Tag: book-reviews

Fiction, literary fiction

Book Review: Margo’s Got Money Problems by Rufi Thorpe

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“You are about to begin reading a new book, and to be honest, you are a little tense. The beginning of a novel is like a first date. You hope that from the first lines an urgent magic will take hold, and you will sink into the story like a hot bath, giving yourself over entirely. But this hope is tempered by the expectation that, in reality, you are about to have to learn a bunch of people’s names and follow along politely like you are attending the baby shower of a woman you hardly know. And that’s fine, goodness knows you’ve fallen in love with books that didn’t grab you in the first paragraph”

Margo is a 19 year old girl who feels lost in her life. The daughter of a former Hooters waitress and an ex- pro wrestler who aren’t together anymore, she attends community college and starts an affair with her married professor, Mark. The affair leads to a pregnancy and despite numerous concerns by her mom and high school friend, she decides to keep the baby, even though she knows she will be doing this on her own.

Margo has the baby and as expected, it’s not an easy feat. Her mom is no help and Margo is broke. Her dad shows up on her doorstep and offers to babysit and be a roomate to help with the rent. Jobless and facing eviction, Margo knows she needs to do something drastic and decides to start an OnlyFans account. It takes a while but she starts to make money but Margo discovers that even though she solved her financial problems, there were a whole host of other problems awaiting her.

“I’m just saying,” Jinx said, seemingly more lucid now, “when you’re lost in the deep dark forest, the thing to do isn’t to get scared of the trees. You have to find your way out again.”

This was such an interesting book. The cover art made it seem like it would be a fluff book and although it had a fluff aura, it actually was a book with realistic themes. The book alternates from first person narration to third but it’s mostly from Margo’s point of view. Thorpe does a good job of reminding us that Margo is 19. At various points in the book, I would get so annoyed and wonder why she made certain decisions but then remember how young she was. For example, it is difficult for Margo to see that she was taken advantage of by her professor and still argues that it was a consensual affair.

“And it really makes you wonder: What kind of truth would require this many lies to tell?”

Another thing Thorpe does well is even though the book is full of heavy topics, the book never feels heavy. She also fully fleshes out all the characters so you have a good understanding of them. I think it helped a lot understanding Margo’s mom and dad’s past and gave insight into Margo’s relationship with them. It was amusing to me how her mom stood her ground on not being a hands-on grandma. I did enjoy seeing the evolution of her relationship with her dad.

“It was the word unfit that scared her, a mother who didn’t fit. A mother who wasn’t the right kind of mother like all the other mothers. A mother without a ring, who was too young, who let men look at her body for money.”

One of the interesting parts in the book to me was how people define and see sex work. Even though Margo had an OF account, at many points she had to defend herself saying “I am not having sex with people”. At the end of the day, the book is about a young lady who is lost, made some bad decisions arguably because of how she was raised and is now trying to make the best of the cards she was dealt with. I did this on audio. It was narrated by Elle Fanning and I have to say I wasn’t a fan of her narration even if I understand why she was probably cast. As expected, the book is being turned into a series starring Elle Fanning and Nicole Kidman.

Taynement

celebrity memoir, Memoirs, Non-Fiction

Book Review: From Here To The Great Unknown by Lisa Marie Presley & Riley Keough

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“I have a vague memory of this one conversation we had in that room about a passage that Elvis had underlined. I started to call someone to help me remember it, but realized that there’s no one left to call”

Whatever you felt after reading the quote above, is basically the feeling you’ll have about this book. For me, it was sadness and the feeling of loss and that’s what I got from Lisa Marie while reading her memoir. For those who don’t know, Lisa Marie, only child of Elvis Presley, decided to write her memoir but got stuck and enlisted her oldest daughter, actress Riley Keough to help her complete it. Not long after this, Lisa Marie passed away and Riley is left to complete what her mother started.

“Grief settles. It’s not something you overcome. It’s something that you live with. You adapt to it. Nothing about you is who you were. Nothing about how or what I used to think is important. The truth is that I don’t remember who I was.”

