind. Charon has given her the green light to do whatever she needs to do in order to get Orpheus out of her system...but none of them anticipates quite how it will feel to be tangled together as three.

Based on the sample excerpts, I'd place this as erotica rather than romance, though it remains to be seen how much the rest of story will focus on carnal pleasure and how much it will focus elsewhere. Either way, the temperature dial has been turned up to eleven—this is not for you if you like your romance sweet and clean, or with just a bit of spice; this is for you if you like your romance raw and explicit and, well, naked.

I love retellings, and while I'm not sure I'll read the full book I'll definitely investigate the rest of the series to see what might catch my interest—this seems like a ton of fun from start to finish.

The Verdict: I'd guess at which book I'm most likely to read, but to be honest, I've already read one of these—I picked up Escape to the Swiss Chalet from the library after it was released. But these are three wildly different books, and it's hard to compare them head-to-head because it depends heavily on what you're looking for: queer historical romance? Light, hetero contemporary with a side of wish fulfillment? Or a particularly smutty take on mythology?

Thanks to the authors and publishers for providing free previews through NetGalley.

Review: "Belly" by Emily J. Johnson

Belly by Emily J. Johnson
Published 2023
★★★

A memoir of food and family and struggling with both. I don't have a ton to say here, but I appreciate that Johnson opted to focus more on binge eating than on anorexia, the latter of which is far more commonly discussed in memoirs. It sounds like when Johnson was a teen, her mother instinctively helped her through that restriction with a finesse that even now, even, with updated research, can be hard to come by—but when she started struggling with bingeing rather than restricting, shame became much more of a factor. There's also a good sense of just how much plays into mental illness; it's not just one thing but a thousand things all bouncing off each other.

What I would have liked to see: Johnston describes her eventual recovery as nearly instantaneous, which is fascinating but surprising to me, and I would have liked more detail there. (Among other things: Is this peer-reviewed? Is it being replicated anywhere? Or was she just fortunate to stumble upon the right unscientific method for herself at the time?) Still, an interesting addition to the genre.

Review: Canadian Boyfriend by Jenny Holiday

Canadian Boyfriend by Jenny Holiday
Published January 2024 via Forever
★★★

These days, Aurora's life is simple but solid: she teaches dance and makes complicated coffee drinks, she's (mostly) over the eating disorder that plagued her younger years, and she tries not to spend toooo much time around her mother. But as a teenager, she couldn't dream of this: focused on a ballet career on stage, and largely isolated from her peers, she picked a random cute boy she'd met and reinvented him as her Canadian boyfriend.

That worked well enough, and then she grew up and moved on—but now the real-life Canadian boyfriend has shown up at her studio, and everything goes topsy-turvy again.

I'm low-key fascinated by the way Canadian Boyfriend feels like an updated, smarter Harlequin. You have a dancer and a hockey player (classic setup), and some conversations they should have had sooner (classic conflict), and exes who are either dead or dreadful (verrrrrry classic; means that they can't compete for the hero/ine's affections), and a heroine still battling some old demons.

But the updates: Mike is a hockey player, and a good one at that, but he's not the star of the show—he gets it done but isn't the sole reason his team wins their games. Aurora has a ballet background, and in one version of her life she could have been a star, but...that wasn't in the stars (so to speak), and she's happier for it. (The book doesn't, for various reasons, wax lyrical about her dancer's body, which alone is a step up from category romance, and for that I'm grateful. Also, I love that she's in that sort of liminal space of food issues where things are mostly better, but there's a ways to go—it's a hugely common and important space but one that is usually ignored in favor of more dramatic moments.) I whimpered aloud when we got the first hints that Mike and his wife, who semi-recently passed away when the book opens, hadn't had things quite as rosy as they'd seemed (because goddamn do I hate it when the ex is both evil and dead; it makes me sprain my eyeballs from how much rolling they have to do)...but then things get more complicated, and we get both realizations from Mike and open conversations between Mike and Aurora about that marriage, and my eyeballs remained uninjured.

I do wish they'd had those conversations-they-should-have-had-sooner, well, sooner—although I can understand both why Aurora shouldn't have had to bring it up sooner and why earlier discussions might have inhibited rather than eased the way for their romance. This should go over really well with those who like their romance classic but...emotionally available, let's say. 3.5 stars.

Side note, with a side of cryptic: I did read the discussion questions. (3) This is one of my favorite parts of the book, because it happens so rarely in romance novels. (7) Not really, but when Mike jokes about calling Olivia Daughter, that hit me like a punch in the gut, because my dad (whom I called by his first name) made similar jokes. (10) Ball pits are absolute germ buckets, and I am sufficiently germophobic that I wouldn't be caught dead in one. Actually, if you'll excuse me, just reading about them makes me need to go wash my hands...

