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Fiction, Historical, literary fiction, race

Book Review: Take My Hand by Dolen Perkins-Valdez

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The year is 1973 and Civil Townsend, a Black nurse in Montgomery, Alabama has just started a new job at the Montgomery Family Planning Clinic. Since she has a car, she is assigned home visits. Excited to make a difference in the Black community, she is up for a rude awakening with her first assignment. First of all, she finds out her patients are living in squalor in a one room cabin. Then she finds out that her patients are 11 and 13 year old sisters, India and Erica. She is supposed to give them this new birth control, Depo Provera but they are so young and have not even kissed boys. She gives them the shot anyways but Civil can’t get them or their living conditions out of her mind.

The next time Civil is supposed to give them the shots, she can’t bring herself to do it. Especially when she realizes they are only being assigned this because they are black and poor. Civil is from a middle class family, her dad also in the medical field as a doctor so she takes them under her wing and helps the whole family (their dad and their grandma. Their mom died when they were young) more often than she should. She buys them clothes, does their hair and even takes it upon herself to apply for a subsidized apartment.

One day, Civil goes for a scheduled visit with the girls and realizes that the powers that be have taken advantage of their dad and grandma being illiterate and done something horrific and irreversible to the girls. Civil is filled with so much guilt and leads the way in getting justice for them. The book takes us down this journey and fastforwards many years later when they are all grown and Civil goes down memory lane.

I was gifted this book for Christmas and didn’t know what it was about but I liked it. It’s a heavy subject matter so if you are looking for something light, this is not the book for you. This book was set in 1973 and in 2023, it serves as a reminder of all the injustices that black people have had to face and still face today in America. The book has parallels and makes mention of the Tuskegee study. Perkins-Valdez does a good job of creating a world that is real and you feel everything that Civil does. I enjoyed the fact that Civil is black and came from a well to do family while we also meet India and Erica on the other side, who were impoverished. It drives home the point, for those who don’t know, that being Black is not a monolith and just like everyone else, we run a spectrum.

I loved how human she made Civil. As a reader, you think like Civil that there is no other route than to help the family, because why not? But Perkins-Valdez adds the plot where it is brought to Civil’s attention that she may be making them feel like a charity case and she has to ponder when helping crosses the line to interfering. Even when the book fast forwards to 2016, you can still see Civil grappling with the choices she made. If you are wondering if the back and forth was distracting, I can assure you that it wasn’t. There was more time spent in 1973 than 2016.

This is a book I expect to evoke many emotions (might not be positive) but it’s oh so necessary for us to never forget what was done before and what could still be. The book isn’t all dreary as there are secondary story lines surrounding Civil’s personal life. Her ex, Ty, her mom and her relationship with the girls’ dad. I definitely recommend the book and despite the subject matter, it managed to be a quick read.

Taynement

african author, african stories, Fiction, Nigerian Author, short story, We Chit Chat

We Chit Chat: Jollof Rice and Other Revolutions: A Novel in Interlocking Stories by Omolola Ijeoma Ogunyemi

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Leggy: You chose this book for us to read. How did you first hear about it?

Taynement: Roxane Gay, the author, had read it early before its release (like 6 months ago) and had given it a positive review. I saw “jollof” and I was intrigued.

Leggy: It took a lot of coordinating for this to check out to both of us at the same time. I thought it was a novel, I didn’t know it was a series of short stories.

Taynement: As did I. Although, I had a tiny feeling with the interlocking stories in the title. I’m not usually a fan of short stories but I think I’m coming around.

Leggy: They’re easy to read because you can commit to a couple of stories a day and before you know it, you’re done. What did you think about this book overall?

Taynement: I think it was decent. Didn’t love it but didn’t hate it. There were elements I liked but I think it just never crossed the mark to really good.

Leggy: Yes, I kept waiting for it to get good but it never did for me. I think a lot of stories had potential but there was a lot holding them back. I kept waiting for her to go further but she never did. Honestly, a lot of the stories were so amateur hour to me.

Taynement: Ha ha, that’s the word. It was like playing dress up.

Leggy: What were the purpose of the dates? The dates seemed pointless to me.

Taynement: I did like that the stories had characters that were connected.