This was a very captivating memoir because it was everything a memoir should have, especially the most important – being honest. Lisa Marie was very open and honest about her life. She laid bare the good (which wasn’t very much), the bad and the ugly and you could feel her struggle and pain through her words. Even when she made decisions that seemed outrageous like deciding she wanted to be a mom and Danny Keough had to be the father and essentially trapping him, you just want to give her a pass because you just wanted to help ease her pain away. The honesty also rang even truer if you do the audio because you get to hear actual audio of Lisa Marie recounting her memories (which is what Riley used to finish up the book)

“He wasn’t an angry person, he didn’t live there. Some people full-on live in destruction. Others buy real estate and walk around in anger for a little while. My dad would just visit.”

Lisa’s first big loss was the loss of her father when she was 9 years old and I don’t think she ever recovered from it. She had a bond/connection with her dad that I can’t whole heartedly say was healthy. Not to say that they didn’t love each other, they did but her dad was an addict and as his addiction got worse and his moods became erratic it seemed like Lisa focused on just making sure she was on his good side. I say this to say that the book sounded like Lisa idolized him especially post-humously and it was almost like he could do no wrong. A stark contrast to her feelings towards her mom. She definitely wrote more about her dad than her mom.

“She mothers my daughter through me.”

As much as this was Lisa Marie’s memoir, the biggest impact it left on me was a desire to know more about her daughter, Riley. I mentioned earlier how it felt like Lisa Marie idolized her dad, I do think Riley did the same for her mom. She did a fantastic job of finishing the book for her mom and piecing together stories told to her by her mom. I felt that Lisa Marie didn’t stand a chance at happiness in life with everything that she went through and I wondered the same about Riley and how she was able to navigate the dysfunction and heartbreaks such as her brother’s suicide. She seems to be a parentified child and the person who kept the family together as the sensible one and it made me want to know more about her true feelings and how she navigated it all.

“I looked at my face as a child and thought, My God, if only anyone could have told you what you were going to go through in this life, what you were going to be up against. That cute little blond-haired child in the matching dress with her mommy. It overwhelmed me.”

Overall, I definitely recommend this book. It’s a quick 6 hour listen on audio. Julia Roberts narrates Lisa’s part and Riley narrates her part (I will admit I was not a fan of Riley’s voice). As mentioned earlier, we get to hear the actual raw tapes of Lisa Marie talking about her life and there is an honesty there that made me believe everything she said. She gave an aura of IDGAF and honestly, what was there to lose? I learned things I didn’t know about her previously like her romantic relationships, her music career and how fraught her relationship with her mom was. All this and more provided for one of my favorite memoir reads.

I’d like to give trigger warnings as there is mention of sexual assault, drug use and suicide.

Taynement

Fiction, Historical, literary fiction, race

Martyr! by Kaveh Akbar

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“Eight of the ten commandments are about what thou shalt not. But you can live a whole life not doing any of that stuff and still avoid doing any good. That’s the whole crisis. The rot at the root of everything. The belief that goodness is built on a constructed absence, not-doing. That belief corrupts everything, has everyone with any power sitting on their hands.”

Cyrus Shams is a young man grappling with an inheritance of violence and loss: his mother’s plane was shot down over the skies of Tehran by America in a senseless accident and his father moved them to the same country responsible for his mother’s death. His father’s life in America is that of survival and making sure that Cyrus also survived. But now, after his father dies, Cyrus is truly alone and is struggling with a lot of addiction issues while developing an obsession with martyrs. He decides that he also wants his death to mean something as he stumbles upon an art installation in New York City where a woman who is dying of cancer is lying there every day until her death, talking to anyone who wants to talk.

“There’s this story I read one time, some old-school Muslim fairy tale, maybe it was a discarded hadith I guess, but it was all about the first time Satan sees Adam. Satan circles around him, inspecting him like a used car or something, this new creation—God’s favorite, apparently. Satan’s unimpressed, doesn’t get it. And then Satan steps into Adam’s mouth, disappears completely inside him and passes through all his guts and intestines and finally emerges out his anus. And when he gets out, Satan’s laughing and laughing. Rolling around. He passes all the way through the first man and he’s rolling around laughing, in tears, and he says to God, ‘This is what you’ve made? He’s all empty! All hollow!’ He can’t believe his luck. How easy his job is going to be. Humans are just a long emptiness waiting to be filled.”

