Review: Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children

Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children by Ransom Riggs
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This is, by far, one of the most unusual and creative books I've read in a long time. It was a novel, but one that made great use of unique photographs as part of the narrative. I thought I'd hate that but I didn't. The story is about a young boy who is very close to his odd grandfather. When his grandfather dies, the boy is left a quest to understand his last words. This takes him to an island where he finds an orphanage that isn't quite as abandoned and closed as most people think. To share more would be to ruin the delight of the book, but it is a lovely coming-of-age story set in a fantasy.

View all my reviews

Review: Nine Perfect Strangers

Nine Perfect Strangers by Liane Moriarty
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

Liane Moriarty is usually amazing brain candy, but this book was more like a graham cracker. It was about nine people who go to a holistic spa (each for their own reasons) but find the experience less relaxing and more threatening. The longer they are there, the stranger the treatments become, all the while their interpersonal challenges are playing out. While the characters were juicy and fun, the plot was really, really strange, and the ending was just plain weird. Didn't love this one.

View all my reviews

Review: Rich People Problems

Rich People Problems by Kevin Kwan
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I mean, the Crazy Rich Asians books are all just so.much.fun. I saved this for the week I started my new job, and had a great time reading it. This one is about Nick's Amah (grandmother) who is on her deathbed. With a huge estate at stake, relatives come out of the woodwork and descend on her property to convince Amah of their loyalty, love, and devotion. Meanwhile, the usual array of marriages, love affairs, and misunderstandings ensure that hilarity and happy endings ensue. A fitting and delightful final novel for the trilogy.

View all my reviews

Review: Leave No Trace

Leave No Trace by Mindy Mejia
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

This was a fun quick read. It was about a young man who re-appears from the wilderness in Minnesota a decade after disappearing with his father on a camping trip. He refuses to talk, and is sent to a mental hospital and assigned to a young speech therapist. As the book progresses, they form a strong bond, one that is at first therapeutic, and then begins to grow past that. Meanwhile, the young man continues to stonewall authorities about what happened to him and his father. All in all a fun psychological thriller, but not particularly memorable.

View all my reviews

Review: Praise Song for the Butterflies

Praise Song for the Butterflies by Bernice L. McFadden
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Found this novel on the Millions list and it will remain with me as one of the most memorable things I read this year. It is about a young woman who grows up, initially happy, in West Africa. When her family falls on hard times, tradition urges her father to sell her to a shrine, where she is left, confused, to a life of servitude and abuse. Ultimately she escapes, but not before her childhood is over. After resuming a new life in the United States, she struggles to reconcile with family and with her own past.

The writing of this book was uneven - sometimes written as a YA book, in other places, deeper, and in other places rushed. Perhaps different editing would have created a better work product. That aside, the story was fascinating and memorable.

View all my reviews

Review: The Language of Flowers

The Language of Flowers by Vanessa Diffenbaugh
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I heard about this book on a moms' email list I'm on, and it stayed on my booklist for a while until I found it at our local used bookstore. It was a really well-written and really unique book. It is the story of a young woman who has aged out of the foster care system in California, and begins to work for a florist. She is introduced to "The Language of Flowers," a Victorian system for communicating using different species of flowers.

She grows into being a well-known florist herself, falls in love, and becomes pregnant. And yet, her history haunts her - and is told in flashbacks in alternating chapters. The reader learns of her childhood, various foster homes she was in, and a family that came to love her, but is clearly no longer in her life in the current time.

All in all, a good read and what it might get a little preachy about foster care, and what it might get a little programmatic with flower language, is absolved with the beauty of the story.

View all my reviews

Review: Almost Everything: Notes on Hope

Almost Everything: Notes on Hope by Anne Lamott
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

I mean, for real, could the world need anything more right now than a fabulous Anne Lamott book? She is, as usual, funny, honest, prophetic, and comforting. Her willingness to put her own neuroses, fears, and disappointments on full display is what makes her so delightfully accessible and helpful. Like reading an email from a friend, this book is balm, salve, and all the things Annie does to sneak spirituality into our lives.

View all my reviews

Review: The Female Persuasion

The Female Persuasion by Meg Wolitzer
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Loved this one! It is a novel that follows a young woman who meets a prominent feminist while in college. The older woman eventually takes the younger under her wing, and this changes the course of both of their lives. I loved the characters, the story, and most of all, Wolitzer's ability to depict feelings as solid, tangible, tactical things. This was a great read, and one I couldn't wait to get back into each night.

