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If You's Joe Goldberg is the prototype for sociopathic creep, Dr. Harding is the primordial ooze from which he sprung. I haven't disliked a narrator so intensely, credit to Jha.
This book takes on so many charged topics, but perhaps too many. Toxic masculinity, codeswitching, racial biases, and more – all set against a backdrop weeks before the 2016 election – WOOF. However, Jha has written an important book here. The Laughter is one to be discussed.
The Ransomware Hunting Team: A Band of Misfits' Improbable Crusade to Save the World from Cybercrime
A semester-long coding course met my childhood love for spies created my gateway to a fascination in the intricacies and happenings of cyber crime.
What this book accomplishes, is bringing someone like me, a tourist, into the gated community of a complicated topic — a rarity for books in this subject realm. The Ransomware Hunting Team was a perfect balance of technical and profile — adding dimension to the characters behind the screen.
Memoirs are in and of themselves vulnerability vehicles. What Owusu has delivered here raises the bar of self-revealing to capture a deeper and viscerally-stunning account of coping with one's own history.
For some, this book will feel too weighty and too angsty. I found Aftershocks to be the kind of appropriate, earth-shattering prose that is earned by Owusu and few others, brave enough to explore their identity, even if it means upending truth as they've known it.
The Missing American is a captivating peek into the underbelly of Ghanaian sakawas, scams and political corruption. Bumpy, yes, but with a compelling setting at the wheel, readers will be captivated by this first installment in Emma Djan's Investigative series.
The Wins:
* Anomoly: With Ghana as the backdrop, The Missing American naturally presents itself refreshing in the thriller genre. Initially, it appealed to me for the same reason What's Left of Me is Yours did — Both centered on a breed of crime specific to a culture. As a series I'll be interested to see how/if Quartey keeps up this unique brand of “sunshine noir”.
* Structure: Though Quartey's time hops show no clear pattern, they intrinsically make sense to the reader. He has a keen sense to snatch and transport at the height of intrigue.
* Twists: A true, unguessable ending. I'll be the first to note Quartey's problematic tendency to toss attention-competing Catch-22s, but the fridge-benefit — we never see the twist coming.
The Opps:
* Dialogue: Most conversations in Missing American seem painfully piped through Google Translator. Instead of revving the plot forward, stilted exchanges and overdone prose stunted the story's pace.
* Cast: Stories set on unfamiliar soil deserve coherency. To add to the Ghanaian lingo, Quartey's laundry list of characters make it impossible to keep up with who's who, who's where, who's good and who's bad.
* Fluff: Internet scams, fetish priests, police corruption, affairs and autism — Missing sends readers' attention in a LOT of directions. While some of these tropes act as clever red herrings, the sum of them feel like wasted threads.
In the wake of 9/11, distrust became a comfortable backdrop to the upbrings of we, the millennials and successive generations. Big Brother and Big Data, ubiquitous surveillance, foreign intelligence and invasion — the breadth of exposure fears is an ever-expanding chasm in the Information Age. In Quotients, O'Neill takes this modern-primal panic of being seen and flips it inward — how far will we go to protect being known fully?
At the center of this narrative is Jeremy, a former intelligence operative, and Alexandra, an image fixer for nations. Their marriage is the chess board O'Neill plays out the relatable relationship fears — Is she cheating on me? — layering it with murkier and weightier questions of assurance — Do my secrets make me unlovable? We see Jeremy and Alexandra flailing in the mental deep ends of their individual pools, an infuriating contrast to the shallow end they often choose to splash around with one another.
The blunt dialogue between the couple is entirely Gilmore Girl -esque, in that, its reflexive wit is quick and smart, almost too quick and smart to be believable exchanges, but instruments each use to forge and ward off intimacy. Ripples of distrust permeate their parenting and surrounding rings, Jeremy's ex-partner, Alexandra's schizophrenic brother and the journalist desperately and feverishly attempting to make sense of it all.
“Pregnant women yelling at their already born.”
No page is without guttural examples of O'Neill's rhetoric. She insists on extrapolating the casual, carefully taking it apart to repackage simple observations into beautifully-complicated narratives. Taken as a one-liner, the effect is stunning. Spanning the course of an entire book? Exhausting. Because by Quotient 's end, the story is less resolved as it is wrapped up in an exquisite linguistic bow.
That O'Neill wasn't out to write just another literary thriller is stunningly clear. However, Quotients is everything but.
In order to keep pace with its plot and characters (plus their code names and those code names' aliases), a reader must assume the lunacy illustrated. O'Neill created a meaty meditation for the current age, art made of our paranoia.
Review to come:
“This I can tell you: when I came to your apartment for the first time, I recognized it. I knew, without knowing how, that I would never leave. These were bricks you had been laying without knowing it; this was the path my flares had been lighting. It was the beginning of a wobbly and joyful and occasionally gross carrying on, learning to come home to you, marked and myself.”
