Julia

Read for my collective liberation book club. This book is about healing justice. It is about how to be alive and in relationship with others (human and more than human), but especially in the current US framework of "healthcare." I basically underlined the whole thing, so it was hard for me to even choose a few quotes of Raffo's writing that moved me, but here's two:

"Each of these weave together: stopping the violence, coming in to the present moment, and creating the conditions to allow deep healing. They are each part of the other, but, if we don't hold them with intention, systems of supremacy may find the cracks to, one small bit at a time, bring us to a place where healing is about feeling better within our isolated bubbles rather than a fiercely felt connection with life. None of this should be a task list. It is poetry, an incantation you whisper to yourself as you are planning your day, organizing an action, sitting down with a group of people to dream or act together, showing up out of deep respect for someone else's pain, or claiming your own survival." (p. 29)

"...how are we honoring the sovereignty of life rather than trying to control it so that we feel like we have done a good job?" (p. 84)

Practically perfect! I might go back and make this 5 stars later! I confess that part of the appeal is that this novel included the reappearance of one of my favorite couples from Kleypas' Wallflowers series, plus a cameo from one other character. There's also more of "lady doctor" Garrett Gibson, plenty of back-and-forth between the main couple about the legal erasure of women's personhood in marriage at the time, and a heroine with an "impulse control problem" such that she's the person the plot climax centers around. There's also a bit on Irish separatism here, though, that I think Kleypas has more sensitively handled in other novels (like even the previous novel in this series): here it's treated more as a vehicle for some plot drama and there's a missed opportunity to reexamine colonialism. Part of why I like Kleypas, however, is that's a remarkable thing to be saying about the plot of a romance novel!

It's always hard for me to discern exactly how I feel about romances I tear through quickly, but "generally positive" is my overall response to #2 in The Ravenels. Helen is more agentic than some of Kleypas' heroines (and they're all pretty agentic), Garrett Gibson gets introduced as the "lady doctor," and Kleypas has some of her typically good subplots about sociopolitical issues (in this case, anti-Welsh bias endemic to British colonialism). I will say overall that I find her novels pretty equally sexy, which is a great thing to be able to count on in a romance novel!

I haven't read any Kleypas since the beginning of 2023 (her Hathaways series), so excited to bookend (hah...I'll see myself out) with another series! This has all the Kleypas characteristics I read for: smart women, well-developed relationships in addition to the romantic duo (in this case, two brothers maturing with good humor together), class politics, etc. I liked that the "crisis" in this one came mid-plot, not 75% of the way through, and looking forward to plowing through the rest of these.

I wish I liked this better! There are many lovely tidbits in here, and it did make me like birds even more than I already do. Straussmann is a little (or a lot) judgy about competitive birding, and I think the book suffers a bit from what ornothology research is geared toward, which veered toward one too many studies about feeding strategies than I'm actually interested in. I suspect because it's relatively easy to study.

Gifted from my uncle. Hits the spot for a book you don't want to put down plot-wise. Plus two bisexual main characters!! The sort of book where you can feel your feelings being played like a fiddle and you don't care.

I started reading this with my collective liberation book club before the most recent conflict erupted, and finished it last night, the day Netanyahu formally declared war against Hamas. It was pretty instructive to follow a fellow book club member's advice to compare U.S. coverage of this with other countries, now that this book has enabled me to disentangle Zionism from Jewishness and better see the purposefully hidden entanglements between Zionism, settler-colonialism, and White supremacy. This book is beautiful and necessary, and I learned a great deal while also recognizing I have much more learning to do. I just wish it had had even more poetry!

Taken from my mother's library. Do you ever find yourself reading a translation and feeling jealous of the folks who got to read it in its original language? Not to knock the translator, because the prose of this absolutely sings - I just suspect it's even more exquisite in Polish. I loved the magical realism, loved the embedded study of Blake and astrology, loved the narrator winding her way through town and the woods knowing few people are more invisible than an older woman.