View all my reviews

Review: Artemis

Artemis by Andy Weir
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

I love love loved Weir's The Martian book, and had high hopes for this. It was good, but not nearly as good as that one. The story followed a young woman who lives in a community on the (now colonized) moon. She is somewhat of an outlaw, smuggling in contraband and doing odd jobs for anyone who will pay. When she is approached to perform an even greater crime, she can't resist but soon finds herself in a world of trouble.

The best part of this book was the action - it read quickly and was fun to see what happened next. However, the biggest issue with this book was the character development. It was obviously a man writing a woman in the first person, and he was not familiar with how a woman would think/act/want. Fatal flaw.

View all my reviews

Review: The Lost Family

The Lost Family by Jenna Blum
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

I just learned that Blum lives in Boston, when I saw that she was speaking at our local library. I thought Those who Save Us was one of the best books I've ever read, and I was interested in reading another by her. It did not disappoint.

The story follows a young man, who comes to the U.S. escaping WWII, where he has lost his wife and twin daughters. When he meets a woman in the restaurant he runs (named Masha, for his first wife), he struggles with whether to live in the past, or to try and form a relationship with her. Told from different points of view, this book explored generational pain, and how the hope of recovery is slim, but strong.

Lovely.

View all my reviews

Review: Crooked Letter, Crooked Letter

Crooked Letter, Crooked Letter by Tom Franklin
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Heard about this book on NPR, and this was one of those titles that languished on my to-read list for over a year. I'm glad I finally got around to reading it, because the book was really, really good. It was about a set of childhood friends from rural Mississippi whose paths cross again as adults. One of them has become the town constable, while the other is ostracized from his neighbors, after he is accused of a crime and never cleared of it. When another crime occurs, and he becomes the most likely suspect. The writing was excellent, as was the character development. And I never would have figured out the ending!

View all my reviews

Review: I Will Not Fear: My Story of a Lifetime of Building Faith Under Fire

I Will Not Fear: My Story of a Lifetime of Building Faith Under Fire by Melba Pattillo Beals
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

You'd have to be a monster/racist to dislike a memoir by one of the Little Rock Nine - the students who integrated the Little Rock, Arkansas school system under the watch of the National Guard. And I was touched by Beals' story - I hadn't known many of the details of the situation, in fact, I believe I had an image from an 8th grade text book of a little girl entering the school as the entirety of my knowledge of it.

That said, it was disorienting to me how much Beals spoke about God and faith as the reason for her overcoming so much adversity. I kept wanting to shake her and say - YOU did that, God didn't. But I guess that's the thing about faith. It's not like I don't read faith-based authors regularly (see Anne Lamott, Jen Hatmaker, etc), but this was different. I admire Beals, of course, and I also wonder what it is like to have that style of faith.

View all my reviews

Review: Love, Africa: A Memoir of Romance, War, and Survival

Love, Africa: A Memoir of Romance, War, and Survival by Jeffrey Gettleman
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I saw this book at the MIT bookstore and it piqued my interest. It's about a young reporter who decides to focus on east Africa, a volatile and scary part of the world. At the same time, he falls in love with a woman, and spends years trying to balance both desires with each other. The book was very well-written and fascinating - I particularly liked the descriptions of his time in Africa. That said, I found him as a human to be very selfish and childish. His expectations of his girlfriend were ridiculous, and unreasonable. It made me like the book less, although that's not a comment on how it was written or the flow of the book.

View all my reviews

Review: The Flight Attendant

The Flight Attendant by Chris Bohjalian
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

This was a pretty good, quick read. It's about an alcoholic flight attendant who wakes up in a hotel room in Dubai next to a man who is dead, covered in blood. She creeps out of the room, and begins lying - to her crewmates, to the police, and to everyone - and hopes to evade being connected to the murder. Naturally, that doesn't happen, and she finds herself swept up into the investigation. She was a sympathetic character and the plot moved quickly, but it wasn't a book I think I'll remember.

View all my reviews

Review: The Motherhood Affidavits: A Memoir

The Motherhood Affidavits: A Memoir by Laura Jean Baker
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

This book was a tough one to review. I have all the respect in the world for the author's writing style and honesty in her memoir. That aside, her life choices were difficult to stomach.