It took me a while to actually start this book because every time it would check out to me; I would send it right back. I saw it so much on Instagram and on so many lists. I read the blurb and felt bored but eventually I decided to just give it a go and I absolutely enjoyed it. One of the reasons I was avoiding this one is because I expected it to be depressing. Martyrs? Lord. But once you meet Cyrus and his self-righteous deep thinking, you can’t help but roll your eyes at all his navel gazing. For a book that explores death, depression and sobriety, it never feels depressing. I actually found it funny in so many ways and the wry humor kept me reading even though Cyrus is the embodiment of “youth is wasted on the young”.

“The performance of certainty seemed to be at the root of so much grief. Everyone in America seemed to be afraid and hurting and angry, starving for a fight they could win. And more than that even, they seemed certain their natural state was to be happy, contented, and rich. The genesis of everyone’s pain had to be external, such was their certainty. And so legislators legislated, building border walls, barring citizens of there from entering here. “The pain we feel comes from them, not ourselves,” said the banners, and people cheered, certain of all the certainty. But the next day they’d wake up and find that what had hurt in them still hurt.”

This book is Kaveh Akbar’s debut novel, and everyone knows I grade these on a curve. I’ve never read any of his poetry and I wonder if his writing would have felt familiar if I did. This is an ambitious work that sometimes misses the mark but through Cyrus, we investigate the concept of identity, especially living in a country that caused your mother’s death. And even though you want to lean into your identity as an Iranian, you find out that most of your thoughts and even your addictions are thoroughly American. As he dives into his family’s history – his father’s slow descent into despair and alcoholism, his uncle dressed as the Angel of Death during the Iranian war to convince dying soldiers to die with dignity and not try to desert the army – you begin to understand why Cyrus is so obsessed with death.

“An anthropologist who wrote about how the first artifact of civilization wasn’t a hammer or arrowhead, but a human femur—discovered in Madagascar—that showed signs of having healed from a bad fracture. In the animal world, a broken leg meant you starved, so a healed femur meant that some human had supported another’s long recovery, fed them, cleaned the wound. And thus, the author argued, began civilization. Augured not by an instrument of murder, but by a fracture bound, a bit of food brought back for another.”

Cyrus doesn’t want to be just another depressed boy who kills himself. He wants his death to mean something, and he is convinced that the woman who is dying in a New York art gallery will help him understand how to make his own death mean something. I really loved Cyrus’ discussions with Orkideh. When he tells her of his plans she says: ahh, another Iranian man obsessed with martyrdom.

“Why should the Prophet Muhammad get a whole visit from an archangel? Why should Saul get to see the literal light of heaven on the road to Damascus? Of course it would be easy to establish bedrock faith after such clear-cut revelation. How was it fair to celebrate those guys for faith that wasn’t faith at all, that was just obedience to what they plainly observed to be true? And what sense did it make to punish the rest of humanity who had never been privy to such explicit revelation?”

I didn’t know the author was a poet before starting this book but the amount of quotes I want to share with you shows you how incredibly well this book is written. Did it set out to do too much and at the end succumbed to cliche? Yes. But I liked the journey and even the cliche ending didn’t dim that for me. I gave this book 4 stars on Goodreads.

Leggy

Fiction, literary fiction, romance

Book Review: Intermezzo by Sally Rooney

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“Sometimes you need people to be perfect and they can’t be and you hate them forever for not being even though it isn’t their fault and it’s not yours either. You just needed something they didn’t have in them to give you.”

Peter is a Dublin lawyer in his thirties while his brother, Ivan, is a twenty-two-year-old competitive chess player whose career has stalled before it could even take off. In the wake of their father’s death, they each deal with this tragedy the best way they can – Peter over medicating himself and struggling to manage his relationships with two very different women while Ivan meets Margaret, an older woman and becomes intensely involved with her. Rooney follows these two grieving brothers and the people they love or try to love through a period of desire, despair, possibility and growing up.

