Year In Review

2020, man, right? Whoa boy. 

 One of my goals coming back here is selfish: I like getting prepub books from Netgalley and they like when you review the books that they give you. So I've got a list of books that I got advance copies of--many from several years ago--that I did read and form opinions on. I'd like to post those opinions to get partial credit, even if it's way overdue.

I'd also like to start blogging what I'm in the middle of again, because within a few hours of finishing a book it becomes hard to talk about. I need to be right in the guts of it to really do that; I want to try it.

But let's take a moment to talk about 2020 as a reading year! I can't pick apart this year from other years, but I can tell you that I'm reading a lot more romance than I used to, that I have library books that are overdue by MONTHS, and that my book count would be significantly higher if I counted book-length works of fanfiction, but I'm far too reliant on Goodreads to pull that off.

I look back at the list of books I read and I literally can't believe this was all this year. This was the year I started reading The Innkeeper Chronicles? But...but that was in the Before Times! It was just in January? I am relying entirely on Goodreads for these records; if it tells me that I read The Rules and gave it five stars, I'm going to have to believe it, I guess.

Some exciting bests this year! The aforementioned Innkeeper books, which Sarah K. has been pushing at me for years and I resisted because the covers are pretty darned cheesy. But then my book club friends got into it and I gave it a try and now I am desperately waiting for Ilona Andrews to write the next book about Maud and I have a whole new breed of warlike spacefaring vampires to be weirdly fascinated by.

The Rules for Vanishing was one of the scariest books I've ever read; it is like someone took Tim Burton and stripped all the candyfloss and gave the script to, I don't know, Ridley Scott maybe to film. 

I already posted about Catfishing on Catnet and am absolutely chuffed to bits (as my son says in imitation of his favorite YouTubers) to have an ARC for the next one, which you'll hear about as soon as I read it. 

No real "worst" books of the year; a few 2-star outings, but none that I had high hopes for. Nothing unfinished and nothing hate-read, which is really for the best.

Oh, my book club is new this year! Or at least from the very end of last year. It's really quite the best. It was all over Zoom from the get-go, because the three of us live in different states, but we vacation together most summers (sigh) and we have nicely dovetailing taste in books. It's the first book club that so rarely feels like a chore, because we only pick books we're all excited to read, and our to-read lists have enough overlap that we'll never get through it all. 

And we chat about what else we're reading, which is usually things we all want to read, too. Sometimes we throw out two books just because we are all excited about them. It's just great to talk to L and E every two or three weeks. 

So 2020 was rough, but it was also the year of the book fairy and Camp Book Club, and the year I read three Penric & Desdemona novellas, reread the whole Murderbot series, and discovered the Innkeeper Chronicles. Whatever else is going on in the world, book-wise I can't complain.

Happy new year, everyone.

Over My Head

You know the thing where you're reading a book out loud to a kid and you start doing a bit--an accent, silly voice, or funny face for a certain character--but as the book goes on, you realize how much trouble you've gotten yourself in by starting this? Like you start reading the Batman comics with the Batman voice, but realize on page 3 that you're going to lose your voice before the end of the first issue if you keep trying this?

I knew I was stretching when I decided that the first person narrator of Mars Evacuees should have an authentic (lol) English accent. But hey, I can do a bad English accent for half an hour a night for a few weeks. It's easy!

It wasn't very far into the book, though, when the titular evacuees are gathered together from all over Earth and sent to Mars. And since I'm doing our narrator Alice's voice, I pretty much have to do the Australian accent that Carl and Noel have. Other main characters started flying at me--the Scottish scientist, the Swedish snob, several robots. 

But I've got in under control. Sure, switching from the Midlands to the outback repeatedly in a conversation is tricky, but I am an artist!

I even managed when we threw in an alien race whose language is mostly vowels and who extend all the vowel words in English. I'm pretty proud of that one, actually.

By the beginning of the sequel, Space Hostages, I'm an expert. Dr. Muldoon can talk about terraforming with Mr. Rasmussen (I'll admit, my Swedish accent leans a little German; luckily my kid doesn't know the difference), Thsaaa can develop a French accent (yes, this is canonical, they moved to the Alps) and I am PULLING IT OFF. 