Leggy: We start off with the story of Adaoma, which I thought was all for nothing because after all the dressing up and making you feel it was building up to something, the ending was so anticlimatic.

Taynement: I think it was cool that it was a descendant of Nonso because I think they casually mentioned how her grandmother was married to a woman. I remember thinking the Segun story was pointless but later realizing he was the husband of one of the three main characters (Remi).

Leggy: The story I really liked and thought made sense was Mama Solape’s story. Everything made sense to me. The arc of the story was well done. The way her daughter was completely erased and how people just stopped calling her Mama Solape. How much she fought to retain her daughter’s memory and then at the end naming her restaurant Mama Solape. It was a full story arc to me which I would have loved to see more of, in this book.

Leggy: I didn’t like the last story and again back to the dates. Aisha claims she’s 78 in 2050 but in another story earlier in the book, she mentioned that she finished undergrad in 1994. How is this possible? I think that’s why I hated the dates.

Taynement: Lol. You’re really stuck on the dates. I didn’t even notice that.

Leggy: Numbers stick in my head. I really can’t help it.

Taynement: I actually liked the last story. I enjoyed the futuristic nature of it. I’m always fascinated by how authors imagine the future.

Leggy: What was your favorite story in the book?

Taynement: My favorite story is very random but it was Area Boy Rescue. Maybe because it was from the point of view of a non recurring character.

Leggy: I really liked that one too. When she said her madam dey act like “somebody who head no correct”. To go from her being such an Americanah to moving back to Nigeria and chasing a lorry through the streets of Lagos. That was funny.

Taynement: A very tiny thing but when she admitted that she liked having sex with her madam’s boss. I wasn’t even mad at her. It made me laugh.

Leggy: I really liked that detail. I thought it was succinct and well done because everything is not black and white. There are shades of gray. I think my favorite story was Start Your Savings Account Today, about Remi and her father. That conversation she had with her father and her father was saying – “You think I don’t love you and I paid your school fees in dollars?”. Because that is such a typical Nigerian dad thing to say. Even though you only saw me 7 times after I divorced your mother, I paid your school fees and that proves I love you.

Taynement: Overall, there were bits and pieces I liked and I would recommend it to people but my con is that it was mid.

Leggy: It was okay to me. I gave it 2 stars on Goodreads.

Taynement: I enjoyed it more than you did. I gave it three stars. I think the writing shortcomings were able to hide behind being a collection of short stories.

Have you guys read this? If yes, what did you think? If no, are you going to give this one a try? Let us know in the comments!

Leggy & Taynement.

Uncategorized

Book Review: The Measure by Nikki

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“That the beginning and the end may have been chosen for us, the string already spun, but the middle had always been left undetermined, to be woven and shaped by us.”

One day, everyone in the world wakes up to a strange box on their doorsteps. Everyone from high rise apartment owners to desert tent dwellers. On the box is an inscription – the measure of your life lies within. Inside the box lies a string that has been determined to show you exactly how long you’ll live. Everybody is swept into frenzy. People are scared. Some people open theirs and some people choose not to. No one under 22 gets the box but as soon as you turn 22 a box appears on your doorstep telling you exactly how long you have to live. No one knows where this box comes from. No one knows who left them. As society tries to pull together and grapple with this new way of living, people are left with a choice – to open or not to open? Would you want to know exactly when you’ll die? What would you do with that knowledge? Erlick charts this new world through the eyes of 8 different characters grappling with different choices and trying to navigate this new reality.

“We humans have an impulse to mark our existence in some way that feels permanent. We scribble ‘I was here’ onto our desks at school. We spray paint it on walls. We carve it into bark. I was here. I wanted this sculpture to do to the same, to let it be know that these people lived. A testament to the fact that these humans — with their long strings and medium strings and short strings — they were here.”

I don’t remember when I first heard about this book but I’ve had it in my library holds since last year and every time it would check out to me, I’d send it back. I guess it finally checked out to me at the perfect time because I loved reading this one. First of all, what an amazing premise! And what a way to think this all the way through. The author takes this and just runs with it, how would this work in politics? in romance? in friendships? between parents and kids? Yes, the results aren’t unpredictable but they are all so well thought out. Where this book really shines is in its characters. This is purely a character driven novel. The plot moves as the characters learn to live with their new reality and figure out a way to make the best out of what life has given them. From a no name politician who after opening his box and seeing a long string decides to use it to make himself into a political star, an architect who after being forced to open his box is left single and alone to sort out the unfairness of the number of years given to him, a school teacher who decides not to open her box and her sister who grapples with the reality of loving a partner who you know exactly when she’ll die.