Baker and her husband live in Oshkosh, Wisconsin. She is a professor and he is a lawyer. She suffers from depression, but discovers that the oxytocin that comes from being pregnant and breastfeeding seems to treat her mental illness. She decides (her husband more reluctantly) to continue having children far past what the couple can handle economically and mentally.

Interwoven with their story of economic distress, marital difficulties, and children - lots of children - are stories of the law firm that her husband runs. Patronized mostly by people living on the fringe and involved in the ever-worsening drug problems that plague the Midwest, his firm struggles to break even, let alone to support their growing family.

This story was frustrating, but as a memoir, it stands strong.

View all my reviews

Review: Fruit of the Drunken Tree

Fruit of the Drunken Tree by Ingrid Rojas Contreras
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

This book was spectacular. It takes place in Bogota, Colombia. The daughter of an affluent family strikes up an unlikely (but predictable) friendship with a young maid who comes to work in her home. The story alternates between their two points of view during the great political unrest of Bogota in the 1990's. It's devastating at times, as the girls don't understand the significance of many of the choices they make, and because there is a sense of determinism based on their classes that pervades the book. That said, it is a beautifully written book.

View all my reviews

Review: Priestdaddy: A Memoir

Priestdaddy: A Memoir by Patricia Lockwood
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I kept seeing this one reviewed and finally picked it up. It is about a woman who grows up with a father who is a Catholic priest - I'll let you learn how that happened, but it was not nearly as scandalous as it could have been. If her childhood was unusual (which it was), her adulthood allows her to relive it, as she and her husband move back in with her parents after an economic setback. Told very humorously, and like all good memoirists, honestly, this book kept my attention.

View all my reviews

Review: An Ocean of Minutes

An Ocean of Minutes by Thea Lim
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This was a really inventive book. It is about a couple who is separated after a major flu epidemic, when the husband contracts the flu and the wife agrees to time travel forward to fund his getting the antidote. Naturally, her travel goes awry, and she lands in a dystopic future, unable to contact him. Reminiscent of The Heart Goes Last and Station Eleven, ultimately this was a love story of sorts.

View all my reviews

Review: Pachinko

Pachinko by Min Jin Lee
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I read this book on the recommendation of a synagogue friend. It was fascinating, with great characters and plotting. It was about several generations of Koreans during the Japanese annexation of Korea. The Koreans are left desolate and are ostracized; this family turns to several different avenues to survive.

I enjoyed getting to know more about that period of history. But most of all, I enjoyed getting to know the characters - and the family secrets that followed them.

View all my reviews

Review: Educated

Educated by Tara Westover
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

This book was great! I read it after seeing it on the Rooster list. Similar to The Glass Castle, it was a memoir about a woman who grew up under circumstances that we would consider negligent. However, what I liked most about this book was how Westover depicted her life in a way that, until she begins to break away from her (separatist, home-schooling, abusive) family, seems at worst odd. There are untreated injuries, siblings who run away, and canned goods stocked for Armageddon. Then as Westover comes to terms with her childhood, as a reader, I was more able to see how her upbringing was abusive and negligent, not quaint and odd.

Ultimately, Westover seeks education, and education wins. This was a great read.

View all my reviews

Review: The Rooster Bar

The Rooster Bar by John Grisham
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

John Grisham's books are always a fun read. This one followed three friends graduating from a for-profit scammy law school with no real prospects for employment. They get together and figure out how to make money ... untraditionally. I thought the character development really stood out in this book - it was really interesting to learn about each character's back story and how they came to attend this law school. Then, how those backgrounds led each of them to have the skills necessary to pull off their plan.

View all my reviews

Review: The Half Brother

The Half Brother by Lars Saabye Christensen
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

WOW. This was quite an epic. Recommended by my Norwegian friend Stig, this book possessed me for months. It was about three generations of a family living in Oslo during and after WWII. Translated from the original Norwegian, it was written very subtly, with moments sometimes not hitting me until I was a few pages past the scene. The character development was really good, and the narrative as a whole was ... epic. Perhaps my only hesitation in a stronger recommendation was the length - I definitely got lost at points in the book, willing it to get to the next chapter.

