Christina

I was so excited to read this book as Quiet was transformative for me. Maybe it was a case of unrealistic expectations, but this book not only didn't resonate much with me (even though I'd certainly describe myself as drawn to bittersweetness; my Spotify Wrapped inevitably skews to “yearning” and “nostalgia”), I didn't find it particularly well-written or intellectually exciting. There were moments I loved, mostly when Cain is reflecting on her own personal experiences, and I thought the final chapter on inherited trauma was well-researched and fascinating. So much of it, though, felt like she was giving credence to scam artists, or at the very least giving way too much benefit of the doubt. In particular, I feel like the sections on “anti-deathers” would have been greatly improved with some healthy skepticism. I'm sad to give this the rating I did, but anything higher would be a stretch.

As someone whose Spotify Wrapped skews towards “yearning” and “nostalgia”, it's no shock that I was drawn to this book of what-ifs. But it's not simply looking back on roads not taken - it's an actual exploration of nine of them. (Yes, like Sliding Doors.)

Rose married Luke knowing they wouldn't have kids. He's since changed his mind. All nine lives are sparked from the same moment - Rose had begrudgingly agreed to take prenatal vitamins, Luke discovers the bottle's full - but each time, she reacts differently and a new future is created. Some include a baby, often under pressure, raising big questions of social norms and identity and consent; others don't. Some include divorce, affairs, career pivots. You see some of her most important relationships strengthen or wither across lives, while others are universally present, just in different ways.

What I loved about this book is that I couldn't always predict which choices would lead to which outcomes. And honestly, as someone who agonizes over making the “right” choice, I found it deeply soothing that there was joy and heartbreak in (nearly) every life Rose chose.

I loved reading this book. I'm shocked that it didn't get more attention when it came out last year - I'm not always a book club person, but this was made for book club discussions. At risk of getting personal, it would be fascinating to hear which choices and lives resonated most with each person and why.

My only caveat is that the lives aren't written linearly - you jump from life to life - so I'd recommend having a hard copy to make it easier to flip back and recall where the life you're in left off!

TL;DR: You should read this book as a physical copy, not an ebook!

This was a stunning book, but - like Honoree Jeffries' The Love Songs of W. E. B. DuBois and Anthony Doerr's Cloud Cuckoo Land - it's one that demands a physical copy to be read and absorbed as intended. I struggled reading this on my Kindle; the book jumps characters, stories, and years (like Sequoia Nagamatsu's How High We Go In The Dark, it's almost more a collection of linked short stories than a traditional novel), but all these threads are elegantly and powerfully woven together, and I know I would have benefitted from being able to flip back more easily. I wanted it to be easier to answer questions like “I know I've heard this name before, what was she doing last we saw her?” and “We've heard a description of a man who sounds like he might be this character we're just now bringing into focus - is that right?” It's by no means a bad thing when I have to work to understand a book - especially, in cases like these, where I'm getting such a vivid, raw glimpse into a world that's far outside my own lived experience - but in my own experience, an ebook isn't the right conduit, and it inhibited what I know I'll get out of this book when I read a physical copy.

Thanks to Farrar, Straus and Giroux and NetGalley for an ARC in exchange for my honest review.

This book was FASCINATING. I was almost completely ignorant about the Deaf community, so I learned an absurd amount from this book, from the systemic oppression of signing to the ethics of consent around cochlear implants. I'm frankly embarrassed to have not known any of it before and I'm grateful to Sara Nović via Book of the Month for educating me (I was going to say “for opening my eyes”, but that reads as ableist in a different way!). Moreover, it was a genuinely great read with characters I found believable yet completely surprising - a great combination. Strongly recommend.

This book is nearly 500 pages, but I was absorbed the whole time. It's been compared to Circe, but it reminded me more of Half Sick of Shadows by Laura Sebastian (which I liked better!), and I loved how it introduced me to a new cultural myth.

One of the greatest pleasures of being alive is reading Emily St. John Mandel.

I tried - I really did - to savor this; I read and reread it in one sitting.

