The Compound by Aisling Rawle (audiobook)

 genre: speculative fiction

When Lily arrives at The Compound, she has no memory of getting there.  That's part of the shtick.  The girls all get there first, the boys arriving a few days later.  The goal of being at The Compound?  Be the last to leave.  But getting to the end is the point of the whole game.  

It's reality TV/dystopian brain candy.  There are relationship dramas and easy tasks and hard tasks, and everything comes with a prize - or a punishment.  Backbiting and betrayals are rampant, of course, as are true friendships and maybe even love.  And Lily wants it ALL.  She's not a particularly empathetic heroine.  Nothing really makes her standout and we see the entire competition through her eyes.  As a narrator, she can be frustratingly materialistic and shallow.  But she also knows it?  Honestly, this just was an really interesting listen.  It really surprised me sometimes and the whole concept never felt like I had to work hard to suspend my disbelief.  

Love, Sex, and Frankenstein: A Novel by Caroline Lea

genre: historical fiction

This past summer I learned the amazing fact that the daughter of Mary Wollstonecraft, early American philosopher and women's rights advocate, is Mary Shelley, the author of Frankenstein. It felt so powerful to me, the idea that having a mom who saw the world with such clarity could possibly have had an impact on this girl and her famous story.  When we meet the woman who will become Mary Shelley, she is already the lover of poet, Percy Shelley, and has had his child. She’s living in poverty and is scraping by not only in a very literal sense but also intellectually and emotionally. She is adrift and scrambling so hard for love that she is constantly betraying herself in the strange love triangle she finds herself in as both a stepsister and the lover of a man who is already married.

Mary’s desperate need to process her life in writing is constantly undermined by the people around her and by that little voice inside her telling her that that she is not good enough.  Not only is this book a retelling of what let up to the book Frankenstein being written, but it is also about the power of female rage. It is about a woman's brain being being so focused on making everyone everyone around her happy that she can literally forget who she even is. It’s about what can happen to a person who chooses to live beyond that place.  This book is about childhood trauma and the act of creation and about how creating can change us.  It is also about betrayal and forgiveness, and, most, especially, about realizing that living up to our own expectations of our ourselves is more important than pleasing anyone else. The word "sex" in the title is less about the act (although there is that) but more about "sex" as gender and a woman having her blinders removed to the reality of how her gender has been used as a vice to control her and keep her small.   It is lush and painfully sad and gorgeous and atmospheric, and I loved it.

Heart the Lover by Lily King (audiobook)

 genre: literary fiction

Our narrator loves words.  She is at college to study them and hopefully, maybe, write her own book someday.  And when she meets Sam and his roommate Yash, who are living the sort of collegiate intellectual life she's craving, she leans in.  She's given the nickname of Jordan.  She falls in love. She studies and works hard and slowly grows up.  Life teaches hard lessons, though, and one of them is learning what we can and cannot control.

I sank right into this study of learning and love and complicated friendships.  Sometimes our narrator (we really don't even know her real name until the end!) is frustrating but in the way that all college students can be frustrating as they figure themselves out and want so much to be grown up but are in some ways still making such painfully short sighted decisions.   It made me feel a LOT, especially the last third of the book.  SO many feelings about life and love and parenthood and the love of our youth that never really leaves us.  I was surprised by how strong my feelings were and I loved this book for that, for making me yearn and grieve and feel truly invested in a story.

Ruth by Kate Riley

 genre: fiction

When Ruth is born into The Brotherhood, she is celebrated the way that all babies are celebrated.  In a community where the self is dead last on the list of priorities, Ruth learns quickly that she is nothing special.  It order to gain God's grace, she needs to make sure that her community continues to thrive and that she keeps allllll the rules that have been put in place to keep her from sin.  There are so many ways to sin, when you are Ruth and growing up on a Hutterite commune.  

On the one hand, this is phenomenal writing.  Over and over, the author's way with words truly jumped out at me in delightful phrases really captured the essence of something.  Learning about commune life is wild and really interesting and I have a lot of compassion for people who truly do believe that living this way is the road to happiness.  On the other hand, Ruth felt like an enigma.  She is wacky and kind of hates her life but also absolutely chooses to live it the way it is.  I wanted her to just see it for what it is and break free but she never got there, even though she could tell things felt off a little bit.  This is no Handmaid's Tale, in my opinion, because there is no real rage and it is hard to watch, this Patriarchal death grip on people's choices.  Like, EVERY choice.

Interesting book.

