Allie
“So what's happening in your ridiculous* romance novel?” Matt asked me last night. He was not expecting my next words to be, “The hero just got kidnapped,” which ended up setting us off into uncontrollable laughter, because what kind of romance novel involves a girl declaring she must be Terrible at sex, demanding sex lessons from her rock star best friend, falling in love with him after the first time they hook up only for him to get kidnapped by a stalker-fan not five minutes later?
Yeah.
*He doesn't normally describe them thusly unless I already have. And frankly, the ridiculousness started early. Who on earth, having only had one long-term partner and a dry spell of a single year decides they are Repulsive to the Opposite Sex and/or must be Lousy in Bed? It didn't start great, is what I'm saying.** But it was entertaining enough that I kept going.
**It didn't end great either. Who, when they are stalking a rock star, decides to drug and kidnap their quarry and lock him in their hunting yurt in the middle of nowhere, and then when it becomes clear that things are coming to a head, decides to set fire to said yurt, because absolutely - arson and murder are better things to go to prison for than outright kidnapping? Yeah.
But still, I kept reading. I wouldn't have been remiss to toss it aside during any of the aforementioned plot points, but eh, whatever. It was fine.
I am not the intended audience for this book. It seems like the people who ARE the intended audience LOVED it. I stayed interested, but at one point I got to what felt like the logical conclusion and there was still like 30% of the book to go. Overly long. A lot a lot a lot of drama - baby mama drama, baby daddy drama, celebrity drama, rapper drama - basically no one ever actually got over their exes and that was major roadblocking the HEA. Really steamy, but a lot (a LOT) of getting down in public at the last minute before things like award shows and whatnot, and I didn't love that.
CW: revenge porn, suicide, abandonment of a partner during pregnancy, single parenthood, physical violence
A twist on my favorite trope! Will and his best friend Rose agree to pretend to date to boost their chances of their Youtube show getting a streaming contract (because the fans are clamoring for it), but a few days before Christmas, Will has a one-night stand ... with Lizzy, who it turns out is Rose's estranged twin, who will also be home for Christmas.
This was DELIGHTFUL. It was steamy and sexy and also had family reconciliation and getting snowed in, and of course Rose was secretly still in love with her ex and had negative-100 chemistry with her fake boyfriend, who couldn't stop mooning over Lizzy.
Read it!
“Complementarianism is patriarchy, and patriarchy is about power. Neither have ever been about Jesus.”
This is not so much a review as a list of things I want to remember prior to discussion with Jeananne.
• Phoebe the Deaconess, being demoted in different versions of the Bible
• Bible translations moving back and forth between gender-inclusive language and gender-exclusive language depending on the time period.
• And also people specifically creating translations to remove women's agency
• Rise of inerrancy, if you don't literally believe the beginning of the story (Creation, Flood), then you can't believe that the Jesus stuff is accurate either. And this is how Paul's words are used too.
• Evangelical heresy (Arianism) that Jesus was subordinate to God, and that's why women are subordinate to men. Triune God = Father Son and Holy Spirit all the same and all equal.
• The shifting of patriarchy as society evolves, to continue to keep specific groups of people out
• Medieval women preaching! Things have ebbed and flowed both pre- and post-Reformation. Women in the 1930s preaching!
• We all have different giftings, doesn't make sense that only half the people should be able to serve with theirs, or that only one group “gets” to be gifted with things like speaking, teaching.
This book made so much sense to me, and gave me so much. Dr. Barr is a medieval historian at a Baptist university about an hour north of me, and her framing was perfect and reasonable. I got this from the library but I think I need to get my own copy. Also I need to buy a different Bible translation for my Kindle, because it turns out the ESV was specifically translated in such a way as to cut women's roles as prophetesses, deaconesses and apostles out of the Bible.
I have never seen a single episode of One Tree Hill. Prior to picking up this book, I had no idea who Lenz was, even after looking through her IMDB page. I did check reviews prior to picking it from Book of the Month, because I didn't want to pick something that was all fan service if I wasn't part of that fandom, but that was not a concern at all. OTH is in the periphery throughout, but this is not a book about being on that TV show. It just happened to be filming at the same time as all the other shit Lenz was going through.