And yes, they have introduced another alien race, who speak through mandibles in a language of mostly clacking. They call themselves the Krakkiluks, and that is actually very fun to say in an Australian accent.

I really thought I had hit Peak Readaloud Complexity. 

Today, we got a new species. They're kind of bat-people, and they speak a tonal language that appears to be a cross between birdsong and yodeling.

Can anyone recommend an online voice coach?

Your Friendly Neighborhood Book Fairy

I think I've found my calling.

It is my ultimate goal in life to drive around town leaving random piles of books on the porches of the good people of Medford, Massachusetts. That's right, I'm the book fairy.

It started when the Friends of the Library did an online book sale--we post bundles of books on Facebook every Thursday morning; first person to comment can buy the item, (offbrand) PayPal us the money, and either pick their books up at a central location or, for a purchase of $10 or more, have them dropped on your front doorstep. On Fridays, I drive all over town and drop off the books.

Then came the grab bags. Tell us who your reader is and what they like, and for $10 you get a pile of used books. Most of them are for kids--a 4 year old boy who loves vehicles and taking things apart; a 7 year old girl who's reading chapter books already, a 12 year old who likes history and adventure. 

Occasionally, though, I get my favorite--an adult who wants funny memoirs, smart romance, thrillers and sci-fi and YA and I get to pick out all my favorites, make a big pile of books I wish I could read again for the first time, or the ones I can't wait to read because all the reviews are SO GOOD. 

And I drop them on someone's porch. Can you imagine, a big bag of fun books just appearing on your porch? Even though you ordered them, even though you paid for them, it's still the dream, right?

I'm the book fairy; I'm getting my business cards made up tomorrow.

A Touch of Romance

After an intense book club read (if anyone would like to discuss Ada Palmer's Too Like the Lightning, I have almost too many thoughts to organize coherently), it was time to downshift into something fluffy and fun.

My waiting ARC of The Boyfriend Project, by Farrah Rochon, was the perfect choice. Beautiful, competent people meet and are wildly attracted to each other, pursue a relationship despite obstacles, overcome pitfalls, and kiss on a lovely fade to black.

The best parts about this book are around Samiah and her awesomeness. She kicks butt and takes name, owns it at work, has goals and meets them. At the beginning of the book she's involved in a viral video with a couple of strangers who quickly become the friends she's been missing as she focused on her work. This new friendship is delightful and charming and I can't wait for the inevitable books about Taylor and London that I certainly hope are coming.

The workplace stuff is also great--watching Samiah navigate idea-stealers and potential promotions is competence at its finest, but watching this company be full of competent, happy people who are treated well by their managers and enjoy their work. I've had a job like that and it was brilliant, and this very much captures that feeling of excitement and teamwork that goes along with that. It's very much a story about a fantasy workplace.

Daniel is also very hot and delightful, and their mutual attraction is full of delightful flirting banter and longing looks.

The reasons Samiah had for not wanting to get serious (because isn't a romance mostly about why they can't just fall for each other smoothly) are pretty thin, but she's a person who's all about control, so it made sense for her character, if not strictly necessary.

Daniel's reasons to resist their attraction are clearer; he's taken his new job as part of a government investigation, and he's here to get the information he needs and get out. Falling for one of his new coworkers was not part of the plan, and the lies he has to tell to sustain his cover story make him uncomfortable, even as he is being his sincere self in falling in love.

This book has an admirable sense of the difference between privacy and lying, because Samiah is a pretty private person, and doesn't expect all Daniel's details. It could be much worse. But the fact is that there are a lot of lies throughout the book, and then at the end, when the reckoning comes, while the apologies are believable, there is maybe not quite enough groveling for me. I feel like some of the angles of his deception that bothered me were not the ones that bothered Samiah, nor the ones Daniel was apologizing for. I wanted a little more nuance in his apology.

BUT: he remains charming and hot and brilliant and nerdy, and a book where the capitalists are not all evil and the "police" presence is after white collar crimes was just the light touch I needed right now. I definitely recommend this one; if you like the cover, this book will definitely deliver.

Catfishing on CatNet

The first thing I need to acknowledge is that the title and cover of this book are pretty awful. I would have had ZERO urge to pick this up based on either of those, and they do not really give you any hint of the facts or feeling of the story you're getting into.