How can I describe it? When I was young, my Greek Sunday School teacher asked us to share the most awe-inspiring thing we'd ever experienced. I think she was hoping for an answer alluding to the religious, but I talked about looking out the window of a plane, seeing the vastness and the specifics - one red-roofed house here, a winding road with cars like ants there - all at the same time. Grasping that (to paraphrase) there was so much world, and that each and every person in it had their own inner thoughts and wants and fears just like I did. Reeling, simultaneously stunned and soothed by the universality of it all. Having just finished it for the second time, Sea of Tranquility - set across and within times and spaces and lives - feels something like that.

I love Emily St. John Mandel's previous novels so much I worried this one couldn't possibly continue to live up. It did, and more.

True story: I bought The Verifiers by Jane Pek on a whim from an airport bookstore solely because of the front-cover blurb; any time Emily St. John Mandel tells me a book is “exhilaratingly well written”, well, I'm going to need it.

I knew from the singularly brilliant use of “potholed” as a verb on the very first page (“Their gazes skitter about, their sentences are potholed with ‘ums' and ‘wells'” -

I really enjoyed this book. Based on the blurb, I was a little worried that the scope meant we wouldn't get an individual sense of the many characters, but that wasn't the case. The snapshots for each character, though brief moments in time, were so vivid and core to their identities - not to mention beautifully written - that I felt not only as though I knew them, but as though I knew them well enough to understand why other characters' perceptions of them were so different from their own. The contrast between how each character saw him or herself and how the other family members thought of them was a fascinating theme, and felt very true to life. What also resonated was how their needs and hopes sometimes overlapped, sometimes clashed with one another - also true. The title - and the explanation for it - was perfect for the story.

For readers seeking plot-driven stories, this isn't it - but for those like me who love a good character-driven novel, I strongly recommend. (I don't often cry while reading books, but the scene where Robin recalls the first dinner Mercy made him brought me to tears.)

Thank you to Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group and NetGalley for the ARC in exchange for my honest review.

I always find Katherine Center's books to be absorbing feel-good breaks from reality, and this was no exception. While the arc of the story was predictable (as it should be for this type of book!), I really did enjoy the twists and turns it took to get there. I especially liked the scenes that included Connie and Doc. Their characters radiated such warmth, and it was clear why Hannah was so drawn not just to Jack - the famous and unfairly handsome movie star she's been tasked with protecting - but also to his family.

That said, I felt the development of Taylor's character was a bit unbelievable. To have her first betray Hannah and so easily and completely dismiss her (“We were work friends, we were never best friends, and your problem is that you don't know the difference”), then spend the rest of the story going to great lengths to apologize and rebuild their relationship, didn't quite make sense to me. Luckily, their relationship wasn't the focus of the book so this didn't have too much of an impact.

Thank you to St. Martin's Press and NetGalley for a digital ARC of this book in exchange for my honest review.

This book was hard work to read. That's not a bad thing by any means, but I do think it's important to be aware of! I think I entered into it with the wrong mindset; based on the blurb, I was expecting something more prototypically “novelesque” - something more squarely aligned with most contemporary or literary fiction. I was taken aback by its detached tone (her father - never named - is simply “The Father”) and its frequent allusions and references to philosophers and artists. I think I was anticipating something more purely emotional, and it was actually quite logical (though by no means linear). Again, that's not a criticism, but it does explain why it took me so long to get through - I ended up struggling so much on my first attempt I had to set it aside, then re-start from the beginning with an open mind one month later.

Once I started for the second time, I was overall glad to have the experience of reading this book. In some ways, it reminded me of The Unbearable Lightness of Being by Milan Kundera, though I'd still describe that book as more overtly emotional than this one. There were some scenes that were incredibly visceral; in particular, the Father losing control of his bowels during the Super Bowl at his first care facility was so hard to read (and so memorable even weeks later) in large part because it was so well-described - the anticipation, the action, the aftermath: shame and relief and disconnection. That said, while there were bursts of vivid and powerful writing that captivated me, I never felt completely absorbed by this book - more vaguely curious, and like I was learning something. (Between this book and Ruth Ozeki's latest, I know more about Walter Benjamin than I ever would have suspected!)