While light in tone, and Lenz is a good writer, this is a heavy book. She didn't start out her life in a cult - in fact, her relationship with God and church has some similarities to mine, where she was just hopping around and trying to find a place to fit. She joined a Bible study with some friends while she was in L.A. auditioning for TV roles, and it slowly got taken over by someone outside the group that morphed into something grotesque. And Lenz was so desperate to have close relationships and family, that so many red flags got ignored. Over and over, until finally the only people she felt close to were in the Big Family and they worked to keep her from building real friendships with her coworkers and her actual family, by continually implying that they weren't safe, couldn't be trusted, would never understand.
You see Lenz getting worn down, knowing she doesn't want the things the rest of the Family want, but not being willing to lose the relationships of her Family. You see her knowing that the choices she's making are terrible, and she wants someone to save her but can't bring herself to do anything about it either. She turns down opportunities for more and better acting jobs because she would have to continue traveling weekly for work, and the Family can see themselves losing their grip on her if that happens. And then she marries someone in the Family, and - MY RED FLAG BELLS were DING DING DINGING - gives him joint access to her bank accounts.
You see where this is going. By the time she's ready to get out and save herself and her daughter, she's lost over $2 million through shady investments and manipulation and outright theft.
She does talk about how easy it could be for anyone to get sucked into this kind of cult relationship, bit by worn-down bit, and I appreciated that. I never felt like Lenz was a sucker, I just wished that she'd had more wherewithal and self-confidence to see that this was not going to a healthy place. I also wish there had been more about how she healed after this time period, other than reconnecting with her parents and two friends that had known her outside of the cult experience. Years afterward were sucked up into legal battles to disentangle herself from the Family, and whether it just meant there wasn't enough time for that healing to occur prior to publication, or if she chose to leave it off-page, I'm not sure.
Still, an interesting and worthwhile read that is not in my typical wheelhouse.
CW: manipulation, physical assault, sexual assault (off page), using mental health as a reason to not trust someone, divorce, custody battle
The speed limit on Texas highways can easily get up to 75, 80, 85 mph, depending on how straight the road is, how much nothing there is nearby, and whether or not it's a toll road. Now, I don't know your life, but if someone is driving a convertible, say 15-20 mph OVER that, there's no way in hell I'd be masturbating in the passenger seat. I'd be holding on for DEAR LIFE.
A merry band of thieves steal from the rich to ... I dunno, they're clearly not giving to the poor. But the only steal from people who are so wealthy that they won't miss their Jaguar going missing and whatnot, and also they do this in the midst of giant galas and fundraisers so there's so many people around that it deflects suspicion. Also this is barely a plot point. Grand Theft N.Y.E. is about Cleo and Robert going nuts on each other, in detail, and honestly it sounds kind of painful the amount of time they spend boinking each other, and thinking about boinking each other while declaring they have been RUINED for other people.
It needed an edit (lot of spelling errors) but this was on KU so I guess I expect less there? It also didn't need the epilogue, which I felt was awkward because NO BUSINESS ASSOCIATES WOULD EVER BEHAVE LIKE THIS even if they were married and hot for their assistant.
So ultimately, it was fine. I'll give it a 2.5.
No actual Sugar Daddies. Zero stars.
Nah, I'm just kidding. Though this is like no romance I've ever read. It's slow to build up to it, but Liberty starts out so young that this is just fine by me. Instead, the background of friendships (Miss Marva, Churchill, the people at the salon) and familial obligations (Liberty cares for her much younger sister Carrington after their mother dies) propel the story along until the real romance comes along, between Liberty and Churchill's son Gage.
There are so many good side characters. Texas is a character too, and that makes up for no sugar daddies. (Though there's a lot of rich oil dudes, and Liberty is po' but gets hired by one of them, so I get what the title is going for.)
There's a Love Triangle (isn't Hardy Cates kind of the best romance name?!), and long-held secrets, and it's sexy but not smutty. I really really enjoyed this.
It started with the romance novels, but I've begun telling Matt about all my books - the characters, the plots, what's happening where I am now, and now, and now.
“It's about a couple that's in the process of divorcing,” I said.
“Uplifting!” he said.