“I watched a lot of people come to the end, and everyone around them kept begging them to fight. It takes real strength to keep on fight, and yes, usually that’s the right answer. Keep fighting, keep holding on, no matter what. But sometimes I think we forget that it also takes strength to be able to let go.”

This is a debut novel and I grade all debut novels on a curve. I think this is a FANTASTIC novel and made me feel a lot of emotions but it did get heavy handed sometimes. Sometimes Erlick couldn’t leave well enough alone, she wanted to make sure her audience was picking up everything she was putting down and sometimes you should just let your plot breathe. The everlasting optimism and hope while everything was going on in this book might come off as heartwarming to a lot of people but to me it came off as naive. If I had written this book it would have been completely fatalistic at least for a whole generation but Erlick chose to see humans as a much better species than I do.

“Maybe the boxes are like that, too. Nobody can offer any foolproof explanation for them, so they just end up meaning whatever we want them to mean — whether that’s God or fate or magic. And no matter how long your string is, that, too, can mean whatever you want it to — a license to behave however you want, to stop dieting, to seek revenge, to quit your job, to take a risk, to travel the world.”

I loved this book and I gave it 5 stars but if you do not like character driven novels, you will not like this book. If you need to know why the boxes appeared and why, this book will not work for you because it is not the point of the book. It’s never explored or determined why or where the boxes came from. This is purely speculative fiction. Realistically, this is a 4 star book but a debut novel deserves that round up. Plus it made me cry and I asked all my friends including Tayne what they would do if they got this kind of box. Would they choose to open it or not? So I’m asking whoever is reading this, if you got a box that contained how many years you have left on earth, would you or would you not open it?

Leggy

Fiction, thriller

Book Review: The House In The Pines by Ana Reyes

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A viral video where a woman is seated across a man at a diner when she suddenly stares into space and drops dead makes its way all over the internet. Maya is one of the many people who views this video but she is triggered as she has seen this happen before. When she was a high school senior preparing to go off to college, she watched her best friend, Aubrey die in the exact same way. That’s not the only similarity, they both died in the presence of the same man, Frank.

Now years later, Maya is in a serious relationship while going through withdrawals from an addiction to Klonopin, a drug she has been on since Aubrey’s death. She is drinking way more alcohol than usual to deal with it, isn’t sleeping well and has lost a ton of weight. After an embarrassing dinner with her boyfriend’s family where she was drunk, she decides to go back to her hometown and find a way to prove that Frank is responsible for both murders.

I don’t think I have ever read a book recommended by Reese’s book club but I was determined to have a better reading life this year and was open to suggestions so when I came across this on IG I was like sure, why not? and I don’t know if it was a good or bad decision. The book started out captivating and I was intrigued and very eager to find out how or if Frank was connected to both deaths. I think Reyes did a good job of mapping out the past and we get a good sense of Aubrey and Maya’s friendship. But then, when the reveal happens, I was like huh?? I almost didn’t believe it. Dare I say, I felt insulted? It was just waaay too far fetched for me.

Maya has Guatamelan heritage and at some point we see her visit and meet her father’s family (her father died when he was young). Her father was a writer who had an unfinished book that was in her possession. Reyes writes this plot point into the story as if it would come in handy at some point and it does interweave during the reveal but it didn’t seem to add to the reveal at all, so I kept wondering why we were dragged into it in the first place.

There is a lot going on in this book and you can tell that it is a debut effort. I don’t know if I’d recommend this book because I don’t think the payoff was satisfying. I gave it 3 stars because it really did have my attention the first half of the book before it started falling apart.

