Amy
This is definitely a book in which I think the title and the cover don't accurately reflect what it was about. The characters are lounging on the beach on the front of the book – and very rarely make it to the beach at all in the pages. I also get that the title is probably poking fun a little at the idea of romance novels as light books you read on the beach, and the basic premise of the book involves the characters exploring their genres, but I think you could have taken the entire story and set it in the mountains and it would have been the same. I like that Emily Henry writes emotionally complex characters. But I think this might be my least favorite of the three adult novels she has published, mostly because I struggle with reading leading men who can't say what they feel. I understand that Gus's backstory explains why he is the way he is. But something January says to Gus really summarizes what frustrated me about this book: "I don't need you to be Fabio...I just want you to tell me how you feel. I want to know what it is you want." I just didn't like how they each made assumptions about what the other was feeling or needed throughout the story. What I did enjoy was the way both January and Gus explored why feel-good fiction is not just naïve or unrealistic.
I don't know why, but I thought this was going to be a cookbook (and there are some recipes at the end), but the main part of the book is explaining how Michelle Obama implemented the White House kitchen garden, what they grew there, and the impact that community gardens anywhere have. The book is organized by season and includes looks into things like beekeeping and school gardens. It was a very approachable but not over-simplified book and definitely made me want to plant some things on my balcony or look into getting a community garden plot.
I know I have read Farewell to Manzanar at some point in the past, but it was good to reread as an adult. My grandparents and their families were incarcerated at Manzanar, and it is amazing how consistent their stories are with Jeanne Wakatsuki Houston's stories, although my grandparents were about 10 years older than Houston was during the time. This did provide me with a different perspective, that of a pre-teen growing up imprisoned versus that of my grandparents in their early 20s and just starting to build their adult lives. Houston provides descriptive details of live in the camp and also introspection about her own family dynamics and how she and the various members of her family were affected by the experience. Because Manzanar is such an important part of my own family's story, I'm always amazed to hear when people don't even know about this part of American history, so this is a great place to start.
This is a tricky book to review. Sandra Uwiringiyimana's story is difficult and important. I wasn't familiar with the Gatumba massacre before, so this definitely did the job of bringing awareness to the story. And as difficult as it was to read, the beginning part of the book including the massacre and the aftermath was descriptive and really takes the reader there. However, a lot of the rest of the book seemed to be a case of telling rather than showing. Uwiringiyimana rushes through a lot of the ups and downs of her life in the U.S. in the second half of the book.
Whew, this was a difficult one to read, mostly for the reasons Lewis wrote himself in the afterword of this edition: “I find its chief faults to be those two which I myself least easily forgive in the books of other men: needless obscurity, and an uncharitable temper.” I see how this book was a way for Lewis to wrestle out his own faith journey, but if one is not generally a philosopher, it is difficult to relate to all of the various allegorical figures the main character, John, interacts with.
I enjoy Prince Caspian because it is a true return to Narnia in the vein of The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe but it is better developed than that one. It's a pretty straightforward battle story (although I did not remember how actually violent, although brief, the battle sequences are) with a good interjection of Aslan mixed in.
I really enjoyed the way this book played with all the tropes of small-town romances. I feel like two of the main concepts of this story, though, that Nora is a cold, big-city woman, and that Charlie is her nemesis, were stated but not really earned. Maybe it was because Nora was the first-person narrator, but she seemed like a very likeable heroine from the start. And I also thought the first interactions with Charlie were flirtatious and not true conflict. Still, I enjoyed the book overall and am definitely on the Emily Henry bandwagon. The best part of this story was really the relationship between the sisters and how this trip affects that.
I've never read any of Christine Caine's full books, but I thought a devotional of her writings might be a good place to start. I'm not so sure that was right. I wasn't particularly affected by the one-page reflections, and I wonder if I need to read her longer writing to feel the impact. Overall, this was just OK for me.
This is the first Emily Henry I've read, but I've heard reviews that this one is less beloved as her other two adult contemporary romances. But I absolutely loved this book. I love Alex and Poppy, but especially Alex. Reading this book reminded me of how I'm much more a fan of character-driven books rather than plot-driven ones, and the entire plot of this book just serves as character development for the two protagonists. There is emotional depth in addition to fun vacations. I also loved Henry's wit throughout – little asides such as, “In fact, she hugged me (it felt like being hugged by Beyoncé).” I closed the book and literally said, well, that was delightful.
This is an extraordinary interweaving story of the life and humanity of Henrietta Lacks, the lives of her children and extended family, the impact of her cells on science and health, and the investigation by the author in trying to learn all these things. Despite all those many aspects to navigate, Skloot has managed to write in such a way that the reader can follow all the threads. She honors the Lacks family's stories while being honest about the challenges they've faced. She explains the science in an understandable way. And she surfaces the complex ethical questions about the impact of race in this story and ultimately who should own HeLa cells without providing pat answers.
It's amazing to me how a story I remember as being so vivid and complex is actually very compact. This may be the beauty of C.S. Lewis, how he sparks the imagination to fill in a lot of the story, or it may just be the memories from childhood as well as the movies making me think this book is more epic than it was as an adult. Still a great one, with a lot to take away – just not as engrossing as I remember.