Overall, I would describe this as slow-paced, esoteric, and unique. I found it intriguing more than enjoyable, but I feel that had I gone in with those expectations, I might have had a more positive experience.

Thanks to W.W. Horton and NetGalley for the ARC in exchange for my honest review.

I wanted to read this solely because of the author (and the mysterious, vaguely sinister cover art!). I've really enjoyed Emma Donoghue's books, especially The Pull of the Stars and Frog Music. Had Haven been written by almost anyone else, I probably wouldn't have considered it - a tale of three monks living in the early middle ages is far from my typical choice. That said, I'm very glad I did. I didn't necessarily love this book, but I found myself completely absorbed in it - I HAD to talk about it as I was reading it (to the point that my husband, not a huge reader, is eager to read it when it's available).

It's very much about religion, but it's also about the struggle to reconcile what you feel in your deepest self to be true about the world with what your ‘superior' is insisting is incontrovertible fact. While I couldn't relate directly to many of the things depicted in the book - from the devoutly religious, like vowing chastity, poverty, humility, and (most important to the plot) obedience, to the day-to-day of the monks' isolated existence, like writing on calfskin vellum and trying to carve out a garden from unforgiving rock - it reminded me in some strange but strong ways of Silicon Valley in the 21st century and the cult of tech leadership we buy into out of some combination of hope and willful delusion (e.g., Theranos). The power dynamics were easily the most fascinating part of the story for me. I also find myself coming back to the haunting implications - even back in the 600s, and exponentially so today - of the belief that everything on earth was put there by God for humans to use.

Overall, a really unusual and well-written meditation on what it means to be a ‘leader' and how to do right in the world. Recommend!

Thanks to NetGalley and Little, Brown and Company for the ARC in exchange for my honest review.

When Emily St. John Mandel praises a book as “deeply moving, always excellent, and often unexpectedly funny,” my expectations are going to be sky-high, so frankly I was a bit wary to read Notes on Your Sudden Disappearance - I didn't want to be disappointed if it didn't live up to the hype. Happily, and astonishingly, it exceeded it.

I absolutely loved this book. It's in that elusive sweet spot - strong plot, compelling characters, AND excellent writing. I felt so strongly for Sally - and, even though we never hear from them directly, for her mother, her father, and Billy, her sister Kathy's boyfriend when she died. Even though most of the book takes place in the aftermath of the accident that kills Kathy, she's such a vivid character, too. (I will note that plot-wise, it reminded me strongly of another ARC I've read recently, Kaleidoscope by Cecily Wong. At a high level, they can be described quite similarly - girl loses beloved sister to a horrific accident, trauma-bonds with her left-behind partner, their relationship begins to transform...)

On reflection, it's fitting that Emily St. John Mandel wrote the review she did. She's described her recently adapted-for-TV book, Station Eleven, as a story not about the apocalypse, but about post-apocalyptic joy; Notes on Your Sudden Disappearance is similar. Kathy's death is apocalyptic for Sally and her family - but, though their grief is endless, there's joy to be found, too. (Along those lines, while the ending may be controversial, I loved it.)

5+ stars. I'll be buying a copy to reread, and I've requested Alison Espach's first novel from the library.

Thank you to Henry Holt & Company and NetGalley for an ARC in exchange for my honest review.

Well-written book with a pat ending that was lovely but (in my opinion) far-fetched to the point of absurdity.

Overall, I found the characters compelling and I was intrigued by their stories, but I felt this book - in large part because of how it ended - to be a little too “shiny”. I preferred ‘A Good Neighborhood' - but I would recommend this for anyone looking for a chicken-soup-for-the-soul-esque novel.

Thank you to NetGalley and St. Martin's Press for the ARC.