View all my reviews

Review: The Life She Was Given

The Life She Was Given by Ellen Marie Wiseman
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

My neighbor Sue recommended this to me and it was a really unusual read. It was about a woman who, as a young girl, was sold by her abusive mother to a circus, because she was an albino. Over time, she builds a family at the circus, but not without drama. There are alliances, betrayals, and complications throughout her life. The plotting of the book was spectacular, the character development bordered on trite, but was well-written enough that I still enjoyed the read. Great ending, too.



View all my reviews

Review: The Lost

The Lost by Daniel Mendelsohn
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

This book was AMAZING. I was familiar with it but never made it a point to pick it up. I found it at a bookstore in (of all places) Kansas City, and took a chance. WOW. It is hard to categorize this book - part memoir, part world history, part American Jewish history, Mendelsohn covers a lot of ground. And I could not put it down.

Mendelsohn opens by describing his Miami Beach relatives, who would look at him as a child and comment how much he looks like a particular relative who died in the Holocaust. This sticks with him through his childhood and into adulthood, and is one of a few influences that drives him to want to learn about his family's history. Rather than be satisfied with "he, his wife, and their four children died in the Holocaust," he embarks on a decades-long quest to learn what actually happened to his particular relatives. In doing so, he really personalizes the tragedy of the Holocaust in a way that is both individualized and universal. He is meticulous in his research, and in his descriptions of his reactions to every piece of information he uncovers.

This is not an easy book to read - it's quite readable, but has a lot of descriptions of Holocaust murders that are, appropriately, awfully disturbing. But I also found it a hopeful book, and one that told a very complete personal story, from beginning to end.

View all my reviews

Review: The Constant Gardener

The Constant Gardener by John le Carré
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I bought this book a while ago, then it sat on the shelf, then Web read it, didn't love, so it sat on the shelf for another while, then I finally picked it up. I did love it! It is about a British diplomat whose wife is killed while they are stationed in Kenya. As he begins to investigate the circumstances of her death, he learns that she may have been uncovering a major public health issue that powerful people didn't want publicized. The balance of the book is about what she discovered and how he tries to avenge her death.

Like his other books, this had plenty of intrigue and twists. Though not a "spy" book like his classic works, it had a similar pace and plotting. It wasn't fast-moving, but the subtleties were well-delivered, and the story overall compelling.

View all my reviews

Review: Asymmetry

Asymmetry by Lisa Halliday
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

This was a frustrating book. The first third was a well-written and enjoyable read about a young woman who falls for an older man, both writers. This made sense with the title of the book (their relationship, due to their age and experience, was asymmetrical on many levels.) The second third of the book was about a man detained at airport security because of racial profiling. Then the final third of the book supposedly tied the first two together - except I don't believe it did - not well at least. After such good character development in the first third, and such good plot in the middle, I was expecting a great crescendo at the end to tie it all together. Alas, no luck.

Perhaps this is an insiders' book - one that is better enjoyed by writers and critics. But for a professional book-lover, it missed the mark.

View all my reviews

Review: That Kind of Mother

That Kind of Mother by Rumaan Alam
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

The premise of the book (a white woman hires a black nurse to help her with her infant; they become close, and when the nurse dies in childbirth, the woman adopts her child) caught my eye when I was at the library. I really, really enjoyed reading this. I think I'm far enough away from my own children's infancy to be able to read of other mothers' experiences without my anxiety spiking, and those descriptions in this book - about sleep deprivation, breastfeeding, spousal relationships - rang true.

The specifics of a white family raising a black child are touched upon, although not comprehensively. More effort is dedicated to the relationship between the adoptive mother and her adopted child's biological sister, who has also just had a child. The family that is built across these people is non-traditional, to be sure, and the challenges they face are more than many families do. But I really loved reading about their relationships, and found myself rooting - hard - for the characters. A lovely read.

View all my reviews

Review: Eleanor Oliphant Is Completely Fine

Eleanor Oliphant Is Completely Fine by Gail Honeyman
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Despite myself, I liked this book. I avoided it for some unknown reason for several months, while it was everywhere. Then one day saw it at the library and jumped in.

Eleanor is a woman who is stuck in her ways, perhaps on the autism spectrum, and who lives a very regimented life. She misses social cues and is very quick to dismiss people and ideas. When she meets an IT manager at her officer, and they save a stranger's life together, she is suddenly thrust into social situations that cause her to question her perspective, and open her life, just a little, to potential.

This was not the "fun" book its title suggests, no The Rosie Project for example, but it was a great read. Eleanor is a supremely sympathetic character, and it is impossible not to root for her. I hope Honeyman follows this up and tells us what Eleanor is up to now.