“what if life is just a collection of essentially unrelated experiences? Why does one thing have to follow meaningfully from another?”

When the blurb for this book came out, everyone went on and on about how this is Rooney stepping out of her comfort zone and writing about brothers. Actually, this is very typical Rooney, she is still exploring human sexual and romantic relationships but this time her main characters are brothers. Like all her books, people fall in love and engage in toxic relationships or less than ideal relationships so that the book suddenly becomes literary fiction instead of plain old romance. I feel, at this point, I’ve accepted that as much as Rooney annoys me, and I genuinely believe that I hate-read all her books, that she has become a must read author for me. Rooney releases a book, and I read it, she just writes books that I enjoy ranting about. I do not even know if I truly enjoy any of her books.

“Yes I would like he thinks to live in such a way that I could vanish into thin air at any time without affecting anyone and in fact I feel that for me this would constitute the perfect and perhaps the only acceptable life. At the same time I want desperately to be loved.”

This book has no quotation marks. That’s probably why you’re reading the above quote and wondering if I made a mistake, but I didn’t. There is just no quotations or commas in the entire book. I came across a clip of Rooney on Instagram in which she said she enjoys exploring different human relationships and accessing what it’s like to need people. I think that clip made me enjoy this book more and I intend to find the full interview and listen to it. Maybe if I listen to her perspective, I’d enjoy her books more. That being said, I ended up appreciating this book even though I started out completely annoyed by the structure. I enjoyed reading about the relationship between the brothers and the relationship they have with their mum. I think this is one of Rooney’s books that I’ve appreciated in a long time.

“Didn’t human sexuality at its base always involve a pathetic sort of throbbing insecurity, awful to contemplate?”

I never recommend Rooney to anybody because even though I will be the first to say that she is a fantastic writer, I still think her books are sad girl aesthetic. Her books are about nothing or about sad people being sad and having sex with each other. It is about people of a certain class, navel gazing about things the rest of the world barely thinks about. Rooney is good at fucked up relationship dynamics, but Ivan and Margaret were just cringe to me. I can’t believe Margaret listened to Ivan chatting like a 12-year-old as opposed to his 22 and still made the decision to sleep with him. Ridiculous. I liked Peter more than Ivan. I found him to be a more complex character but then Rooney decided to wrap everything up in a bow and everything was just tidied up at the end. I found that completely disappointing.

“Nobody when they’re rejected believes it’s really for extraneous reasons. And it almost never is for extraneous reasons, because mutual attraction — which even makes sense from an evolutionary perspective — is simply the strangest reason to do anything, overriding all the contrary principles and making them fall away into nothing.”

Overall, I liked this book better than I did her last offering. I gave this 3 stars on Goodreads. Am I going to read the next Rooney book? Who am I kidding? Of course!

Leggy

Fiction

Book Review: I’m Starting to Worry About This Black Box of Doom by Jason Pargin

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“I have this theory, that everything that happens on our screens is designed to do exactly what’s happening here, to repel us from one another, to create a war of all against all. It’s like a filter that only shows you others’ bad behavior, blocking the pure and letting through the poison, to make you scared of everyone who isn’t exactly identical to you. I think that, long-term, it traps your brain in a prison, that it’s designed to keep you inside, alone, with only those screens for comfort. A friend of mine came up with a name for it, for these algorithms, this media mind prison. We call it the black box of doom.”

Abbott Coburn is a 26-year-old Lyft driver who gets a job to take a woman to LAX. When he gets there, he meets a woman (Ether) who makes him an offer – $200,000 to cancel the ride on the Lyft app but instead drive her and the big black box she’s sitting on to Washington, D.C. The catch is that they have to get there by the 4th of July for him to get the balance and he can’t come with any electronic devices. She gives him $100,000 upfront and promises him the balance if he keeps to their deal.