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

Review: "Work It Out" by Eva Siedler

Work It Out by Eva Siedler
Published January 2024 via Entangled
★★★

To get the movie role he's after, Jake needs visible abs—and to get visible abs, he needs a plan. Luckily, that's what Rayah offers: since the end of her gymnastics career, she's opened Explosion, a resort with a focus on helping clients meet their fitness goals. It's perfect...as long as Jake can hide his health concerns from Rayah. And as long as nothing else goes wrong...

What worked for me: this is a high-energy and fast-paced read, with likeable characters and a bit of quirkiness to keep things interesting. Readers who like to follow characters through a romance series might find some satisfaction here—I can't be sure that there are more books to come, but there's enough setup for a few characters that I wouldn't be too surprised if this isn't the last we see of Explosion. For some inexplicable reason I am fond of gym-setting romance, and I love that we see a health condition that doesn't show up much in fiction (and that the author is writing from her own experience). It's also a book that runs high on big feelings and emotional conversations, which, while not entirely my thing, is better than stoic heroes who are determined to be the manliest men who ever did manly-man (and will likely be an unreserved plus for those who are in it for the feels).

What didn't work so well: there's a lot going on. In addition to Jake's health, there's Rayah's backstory, which is pulled from real-life USA Gymnastics stuff and sometimes becomes the...frontstory? Is that a word? There's drama with Rayah's best friend and with Jake's costar and with Rayah's father; there's a subplot regarding the small town where Explosion is located and a subplot about a skeevy insurance agent and at least three love triangles that I was sure of, but possibly more. (Oh, also, Pierce should have been fired, probably more than once.) I was left thinking that the least exhausting thing about Explosion would be the exercise, and...I wouldn't have minded a significant trimming of subplots to calm things down a bit.

What was overdone: The use of 'cupcake' as an endearment could have been dialed back 50% and it still would have felt frequent. And...I read or heard something recently talking about the emphasis some romance novels put on tiny heroine + big hero, and holy moly but that is here in spades. It's not a new thing—skim just about any romance novel from the 60s and you'll find plentiful descriptions of the heroine's tiny waist or slim build. And here at least it makes a certain amount of sense; Rayah is a former gymnast, and it's unusual at best for an elite gymnast to be anything other than compact. But when even the heroine herself is thinking The bed's a king, and I'm ever so little (loc. 1335*), the description has become a caricature of a caricature. 80% fewer references to how little she is and we'd still have gotten the point.

The positives outweighed the negatives here, and I sped through the book in a couple of days—it was one where I suspected from the cover alone that I'd enjoy the story, and I did. But I hope that if this turns from standalone to series, the next books will get a bit more streamlining.

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

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

Review: "Just Keep Pedaling" by Connie Ness

Just Keep Pedaling by Connie Ness
Published 2023
★★★

In the 90s, Ness took a leap and joined the Peace Corps. Wanting somewhere tropical, she landed in Uruguay: Most of the land in the countryside around Brum was used for grazing sheep and cattle. The land was very flat, and there weren't many trees. The country roads were rocky and straight. Ironically, I had wanted tropical and instead I got North Dakota: flat, barren landscape with no trees. (42)

But she ran with it, because...that's what you do. Tasked with supporting small businesses, she quickly realized that she'd be starting with the basics, like how (and why) to track expenses and profits. Money is often a theme of Peace Corps memoirs, partly because volunteers may not be used to living on a (small by US standards but generally reasonably generous by local standards) stipend, and partly because of the gulf between standard of living for middle-class and up parts of the US and standard of living for often remote parts of developing countries. How writers talk about it varies; Peter Hessler talks about being determined to spend his whole stipend each month, because it went so far in China but saving it would amount to a pittance in the US, while Susana Herrera struggles to grasp that although by US standards she is by no means wealthy, her income as a single woman—not to mention resources outside her Peace Corps stipend—makes her seem wealthy, and white, to her community in Cameroon. Meanwhile, Ness falls somewhere in between: her stipend feels small initially, but, perhaps because she was in Uruguay to talk business, the numbers interested her, and she offers comparisons of how, e.g., she spent her stipend and how much somebody in the community could expect to earn. (Similarly, she confirms something I've always wondered...that the US credit card makes for a backup plan, at least when on holiday.)

It's not all money, of course, and it sounds like Ness made some strong connections—she was lucky to be paired with a local counterpart with whom she clicked, and who had his finger on the pulse of local life and needs. I imagine a lot has changed since Ness was there, but it was satisfying to read about a place and culture about which I know so little.