View all my reviews

Review: Imperfect Birds

Imperfect Birds by Anne Lamott
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Lamott is my rabbi for many things spiritual (other than my actual rabbi, of course.) I've found her fiction to be uneven, but likable. I really liked this book. It was about a teenager and her relationship with her parents, all three of them flawed. Her mother was particularly relatable - clearly the "Anne" character in the book - she discloses to the reader all her worries and flaws and fears, and has a lovely and (too?) perfect best friend who helps her with them, a husband who loves her, and a relationship with her daughter that is tumultuous and, frankly, kind of terrifying as the parent of a (now) preschooler. Like many of Lamott's books, fiction and not, I found myself wanting to save different scraps of text from the book - phrases and ideas that I loved or gave me the feels.

I just found out that there are two other books about this mother-daughter duo, so I'm off to find those...

View all my reviews

Review: The Last Equation of Isaac Severy

The Last Equation of Isaac Severy by Nova Jacobs
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

This book was described as "an adult The Westing Game" so I jumped at the chance to choose it as my Book of the Month. Meh. It was a combination between a puzzle from a last will and testament that the characters are trying to solve, and a family psychodrama. I didn't think it did either of those things particularly well. The characters were not very well-developed, and the plot was reasonably predictable. Not a fan.

View all my reviews

Review: American Gods

American Gods by Neil Gaiman
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

I wanted to like this book - I really did. Gaiman can be a magical writer, and I have enjoyed some of his other short works of fantasy. But this book was a slog for me! It is about a man who is released from prison, aimless as his wife has been killed in a car accident just a few days before his release, who encounters a mysterious guy who claims to be a "god." The book follows these characters, along with a rich cast of other gods and mortals, as they criss-cross the United States, seemingly living normal lives, but engaged in parallel in a war across new gods and old, as magnificent as what you'd see in classic Greek mythology.

Sounds compelling, right? But it wasn't - it was hard to follow, with twists that didn't all pay off. The social commentary was good, but not enough to carry as wide a set of characters as this had, and not good enough to make up for the convoluted plot. I know I'm in the minority here: this was optioned as a tv series, and has pretty universal great ratings. Didn't do it for me, though.

View all my reviews

Review: The Boys in the Boat: Nine Americans and Their Epic Quest for Gold at the 1936 Berlin Olympics

The Boys in the Boat: Nine Americans and Their Epic Quest for Gold at the 1936 Berlin Olympics by Daniel James Brown
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This is one of those books that sounds like it is going to be a dry historical tome, and turns out to have as much excitement and intrigue as a Tom Clancy novel. Written in a similar tone and with similar depth as a Laura Hillenbrand book, this is about an underdog rowing team from University of Washington who make it to the 1936 Olympics. Sorry for the spoiler, but it doesn't ruin a thing to know this. I had no idea how much I could get into understanding the sport and strategy of rowing, but I did. Equally compelling were the individual characters profiled in this book. Great read.

View all my reviews

Review: Tell Me More: Stories about the 12 Hardest Things I'm Learning to Say

Tell Me More: Stories about the 12 Hardest Things I'm Learning to Say by Kelly Corrigan
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I am spoiled. I've read Anne Lamott, so any memoirist/spiritual writer/self-help guru is going to pale in comparison. That said, Corrigan is undeniably likable and compelling. In this book, she devotes a chapter to each of 12 things that help her through difficult situations, like "Tell Me More" and "I Was Wrong." She intermixes personal anecdotes with introspection, staying away from the common traps in these sorts of books: being too preachy, or too repetitive. She comes across as delightfully likable, human, honest, brave, and flawed. I'll be following her in the future.

View all my reviews

Review: Idaho

Idaho by Emily Ruskovich
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

I liked this book well enough - it was an engaging read and the plot had a mystery-like theme to it, which I liked. A woman finds clues that lead her to question violent acts in her husband's first marriage. However, I wasn't drawn enough to the characters; in their own ways, they were each unlikeable, and it was hard to connect to a book when I couldn't identify a hero-protagolist. I also found the author's way of suggesting events rather than being explicit about them frustrating. Overall, not as good as many other books I've read lately.

View all my reviews

Review: The Great Alone

The Great Alone by Kristin Hannah
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

This was a chilling, excellent book. The Nightingale, by the same author, has been recommended to me numerous times. While I haven't yet read that, I immediately appreciated Hannah's writing style and mastery of writing a complex book.

