Allie

What a weird book. I enjoyed it, but how to actually classify it? I picked it for my book club because they requested “something lighter, maybe something dystopian.” They're probably never going to let me pick anything again!

Because while I thought it was supposed to be a thriller, The Survivalists didn't match the quick pacing that I've come to associate with thrillers. There was a lot more about main character Aretha, her character motivations, a bit of character building associated with the other characters as well, but a lot of the action up until the very end was more internal than external.

And I didn't know where it was supposed to be headed! Which was kind of nice that I didn't figure it out, though there were zero hints dropped in advance. Most of the time we were in Aretha's head, but occasionally we would randomly jump into one of her roommates' heads.

Sometimes the format confused me as to whether Aretha as literally traveling around the city or just fantasizing about doing so. Her job and most of her existence sounded hellish. As always, you should watch the Crazy Ex-Girlfriend “Don't Be a Lawyer” song.

Anyway, I hope some book club people read it so I can talk about it.

CW: sexual assault; violence against an animal

It took me a while to get into this, despite it jumping out at me from the indie bookstore “In Translation” shelf. While it tells the story of a mother and her son in parallel, the stories - their content and tone, and even the lyricism of the writing - are so drastically different from each other that it was jarring at the start, but as the book continues, the storylines seem to veer closer to each other, and you start to understand the layers that make up a family and a life, and all the secrets and hurts and shames and fears within. This is a refugee story, and a story of a spiraling young man whose actions often seem like a cry for help, and a story of war, and patriarchy, and how fast cultural changes and expectations can occur. There is a lot here, and I don't feel like the blurb does it justice.

This is not a book where I felt for the characters; I was a bystander watching this story unfold, and that's okay - I never felt like I needed to be closer. Even though I didn't love it, I'm glad I read it.

A sweet graphic novel about a seamstress who wants to be a clothing designer and the prince that hires her. Prince Sebastian sometimes feels like a prince, and sometimes (to his shame) feels like Lady Crystallia, and seamstress Frances designs for both - and you see her career skyrocket as people begin knocking off her designs and she becomes in higher and higher demand. We watch their friendship grow and change, and the way Sebastian tries to keep his secret before his eventually being outed as Crystallia. It wraps up neatly with everyone (that matters, at least) accepting him for who he is, and Frances getting to design her own collections. The art is lovely, and clearly this book has been well-loved because my library copy was pretty close to falling apart. Lovely.

I've done a lot of cooking, and a lot of learning how to cook, since college, because neither of my parents did a lot of cooking or ever really taught me when I was younger. Even so, with years of dinner prep under my belt, most of the time it's a recipe or bust. I have a very small handful of meals I'm confident making without a recipe, but I had no idea why those worked, just that if I did the same thing time and again, it worked.

This was a great, if hefty in size and information, primer on the basic building blocks of cooking, what flavors work together, and how to elevate even regular, routine meals with just an extra sprinkling of salt or splash of lemon juice. There's even mini cooking lessons throughout and in the recipe suggestions in the back, which I hope to try, but I also learned quite a lot throughout the reading that I took back to the kitchen with me as I went (and declared to Matt as Fun Facts). I liked learning about Nosrat's learning to cook, and her experiences in famous kitchens even if I never plan to set foot in one; she is a lively and passionate teacher with a great sense of humor, and the drawings and charts throughout were delightful. I'm personally a pescatarian (mostly vegetarian) for health reasons, but I found good useful information even among the sections that were more meat-heavy.

This one's going to live in my kitchen and be referred to often.

WHAT. THAT'S WHERE IT ENDS???