Later, "They just found the husband's body in a ravine," I said."Was it the wife?" he asked."I don't know yet," I said. "There's also a jealous other woman.""Of course there's a jealous other woman!"
Of course, that makes this sound much more thriller-y than it actually is. Even though there are a few other central characters - the unnamed narrator's in-laws, a hotel concierge, and a driver that shuttles her across the Greek village - most of it is the narrator speculating on their interior lives, what they must be thinking and feeling as the story slowly unfolds. And it is slow. Her hopefully-soon-to-be-ex is only present in the periphery of the book; we never see his point of view, just an increasingly disappointing picture of a marriage that might have been doomed from the start, and yet the fact that they are separated is a secret that he has asked her to keep and that she feels obligated to keep even after his death. The Greek setting doesn't offer up much beauty either, it is a harsh landscape that recently experienced devastating fires, and it's a fitting setting.
I'm not sure what to think about this, overall. It wasn't quite as tightly constructed as her later Intimacies, which I thought was excellent, but I still enjoyed sinking into Kitamura's words. (Do I wish for some quotation marks? Maybe, sometimes, but that's not a deal-breaker for me. It might be for you.)
I was prepared to love this. Harris starts out with a story about Crazy Ex-Girlfriend, a show I adore, which doesn't appear to be streaming anywhere anymore FOR SHAME.
I knew Harris's voice from Pop Culture Happy Hour (where she is one of the four main hosts), and she reads her own audiobook as well, but as I was listening I realized I didn't actually know anything about her. This book was part personal essay, part cultural criticism, part discussion of race as it applies to the pop culture we're raised on.
Harris and I are of the same generation, and have a lot of the same cultural touchstones (except that she's a pop culture critic and I've missed a lot of the TV shows and movies that have come along in the last five years). I generally like her dry, wry humor. And so I was enjoying Wannabe with its discussions about The Lion King, and The Babysitters' Club, and the one Black friend in every teen romcom from the '90s.
But the further I got into the book, the more annoyed I felt. There's a chapter about the rehashing of intellectual property and how nobody has new ideas anymore (which is true and also we all already know this). There's an essay about how Harris as a 30-something doesn't want kids, and how pop culture makes parenting seem awful, rife with examples about how kids ruin everything. (You do you, but I don't care, and I don't need to hear people shitting on being a parent - just experiencing it is hard enough.) Megyn Kelly shows up in an essay about there being more people of color and women in re-imaginations of existing IP, and how white has always been the default, and how white people can't or won't tolerate non-white people being centered in things. Yes, AND ... if you know anything about cultural criticism already, none of this is NEW.
The best parts were where she was applying things to her own life, like how her white middle school friends always expected Harris to be Scary Spice when they pretended, how she thought she was named after a Stevie Wonder song, and how her dad didn't want her to have white dolls growing up but she was desperate to play Ariel from the Little Mermaid (the ‘89 version), with ridiculous results.
I'll still enjoy Harris' work when she's on PCHH, but this was only okay.
A sweet, quick read featuring a Russ, a hot ex-marine, and Esteban, a hot ex-actor, who are neighbors and pretend to be in a relationship when Russ is expected to introduce a significant other to his family on Thanksgiving the following day, but that dude was the worst and broke up with him the day before and left Russ in the lurch. It pretty much keeps to the few weeks between Thanksgiving and New Year's, but it is heavier on the relationship aspect than the holidays specifically. Some steam, not a ton. I liked Russ and Esteban, I could see why they were good together. And no 3rd act breakup unless you count one stalking back to his own house and the other following like half an hour later.
Buddy read with Jeananne. This was an interesting book, focusing on Paul's letters. Borg & Crossan's specific argument is that, of Paul's New Testament letters, some of them are “authentic” aka written literally by Paul, some are unclear as to whether historically they were written by him (“pastoral” letters), and some were absolutely not written by him (“disputed” letters). The authors focus on the so-called authentic letters (Romans, 1 & 2 Corinthians, Galatians, Philippians, 1 Thessalonians and Philemon), discussing various subjects like slavery, patriarchy, sacrifice, justice/sanctification using Paul's historical perspective as a lens.Overall it gave me a lot to think about - retributive vs restorative/distributive justice; radical Paul vs conservative Paul vs reactionary Paul - but also this book is so slim and doesn't have a lot of endnotes/sources, and I wanted more from it and also more application. (What am I supposed to DO with the fact that this made me like Potentially Real Paul better, but that the other maybe-Pauline letters are still biblical?)Made for a good discussion, and as always much more reading to do.Turns out these were already my faves of the Pauline letters HMMM. The extensive look at Philemon in particular was excellent, as I had never given that one as much attention as some of the bigger names.
