Christina

I liked this book well enough, but I didn't find it particularly interesting or memorable. In my opinion, high points included Ellie's interactions with Larry - I feel like Fairbrother really brought his character to life (I just wanted to give him a hug!) - and her roommates. I also enjoyed the descriptions of DC. Overall, though, I think where this fell flat for me is that it tried to be both character- and plot-driven, and I don't believe it fully committed to (or was super successful at) either. 3-3.5 stars.

Thanks to NetGalley and Random House for the ARC.

Tabitha, Elizabeth, and Ginger aren't related by blood or by marriage, but they're indisputably family: they're mothers who find themselves (and, in two cases, their partners) indelibly linked after adopting four biological siblings. They've committed to keeping their kids as close to one another as possible, though they've got wildly different ideas of what that looks like; for example, Elizabeth and Ginger could do without the two-week vacation Tabitha's been eagerly anticipating and voraciously planning (down to the minute) for months.

The format of this book - alternating perspectives from each of the women - worked well. While their personalities occasionally teetered on the caricature-esque (the perfect one! the cool one! the anxious one!), they were inarguably vivid. I suspect most readers will find one of the women most relatable (for me, it was Ginger), but will find elements of themselves in all three. I also loved how Brown interspersed notes - I won't say from whom for fear of spoilers - throughout. However, the overall reading experience felt fairly slow (and I love character-driven fiction, so it's not that); it dragged for me, especially in the middle, and I feel like it would have been stronger had it been 50 pages shorter.

Ultimately, I'd describe it as a beach read with a twist - an interesting exploration of what it means to be a family and how our own childhood hopes and fears never really leave us. I think fans of Gina Sorrell's “The Wise Women” and Therese Anne Fowler's “It All Comes Down to This” will really enjoy it.

Thanks to NetGalley and Penguin Group Putnam for my ARC.

I found this book lighter than expected considering its subject matter! It's a well-written, clever, and entertaining debut.

The story follows Geeta, a thirty-something-year-old woman living in - and ostracized by - a small village in India; everyone assumes she had something to do with her husband's mysterious disappearance. She tells herself she's made peace with her pariah status, but when a woman in her loan group comes to her for help ‘taking care of' her own abusive husband, she can't bring herself to ignore her - and finds herself in an increasingly tangled web of plans, lies, and backstabbers. Enemies turn to friends and back again as the women examine their relationships and grapple with the age-old question: How many murders is too many, anyway?

Thanks to Ballantine Books and NetGalley for my ARC.

I loved this book! Thrillers aren't my preferred genre, and I rarely find them memorable - I tend to enjoy them enough as I'm reading them, but forget them almost as soon as I'm done. Small Game was an exception: in fact, as soon as I finished it, I started again. A few reasons it stood out for me:

- Braverman is a strong writer - again, with thrillers I often find the actual writing to be secondary (if not tertiary) to the conceptual plot, and I was pleasantly surprised that wasn't at all the case here. (This is her debut novel, though she's written two nonfiction books - one a memoir that I've added to my TBR.)

- The story itself was propulsive and immersive. Another pleasant surprise: I felt like I got a stronger-than-usual sense for most of the characters, especially Mara, the protagonist - but in a slow and semi-stunted way, which feels appropriate given Mara's personality. She's quite introverted, and connection doesn't come naturally to her, but when it does it's real and deep. I found her not just believable but relatable.

- The blurb teases that “the cast wakes up one morning to find something has gone horribly wrong.” I personally loved the process of finding out what exactly it was that had gone so off-the-rails, and I was very satisfied with the resolution. I won't say more for fear of spoilers!

- I've seen a few reviews complaining that the ending felt rushed. Yes, it wasn't fleshed out, but I don't think it should have been. The story was about a specific experience from start to finish. I'd argue anything else doesn't belong.