Taynement

Fiction, literary fiction, romance, women's fiction

Book Review: The Idea of You by Robinne Lee

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Solène Marchand, a 39 year old, divorced, art gallery owner, takes her 12 year old daughter, Isabelle, to her favorite boyband’s concert. August Moon, a band filled with young British boys, has taken the world by storm. They’re selling out stadiums and young girls all over the world are madly in love with them. The last thing Solène expects when she takes her daughter and her friends backstage to meet the group is to make a connection with one of the boys, who is just 20. Hayes Campbell is clever, charming and severely attracted to Solène. What begins as a series of clandestine trysts quickly evolves into a passionate and genuine relationship. She flies across continents and cities to meet up with him and have amazing sex until their relationship is revealed in the press leaving her daughter heartbroken and vulnerable and Solène, herself, exposed to the millions of girls who are mad that this old woman is with the love of their lives.

When I started this book, I was sure I was going to give it a one star at the end. A fanfiction about Harry Styles? I don’t care how many times fans of this book and the author denies it but this book is very clearly about One Direction and Harry Styles. I just couldn’t get past the age gap and the judgement I had. But I thought for a long time about this book while I was reading it and afterwards. If the genders were reversed would I feel so judgemental towards Solène? Would I judge a dad for sleeping with a 20 year old and question his love for his daughter? I realise that girls have a very different relationship with their favorite male pop stars than their favorite female pop stars so none of the dilemmas that arose in the book would have even been a thing in the world we live in. I also knew how this book was going to end. There was no other way for it to end except the way it did. I don’t want to spoil the book for anybody.

My problem with this book is that the author tried to convince us that Solène and Hayes fell in love but I never saw that on the page. I never thought they had any real conversations. Every conversation they had was about sex and about how much they loved sleeping with each other. The author didn’t show us in depth conversations that showed they were anything other than sex buddies. All we kept being told was the number of orgasms he kept giving her. There was a night he gave her 8 orgasms! Maybe I’m speaking too quickly. Maybe if someone gives you 8 orgasms, you have no choice but to fall in love too. This book has a lot of fans (there’s even a Facebook group just for the fans of this book) and I picked this book up because someone mentioned how much they loved it. I was in a book slump so I quickly picked this one up and another reason I didn’t give it one star is because it did exactly what I wanted it to do. It completely rebooted my reading life which I’m so happy about.

The characters in this book were so pretentious, I don’t even know where to start. Of course Solène is French and even though she was born and raised in America, she still considers all things French to be cool and sophisticated. She’s so well traveled, went to an Ivy league school, so beautiful, so intelligent. She is everything you think of when you think of a stereotypically sophisticated French woman. The author did not lift her pen when jotting down ALL the stereotypes. Hayes is also very rich, very posh, went to private school in England, father went to Eaton, and of course so mature for his age! These two people are gallivanting the world, meeting other cool and sophisticated people like them, buying art, discussing art, having dinners in fancy places, meeting more cool people like them and buying thousands of dollars worth of art!

So why did I not give this book one star? Because honestly it has stayed with me since I read it and I’ve had the urge to convince other people to read it just so I have someone to talk to about it. It’s also interesting to me that I had a lot of problems with this book but I did not find the age gap as creepy as I thought it would be. The author, I feel, did a very good job with that. Hayes still read very young to me but I kept forgetting he was barely legal. Anyway, I gave this book 2 stars and seriously considered giving it 3 stars but came to my senses. I will say though, that I enjoyed being irritated by these characters.

Have you read this one? What did you think? Let me know in the comments!

Leggy

dystopian, Fiction, literary fiction, Young Adult

Book Review: Our Missing Hearts by Celeste Ng

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Bird is 12 years old and he lives with his white dad. His mom, Margaret, is Chinese-American and she walked away from them 3 years earlier to protect them. They are living in a world governed by PACT (Preserving American Culture and Traditions Act) which is supposed to protect America from foreign influence aka China but what it is really doing is giving room for anti-Asian hate. Bird’s dad has told him to lay low and keep his head down but Bird is dealing with the loss of his mom and everything going on around him. After seeing a cryptic note, he is determined to find his mom and fill the gaps that have been resurrecting in his heart and mind.

I am a fan of Celeste Ng. I enjoyed Little Fires Everywhere and Everything I Never Told You. Those books were slow burns and I thought this was going to be the same journey for Our Missing Hearts when I started. Except, where the two books led to something, this one never did. I don’t remember at what point I realized this was going to be the book but I was probably too far gone to quit. We have seen a rise in apocalyptic settings in books and some may disagree but this was apocalyptic for me. It’s truly not fun to read something that is close to real life. All that to say that the mood for the whole book was dreary, I felt a dread the entire time.

