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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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!

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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.

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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.

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