Overall, I'd recommend this to anyone curious about survivalism in search of a well-written thriller they'll get lost in (metaphorically, though a bit on-the-nose considering the plot!). 4.5 stars, rounded up to 5. Thanks to NetGalley and Ecco for my ARC.

I really loved this book. Others have covered the plot points and the story's expected - but still delightful! - overlap with Strout's other books, so I'll stick to how she made me feel: unexpectedly, utterly soothed.

‘Lucy by the Sea' is hot tea with honey in your favorite mug, in book form. It made me not only want to call my mom, but connect with strangers. Strout's writing always reminds me of the John Donne poem - “any man's death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind” - because it's just bursting with humanity. This is no exception, and probably my favorite thing she's written so far.

WHAAAAAAT. WHAT WHAT WHAT. This book had me on the edge of my seat.

Haley, our fifteen-year-old protagonist, is used to not so much mediating between her divorced parents as choosing between them; it seems she can never make one happy without hurting the other, so the best she can do is toggle between them. It's not easy, but she's mostly got it under control - that is, until her dad kidnaps her and her younger brother. He brings them to a hideaway house with his fellow preppers and survivalists, where he believes they'll be safe from the upcoming pandemic. From there, it's fair to say things ... escalate.

Throughout the book, Haley veers from extreme to extreme in considering who to believe, whose version of reality to embrace: her father's (the pandemic-to-end-all-pandemics is upon us!) or her mother's (the world is just fine, thank you very much!). While this sounds dark, the book is at times quite funny - yes, there's trust issues and impending doom aplenty, but also crushes and hilariously consistent interactions with her parents, despite the chaotic circumstances.

And, of course, every time she thinks she's finally got things figured out - the rug gets pulled out from beneath her (and the reader!) again and again.

Plot-wise, I thought this story was propulsive and compelling. It probably could have been shorter - some of the back-and-forth, I'm-with-dad-no-I'm-with-mom started to feel stale after a while - and the writing was clunky in some places (Haley's voice sometimes felt less authentically and more stereotypically teenaged). But I'm overlooking that because I could. not. put. it. down. 4.5 stars, rounded up to 5.

Thanks to Harper Perennial and NetGalley for my ARC.

I enjoyed this book. Maddie is an earnest, funny narrator (we're not supposed to quote from ARCs, but there are many examples I could cite - you'll know what I mean if you read it!). She struck me as both younger and older than 25 at different moments during the story: she's fairly guileless and naive, but shouldering some serious responsibility.

While she loves her dad, who is sick with Parkinson's, she's increasingly tired of being the only one living at home and contributing to his care.

Many of Maddie's early actions are (IMO) frustratingly passive to the point that they strained credulity, but Maame is a story of her growth and evolution. While I do think this book is predictable, I don't think that's necessarily the point - to paraphrase a cliche, it's all about the journey, not so much the destination.

Overall, I think this is a solid debut, and I look forward to reading more by Jessica George.

Thanks to NetGalley and St. Martin's Press for my ARC.

Hmmm, I'm struggling with this rating! I would say I enjoyed this book, but not for the reasons one might expect, and I found the first half to be much more compelling than the second.

What worked well for me:
- The descriptions of the tech scene were uncomfortably, uncannily lucid - though I didn't know this when I read it, I'm not at all surprised that the author was the first employee at Instagram!
- The vivid sense of place; San Francisco (and Oakland, and the South Bay, and, hell, even the shuttle!) truly were supporting characters.
- The dynamics between Ethan, our somewhat hapless protagonist, and the much stronger and more opinionated characters around him, like Mona and “the Founder”.
- Ethan's obvious discomfort and struggle to find his footing throughout his time at DateDate and in his early days at “The Corporation”; I thought his thoughtful, tentative interiority - especially contrasted against the brash confidence of his environments - was extremely well-done.