This story is about a girl whose father is a drifter. At loose ends after a traumatic experience in combat during the Vietman War, he moves their family of three every few years. This time, he learns that his best friend from the War has left him some land in rural Alaska, so the family moves there. At first, they struggle with basic survival, completely unprepared for how rugged and cold and remote their new home is.

Then the father falls in with a group of survivalists, and begins to alienate the family from the small number of townspeople in the village. While his wife and daughter retain a working relationship with certain members of the village (and the daughter enters adolescence, with all its complications), the father becomes increasingly erratic, violent, and separatist.

As the book reaches its climax, I could not stop reading. The characters were so well-written, the obstacles so seemingly immovable, and the resolution just heartbreaking. And at hundreds of pages, Hannah reserved an appropriate amount for a proper denouement, which not all authors do. Just lovely, all around.

View all my reviews

Review: The Heart's Invisible Furies

The Heart's Invisible Furies by John Boyne
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

This was a great, juicy, thick, fun read, chosen as the book of the year a few years back by the Book of the Month Club. The book begins with a young woman being expelled from her church and village upon her priest and family learning that she is pregnant out of wedlock. Through a little luck and a lot of perseverance, she makes her way to Dublin and finds both housing and work within a few weeks.

Next, we meet her son, who she has given up for adoption. He is adopted by a truly dysfunctional and loveless couple, who choose to adopt because they think they ought to, and who remind him ceaselessly that he is not "a real Avery." The book follows this boy as he grows into a young man and an adult, always curious about his origins, and (surprisingly) never bitter about his childhood.

At the same time that the book is a specific story about a specific man, it is also a meditation on Ireland, and all its prejudices and societal changes over several decades. I really enjoyed reading it, and it stuck with me for a long time.

View all my reviews

Review: The Immortalists

The Immortalists by Chloe Benjamin
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I saw this book in the library, and the premise was intriguing: a set of siblings have their fortunes read, and each one learns the date of their death. With this information, they each make vastly different decisions about their lives, sometimes together, and sometimes in isolation. As the first few siblings die, the book raises some tricky questions about fate and free will, while remaining a compelling narrative with complex characters.

really liked the writing and the story, and appreciated that the storytelling itself let the questions about fate work themselves out.

View all my reviews

Review: I'm Just Happy to Be Here: A Memoir of Renegade Mothering

I'm Just Happy to Be Here: A Memoir of Renegade Mothering by Janelle Hanchett
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I've been following Hanchett's blog, Renegade Mothering, for several years. I have always liked her down-to-earth and honest depiction of motherhood. In her blog, she often mentions in passing of having struggled with addiction, so I was interested to read this memoir of that period of her life.

I was rather taken aback at her story - I guess as someone who started following her once she was in recovery, and seemingly a successful blogger, it was hard to relate that to the addict she is. In this book, she describes a life defined (for a time) by drugs. How to get them, who to get them from, scenes in crack houses, in trailers. She is consumed by when she is getting them next, and suffers from many, many relapses. Clearly, she displays an inability to parent her children, which culminates in her parents taking temporary custody of them.

The right combination of family support and professional help ultimately lead her to recovery, but not before several heartbreaking false starts. I am in awe of her strength over her illness, and her honesty in writing about truly shameful periods of her life, all in the hopes of being a better mother. Which, I believe, ultimately she is.

View all my reviews

Review: The Martian

The Martian by Andy Weir
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

This book was wild! I couldn't put it down. I hadn't seen the movie, although now I am curious to check it out.

The story is about an astronaut on a manned mission to Mars who is stranded there after a major equipment malfunction. The rest of the crew and Mission Control think him dead, but he survives, and begins to figure out if he has the supplies and the time to meet an upcoming mission to Mars and hope for a rescue. This has all the heart, drama, and ingenuity of Apollo 13!

The parts of the book that represent the astronaut's point of view through journal entries, depict a very likable, very smart, and very flawed guy. The rest of the book is told from the point of view of NASA, and their review of what went wrong and how to recover, both personally and politically, from the disaster.

View all my reviews

Review: Black Rabbit Hall

Black Rabbit Hall by Eve Chase
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I found this book while in line to pay for some other books at the Tattered Cover Bookstore in Denver. The reviews of this book compare the author's work to something written by Kate Morton or Sarah Waters, which is why I chose it. I like that comparison: this is a modern-day gothic-style mystery.