Abbott is a Twitch streamer and when he goes back to this house to pack, he uploads a quick video to let his followers know that he would be gone for a while. As he leaves all his electronic devices behind and embarks on a cross-country journey with this strange woman he just met, he is unaware of the online furor that unleashes due to his video spearheaded on Reddit and then spread across all online platforms.

“A sprawling audience of spectators whose demands for compelling news were growing faster than it could be produced. Attention-seekers were eagerly filling the void, and that, friends, is how you build a bullshit machine.”

This book has excerpts of threads from Reddit and comments from spectators as strangers track these two from California to Washington, D.C. The comments get more outrageous as video of him picking up said woman and the big black box with what is thought to be a radiation symbol on it surface online. Everyone has their own theory from a planned terrorist attack on the capital to aliens to drugs to dead bodies.

It’s fascinating and true to real life, watching people make up their minds about strangers who they do not know in real time. People pull up Abbott’s entire Twitch streams and find rants he’s made about women which clearly shows that he has incel tendencies. Every single thing he’s ever said in the past are examined and put up as proof of his intentions.

“Our whole society is idle and overeducated, and nothing spices things up like conflict. There’s an old saying that a child not embraced by the village will burn it down to feel its warmth. I’d update it to say the child not sufficiently entertained by the village will burn it down for the spectacle.”

Abbott is a very unlikeable character, but I enjoyed reading his arguments and why he is the way he is. When I was reading comments about this book, I saw a lot of people say they hated this book because they couldn’t “relate” to an incel, and I think this is what is wrong in today’s art. I called it the Taylor Swift effect where everyone wants to relate to art for it to be good. We are demanding that people stop writing any characters that we do not see reflected in us because good art should only reflect us which is leading to artists making albums that are essentially tabloids of their lives.

All I demand from my books is that that character exists. I don’t care if I’m able to relate to that character, I just want the character to exist. Do I relate to Abbott and his arguments? Do I agree with him? Absolutely not. But you cannot argue that men like him exists. You only have to go to a woman’s page on Instagram and read the comments and you will find plenty of men like Abbott.

“Placebos work better when they cost more; it’s science”

I read this book after I wrote our best and worst books of the year, but this is hands down the best book I read this year. I even hesitate to say this because this is not the best written book or the most literary, but I think it’s the book that most struck me and delighted me. I read this book in one sitting. It’s been so long since I’ve been able to do that. Do I think it completely fell apart in the end and the author did not know how to keep up the momentum? Of course, but I still gave this book 5 stars on Goodreads.

Leggy

Best & Worst, Black Authors, celebrity memoir, Fiction, literary fiction, Memoirs, romance

Our Best and Worst Books of 2024

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Another year of reading is coming to a close and as always, we share with you what our best and worst books of the year were.

Taynement’s Best:

“I think of Constance’s hushed voice whenever we were cleaning together. Once some things get dirty they can never be clean again and once some things are broken they can never be fixed.”

I stumbled upon this book randomly. I sometimes go to the bookstore just for a happy high and I take pictures of the featured book display and go down the list to see what is available in my library. Sugar, Baby was and from the moment I read this book it has not left my mind and that’s why it is my favorite read. I couldn’t stop gushing about it to Leggy. I love books that remind you that life isn’t black and white. I don’t think enough promo was done for this but here is my review. Check it out and let me know what you think!

Some other faves:

  • Hold My Girl by Charlene Carr (another underpromoted book, I couldn’t even find it at the bookstore. The book asks the question “What defines a mother?”. Full review here)
  • Here One Moment by Lianne Moriarty (I never thought I would have a Moriarty book on my “best of” list but here we are. Full review here)
  • How To Say Babylon by Safiya Sinclair (What a memoir. Full review here)
  • A Kind of Madness by Uche Okonkwo (Enjoyed these collection of short stories)
  • Little Rot by Akwaeke Emezi (Listen, I am just as surprised as you are to see this here)

Leggy’s Best:

“In the rare hopeful hour, I tell myself this darkness has a purpose: to help me recognize light if I ever find it again.”