Well, this book broke my 10-year-old Kindle.
Was it because technology isn't really meant to last that many years?
Or was it because our hero, Beck, is turned on by everything and therefore spent 90% of this book sporting a partial, if not full-on boner? eyebrow waggle
This is a very horny book. There's your warning and/or endorsement. Beck and Everly - or Beverly, as is their portmanteau - are BFFs and she moves in with him after her house burns down, and there's only one bed and oops they banged in the shower. (I don't know about you, but I've never had this accidentally happen to me LOL.)
I've been really enjoying the setting of this series, and that the characters from the previous and next books are all involved in the storylines so I've already gotten a taste as to what's coming in the next one, and grabby hands
Luckily my new Kindle arrived this afternoon because reading on my phone is no bueno.
Gotta do whatever brings us joy!
Really loved living in Michelle and Gabe's world for a brief moment. Childhood friends-to-lovers, he's always been in love with her, they had an almost-hookup right before he left for college on the other side of the country, but then he left and didn't talk to any of them for years and years ... and suddenly they're working together on a marketing campaign for Gabe's gym. ‘Cause of course he's freaking giant and ripped. And they decide to get the sexual tension out of their systems so they can focus on work. Oops! That doesn't work. And sneaking around because remember childhood best friends? Her parents' house is next door to his parents' house, and they're staying at her parents' for Reasons, and he has Issues with his parents. But OOPS, Gabe's dad had no idea he was in town and discovers this ... while Gabe is at the drugstore holding boxes of Magnums. Because OF COURSE.
Really, this was perfect.
At this moment, I am all about the ridiculous premise. She is an environmental protestor, and he is the sheriff of the small town who has to keep arresting her when she continually chains herself to things. It was all, sweet-cute-banter - 50% mark - smut-smut-banter-smut-HEA. Not mad!
I'll probably read the second one in the series, Sheriff's brother who reads romance novels and is in love with his best friend and oops there's only one bed. Yep, just talked myself into one-clicking that. I need all the happiness I can get this week!!!! Forget all those other book club books and library books on my nightstand!
I enjoy Sharon's work on her Instagram, where she explains news, context and big concepts in easy-to-understand ways, and I enjoyed reading this book too. I enjoyed the conversational tone, though it sounds like some reviewers didn't, but for me to dig into history and get anything out of it, it's gotta be interesting and engaging or I lose interest. This is a me problem. And while I had broad strokes knowledge about a lot of the topics in this book, I didn't know (or remember) a lot of the specifics.
(Like, did you know, when the segregationists were told they HAD to integrate schools in the 1950s, ‘cause SCOTUS says so - when asked what a reasonable timeline might be, the segregationists said by 2020. TWENTY TWENTY. CAN YOU EVEN IMAGINE.)
I'm not sure who, exactly, the 12 unsung people are, because there are names alllllll over this (as it should be with history!) but even when I flipped back to the beginning and re-read the Table of Contents, there were more than 12 people included, so ... marketing I guess.
Things I want to remember though - that as history plods on, your actions are not forgotten. Do the next right thing. Take the next needed step.
Worth a read, though definitely not perfect.
I don't do a whole lot of horror, but usually in October I get a hankering for something a little spooky. This was a lightly scary tale by an indigenous author featuring urban Indian characters, and a folkloric monster that terrorizes the main character, Kari, who begins seeing horrifying apparitions of her mother, who disappeared when Kari was two days old.
This is a very interior book, you're mostly in Kari's head, not sure if she's a reliable narrator, but still rooting for her to get her stuff together. She doesn't have a lot of people in her life, and she is a primary caretaker for her dad, who has a brain injury, and her life has not been easy by any stretch.