What didn't work so well:
- Just one, but it's a big one: I didn't find the central conflict - will Ethan be able to get back to the “mystery world” and achieve [spoiler]? - particularly clear or compelling. I understand it's sci-fi, but I read a lot of sci-fi, and the logic behind the glitch fell flat for me. I think I would have been willing to overlook this if the events the glitch set in motion were more interesting, but they almost felt like a distraction - I cared more about Ethan's deteriorating relationship with Noma, and his general identity issues, than this plotline. (And I understand that they're related, but ... that felt a little forced.) Overall, the second half of the book - in which this plotline takes precedence - just didn't feel real or exciting to me, even though in theory it should have.

Thanks to Henry Holt & Co and NetGalley for an ARC in exchange for my honest review.

I've been lucky enough to read some excellent short story collections this year (Bad Thoughts by Nada Alic, Stories from the Tenants Downstairs by Sidik Fofana, You Never Get it Back by Cara Blue Adams), and Bliss Montage by Ling Ma is yet another standout. (How I'll manage to wedge it into my already-overcrowded “favorite short story collection” section of my bookshelf is unclear, but a great problem to have.)

The stories in this collection are surreal but they all feel real. This is the brilliance - Ma brings it all to life, as implausible (and at times grotesque) as some of it may be. She finds the universal in the specific (not to mention the impossible) and writes it in ways that stun in the moment and reverberate long after you've finished. Her style is detached, not intimate - so the fact that she manages to hit the emotional nail on the head in such an indirect way is all the more impressive. I loved this book and can't wait to reread.

Thanks to Farrar, Straus and Giroux and Netgalley for my ARC in exchange for an honest review.

This is a book I'd buy and display for the cover and title alone. As an outgoing yet wildly introverted human who's been gifted that “Please Leave By 9” banner by not one but several friends, and whose attempts at small talk either fall flat or evolve (devolve?) into therapy-esque territory in the first five minutes, I laughed out loud when I saw this book. The only way I'd ever display one of those horrible, ubiquitous ‘Good Vibes Only' signs is if I'd been kidnapped and needed to somehow signal to my loved ones that all was not well without tipping off my kidnappers, so, yes, I felt deeply and immediately seen.

Moving along to the content! Like the author, I am a Taylor Swift aficionado. She's a spectacular songwriter - and the gorgeous, gut-punching power of her work comes from her specificity. The ten-minute masterpiece All Too Well, for example, is chock-full of details - and while I've never literally left a scarf at a former lover's sister's house (as far as I'm aware), nor have I had weepy encounters with famous actresses in party bathrooms, I scream-sing along and I feel every bit of the emotion in it. On the other hand, it's no coincidence that ME!, arguably the most maligned song in her discography, is also her most generic.

I swear this digression has a point, and it's this: By far my favorite essays were the ones where McInerny got personal, sharing specific details of her and her loved ones' lives. In my opinion, two of the standouts were ‘Stay-At-Home Mom', where she examines her lack of interest in travel (in stark contrast to her activity- and adventure-inclined second husband) and then relates their dynamic to the disparities in her parents' relationship, and ‘Asking for a Friend', in which she recounts growing apart from - and eventually reconnecting with - her childhood friends after her first husband dies. On the other hand, ‘Competitive Parenting Association', which didn't center or even mention her own experiences, read like a tired (if amusingly written) rant I could probably recite offhand if required. Overall, I liked most of these essays and loved a few - and in all seriousness, I'm in awe of McInerny's ability to find the humor in almost everything.

When I think of books to compare this to, strangely, Bittersweet by Susan Cain comes to mind. While that's traditional nonfiction and this, while true to her own life, decidedly isn't, it felt like a more casual, more personal, and far funnier exploration of that same phenomenon.

Thanks to NetGalley and Atria Books for an ARC in exchange for my honest opinion.

I loved this book. I've read many coming-of-age stories, many coming-to-America stories, and this one is jarringly memorable.