I heard such good things about this book when it was released in 2023 but I never got around to reading it. Finally, I cracked it open in 2024 and I understood why it was recommended so much to me. Read my full review of this one here.

Some other favorites:

  • The Wedding People by Alison Espach. I read this last month and really, really liked it. I feel like everything might have been wrapped up too neatly but I still really enjoyed my reading experience. This will probably be my first review of the new year.
  • Long Island Compromise by Taffy Brodesser-Akner. Rich people being badly behaved will always have my heart in literature. You can read my review here.
  • James by Percival Everett . You can read my review here.
  • Summer Fridays by Suzanne Rindell. I think this is my favorite romance of the year.

Taynement’s Worst:

I tried but I couldn’t get over the premise. Maybe it is possible, but it’s hard for me to imagine that someone would fall for the identical twin brother of the person who raped and impregnated her and have that child have an Uncle/Dad relationship? I know I say life isn’t black and white but this was not it at all.

Leggy’s Worst:

This book was just badly written and just bad. This was also the only book that I gave one star this year soooo it earned its place.

Thank you so much for sticking with us this year. Let us know your best and worst books of the year in the comments. Happy Holidays, everybody!

Taynement & Leggy

Fiction, Historical, literary fiction, Mystery

Book Review: The God of the Woods by Liz Moore

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“Rich people, thought Judy—she thought this then, and she thinks it now—generally become most enraged when they sense they’re about to be held accountable for their wrongs.”

It’s early morning, August 1975 and Barbara Van Laar has gone missing. She’s the daughter of the family that owns the summer camp and employs most of the region’s residents. And this isn’t the first time a Van Laar child has disappeared. Barbara’s older brother similarly vanished 14 years ago, never to be found. As a search begins, we find ourselves chasing down the secrets of the Van Laar family, their history, the 14-year-old stone cold case and the blue-collar community working in the shadow of this powerful family.

“It was funny, she thought, how many relationships one could have with the same man, over the course of a lifetime together.”

Liz Moore is the writer of Long Bright River which was a huge hit during the pandemic. I remember being the odd man out on that book because I did not like it and gave it 2 stars. I also realized that I had read her 2016 novel, The Unseen World, which I frankly have no recollection of reading, but Goodreads tells me I gave this book 4 stars. Anyway, I wasn’t going to read this book because it was getting so much hype, and I remembered my experience of her previous book and was going to stay away until I saw her on Obama’s list. I was intrigued that a mystery novel made it on there, so I decided to finally pick it up and was not disappointed.

“This is one of the few sheer pleasures Louise knows in life: the near-otherworldly feeling of touching another human’s body with your own body in a way that, for the first time, transcends mere friendliness. These are the times in her life that Louise has felt most acutely the animal nature of her humanity, and therefore they have been the most comforting. To be a human is complex, and often painful; to be an animal is comfortingly simple and good.”

This book is a master class in well written prose. I thought the descriptions and the turn of phrases were fantastic. This story is told through multiple perspectives taking us on a history journey through the Van Laar family. We get Tracy, a young meek girl who is suffering from her parents’ divorce and is sent to this camp by her father for the summer to avoid actually spending time with her. Alice, mother of the missing Barbara who also lost her son 14 years ago and is addicted to pills having never gotten over the disappearance of her son. Louise, a 26 year old camp counselor who is “engaged” to a boy from a wealthy family and wonders if this will be her ticket out of poverty until she encounters what it’s like to become a scapegoat to a family that finds you expendable and Judy, the first female investigator in the state at 26 who is smart, observant and very good at her job.

“she also believed that part of a mother’s duty was to be her daughter’s first, best critic; to fortify her during her childhood, so that in womanhood she could gracefully withstand any assault or insult launched in her direction. This was the method her own mother had used upon her. She hadn’t liked it at the time, but now she understood it.”

This book was a 5-star read for me till the end when I deducted a star because it was the worst ending. The author takes us through the book and dangles multiple suspects at us only to completely drop all of them for an ending that I found so unrealistic and ridiculous. I can’t believe her editor let her keep that ending. It just did not work for me at all. I gave this book 4 stars because I did not think the ending lived up to the entire work for me, but I still recommend it for the journey.