There were some continuity things I noticed (I received this from Book of the Month a couple years ago, maybe this was an early version?), but the writing was engaging and the story pretty quick paced once I got into it. I enjoyed getting a perspective of modern, less traditional indigenaity (sp?) too, which I have not read much about. I'd check out other of Wurth's books in the future. 3.5 stars.
CW: alcohol (including drinking and driving), drug abuse/overdose, death, ghosts, racism, child sexual assault (off page), smoking, police/FBI, guns
It took me about a month to read, and luckily Jeananne wasn't available to meet when we had originally planned to discuss this, because I was only halfway through at the time!
The Sisterhood was not the kind of book I could sit down and immerse myself in for very long. It was very interesting, and I enjoyed the reading experience, but it was NOT an easy read for me. There's so many names and jobs and time periods and countries going through turmoil that the women were working in, and some of the big names kept being referred back to, and it was challenging to keep up even though I think Mundy did a good job of attempting to differentiate the main players she focused on.
I also get that you gotta market a book in order to get buyers for it, but other than a few groups of women that remained close over the course of their lives through their work and after leaving the CIA, I never got a sense that the women were very all-in on “Women in CIA!” They just were working for their own individual reasons, and they all had their own experiences in it (some better than others), and some saw other women as competition and did everything to keep them down while others saw that rising tides lift all boats.
Also I knew, I KNEW even then, in 2001, as a freshman in high school, that it made ZERO sense to fight the Iraq War. Personal vindication lies here - the female analysts doing counterterrorism told people again and again that there was going to be an attack from al-Qaeda, that Afghanistan was where bin Laden was, and the Powers That Be also wanted to take out Saddam Hussein and so kept asking said analysts to run again and again scenarios in which it might make sense to attack there ... and of course there wasn't but you can't prove a negative. These last few sections were a) really strong, and b) really hard to revisit because I was aware of a lot of what was happening in the world, whereas I had a lot more remove from the earlier parts of the book (during the 1960s, the Cold War, the Vietnam War, etc.).
If Mundy's goal was to introduce people to women doing excellent work in their chosen fields, she succeeded. The Sisterhood didn't make me see the CIA or other intelligence agencies in a better light - I've got some feelings about why it's legal to do illegal things if it's in the name of catching bad guys - but I never got the sense that that was what Mundy wanted to do.
If you're interested in women doing cool shit while the Man tries to keep them down and also get into their skirts, this one's for you.
I was reading the end of this book on my phone in the doctor's office this morning and trying not to sob. I'm wearing my bookshelf earrings today, so the doc asked what I was reading, and I mentioned that I've read most of Jimenez's books and also that she's the worst because she breaks your heart and makes you cry, then fixes it and makes you cry AGAIN when everything is better.
I did not see the third act of this coming AT ALL, and it was DEVASTATING.
I'm docking a star because Kristen's refusal to Have a Conversation went on and on and on and on. It's not even that the Conversation would have solved things, necessarily, but I'm always on the side of more conversations. And then at least she and Josh would have been on the same page.
CW: infertility and treatment related to infertility, obsessive compulsive disorder, medical trauma, death, alcohol, grief, pregnancy (uneventful)
It was due back to the library, so I had to hurry! 3.5 stars. Took a while to get into, but then I got a lot more engaged (especially once I started skipping over Swede's unrealistic poetry and cowboy stories). Also, a lot of this is set in the North Dakota Badlands, and once upon a time Matt was considering taking a job in North Dakota and BOY HOWDY am I glad that did not pan out! The descriptions of snow, ice, being cold, cold rooms, horses tromping through crusty waist-high frost, being buried in quilts to no effect, plows not being able to get through six feet of snowfall in one night... I would not have survived there.
Anyway, I enjoyed the story of Reuben, Swede and Davy, Dad and Roxanna.
Gyasi is a gorgeous writer. This is not a happy book, and yet it was beautiful and touching and deeply resonant. It's about addiction, and faith, and depression, and the complexities of family, and trying to find answers when you can't even articulate the questions.
I don't even want to write more than this, because it was beautiful in the way it unfolded. Read it.
TW: drug addiction, overdose, depression, suicide attempt, animal experimentation