Ignore that.

I book talked this one so aggressively at work that all the YA librarians have read it and are spreading the gospel of Naomi Kritzer's Catfishing on CatNet. This is a book for people who love heartwarming stories about finding friends and family who will take care of you when the world gets scary.

You might have heard of Naomi Kritzer recently because she wrote a pandemic story a few years ago that was so prescient it's been getting a lot of notice--"So Much Cooking." But what I first read by her was the story "Cat Pictures Please," which is the story on which this novel is based. Go ahead and read it first, if you want--it doesn't give anything away. It's just about the character; the book introduces a bunch of people and problems.

The main character and heart of the story is a sentient AI that knows all about you. It knows everything about everyone--it is basically comprised of all the information on the internet. Mostly what it loves and wants are cat pictures, so it started a chat room for people to post cute animal pictures. It acts as a mod and calls itself CheshireCat, and it chats with friends, reposts pics, and studies human nature.

One of CheshireCat's friends is Steph, a teenager on the chatroom. Steph and her mom live a life in hiding, running from her scary dad. She's finally making IRL friends in the new town they've come to, though, so she'd really like to not have to run again. But when Steph's problems start getting bigger, the AI and her friends might need to save Steph from IRL dangers that might be over their heads.

Ugh, I'm not a blurb writer. Two big selling points here: one, everyone in this story is lovely. Well, not everyone. There are bad guys. But the big group of online friends and friends at Steph's new school are just all great. The show up for each other, and trust and respect and believe in each other. They roll with each others' weird home situations, changing pronouns, romantic confusions, and new attempts to understand humanity. Some of the bad guys are scary, and those bad guys come after them, but this story is full of people taking good care of each other, without being perfect.

Point two: watching an AI figure out how people work will never not be fun. CheshireCat is sweet and well-meaning, but only knows the internet parts of life--which is a lot, but not everything. Watching it navigate interactions with a combination of expertise and bafflement is just so heartwarming and charming and funny.

I loved this book. And the Amazon page says there will be more CatNet books, about which I am super excited. So please ignore the cover and give it a try.

(Welcome to post 2 of my dreck writing. I apologize. I make no quality promises for at least a month.)

Thank you Netgalley for sending me an advance review copy of this book before it came out months and months ago.

New Kindle, New You

I have a full dozen unposted drafts, because I haven't written in so long that everything I write is dreck. See this? This is dreck.

But the only way out is through, so from now on I'm posting a tiny bit of dreck all the dang time. I've got a backlog of reviews to do (literally years of neglected ARCs) so let's make this happen.

So the book I currently haven't quite finished is called Nothing Can Hurt You, by Nicola Maye Goldberg. I was expecting a straight-up standard thriller or mystery--you've got a murdered girl in the woods outside a small college town and her loving boyfriend, high on LSD and mood stabilizers. Is it open and shut but-we-were-wrong? Is it going to be a courtroom drama, where the clever defense attorney will put the police to the test? Will the other serial killer arrested just a few weeks before in the same town be related?

Whatever I thought I was getting, this is not it. This whole novel is a series of vignettes, barely interconnected, all about people tangential to the events. It's very well written, and I'm enjoying it a lot, but it's such a strange beast of a book that I am having trouble imagining its market.

The book opens introducing a woman who moved to the small town because of a strange medical condition, whose marriage is on the rocks. We follow her through entertaining her husband's coworker, a fight with her husband, an angry walk in the woods--when she finds a body--Sara's.

Next we meet a totally different character a thousand miles away. We get to know her in rehab, and why she's there, and about her life and personality. We get a little invested in her rehab, and are concerned about the crush she develops on a fellow patient, who is rumored to have killed his girlfriend. Which he admits to; he was high on LSD.

And then we jump forward. We flash around, meeting the dead girl's half-sister, who barely remembers her, 15 years later. A reporter covering the murder trial, whose section is mostly about her fraught relationship with her mother. A teenager who Sara used to babysit for, whose lonely high school life leads her, in a sideways fashion, to a correspondence to the other murderer who was active in the town at that time. The guilty boyfriend's nanny, many years later when he has children of his own.