Have you read this one? Let me know in the comments.

Leggy

Fiction, literary fiction

Book Review: Long Island Compromise by Taffy Brodesser-Akner

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“There has never been, in the history of all human interaction, a way for a woman to explain effectively that she’s calm when a man has suggested she isn’t.”

In 1980, a wealthy Jewish businessman, Carl Fletcher is kidnapped from his driveway and held for ransom. He is returned to his wife and kids less than a week later and the family moves on with their lives. Two simple minded brothers are arrested for the crime after marked bills used to pay for the ransom are found in circulation but only a couple thousands are found with them. They are imprisoned with the underlying understanding by everyone that there is someone else who masterminded the whole thing and has gone scott-free. Nearly 40 years later, it is clear that nobody has ever gotten over anything, after all. Carl is barely functioning when he’s at home. Ruth, his wife, has spent all her time protecting her husband’s emotional health and left the kids to their own devices.

“They had watched all this, as the understanding of what had really gone wrong in their lives revealed itself to them, which was that the tide pool you’re born into is only manageable if someone gives you swimming lessons. Or, put more simply, in order to be a normal person, you had to at least see normal people.”

The three kids born into the family – 2 brothers that were alive during the kidnapping and a sister that was born after the kidnapping but born into a life that has been shaped by the most consequential thing in their lives. Nathan’s chronic fear won’t allow him to advance at his law firm and is constantly anxious. Beamer rose to Hollywood fame by writing a blockbuster that involves a kidnapping and now has not been able to write anything else and has had to watch his writing partner go off and start a successful series that Beamer suspects is based fully on his family. Beamer deals with his perpetual terror by consuming anything that will numb him – drugs, food, women. Jenny has spent her entire life so bent on proving that she is better than her family, railing against capitalism while accepting the money she is paid every month from the family business.

“The irony of it nearly crushed her. She had been locked in a debate with herself her whole life about how to be good in the world, and the only thing she left out of that very private conversation she was having was the actual work of being a nice, normal human being.”

I like a book that knows the characters they are writing about. I love the process of recognizing a character and just reveling in them being who they are and the author making no apologies for them. I recognize that people grow as they become older but as I’ve become older, I recognize that more people remain the same than grow. I think in a society and generation where we go to therapy and talk a lot about introspection, we have convinced ourselves that we are constantly self-improving, but I would posit that we are just talking about the same issues with our therapists over and over again and learning coping mechanisms, but we aren’t changing.

I say all this to say that the characters the author created are amazing. They are proudly Jewish and rich with all the trappings that come with that. They have grown up insulated from the rest of the world and it has played out in their lives and the author lets us be a spectator to their glorious lives. These are characters that seem so real, you feel like you can see them and you think you know them.

“Maybe that was the real Long Island Compromise, that you can be successful on your own steam or you can be a basket case, and whichever you are is determined by the circumstances into which you were born. Your poverty will create a great drive in your children. Or your wealth will doom them into the veal that Jenny described at her science fair, people who are raised to never be able to support a life so that when they’re finally allowed to wander outside their cages for the first time on their way to their slaughter, they can’t even stand up on their own legs. But the people who rise to success on their own never stop feeling the fear at the door, and the people lucky enough to be born into comfort and safety never become fully realized people in the first place. And who is to say which is better? No matter which way it is for you, it is a system that fucks you in the ass over and over, in perpetuity, and who is to say which is better?”

I loved the end of this book. I thought it was realistic. Rich people keep being rich and keep being bailed. This is not a fairy tale. We live in a capitalist society, and this is what it looks like. No one is better at the end of the book and that’s something you have to sit with and accept. You want to read about rich people being rich living their lives in their bubble and never knowing real life? This is the book for you but also what is even real life? Whatever life anyone is living is real. I gave this book 4 stars on Goodreads.