The narrator, Hira, who's found herself in a small town in Oregon for an exchange program, adroitly pinpoints and unsparingly skewers a range of unexamined American beliefs and behaviors. From the assumption that of course she must be grateful to have ‘escaped' Pakistan to her disgust about toilet paper, I found her observations and monologues - both inner and outer! - utterly immersive.

I'm surprised by how many reviewers have called Hira unlikeable, bitter, or worse. Sure, she has her issues - as do we all, especially as teenagers! - but she's by no means unaware of them, especially since she's telling the story retrospectively. (She's looking back from some unspecified time later in life, which I think was a smart choice on the writer's part.) I actually found her to be sympathetic and relatable; even though our life experiences are wildly different, she brought me right back to what it felt like to be sixteen. Also, let's be honest: it's not like her complaints about America are entirely off-base.

While I rarely recommend ebooks over physical ones, reading on my Kindle was so helpful since it made it easy to look up words and references I wasn't familiar with. There were still non-English banter and phrases I couldn't follow, but I could get the gist from the context. I would say the first third of this book, when Hira is still in Pakistan, is a little more work because of that, but I don't say that as a negative - books don't have to be easy to be worthwhile, and this one definitely was.

Thanks to Skyhorse Publishing and NetGalley for an ARC in exchange for my honest review.

I feel like this book would have really resonated with me had I read it a decade ago! Like the protagonists, I'm in my early 30s - and while you'd imagine that would make them relatable to me, I agree wholeheartedly with another NetGalley reviewer who said they felt younger. Reading about them brought me back to my early 20s, but not in a particularly entertaining or illuminating way. Their dynamics, both inter- and intra-personal, felt overly familiar in the sense that reading an old journal might. It wasn't that I didn't enjoy the experience, but it wasn't new or especially interesting.

For a novel about women, it revolved around men; I'm not confident it would pass the Bechdel test, though I get that it was in large part the point. I do think that Casale did a really nice job building up the character of Theo - his relationship with Joy felt realistic and nuanced, and I understood why she gravitated towards him. I also liked how Joy and Annie's friendship ebbed and flowed throughout the book - their dynamic was a little bit messy, and that felt authentic. Celine, to me, felt like an afterthought - while I probably liked the writing in her sections the most, she didn't feel quite as believable or fleshed-out to me as Joy and Annie did.

Overall, 3.5 stars for me, rounded up to 4. Thanks to NetGalley and Random House Publishing Group—The Dial Press for my ARC.

This debut short story collection is my favorite kind of funny. Not ha-ha funny, not dad-joke funny, not even SNL-funny. It's dark funny, sardonic funny, holy-shit-she-nailed-it funny. Picture four out of five people scratching their heads, and the fifth one (me) unabashedly snort-laughing as I underline. It's completely disturbing and utterly delightful. The kind of book I'll recommend to my younger sister, not my mom.

My one critique: while the premise of each story is thrillingly unique, the actual narratives seemed to blur together. Our fourteen protagonists face a wide range of absurdist circumstances - for example, ‘Earth to Lydia' centers on an all-too-plausible support group that helps people struggling with capitalism to embrace greed and materialism, and in ‘Ghost Baby', our cynical narrator is “the spirit of a proto-child assigned to a couple whose chemistry is waning,” writhing in disembodied frustration as its parents fail to conceive it. As much as I love Alic's voice, I wish it had been more distinct from story to story - after the fact, specific sentences and moments are sharp in my mind, but it's hard to remember where they came from.

That said, I will EAGERLY pick up anything Alic writes from now on. This irreverent, biting, and unexpectedly vulnerable collection is reminiscent of Gabriela Wiener's Nine Moons, another favorite among the 200+ books I've read so far this year.

Thanks to Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, Vintage and NetGalley for an ARC in exchange for my honest review.

It would be easy to summarize The Perfect Other as a memoir about experiencing a sister's battle with mental illness, and it would be true. But even with the author's deep clinical knowledge of schizophrenia (driven by her own research and experiences), it's really about love and how fiercely it persists.