There's no mystery here; we know who did what and when. We even know why, because mental illness and contraindicated drugs leave it pretty obvious. We're not angry, necessarily, but we are maybe as befuddled as all these people who are trying to make sense of a world that has such a horrible crime in it.

I liked this book very much--which is impressive for a book that is carried so heavily on its writing. Each section is a really thoughtful dive into a character, sympathetic and clear-eyed. There are no bad guys here; everyone's doing their best, although some of their bests aren't very good.

But it's so far from what I expected when I picked it up, and from what I think most people expect when they look at a book about a murdered girl in a small town, I worry that it'll have a hard time finding its audience. This is a book for people who know that a murder like this isn't something that disappears after the show ends in an hour--it changes everyone around it, in every kind of way, for the rest of their lives.

Thank you to Netgalley for a review copy of this book.

The Returned

Hi, guys! Miss me?

Been reading a bunch, of course; lots of stuff to talk about. Also realizing as I open Blogger for the first time in over a year that I'm not sure I remember how to put words together to form thoughts and say...things...with them. So let's see how this goes.

Here and now, I just finished The Return, by Rachel Harrison, which, whatever its literary merit (read: lack thereof), absolutely sucked me and would not let go.

But I don't know if I can properly review it. See, going in, I only knew what the cover copy told me: Julie went missing two years ago, and by now she's presumed dead by everyone except her best friend Elise. So Elise is the only one who's not surprised when Julie turns up on her own front porch with no memory of where she's been for the past two years.

Now Elise and Julie and their other two best friends, Molly and Mae, are getting together at a Catskills hotel for a girls' weekend, to get to know each other again and maybe try to figure out what really happened to Julie.

That was all the info I had. Somehow, I had it painted in my mind as a domestic-thriller type of book, where it's probably the gorgeous and sweet-seeming husband hiding a dark secret, and probably all these women are various flavors of rich suburban white ladies.

I was very wrong.

I don't think it's a spoiler to get more specific, because I've seen other reviewers doing it, but if you would like to go in blind, here's the spoiler-free version:

the book is about a bunch of 20-something post-college women who are not very good at being emotionally mature people. While each one was definitely a trope (Molly wears no makeup and takes no bullshit; Mae is a rich personal stylist in NYC wearing weird, fashionable clothes and always sweet as candy; Elise has a dead end job and can't keep her life together), and they were all seriously not emotionally healthy.

I have rarely felt so much affection and hope for characters just like this. I generally have no use for 20-somethings who are aimless and whiny and not so much bad at self-examination as unaware that it exists. People who are miserable and not trying to fix it; people who are only into appearances and feel hollow; people who are prickly and rude and treat it like a badge of honor. These are my nemeses.

But what the author captures here in such an amazing way is their friendship. The kind of friendship that is most like a good sibling relationship--where you can doubt each other and lie to each other but still love each other, still always come back to each other. A friendship based on living as one organism with four bodies for the crazy, charmed years of college, so you know each other's strengths and weaknesses as well as your own. A friendship where years may pass but your new, older selves click right into place together.

So: portrait of a friendship, not what I expected. Not great literature, but very readable.

Now for the spoilers.

You are warned.

XXXXXXXXXXXX

This is actually a horror novel. There's some haunted house tropes, some standard hotel-in-the-woods stuff, but in the end it comes down to body horror, and BOY HOWDY is it horrifying.

For so much of the book you mostly get hints. Heavy hints--like, it's really damned obvious hints, but the characters don't know they're in a horror novel, so maybe it's just the lighting that makes her hair seem thinner last night than today? Probably that's rusty condensation dripping from that vent, not some...other red stuff. Your suitcase totally didn't move by itself; you're remembering wrong. REALLY IT'S FINE.

Friends, it is not fine. And while, looking back on the book, there are many unexplained weirdnesses, many hints dropped that in the end don't actually go anywhere, by god I don't care. I spent most of the book looking up every half hour saying, "vampire? zombie? werewolf?" I finally came up with "wendigo," which is also not quite right but closer than anything else.

If your idea of fun is sitting in a hotel room with your besties, reality TV in the background, pouring liquor into half-full soda cans and knowing that you are the funniest, snarkiest, people you'll ever meet...and you don't mind the rattling in the walls or the occasional spurting gouts of blood....this one's for you.