We were told the story from Bird’s perspective and he just seemed sad. I have to say that Ng did a good job of conveying his complicated feelings as a 12 year old. His dad on the other hand didn’t seem fully fleshed out and seemed very much like a background character. When the story gets told from Margaret’s perspective, I felt like the book picked up some and was more interesting and we got more insight. But then, that felt rushed and after waiting to know more about Margaret she just seemed so impulsive and I don’t think I fully understood her motives.

I completely understand Ng’s frame of mind for writing this but I feel like she didn’t find the balance between writing about a conscious message and writing something enjoyable. There was a lot of focus on getting the message across that it didn’t feel relaxed. Although it was an important message, I think it failed in execution because overall I found it boring. I could not get myself to connect with any of the characters. I really wanted to like this one but being bored + the constant sense of dread didn’t make for a pleasant read.

Taynement

Chick-Lit, Fiction, literary fiction, romance, women's fiction

Book Review: The Most Likely Club by Elyssa Friedland

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“The thing about problems is that they will be there tomorrow.”

It’s 1977 in Belfort, California, 4 high school senior friends are ready to take on the world. Melissa Levin, Priya Chowdury, Tara Taylor, and Suki Hammer have weathered high school together and even their yearbook superlatives confirm their dreams: Most Likely to Win the White House, Cure Cancer, Open a Michelin-Starred Restaurant, and Join the Forbes 400. Fast forward 25 years and only Suki has made her dreams come true while the rest of the girls are struggling to figure out life. As they gather at their high school reunion and look at the ones who did turn themselves into something, they dream of what life could have been if they had stuck to their goals or if life hadn’t decide to screw them over. There and then, they make each other a promise to strive more and finally achieve at least a version of their high school superlatives.

I love a second chance story, which is why I picked this one as my Book of the Month Pick. Unfortunately, this book fell flat for me because it was trying to do too much. I enjoyed learning about these women’s friendship dynamics because I quite like reading about complicated female friendships. Ultimately, I didn’t think they had a good enough friendship for the bad parts of the friendship to be overlooked or read as just complex human nature. When Melissa finds out something about Priya’s daughter on social media, instead of going to her friend with it (it’s a child for crying out loud), she uses it to feel better about her own life and her own child. She then uses it to comment snidely to her friend whenever she felt like Priya was being holier than thou. I just felt, this is not friendship. Once it involves children, you cut the shit and make sure your friend’s child isn’t putting herself in dangerous situations.

There are so many issues that the author would just throw at us and then none of it even mattered at the end of the book in her hurry to try to pull together all the threads she tried to force into the book. Tara, the bisexual character in this book told us so much about her crush on Suki. Her every high school memory is tied to Suki and the author doesn’t fail to tell us this, every chance she got. But when we finally meet Suki, which for some reason doesn’t happen till the last 15% of the book, nothing is even explored with that. It’s like the storyline just died? Suki seemed like the one with the most interesting life among the friends but we never get her actual full story and when we meet her, she’s in crisis and we can’t even follow what exactly is wrong with her husband. Melissa just happened to meet a millionaire at the high school reunion who just proceeded to fund her campaign for Mayor which I found so eye roll inducing.

The only character I liked in this book was Priya. I think her problems were real life grown woman problems that I could identify with. She was a doctor who was turning down opportunities because she couldn’t get her husband to be an actual full participant in their family. Her evolution in this book was honestly the only one worth reading. Her, standing up for herself and insisting her husband actually parent the children he helped bring into this world, was the only reason I didn’t give this book one star. I wish every character had been written as honestly as Priya was. Her struggles trying to balance being a doctor, a wife, a mother and a daughter in law was so hard for me to read. I was exhausted just reading what her day was like.

I gave this book 2 stars on Goodreads. I think you should check it out if you’re looking for something easy to get through and hopefully, this review has made your expectations realistic so you’d probably enjoy it more than I did.