Like Kyleigh Leddy and her sister, Kait (whom she describes as “exuberantly bright,” “confident and hilarious and at least five years ahead of every trend” - the kind of person people can't help but write books about), my sister and I are five years apart. The Perfect Other pushed me to imagine what my life would have looked like if, through some accident of biology or neurochemistry or maybe even just few bad concussions, my beloved sister changed into someone I didn't recognize, someone dizzying and unpredictable and capable of violence - but deep down, still in there, fighting with voices for space inside her own head. What we and the world would have lost if she'd ultimately felt hopeless and overpowered enough to end her life at 22.

I'm astonished that Leddy - who won the NYT's Modern Love college essay contest in 2019 - is only in her mid-twenties. Her reflections not just on her own experiences but on the human condition are beautifully written and hauntingly accurate. Consider this description of interactions with classmates and teachers after her sister has gone missing, presumed dead:
“This is an essential lesson: The indifference of the world ... People will say, ‘I can't imagine what you're going through.' What they won't say is, ‘I don't want to.' You know this is a necessary, albeit unfortunate, limitation of human empathy: If society stopped to embrace the full scope of every loss, it would cease to function - no mail, no grocery delivery, no economy. We would be in a constant state of mourning, but to be grieving and watch the world continue on is the cruelest outrage.”

Yes, this is heartbreakingly true - but by telling this story in such a raw and honest way, she makes Kait real and forces the reader beyond indifference. The care she catalyzes starts out as specific to Kait, but later expands to many others. You can't read this book and not feel grief and empathy and love.

I devoured this book in a few hours. There were a few occasions where Leddy's writing started to feel repetitive or rambling (more like a journal entry than a memoir), but this isn't surprising considering the subject matter - while we'd like to think of mental illness as tidy, as linear and predictable, it's anything but and I think this is a reflection of that. And while she does an impressive job of acknowledging Kait's and her family's relative privilege, I was struck by the use of “gypped” as a slur.

Overall, I'm glad the world has Leddy as a writer. I'll be thinking about her, her mother, and Kait for a long time.

Thanks to Mariner Books (formerly HMH Books) for my ARC.

The short stories in Colleen O'Brien's All Roads can best be described as visceral. On more than one occasion, I physically cringed away from the page, and I mean that as a compliment: it's incredible that she brought to life these vivid characters and moments in such brief glimpses - some contained in just five pages. As a collection, it reminded me of Curtis Sittenfeld's ‘You Think It, I'll Say It'' - both piercingly observant and more than a little unsettling, or at least unsettled.

My favorites were ‘Charlie,' ‘Valentine's Day,' ‘The Deal', ‘The Cheesecake Factory,' and ‘Here For,' but truly, I appreciated nearly all. I found ‘All Roads' unpleasant, but in a provocative and compellingly hate-readable way. Similarly, I'll be going back to ‘The Fathers' because I have a sense there's something powerful there, but I'll admit that on first read I struggled to follow all the Michaels and their relationships to one another.

I'm thrilled to have gotten to know O'Brien as an author; hers is a collection that invites revisiting and warrants space on my increasingly crowded bookshelf. I'll be purchasing (and underlining, and rereading) a hard copy.

Thank you to Northwestern University Press for my ARC.

How to explain Kaleidoscope by Cecily Wong? I've struggled with this since I finished reading it (for the second time this week) two days ago. So I'll start with someone else's definition and share where I disagree: “A dazzling and heartfelt novel about two sisters caught in their parents' ambition, the accident that brings it all crashing down, and the journey that follows.”

I think I was expecting something a little different, more straightforward, based on that blurb - for the parents to be more sinister and conniving, maybe, or for their ambition to be the direct cause of the accident. In my opinion, the book is more nuanced than that. It's an exploration of love and humanity, of the connections who make us who we are and what happens when we lose them - and, to borrow a titular phrase of Alice Sebold, the “lovely bones” that can take shape around these absences. It's a testament to Wong's writing that it manages to be both heartbreaking and hilarious, sometimes even at the same time.