The Magician's Nephew is a great setup for the rest of the Narnia books, although on its own, it's not super compelling. I like Polly better as a character (perhaps because she has more common sense), but she ends up sort of relegated to a sidekick for Digory, the titular nephew, and I don't love that. But I really love the way Narnia is sang into being and, of course, the first time we meet Aslan.
I had Cinda Johnson as a professor in graduate school and heard a little bit about her daughter's story and that they had written a book together, so this book has been on my list for a long time before I finally read it. It is an extraordinary story, particularly in the way that it is written, alternating between Linea's (the daughter) and Cinda's (the mother) perspectives as Linea experiences learning she has bipolar as she goes through a series of episodes. It is definitely a difficult book to read because of the reality portrayed, but I think it's important and worthwhile.
At first, I couldn't get over the really traumatic things that are part of the backstories of the characters in Sonali Dev's Jane Austen retellings. I still think that the ones in A Recipe for Persuasion are not handled very well. But in Dev's bio, it says she writes “Bollywood-style love stories,” and I feel like thinking of them through that filter helped me. Still, if you have any sensitivity around sexual assault and domestic abuse, use caution. (It's all off the page and in backstory, but several of the characters are dealing with the trauma in present day.) All that to say, I do really like the Raje family at the center of this series, and I think Dev does a good job of capturing the heart of the original novels in these modernized versions. One thing that confused me a bit here is that she gender-flipped the Darcy-Elizabeth roles, but then mixed around some of the story elements. (For example, the male lead, DJ, is the Elizabeth equivalent, but then he has a close younger sister, who would be Georgiana. A little confusing.)
I love the way that Michael Pollan has been able to take a broad, basic concept, like what we eat in The Omnivore's Dilemma, and do a deep dive into the history and social implications of it. In Cooked, the subject this time is cooking, how humans have transformed raw ingredients into meals, and how these processes have transformed the way we live. Pollan frames his investigation in the four elements, which he ties to a specific cooking process (such as fire with barbecue). I wasn't as blown away by this book as some of his previous ones, but I did enjoy it and learned a lot. The most fascinating tidbit to me is the way that the air inside bread contains flavor – and in fact, may contain the majority of flavor in a bread. That is mind-boggling!
Oh, dear. This was not good. I can deal with cheesy, and I liked the idea of gender-swapping the lead characters in this modern-day Pride and Prejudice reimagining. But the writing was just so bad. Everything felt frantic (I like you, I don't like you, I'm marrying someone else, I called off the wedding, me too, I love you, wait I'm not sure, OK yeah I love you -- all in about two weeks!), Luke was not really like Elizabeth Bennet at all, and Darcy was not believable as a super successful business person. I really want to love Austen retellings, but there are a lot of bad ones out there, and this is one of them.
This book was almost the reverse of Out of the Silent Planet for me, in which the beginning was dark but the book as a whole was not. In Perelandra, it starts off pretty quietly, with Ransom essentially being supernaturally transported (no actual space travel involved this time) to Perelandra, or Venus, and then about a third of the way through the book, something evil arrives. I personally find this kind of evil, the conniving and sinister type, to be the most disturbing and haunting. But although set in another planet, with wonderfully imaginative world-building, this book is ultimately an exploration of theology. I can't exactly say that I enjoyed the book, but it was intriguing and well done.
I like to check out cookbooks to get a feel for whether I'd like to own the book and use it regularly. With this book, I'm not likely to make many of the recipes, but I ended up reading it like I would a narrative. Edna Lewis grew up in a community in Virginia that had been established by formerly enslaved people. Their meals were delightfully seasonal, connected to the food being produced on the farms. The structure of the book includes sections for each season, then a menu for a different type of meal, such as “an early spring dinner after sheep-shearing” or “fall breakfast before a day of hunting.” Lewis introduces each section with a couple of pages about that season, then each meal includes a brief description, and finally almost every recipe includes charming headnotes. The food all sounds delicious, and the community connections are also wonderful.
I don't read a lot of science fiction, but I'm starting to work my way through all of C.S. Lewis's fiction, which starts with this book. I really didn't think I was going to like it at all, as the first few chapters seem to be setting up a sinister plot, but once Ransom arrives on Malacandra, most of the book is actually just about his life on the planet, learning about the lives of the various beings that live there and describing the environment. The setting allows for exploration in the later chapters of the morality of humanity on Earth, as seen from the perspective of another planet. I enjoyed the world building and the allegory more than I was expecting to dislike the intrigue, but it's still not quite a favorite.
I didn't think I liked this book for awhile, than it grew on me, than I wasn't so sure again, and I ended up with: it's really well written, I enjoyed some aspects of the book, I'm glad I read it, and it's not a favorite. The book includes a lot of the descriptive details that I love to set the scene and time period; in a way, it kind of reminded me of Little House on the Prairie in how I was interested in all the aspects of subsistence farming and hunting. (I'm glad that I don't have to grow all my own food to survive, but I'm actually fascinated by all those things.) I was also surprised that the adopted fawn didn't show up until about a third of the way into the book, as I thought the book was about the yearling. At some point later in the book, it clicked to me – Jody is The Yearling!