A woman searching for a wedding venue is uniquely attracted to Black Rabbit Hall, a dilapidated and crumbling once-beautiful estate. She tries to figure out why she is so fascinated by it, and whether she has a connection to it. Meanwhile, decades before, an otherwise happy family is devastated by an untimely death, and never really recovers. By the end of the book, these two storylines join together, but not in any way that I could have figured out. And the journey is full of beautiful writing and sympathetic characters.

View all my reviews

Review: The Phoenix Project: A Novel About IT, DevOps, and Helping Your Business Win

The Phoenix Project: A Novel About IT, DevOps, and Helping Your Business Win by Gene Kim
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This is a really wonderful book - if you work in technology. If you don't, it's completely inaccessible. So take this 4-star review with that audience in mind.

This book reminded me most of The Goal: A Process of Ongoing Improvement, in that it was fiction, with composite and shallow characters, designed to explain a new business process. In this case, it is the relationship between developers (people who write code) and IT (people who manage computer systems). Notable venture capitalist Mark Andreessen wrote a piece several years ago in the Wall Street Journal called Why Software is Eating the World, and this book seeks to teach us how to adjust our organizations to accommodate this.

What I found most useful in this book was not the proposed solutions as much as it was the descriptions of the problem. The composite characterizations of everything that can be wrong between Development and IT: prioritization, speed of deployment, interdependences, individuals relied upon too much, and many, many more. It gave me a great view into my customers' daily lives.

There is a companion book to this, The DevOps Handbook: How to Create World-Class Agility, Reliability, and Security in Technology Organizations, which takes it out of the fictional world of this novel and into a tangible set of recommendations. But for me, for now, this was a great introduction to the world of DevOps.

View all my reviews

Review: How to Stop Time

How to Stop Time by Matt Haig
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Though not classically a time traveling story, this book falls into that category. The protagonist has a condition that ages him only a year or so every decade. So he appears to be in his 30's but is actually 400 years old. While the book delights in regaling the reader with his exploits in history - a part in one of Shakepeare's debuts, for example, and a voyage with Captain Cook - it is his current life that is most compelling. He struggles with falling in love, both drawn to a colleague at a school where he is a teacher (history, of course), and cautioned against such relationships by the leader of "The Albatross Society," who has assembled and protects people with this condition.

I found the historical chapters tedious, but enjoyed the narrative of the present day.

View all my reviews

Review: Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis

Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis by J.D. Vance
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I really enjoyed this book. It's a memoir, of sorts - to the extent Between the World and Me is, in that Vance tells his story of growing up in rural Kentucky, using the narrative as a jumping-off point to characterize Appalachia.

Vance grows up with domestic violence, drugs, poverty, and many other poor circumstances. And yet, he perseveres, ultimately attending Yale Law School. In describing his life story, and what differences he experienced that enabled him to break the cycles his family had settled into, he did a great job explaining the life choices and prejudices that exist in Appalachia today. Though published several months before Trump's victory, it goes a long way to describe a community that, illogically, will end up voting for Trump.

I'm glad I read this and will be interested to follow Vance's career, as he is only 33.

View all my reviews

Review: This Messy Magnificent Life: A Field Guide

This Messy Magnificent Life: A Field Guide by Geneen Roth
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

I am supposed to love Geneen Roth. I just wonder if I started with the wrong book. She is well-known for her seven rules of eating that helped her find a healthy relationship with food; they include things like, "Eat when you are hungry," and "Eat sitting down in a calm environment. This does not include the car." And Anne Lamott wrote the preface to this, so that was a must-by endorsement on its own.

But somehow I didn't click with much in this book. Like Lamott, Roth is honest, and funny, and broken, and optimistic, and a realist. But I found some of the chapters of the book just too short - I wanted more meat, I wanted to know more - and other chapters of the book lacking in a relatable point. The two things I related to most in the book were quotations from other people (Shunryu Suzuki: "All of you are perfect just as you are and you could use a little improvement," and Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche: "The bad news is you’re falling through the air, nothing to hang on to, no parachute. The good news is, there’s no ground.”) With so many references to her earlier books - about food, about losing all her money to Madoff, about her husband - I can't help but wonder if she wrote this one on a contract, not because she had something to say.