This is a powerful story, one I had to sit with for a while. I read it on Tuesday and again on Thursday; I liked it the first time and loved it the second. I did have to work a little harder, as a reader, than I'm used to - there are several times when something's alluded to but only elaborated on later, and I had to backtrack to fit the pieces together to accommodate my new understanding. While this could be frustrating, in this case it added to the experience; when you hear Karen's (Riley's mother) profound frustration with her daughter's fundamental unknowableness, how it's not in her nature to accommodate or seek approval, this stylistic choice makes even more sense.

There's more that I loved about the way Wong told this story. I found the shift from first- to third-person at the start of Part 3 jarring, but on reflection, it was brilliant. Riley's sense of self has been shattered, so why would we expect to continue hearing from her directly? The disorientation of the reader echoes and reinforces her own.

I don't want to share too much about the story itself, but I will say that I loved it. The last book to make me feel this type of way was Maggie Shipstead's ‘The Great Circle,' and while the plots aren't at all similar, what's striking me is the twin sense of exhaustion and awe and appreciation I felt after each - for the range and depth of emotion, and the extent of journeys (metaphorical and literal!) that can be contained in one book. If you're looking for a quick beach read, this isn't it, but if you're looking for something you'll return to, that I imagine will resonate differently based on whatever's happened in your life between each reading - you'll want this.

My phone's photo album is currently dominated by screenshots of pages from this book: there was so much here I wanted to save to re-engage with later! As I read, I itched to have a hard copy and a pencil in my hand - there was so much it was sparking for me, so many questions and reactions and !!!!s.

Given the above, it should go without saying that this book is a powerful thought-starter. I was fascinated by Marron's evolution - from conceiving of online debate as a game you win or lose, to starting to cope with virtual hate slung his way by imagining touchingly human narratives about his ‘trolls', to questioning whether ‘trolls' is maybe not the right term at all, to wondering whether he's been going about things the wrong way. I particularly loved this summation: “My videos alone were never going to sufficiently evangelize progressive ideas ... Was I simply enjoying the reverberations of virality in my own little echo chamber, thinking that. was slaying Goliath when I was simply cosplaying battle reenactments with my fellow self-identified Davids?” (Yes, this book is also, at times, laugh-out-loud funny.)

From there, the real excitement begins: he starts to engage - civilly, curiously, sans any persuasive agenda - with individuals he plucks from his ‘HATE FOLDER' (which, spoiler alert, he rethinks the name of down the line) and invites to connect. These stories - wow - I was on the edge of my seat. And this isn't Chicken Soup for the Soul; not all of them go well - in fact, some of them go really badly, and not just for him but for other folks he invites into the conversations once he decides to take more of a mediator role. (One, in particular, was a punch to the gut.) Through it all, Marron keeps questioning his own assumptions, acknowledging his mistakes, and trying to do better.

My favorite part, if I had to choose: his careful consideration about whether engaging and empathizing with people who believe things that are deeply harmful is implicitly validating or endorsing those beliefs. I've been wrestling with this myself, and it's often prevented me from engaging in conversations that, maybe, could have been worthwhile. I loved his analogy: people are the trees, ideologies are the forest, and it's crucial to not lose sight of either.

I would recommend this book to anyone who senses that polarization is a race to the bottom, but isn't quite sure what to do about it. I will be thinking about this book for a very long time.