👍🏼Pick It: if U2's “Sunday Bloody Sunday” is the extent of your knowledge concerning Northern Ireland.
👎🏼Skip It: if thick ‘n' rich journalism bores you.
I initially picked Say Nothing thinking the story of the mysterious disappearance and murder of Jean McConville would coddle my true crime cravings. So by the end of Chapter 3, largely dedicating to staging the developing conflict, I felt duped...but hooked.
The Troubles?
The IRA?
The Stickies?
The What?
The Who?
Here was major period of history reading like a revelation! Never touched, mentioned nor acknowledged in any one social studies class.
Before Say Nothing, I largely type-casted History as regurgitated black-and-white events, contained in dusty books, inked to yellowing pages, shoved on forgotten shelves. This book refreshed the genre with a curiosity to learn about the world around me, over the wall, over the pond.
The magnitude of history is hardly digestible for a fifth grader during a five-month learning frame, so I don't fault my K-18 history teachers for skimming or omitting chunks of happenings. However, this book spoke to the need for writers like Keefe to revive the stories that go unsung.
Keefe's ability to give the in-depth, decades-spanning scoop on the Troubles is stunning. Because of his careful narration, I closed the book with conviction that history class is still in session and happening now.
So to be considered active participants in this world, we must pick up books like this one to develop empathy and to stay cognizant of the shifting landscapes and consequential evolutions of countries and cultures outside our own.
👍🏼Pick It: If you're a therapist, in therapy or refuse think you'd benefit.
👎🏼Skip It: If you're content with a life forever half-felt and never shared.
I have been to therapy off and on since I was a little girl. My uncle is a therapist. I'm familiar with the couches, the wall of first-session silence, the tissues that sop up the debris when it crumbles during your fifth.
I feel fortunate to find myself in a family that has always made space for treating the emotional self, no taboos attached. It's because of this proximity, I didn't expect to extract much novel insight.
What she offered me instead was the catalyst to consider my own recent refusal to get back on the couch.
I think part of therapy's stigma is derived from this image of a double-degreed lord or lady upon his or her throne, collecting your raw fears solely as ammunition to dish at the water cooler with their fellow Freudians.
“I've got ten on Patient #783 bolting before the session even starts.”
“Wanna hear about the train wreck I've got at 2?”
Gottlieb has done a service to the world of therapy by acknowledging this general misconception and sitting on the floor with readers instead.
How much did I like this book, you ask?
I Amazon Primed it to my porch the hour I finished my library copy. And every since I've been a missionary on a pamphlet route, shoving it into arms because I believe her account needs to be heard.
Read it.
👍🏼Pick It: For that familiar, snuggly style that is the phenomenal Sally Rooney
👎🏼Skip It: until you allow three months of Normal People separation and desensitization
I didn't let the back page of Normal People close before putting Conversations With Friends on hold.
And while it was still stuffed with the same Rooney-reminiscent prose, it didn't carry the same emotional pull.
Perhaps I did her a disservice by reading the two novels back to back. Or perhaps what made Normal People the stronger of the two was its multiple POVs. Much of what made Normal People so searing was knowing where both parties stood and their sheer unwillingness to be vulnerable.
On the other hand, Conversations is a one-woman vulnerability spillage and inner rummaging. And when that sole voice is from 21-year old Francis, placing yourself on her carousel of feelings begins to feel like a selfish indulgence rather than possible and resolvable development.
And still, I'd read this book again and again, because Rooney makes it impossible to not feel and feel tied to the what makes us our most-devastatingly human selves.
👍🏼Pick It: if you're looking for the softer, genre cousin to science fiction.
👎🏼Skip It: If you want the zip! and zing! of space and time travel.
I came for the sci-fi, I stayed for the writing. Swyler has the ability to scale a desaturated wisp to a blinding stadium of color.
The problem is, ALFOS is a mosh pit of the realistic (Challenger crash) and the fantastical.
Trying to guide readers through the “fi” of sci-fi, while maintaining the standard of prose was too daunting.
Swyler took 300 pages for the character narrative, slogging a 100-page plot through like a consequence.
I really hope Swyler's next work is grounded (literally) in what she does best: a feelings-forward, character-focused story.
👍🏼Pick It: For a heavy-bagged, home-hitting version of Harry Met Sally
👎🏼Skip It: If you damn any romance that deviates from Happily Ever After
“Well, that destroyed me,” I said, out loud, to no one in particular, when I closed this book.
Marianne and Connell are not living out a particularly unique trope. Boy likes girl. Girl likes boy. Boy and girl can never get the timing right. Boy and girl feel too wrong to be right for the other. Rooney is the difference maker here. She pieces out truths and extracts fears that go unearthed by even the most self aware and vulnerable individuals.
The result: me, the reader, fighting the every-page urge to annotate passages of my library copy, rip sentences for later recycling to scream, “THIS! I FEEL LIKE THIS!”