All that aside, I'd read something else by her - but only because Lamott (and, ok, Oprah) tells me to.

View all my reviews

Review: The Girl Who Smiled Beads: A Story of War and What Comes After

The Girl Who Smiled Beads: A Story of War and What Comes After by Clemantine Wamariya
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This memoir was beautiful. It followed Wamariya as she and her sister flee civil war in Rwanda, survive several refugee camps throughout Africa, and eventually make their way to the United States.

What I most liked about this is that embarrassingly, the majority of my knowledge of the civil war in Rwanda was based on the movie Hotel Rwanda. This was a great education on what happened after - how did the people who escaped make their way, what kind of difficulties did they have, how did resettlement feel to people, what did it do to relationships among refugees?

Wamariya was generous in sharing a wide swath of her experience - from the pain and disappointment, to the people who helped her, to the complex relationship she had with her sister, and even the dark side of appearing on Oprah. Truly a lovely, honest, and wonderful memoir.

View all my reviews

Review: The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay

The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay by Michael Chabon
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Yes yes yes. I adored this book. I had tried to read it years ago, and didn't get very far, but glad that I read Chabon's wife's recent book A Really Good Day: How Microdosing Made a Mega Difference in My Mood, My Marriage, and My Life, which prompted me to try this again. The story follows two cousins, Clay, raised in the United States, and Kavalier, a magician-in-training who flees Nazi-occupied Czechoslovakia. They become fast friends, and partners in creating a universe of comic book characters. The book follows decades of their lives, loves, and business together.

I loved everything about this book - but most of all the storyline. I really enjoyed the depiction of the comic book industry of the 1950's and '60s, Kavalier's magic and escapism, and the love story that runs through the book. I also appreciated the comic-book-like characters and situations sprinkled throughout the book.

Can't wait to read another book by Chabon.

View all my reviews

Review: The Fishermen

The Fishermen by Chigozie Obioma
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

I picked this book out when I was stranded in Toronto and sought refuge in a bookstore. :) It was ok. The story followed four brothers in Nigeria who are growing up. When they run into the town madman during a disallowed visit to go fishing, he prophesies the death of the eldest. This prophesy sets in motion a complex set of familial decisions and its own madness. The writing was good, and I appreciate how well the author painted the setting and surroundings. However, I found the story to move too slowly for my taste, and take some predictable turns. I almost loved it, but in fact did not.

View all my reviews

Review: Home Fire

Home Fire by Kamila Shamsie
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

This was definitely one of the best books I've ready lately. It was about Pakistani Muslim three siblings who (as adults) are separated for the first time. One arrives in the US for college, one remains in London, and the third, the only boy, is suddenly missing.

The story unfolds with the sister in the United States running into a former neighbor, and as they become close, she worries that their political differences will stand between them. He and his family become inextricably linked with her family over time, though not in the ways that present themselves initially. I thought the characters were great, the plot was wonderfully complex, and the writing was excellent.

As a side note, the plot follows that of Antigone - which I had no memory of from 10th grade English class. Still a great read.


View all my reviews

Review: Alternate Side

Alternate Side by Anna Quindlen
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

I usually love Quindlen's books - Object Lessons is one of my all-time favorites. But this just didn't hit the mark for me. It was about a tight-knit neighborhood on a dead end street in Manhattan. The neighborhood had the usual squabbles over parking, personalities, and annual parties. When there is an accident involving the neighborhood's friendly handyman, suddenly fractures in marriages, racial tensions, and complications in friendships arise. While the story was good, her writing - usually ethereal - wasn't as good as usual.

View all my reviews

Review: Little Fires Everywhere

Little Fires Everywhere by Celeste Ng
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This seemed to be an "it" book recently, so I choose it from Book of the Month when it came up. I really liked it - much more than her last book. It followed the intertwined lives of two families in a neighborhood in Shaker Heights, Illinois. While the neighborhood is planned, and orderly, and standardized, the introduction of a new set of neighbors throws everything out of whack. When one of the town's most upstanding and invested families hires a vagabond single mom as their housekeeper, the families become interconnected in several ways, none of which anyone expected.

I really liked the writing in this book, and I appreciated that Ng developed so many characters, and well. I also liked that several different mother-daughter relationships were contrasted - in a nuclear family, a single-mom family, an adoptive family, an estranged family, and a few other configurations. Really great read.

View all my reviews