I'm having a hard time with this review for two reasons: one, it strongly reminds me of something I read a few years back but I can't remember what it is and I've held off for long enough (I'll update if I recall!). Two, and more importantly, while I liked this book, it didn't feel entirely finished to me. I'll echo other reviewers when I say key plot points seemed not as fleshed-out as they could have been (to the best of my understanding, burials are prohibited because land is in such short supply and maybe because natural disasters could unearth bodies - but I'm less confident in that than I'd like to be). That said, we're hearing from a grieving narrator in a drained, climate-changed world where very little feels within her (or anybody's) control, so maybe this lack of clarity is appropriate. And despite my not fully understanding why burials are so aggressively banned, I completely bought Alma's single-mindedness in her quest to obtain her mother's ashes. I guess I just wanted to go a little deeper - this was a very factual, here-and-now novel - but I can understand why it was written that way.

Thank you to NetGalley and Grove Atlantic for my ARC in exchange for an honest review.

I couldn't put this book down, but I didn't particularly like it (and I don't think that's what Henderson was going for). At the most granular level, the writing is excellent, and at the broadest, the story resonated with me for personal reasons.

However, I think it could have been told in a far stronger way. I completely understand that with chronic illness - physical and mental - there's rarely a clean and linear resolution, so a tidy ending wouldn't mirror real life. That said, I think she made things harder than necessary for the reader to follow by constantly leaping across timelines (and if she was really tied to that approach, I think the designer should have made it clearer when these jumps were happening - at least in the version I got from the library, the years at the start of each group of chapters were printed far too lightly and were easily overlooked). I also think this is wrenching material and by the end, there was just so much to absorb that it started to lose its impact. Again, I respect that she's likely mirroring her own experience - which I'm sure she and her husband, of all people, would agree has gone on for far too long - but it almost seemed to me like she wrote this book, and made the decisions about it she did, more for herself rather than for a general audience.

Hope, heartbreak, rage. A story about a father's love for his son, his son's inexhaustible care for every sentient creature, and the awe-inspiring potential of science - and how that potential loses out to fear. The definition of Bewilderment. Read this if you're craving a wake-up call, a beautiful punch to the gut.

Overall, I enjoyed and appreciated this book. In some ways, it reminded me of The Glass Hotel by Emily St John Mandel, which you could also describe as focused on a woman's brief, fascinating, and ultimately untenable foray into the “country of money” and all of the protections (and hypocrisies) that come with it.

Given that, I feel the blurb wasn't a great representation, so it took me a while to start to feel oriented - I struggled to follow along with what was happening or to feel really invested in the book for the first third or so.

There was some really gorgeous writing; there were a few phrases and sentences that really struck me (I loved “wine wicked away my guilt at overshooting survival all the way up to this strange, stratospheric new world” and “some women see a gilded cage and think, it's still a cage; some women see a gilded cage and think, it's still gilded”).

However, it took me much longer than usual to finish this book, both because of the mismatch between my expectations and what it was actually about and because its topic and content just hits SO close to home right now. I know the author wrote this a while ago, but it almost felt like doomscrolling the news at times (which is far more a commentary on our current state of affairs than anything she could have done differently).

This was 3.5 stars for me, rounded to 4. Thanks to Dundurn Press and Rare Machines for my ARC.

I wanted to read this solely because of the author (and the mysterious, vaguely sinister cover art!). I've really enjoyed Emma Donoghue's books, especially The Pull of the Stars and Frog Music. Had Haven been written by almost anyone else, I probably wouldn't have considered it - a tale of three monks living in the early middle ages is far from my typical choice. That said, I'm very glad I did. I didn't necessarily love this book, but I found myself completely absorbed in it - I HAD to talk about it as I was reading it (to the point that my husband, not a huge reader, is eager to read it when it's available).

It's very much about religion, but it's also about the struggle to reconcile what you feel in your deepest self to be true about the world with what your ‘superior' is insisting is incontrovertible fact. While I couldn't relate directly to many of the things depicted in the book - from the devoutly religious, like vowing chastity, poverty, humility, and (most important to the plot) obedience, to the day-to-day of the monks' isolated existence, like writing on calfskin vellum and trying to carve out a garden from unforgiving rock - it reminded me in some strange but strong ways of Silicon Valley in the 21st century and the cult of tech leadership we buy into out of some combination of hope and willful delusion (e.g., Theranos). The power dynamics were easily the most fascinating part of the story for me. I also find myself coming back to the haunting implications - even back in the 600s, and exponentially so today - of the belief that everything on earth was put there by God for humans to use.