Rooney is a prolific rarity in the character-driven plot. The way she lays out the ever-shifting dance or demise of Connell and Marianne's relationship is a dizzying masterpiece.
👍🏼Pick It: for an intricate and tangled look inside true events that read like a dystopian
👎🏼Skip It: If you're expecting a loud Handsmaid's Tale-esque revolution
Miriam Toews authored one of my 2018 Favorite Reads (All My Puny Sorrows), so I cracked this one open with first-born expectations.
And she came to the story with a full arsenal:
* Firsthand experience in Mennonite culture.
* Matchmaker Queen between readable word and unspeakable pain.
Unfortunately, this was a fumble. I found the plot painstakingly slow with little resolve.
Dubbing a male to narrate contradicted and eliminated her first-row opportunity and responsibility to convey the story of the voiceless.
👍🏽Pick it: if you love music, dig the 70's and unresolved heartache.
👎🏽Skip it: if you're looking for the book version of A Star is Born.
SEXY. I struggle to find a better umbrella descriptor of Daisy & The Six, This book impressed me on so many levels that I'm going to bullet point the goodies:
* As a musician, this book captured the intimacy that hums down to your toes when you're on stage, behind your instrument, singing into someone else's harmony.
* Camilla & Billy. Daisy & Billy. Karen & Warren. The relationships – the breaking, making and ambiguity – jolted me.
* And can we talk about girl power? If you read Jenkins' Seven Husbands, this trope wont surprise you. The females in Daisy & The Six covered the spectrum of feminism, each wrestling with unique, but relatable head v. heart turmoils.
* Jenkins is untouchable in the art of dialogue.
* Additionally, seeing that this book is a fictional creation, the inclusion of the completed song lyrics are the understated, but most-stunning proof of Jenkins' talent.
👍🏽Pick it: if The Sinner and psychology is your jam.
👎🏽Skip it: if you're looking for a horror, not cerebral thriller.
I pride myself in pegging the plot twist. Even the best of thrillers tend to follow a loose, but calculable trajectory. When I hit that plot point in Silent Patient biting my tongue on spilling spoilers, I gasped out loud. Not because it's a dramatic reveal, but because the author rolled out the climax patiently, which personally, made this thriller stand alone. I've recommended this book to several who will back up the hype.
👍🏽Pick it: If you find yourself addicted to optimization and dissatisfaction.
👎🏽Skip it: If you can't stomach conviction.
Cultural criticism is often penned from the throne of a writer who removes himself or herself from the dysfunction they judge. Which is perhaps why I have a hard writer crush on Havrilesky.
She does not excuse her participation in our society's obsessive pursuit for the bigger, the better, the next – anything other what we have, who we are in the NOW.
And it's because she writes as someone in the arena, searching out and screwing up, a reader will not feel threatened by her observations, but feel enrolled to deem the present enough.
Each essay can stand and shine on its own. But thread together, it's one of the most-focused collections I've ever read.
👍🏽Pick it: If you're looking for a refreshing take on the often-exhausting memoir.
👎🏽Skip it: If you're not quite ready to part from your Steve Jobs' shrine.
Small Fry was the best Memoir of 2018. Yeah, I said it. I shy away from this genre because I naively have always believed memoirs either serve as a humble-brag or a woe-is-me rant. Small Fry humbled my ignorance. Brennan-Jobs respected her exclusive position and responsibility to peel back the curtain of the mysterious tech-God, bizarre visionary, Steve Jobs. Instead of using the book as a posthumous bashing of an absent Papa Jobs, she moved me by simply telling her story-unbiased and reader all insight, no fluff. The result: an untheatrical confidence that'll move anyone who has a child is a child, or craves love, no matter how far removed.
Things I loved:
• Interesting time-period mashup (20's + 70's)
• Alternating POVs
• Appreciation for both architecture and art
“Slow burn” is how I can best describe this read.
Beginning and ending seemed to dragggggggg their feet, while the middle, I found, seemed to be rushed. This book is worth picking up, just perhaps more appreciated by a more patient reader than myself.🤷🏽♀️
4.5
The sheer manpower demanded to gather and compile the material for this book had me frequently pausing to appreciate Brown's full-throttle commitment to writing a panoramic portrait of Princess Margaret.
Brown goes a step further and crafts each chapter to be uniquely structured. 99 glimpses sets this book up to be thick, but fascinating to the last page.
The synopsis for this book had me immediately. The pervasive fascination with true crime has dulled our culture's ability to examine and alter some disturbing mindsets we've mindlessly adopted. This book had that opportunity.
The first few chapters were intriguing investigations. Then, the focus collapsed into a memoir about a young woman's transition to Los Angeles. It was a confusing pivot and I waited in vain for Bolin to return to the Dead Girls matter at hand, on book jacket.
She is a talented writer. Unquestionably. But this collection of essays would have been stronger as two separate books.