Leggy

Black Authors, literary fiction, race, women's fiction

Book Review: Hold My Girl by Charlene Carr

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Tess and Katherine are two women who could not be any more different but they have one thing in common, they both desperately want to have a child. Katherine is married and has spent most of her life trying to be perfect, obsessing over her home and family looking perfect. The one thing that’s missing is a child. Tess is recently divorced, estranged from her family and generally unhappy. Both women underwent IVF a year ago at the same hospital. Katherine’s resulted in a baby girl, while Tess had a stillborn.

A year later, Katherine is about to celebrate her daughter, Rose’s first birthday while Tess is still grieving her loss. Katherine, who is biracial (half black/half white) has been harboring a secret fear due to her daughter’s pale skin and bright blue eyes and her fear is confirmed when both women receive a call from the fertility clinic letting them know that their eggs were switched. This starts the story of one woman’s life falling apart while the other thinks it’s a start of a new life for her and Carr takes us on a journey for the battle for Rose.

This book had me thinking hard – in a good way! I really enjoyed it. For me, it was a unique story in that I haven’t read anything with this storyline and that in itself is surprising as it seems like a very likely thing to happen. There were so many layers to the story that I cannot give away without spoilers but I truly kept going back and forth on who has the right to Rose? What makes a mother? One person carried her to term and raised her for a year but the other is biologically her mother.

The author is a black Canadian woman and I expected more in terms of Katherine’s race and how it played into the battle – in court and within her husband’s family. I also wish we got as much of Katherine’s parents as we did of her husband’s family. That being said, Tess was fully developed and we definitely understood every facet of her life and what made her who she is today. Carr did a good job of navigating multiple narratives with multiple characters and also time spans without it feeling bogged down.

While I highly recommend this book, I do want to let you know that there are some trigger warnings with topics of rape and infertility. Ultimately the book is about motherhood. Being able to be one, the journey to being one, the longing to be one when your body betrays you and all the side effects it comes with. This book is definitely one that would be a great one to discuss with others.

Taynement

Black Authors, Fiction, Historical, literary fiction, race

Book Review: James by Percival Everett

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“Belief has nothing to do with truth.”

When enslaved Jim overhears that he is about to sold to a man in New Orleans and separated from his family forever, he decides to hide in nearby Jackson Island until he can decide what to do. Meanwhile, Huck Finn has faked his own death to escape his violent father on that same day. This leads to a collision that leads to Jim being wanted for murder and being a runaway. This also leads to a dangerous journey via a raft, down the Mississippi River towards the elusive and unreliable promise of the Free States and beyond.

“At that moment the power of reading made itself clear and real to me. If I could see the words, then no one could control them or what I got from them. They couldn’t even know if I was merely seeing them or reading them, sounding them out or comprehending them. It was a completely private affair and completely free and, therefore, completely subversive.”

I avoided this book for the longest time because I believed it would be too depressing for my state of mind at the time. I went to Barnes and Noble with a friend who bought me a copy of this book and seeing how slim it was, I decided to just give it a go and then couldn’t put it down. Everyone says this is a retelling of Huckleberry Finn, which is a book I’ve never read, so you don’t have to be worried about not getting it if you haven’t read it. I decided to ignore all talks of a retelling and just read the book as its own thing. Even though this book is about slavery and its many horrors, Everett finds a way to make it a great adventure novel that always tried to put the humanity of its characters at the forefront of the novel.

“I did not look away. I wanted to feel the anger. I was befriending my anger, learning not only how to feel it, but perhaps how to use it.”

I don’t understand why the Goodreads blurb of this book calls it “ferociously funny”, there’s nothing funny about this book. I can’t even think of one scene that made me laugh out loud. This book is serious and thought provoking and no, this is not euphemism for boring. It really gives you a lot to think about, especially the power of language, how we use it and how it’s used to empower or colonize a group of people. This is not an easy book to read because lots of terrible things abound and most of these terrible things happen to people because of the color of their skin but Everett’s writing makes it a fast read.

I found this book to be suspenseful and heart wrenching and I gave it 5 stars on Goodreads.

Have you heard about this book? Have you read it? Let me know in the comments what you think about it!

Leggy