GRRR. This book was so frustrating to me, because for the first two-thirds, it was unquestionably a five-star read. The way it all concluded, though - WHY. WHY WHY WHY. Especially in a world in which it's immediately established on that magic exists - one character gets flashes of sentiment and stories whenever he touches an item someone else has touched first, another can hear and interpret heartbeats - why wouldn't you take a creative, compelling approach to resolution over a ‘grounded' ending that defies belief?!

Normally, I tolerate just-OK plots so long as the writing is good. The writing here is gorgeous, if occasionally overwrought - dark, moody, dreamlike, building a sense of dread that reminded me of Rumaan Alam's Leave the World Behind. But the plot felt like such an afterthought, I just couldn't get past it. Without getting too specific (but stop reading if you want to be 100% unspoiled!), the control mechanism the plot rests on was not compelling (and frankly borderline cliche), and the epilogue section glazed over a key plot point (like, OK, everyone in the entire community just accepted this world-shattering information and unconcernedly went on with their lives? no questions, pushback, anger? it's just...all good?). I felt like the author knew in broad strokes where she wanted to go but didn't think deeply enough about how to get there.

Overall, I enjoyed and appreciated this book. In some ways, it reminded me of The Glass Hotel by Emily St John Mandel, which you could also describe as focused on a woman's brief, fascinating, and ultimately untenable foray into the “country of money” and all of the protections (and hypocrisies) that come with it.

Given that, I feel the blurb wasn't a great representation, so it took me a while to start to feel oriented - I struggled to follow along with what was happening or to feel really invested in the book for the first third or so.

There was some really gorgeous writing; there were a few phrases and sentences that really struck me (I loved “wine wicked away my guilt at overshooting survival all the way up to this strange, stratospheric new world” and “some women see a gilded cage and think, it's still a cage; some women see a gilded cage and think, it's still gilded”).

However, it took me much longer than usual to finish this book, both because of the mismatch between my expectations and what it was actually about and because its topic and content just hits SO close to home right now. I know the author wrote this a while ago, but it almost felt like doomscrolling the news at times (which is far more a commentary on our current state of affairs than anything she could have done differently).

This was 3.5 stars for me, rounded to 4. Thanks to Dundurn Press and Rare Machines for my ARC.

I couldn't put this book down, but I didn't particularly like it (and I don't think that's what Henderson was going for). At the most granular level, the writing is excellent, and at the broadest, the story resonated with me for personal reasons.

However, I think it could have been told in a far stronger way. I completely understand that with chronic illness - physical and mental - there's rarely a clean and linear resolution, so a tidy ending wouldn't mirror real life. That said, I think she made things harder than necessary for the reader to follow by constantly leaping across timelines (and if she was really tied to that approach, I think the designer should have made it clearer when these jumps were happening - at least in the version I got from the library, the years at the start of each group of chapters were printed far too lightly and were easily overlooked). I also think this is wrenching material and by the end, there was just so much to absorb that it started to lose its impact. Again, I respect that she's likely mirroring her own experience - which I'm sure she and her husband, of all people, would agree has gone on for far too long - but it almost seemed to me like she wrote this book, and made the decisions about it she did, more for herself rather than for a general audience.

Hope, heartbreak, rage. A story about a father's love for his son, his son's inexhaustible care for every sentient creature, and the awe-inspiring potential of science - and how that potential loses out to fear. The definition of Bewilderment. Read this if you're craving a wake-up call, a beautiful punch to the gut.

Was pleasantly surprised by this book - the plot was compelling AND the writing was strong (I feel like with many thrillers, the writing is so clunky or overwrought it takes me out of the story). In this sense, it reminded me of Luckiest Girl Alive by Jessica Knoll. The twists and turns made sense, but I didn't see them coming. I really enjoyed the experience of reading this - I started and finished in the same sitting.

Perfect for what it is. Light, enjoyable, a great experience while you're reading it but not necessarily a story you'll think about again and again.