Leggy

Fiction, literary fiction

Book Review: Carrie Soto is Back by Taylor Jenkins Reid

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“My ambition has long felt oppressive. It is not a joy—it is a master that I must answer to, a smoke that descends into my life, making it hard to breathe. It is only my discipline, my willingness to push myself harder, that has been my way through.”

At 37, Carrie Soto is a retired, celebrated tennis player. The year is 1994 and she is sitting in the stands with her dad, Javier who introduced her to tennis and was her coach for a long time. They are both watching Nicki Chan at the US Open as she inches closer to breaking Carrie’s record of having the most Grand Slam titles. Carrie is not having it and decides there and then to un-retire to defend/maintain her titles.

Her retirement opens the floodgates for the media, who have never liked her, to share their not so nice opinions about Carrie who is nicknamed “The Battle-Ax”. It also brings back someone from the past, fellow tennis player, Bowe Huntley who is also trying to prove something to himself before he retires. Jenkins takes us on a journey of all the events that led Carrie to this moment and how she deals with this new phase in her life.

“One of the great injustices of this rigged world we live in is that women are considered to be depleting with age and men are somehow deepening.”

TJR rarely misses for me and this was no different. I absolutely loved this book. It didn’t take long for me to get swept into Carrie’s world. Something TJR does well is that she creates world that feels so real that you start wondering if you aren’t reading a biography. It felt so real to me that I spent so much time googling each tennis tournament as it came up in the book. The pacing of this book was just right and nothing dragged. I truly enjoyed Carrie as a character and I loved how unapologetic she was. I know TJR was trying to subtly point out the injustices of how women are being treated vs. men and she achieved it.

“I am afraid of losing. I am afraid of how it will look to the world. I’m afraid of this match being the last match my father ever sees me play. I am afraid of ending this all on a loss. I am afraid of so much.”

Another character I truly liked was Carrie’s dad, Javier. It was fun watching the many stages of their relationship and how TJR fully developed it for our understanding. Carrie was a hard shell but you could tell she had a soft spot for her dad. Just like her character, TJR wrote their relationship as flawed which made it realistic. Javier was so good at tennis that I kept wondering how much research TJR did to come up with all the techniques and tricks that Carrie had to do to keep up with her opponents. I want to add that it may seem little but I appreciated TJR infusing Javier’s culture in the moments when he speaks to Carrie in Spanish.

“When did I lose that? The delight of success? When did winning become something I needed in order to survive? Something I did not enjoy having, so much as panic without?”

One thing TJR does in her books is she infuses characters from her other books. When I started this book, I was confused because I thought it was a sequel to Malibu Rising till it dawned on me that it wasn’t a sequel and instead Carrie was the person Nina’s husband left her for in the book. It’s easy to think this was just a book about tennis but not at all. If you ever watched the show Friday Night Lights, it’s something like that. Where the anchor is the sport but it’s truly about everything else surrounding it and life as we know it. CSIB had a lot of heart and soul and I liked how it ended. I enjoyed every stop along the way and the lessons learned as well.

Just in case you couldn’t tell, I highly recommend this one.

Taynement

Book Related Topics

Our 2023 Reading goals

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Leggy:

Happy New Year! I hope everyone had an amazing and relaxing holiday because I did. I went home to Nigeria to see my family and friends and have a detty December, which was fantastic. Anyway, back home to the hustle and bustle of work and real life. How was your reading life in 2022? Mine was amazing. I hit the 100 mark for the first time as an adult reader. I set a goal of 70 books like always on Goodreads and read 107 books the entire year. I read so much during the summer and barely read after October so I’m super proud of that number.

This year will be exactly the same number of books on my Goodreads challenge – 70. I usually spend January reading all the books I missed from last year and catching up on some backlist titles that I ignored for more recent reads. I’m also super excited to read Spare by Harry.

Taynement:

Happy New Year everyone. Hope everyone had a memorable holiday with loved ones. I had family around so it was nice but very busy. I got gifted physical books for Christmas which if you have been following us, you know that I have not read a physical book in years. But I decided to give it a go and started reading them and I even got a book mark and everything. All that to say that, that is one of my reading goals to start my journey back into reading physical books (preferably hard covers!)

