Katie

This was probably 2.5. If you enjoy tortured/mixed metaphors, 2 adjectives for every noun, jumbled timelines and random pronouncements with cliches mixed in, this is the book for you. The information is good, but the book itself is painful to read.

If you like reading about people suffering from generational trauma living sad lives and making terrible choices, this is the book for you. As always, my rating is based on how much I enjoyed (or didn't, in this case) reading the book. I certainly felt sorry for the characters in this book but I can't say I really liked any of them, or enjoyed being a part of their lives.

I'm a little obsessed with Lagos, so this was a very fun read for me. I love the slang, the descriptions of houses and jobs. And, of course, the stories were funny.

Like everything I've read by Percival Everett, this was genius, and heartbreaking, and funny, and thought-provoking.

This was a chonk of a slog of a book, but so, so interesting and often hilarious. Do not skip the footnotes! I learned a ton, lots more went over my head, and it gave me a lot to think about. Highly recommend.

This is another 10-star book. Wow. It made me consider points of view I had never even though of considering before, and opened my eyes to everything that's wrong with adoption. I really appreciate that she references so many other scholars and directly takes on issues that impact mothers of color, instead of just brushing those things aside with a “that won't be covered in this book, though it's an important issue” like so many other books seem to.

This was brilliant, of course, but so unrelentingly depressing that it was hard to get through. More than anything else I've ever read, this gave me a feeling of what exactly it feels like to be addicted to drugs.

Some of the sentences in this book were such lightning bolts of truth they took my breath away. I don't ever underline in books, but as I was reading this one I wished I owned it instead of it being a library book so I could highlight. Beware that you might sob big sobs like I did as you make your way through it.

I really wanted to like this but I just kept wishing I was reading a better book about otters. This is like a fangirl of otters writing about herself (sometimes sanctimoniously) and also about looking for and not finding otters. At least in the half I read...

I learned so much from reading this book, but was also left with many questions. She states in the introduction that she's not going to edit the book, which was originally published in India in 2019, for her new American audience. This means lots of the nuances of the book are lost. It's a good blend of memoir and historical overview.

This was probably a 3.5. I liked the first essay a lot, and the last essay not that much (it took me three tries to finish the last one).

Oh, I loved this book. Great characters, great story, completely heartrending and beautiful.

I'm a fan of moral dilemma/morally ambiguous books and situations, and while there were some clear rights and wrongs in this book there were other situations and decisions that were harder to label. A thought-provoking read for sure.

This was a fun read for the voyerisom. But it rings a little false the way she tries to bring in social justice. Anyway, an eye-opening window into the high finance world.

I love fairy tales, and I loved the way this book took that genre and changed and stayed true to it. I loved the characters and enjoyed spending 600+ pages with them. It just got better and better (even though it was pretty easy to figure out where the missing object was).

This was so well-written. And honest. And interesting. Yes it's about her discoveries about her husband's secrets, but it's also a great examination of grief and living with loss.

This was just as fun as the first and followed pretty much exactly the same pattern. But now with fox and cat!

I spent way too much of this book looking at the words through squinty eyes, dreading something terrible happening, because people were making Very Bad Choices. As it turned out, I wished I had enjoyed it more and worried less. I loved the nuanced, gray situations and people in this book. Very well written.

This was a really interesting, enjoyable, and wide-ranging read. I didn't know anything about Cory Richards before reading this book, but I had to keep stopping to go look up various things (his photographs, his films, the NYTimes article he mentions). He's obviously been through a lot and put others through a lot, and I felt like he did a good job of taking responsibility for that (thought who knows if others will agree). The book could have felt like score-settling in some places, but it didn't, at least to me. Mental health, mountain climbing, mediation–there's a lot in here.

I know this is a great book. My star rating reflects how much I enjoyed reading it, not my opinion of the quality of the book. I don't enjoy books where the reader knows more than the main character does, and I think that's why I don't really enjoy books where the main character is a child (unless it's written for children). I didn't particularly like the main character, though I certainly felt bad for him. The author does a great job of pointing out the many injustices and horrors children experience in India.

This was a chonk of a book. It included so much, from family stories to much wider discussions about race in America. Very interesting.

This was a fun, brainless read to keep me occupied on a day I was too sick to do much of anything.

Who is the audience for this book? It's written at such a basic, surface level that it seemed more like a textbook for college freshmen than a book that had something new to say. The author's nonprofit is interesting, but other than that it took about 180 pages before I learned anything new. I ended up skimming a lot of this.

This was quite a book. I had read about it beforehand and thought I knew what to expect, but boy was I blown away. I don't want to say any more so as to not give anything away.

This was an incredibly well-written, nuanced account of a very difficult incident. At first I was a little hesitant about the bits of poetry scattered throughout the story, but I think they do a good job of expressing things that prose might not have been able to. It looks like a thick book but it's a fast and engrossing read.