I'm having a hard time with this review for two reasons: one, it strongly reminds me of something I read a few years back but I can't remember what it is and I've held off for long enough (I'll update if I recall!). Two, and more importantly, while I liked this book, it didn't feel entirely finished to me. I'll echo other reviewers when I say key plot points seemed not as fleshed-out as they could have been (to the best of my understanding, burials are prohibited because land is in such short supply and maybe because natural disasters could unearth bodies - but I'm less confident in that than I'd like to be). That said, we're hearing from a grieving narrator in a drained, climate-changed world where very little feels within her (or anybody's) control, so maybe this lack of clarity is appropriate. And despite my not fully understanding why burials are so aggressively banned, I completely bought Alma's single-mindedness in her quest to obtain her mother's ashes. I guess I just wanted to go a little deeper - this was a very factual, here-and-now novel - but I can understand why it was written that way.

Thank you to NetGalley and Grove Atlantic for my ARC in exchange for an honest review.

First of all, yes, this is a singularly strange book: Miri's beloved wife Leah has finally returned from a deep-sea exploration gone wrong, and she seems to slowly but surely be turning into some kind of ocean creature. The story alternates between Miri's and Leah's perspectives, but we never hear from Leah once she surfaces - we only learn, in bits and pieces that jigsaw-puzzle together around holes never quite filled in, what might have happened in that dark and crushing pressure at the bottom of the sea.

If pushed to describe it, I'd say imagine vestiges of the plot from Dr. Franklin's Island (Ann Halam), with the stunned disbelief - articulated in the most hauntingly beautiful ways - of finding oneself in a completely new reality from Station Eleven (Emily St. John Mandel), with amassing undertones of the amorphous dread so compellingly conveyed in Leave the World Behind (Rumaan Alam).

While the plot is extraordinary in every sense of the word, the story manages to be deeply, heartbreakingly relatable. Ambiguous loss - the specific type of grief you feel when the person you love still exists, in a sense, but isn't the same - is universal, and this eerie and beautiful book is fundamentally about it.

I loved this book and believe it will be one of the most-discussed, most-acclaimed of 2022.

My phone's photo album is currently dominated by screenshots of pages from this book: there was so much here I wanted to save to re-engage with later! As I read, I itched to have a hard copy and a pencil in my hand - there was so much it was sparking for me, so many questions and reactions and !!!!s.

Given the above, it should go without saying that this book is a powerful thought-starter. I was fascinated by Marron's evolution - from conceiving of online debate as a game you win or lose, to starting to cope with virtual hate slung his way by imagining touchingly human narratives about his ‘trolls', to questioning whether ‘trolls' is maybe not the right term at all, to wondering whether he's been going about things the wrong way. I particularly loved this summation: “My videos alone were never going to sufficiently evangelize progressive ideas ... Was I simply enjoying the reverberations of virality in my own little echo chamber, thinking that. was slaying Goliath when I was simply cosplaying battle reenactments with my fellow self-identified Davids?” (Yes, this book is also, at times, laugh-out-loud funny.)

From there, the real excitement begins: he starts to engage - civilly, curiously, sans any persuasive agenda - with individuals he plucks from his ‘HATE FOLDER' (which, spoiler alert, he rethinks the name of down the line) and invites to connect. These stories - wow - I was on the edge of my seat. And this isn't Chicken Soup for the Soul; not all of them go well - in fact, some of them go really badly, and not just for him but for other folks he invites into the conversations once he decides to take more of a mediator role. (One, in particular, was a punch to the gut.) Through it all, Marron keeps questioning his own assumptions, acknowledging his mistakes, and trying to do better.

My favorite part, if I had to choose: his careful consideration about whether engaging and empathizing with people who believe things that are deeply harmful is implicitly validating or endorsing those beliefs. I've been wrestling with this myself, and it's often prevented me from engaging in conversations that, maybe, could have been worthwhile. I loved his analogy: people are the trees, ideologies are the forest, and it's crucial to not lose sight of either.

I would recommend this book to anyone who senses that polarization is a race to the bottom, but isn't quite sure what to do about it. I will be thinking about this book for a very long time.