I have been in a weird reading slump in the last few years. The pandemic did a number on me as my anxiety was at an all time high and my reading began to drop as I could not concentrate or keep my interest on anything. Last year, I had a goal of 35 books and only ready 26. Mostly because nothing was really holding my interest and I had quite a number of DNF titles.

So to combat this issue this year, I am going to try and find titles that really sound interesting. As a side bar, Leggy is part of my issue because she reads all the good books and once she does, it’s usually a DNR for me lol. But as a goal, that shouldn’t matter, I am currently reading Sea of Tranquility because it was Leggy and Obama’s list of favorite books because a good book is a good book. I hope to enjoy most of the titles I read this year and I wish the same for everyone.

We hope everyone has the best reading year ever and we hope this year brings us good things with this blog. We really appreciate y’all andare so grateful for everyone who keeps tuning in to read our content. Can’t wait to see what this year brings!

Book Related Topics, celebrity memoir, Chick-Lit, Fiction, literary fiction, Memoirs, Non-Fiction, romance

Our Best and Worst Books of 2022

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Leggy’s Best:

“My point is, there’s always something. I think, as a species, we have a desire to believe that we’re living at the climax of the story. It’s a kind of narcissism. We want to believe that we’re uniquely important, that we’re living at the end of history, that now, after all these millennia of false alarms, now is finally the worst that it’s ever been, that finally we have reached the end of the world.”

Emily St. John Mandel has become such a must read author for me. I have enjoyed every book of hers I’ve ever read. I absolutely adored this book and gave it 5 stars. You can read my full review of this book here. This year has been a fantastic reading year for me in all genres so I thought it would be hard for me to pick a favorite but this was such a clear answer for me.

Other favorites:

  • Book Lovers by Emily Henry (favorite romance book this year for sure! Full review on the blog here.)
  • Dreadgod by Will Wight (The 11th book in the Cradle series by Will Wight. Please read these series if you haven’t yet. These books are so much fun. The 12th and final book comes out next year. favorite fantasy book of the year for sure!)
  • Our Wives Under the Sea by Julia Armfield (This was my favorite weird book I read this year. Goodreads marks this as horror? Didn’t get that at all but it was so strange and such amazing writing)

Taynement’s Best:

This was one of the first books I read this year and nothing else captured my attention like it. This memoir of sorts has Faith Jones recounting her time in a cult and how she got out of it. I could not believe a lot of the things I read and the fact that it was someone’s real life was really jarring. As mentioned in my full review, loads of trigger warning for this one. Any book that had me go down a rabbit hole of wikipedia and documentaries just to get more information after I was done, was bound to be top of my list.

A lot of the books I enjoyed were niche favorites (books about reality show bts) but some other favorites were:

  • Verity by Colleen Hoover (This book was an acid trip but I probably read this the fastest. Full review here)
  • The Anthropocene Reviewed by John Green (I guess I had my number of non fiction reads. Perfect blend of smart and interesting. Full review here)
  • The Good Sister by Sally Hepworth (This was a random read that I ended up liking a lot. Full review here)
  • Carrie Soto Is Back by Taylor Jenkins Reid (TJR rarely misses with me and this was not an exception)

Taynement’s Worst:

This was a recent review of mine so it should be no surprise that it is my worst. Up until writing this, I didn’t realize how much non-fiction I read this year. Well, my worst book is also in this genre. Every Tom, Dick and Harry has a memoir now whether they deserve it or not. This memoir had so many missing gaps, way too much toxic positivity and just overall missed the mark. Extra negative points for the terrible voice cadence that was used in the audio book. I just really hated this book y’all! (Full review here)

Leggy’s Worst:

Instagram loves this book. I have a mini rant about this book on our Instagram page (@nightstands2, follow us!). I picked up this book because of the hype and because I saw a trailer of the movie adaptation on Youtube and decided to just read the book instead, what a bad idea. There was nothing romantic about this book. The heroine is the exact type of character I hate in a romance – think Zooey Deschanel from New Girl, obviously hot girl who is “awkward” and has no idea she’s hot. I rolled my eyes so much reading this book it almost fell out of the sockets.

We hope you have enjoyed talking books with us this year. We’d love to know what your best and worsts were so let us know in the comments. Have an amazing Christmas and we’ll see you in the New Year. Happy reading everybody!

Leggy & Taynement