Overall, a really unusual and well-written meditation on what it means to be a ‘leader' and how to do right in the world. Recommend!

Thanks to NetGalley and Little, Brown and Company for the ARC in exchange for my honest review.

TL;DR: You should read this book as a physical copy, not an ebook!

This was a stunning book, but - like Honoree Jeffries' The Love Songs of W. E. B. DuBois and Anthony Doerr's Cloud Cuckoo Land - it's one that demands a physical copy to be read and absorbed as intended. I struggled reading this on my Kindle; the book jumps characters, stories, and years (like Sequoia Nagamatsu's How High We Go In The Dark, it's almost more a collection of linked short stories than a traditional novel), but all these threads are elegantly and powerfully woven together, and I know I would have benefitted from being able to flip back more easily. I wanted it to be easier to answer questions like “I know I've heard this name before, what was she doing last we saw her?” and “We've heard a description of a man who sounds like he might be this character we're just now bringing into focus - is that right?” It's by no means a bad thing when I have to work to understand a book - especially, in cases like these, where I'm getting such a vivid, raw glimpse into a world that's far outside my own lived experience - but in my own experience, an ebook isn't the right conduit, and it inhibited what I know I'll get out of this book when I read a physical copy.

Thanks to Farrar, Straus and Giroux and NetGalley for an ARC in exchange for my honest review.

I fully expected to love this book based on the description - “a brilliant, provocative, up-to-the-minute novel about a young white man's education and miseducation in contemporary America” who falls in love with a black woman from Nigeria and is forced to reckon with his racist upbringing and society at large? Wow, yes, sign me up. Unfortunately, I found the description far more intriguing and powerful than the book itself.

It started off strong - we begin with a teenage Harry enduring a safari in Tanzania with his unabashedly racist parents, Chevy and Wayne, who “wear their ignorance with confidence, like a God-given and indisputable birthright” - but by the halfway point (once Harry moves out), it had become something I had to push my way through, and it remained that way through the end.

I understand that Harry, especially as he ages into adulthood, is not intended to be a likable character - but he really seemed to push the boundaries of an evil cartoon caricature. I was disgusted by him throughout most of the book (in some moments, that disgust progressed to visceral, skin-crawling repulsion). One of my biggest issues with this story: I couldn't for the life of me find any reason Maryam would tolerate five minutes in his company, let alone pursue a relationship with him.

At one point, Harry recognizes Maryam's (regrettably short-lived) frustration towards him, describing her as “visibly weary of me” - coincidentally, that's exactly how I felt about him and his cowardly, gaslightly, fetishizing, self-pitying behaviors. (I could go on.) This is a man who has accepted a scholarship from a white-supremacy organization and soothed himself by telling himself that it's OK because he's not white in his heart, a man who is constantly comparing his own life to that of slaves and concluding his own circumstances are as bad if not worse. How anyone could perceive him as sympathetic is beyond me.

To be clear, I'm by no means indifferent to this book: I actively hated it. I'm a white woman, and I am open to the idea that I was supposed to hate this book. Maybe there's something that hits a little too close to home: Harry's probably the type of guy to throw a BLM sign on his front lawn, then privately vote NIMBY (and on the off chance that a black family does move in next door, well, how “exotic” for him). That all said, I just didn't find any nuance in Harry's character. Even though he's supposedly reflecting back on his choices at the end, I saw no evidence of real understanding.

Two stars because the writing itself was strong, and frankly because even though I hated this book, it's an accomplishment in that it elicited such strong feelings. (I'm very curious to see how others respond to this book.)

Thanks to NetGalley and Mariner Books for an ARC in exchange for my honest (as honest as it gets!) review.