How to explain Kaleidoscope by Cecily Wong? I've struggled with this since I finished reading it (for the second time this week) two days ago. So I'll start with someone else's definition and share where I disagree: “A dazzling and heartfelt novel about two sisters caught in their parents' ambition, the accident that brings it all crashing down, and the journey that follows.”

I think I was expecting something a little different, more straightforward, based on that blurb - for the parents to be more sinister and conniving, maybe, or for their ambition to be the direct cause of the accident. In my opinion, the book is more nuanced than that. It's an exploration of love and humanity, of the connections who make us who we are and what happens when we lose them - and, to borrow a titular phrase of Alice Sebold, the “lovely bones” that can take shape around these absences. It's a testament to Wong's writing that it manages to be both heartbreaking and hilarious, sometimes even at the same time.

This is a powerful story, one I had to sit with for a while. I read it on Tuesday and again on Thursday; I liked it the first time and loved it the second. I did have to work a little harder, as a reader, than I'm used to - there are several times when something's alluded to but only elaborated on later, and I had to backtrack to fit the pieces together to accommodate my new understanding. While this could be frustrating, in this case it added to the experience; when you hear Karen's (Riley's mother) profound frustration with her daughter's fundamental unknowableness, how it's not in her nature to accommodate or seek approval, this stylistic choice makes even more sense.

There's more that I loved about the way Wong told this story. I found the shift from first- to third-person at the start of Part 3 jarring, but on reflection, it was brilliant. Riley's sense of self has been shattered, so why would we expect to continue hearing from her directly? The disorientation of the reader echoes and reinforces her own.

I don't want to share too much about the story itself, but I will say that I loved it. The last book to make me feel this type of way was Maggie Shipstead's ‘The Great Circle,' and while the plots aren't at all similar, what's striking me is the twin sense of exhaustion and awe and appreciation I felt after each - for the range and depth of emotion, and the extent of journeys (metaphorical and literal!) that can be contained in one book. If you're looking for a quick beach read, this isn't it, but if you're looking for something you'll return to, that I imagine will resonate differently based on whatever's happened in your life between each reading - you'll want this.

I LOVED this book. Couldn't put it down, couldn't stop dog-earing, couldn't stop texting friends with snapshots of paragraphs and !!!!s kind of love.

Win Me Something follows Willa Chen - half Chinese, half white - through a formative year-ish of nannying for a wealthy white family in Manhattan and reckoning with her own muddled childhood. In the author's words, from the very first page:

“I had parents. I had siblings. I had homes, multiple or zero, depending on how you looked at it. I wasn't unloved, not uncared for, exactly. It was cloudier than that, ink spreading into water as I tried to claim the words. If you're undercared for, but essentially fine, what do you do with all that hurt, the kind that runs through your tendons and tugs on your muscles but doesn't show up on your skin?”

WHEW.

Throughout the (debut!) novel, Willa grapples with this pervasive feeling of not belonging, of feeling tolerated but never actively wanted, of squeezing herself in to the margins of other people's lives. (The way Lucia Wu writes this is fresh and resonant and haunting; the prose is stellar.) I was so compelled by her journey as she starts to name and explore and question these beliefs.

Strongly, strongly recommend.

I wanted to love this book, but it wasn't as ‘for me' as I'd expected. I love character-driven novels, which is how it's been described, but I struggled to connect to any one character - just as I was starting to get really invested, we jumped to the perspective of another. And while the characters' lives were interconnected, with 12+ of them, we really could only get snapshots. It felt like we were scraping the surface - of important moments, certainly, but fleeting ones - and I craved more depth and less variety. Because of that, I enjoyed the second half - once we'd finally met the entire cast of characters - far more than the first.

I think this is intentional on Joella's part - the jacket copy says, “A Little Hope celebrates the importance of small moments of connection” - so maybe this is a case of expectations setting me up for disappointment! With that goal in mind, though, I wonder if I would have preferred this as a series of interconnected short stories/vignettes rather than a novel.

I found the writing itself to be generally solid, with a few moments of clunkiness that jarred me out of the story. I did like the ending.