Vagabond by Tim Curry (audiobook)

 genre: memoir

I have been a fan of Tim Curry all my life. I first adored him in Annie and most especially in Clue, where he hilariously stole my heart in way that has endeared him to me in a real way I’ve watched him as the Pirate King on YouTube and loved him in Oscar, which I saw in the theater as a kid. OH and now I’ve seen him in Home Alone 2 now 17 times because my kids were obsessed, ha! I was too young to have Rocky Horror be a part of my life but I’ve always been aware of it out there in the zeitgeist. But my most favorite thing he’s done is his guest role on Psych as Nigel St Nigel and his deadpan lines in that episode will live on in our family forever.

I bought the audiobook both to support him and to hear him read it, unaware ahead of time that he’d suffered a stroke several years ago, so his voice is different. He’s still in there and you can hear the sarcasm and sometimes he actually laughed while reading. It was slow enough that I read on 2.3x but it really endeared him to me even more, learning about not just his hardships but all the opportunities he took advantage of, many I’d forgotten about or never even knew of. I had no idea about his childhood and I enjoyed learning about his early years as much as his time on the stage and screen. He’s vulnerable and honest and I just found myself grateful that he and his work have been a part of my life.

Good Wives: Image and Reality in the Lives of Women in Northern New England, 1650-1750 by Laurel Thatcher Ulrich

genre: social history

I've been on a quest for the last decade to read the stories of women from the past, written in their own words.  There is a part of me that literally yearns to understand what it was like to be a women in times so different from my own.  When I saw this book at the thrift store, it immediately went into my cart not just because of the title but because of the author.  The two other books I've read by Laurel Thatcher Ulrich have had a deep influence on me and on how I look at a woman's place in early America.  This book, while admittedly sometimes a bit dry and slow, is also a fascinating look at the role women DID play in colonial time.  I think what's important about it is that whenever we discuss that period, we really only ever talk about men and what they were doing - with the exception of the Salem Witch Trials (which is briefly discussed in the book).

In this book we learn, with primary source documentation, that women were not just influential but a profound and necessary part of our country's growth and development.  We can also see the beginnings of some social movements (away from midwifery to obstetricians, for example) as well as how the Patriarchal order impacted the roles women could and did play.

It's a history book and it's not the kind that's written like a story.  It is a well-researched and deeply important treasure trove of knowledge of our fore-mothers and the context in which they learned and grew.

Sisters in the Wind by Angeline Boulley (audiobook)

genre: young adult contemporary fiction

Lucy knows it is time to be on the run again.  Ever since her father died, the idea of "home" has been nebulous as various foster placements have resulted in relationships both stable and traumatic.  She only recently has learned that she is connected to the Ojibwe tribe but when Mr. Jameson shows up at the diner where she's working to try and expand that connection, Lucy knows she's better off on her own.  Until one moment changes everything and being alone is no longer an option.

The book is told in two time periods, sharing with us Lucy's experience growing up and in foster care switching to the present and how she's processing where she's ended up.  The truth is that it reads really fast, various mysterious threads and my desires to learn more about the Ojibwe people as well as the political and social ramifications of how our country has treated its First Peoples kept me very interested. I had to suspend my disbelief a lot when it came to the mystery plot.  For whatever reason, my brain just kept asking too many annoying questions that weren't really answered.  But overall, Boulley tells important stories in engaging ways, even if this one isn't my favorite of hers.

Six Days in Bombay by Alka Joshi

 genre: historical fiction

Sona's life in Bombay as a nurse in a British hospital in the late 1930s doesn't have a lot of happiness in it.  She loves her mother and enjoys her job, but money is always tight and with her clearly half Anglo and half Indian looks, she is often mistrusted before she even has a chance to explain herself.  What she does enjoy is working with her patients, and when the artist Mira Novak is admitted into Sona's care, the world suddenly seems much bigger.  As Mira befriends Sona and tells our naive nurse about her jetsetting life, Sona slowly awakens to the wideness of the horizon - and how little of it she has experienced.

You know I'm a sucker for a good historical fiction novel - but this one did not ever grip me the way I wanted it to.  It took me an actual month to get through its three hundred and fifty pages, although whenever I DID actually pick it up, I wasn't bored. I think the writing was just not that particularly good.  So much telling and so little showing. So much disbelief to suspend.  Word choice was bland and Sona made so many decisions I just did not understand, decisions with huge consequences that felt out of the blue.  I really enjoyed this author's book The Henna Artist but this was not for me.

Everything Is Tuberculosis: The History and Persistence of Our Deadliest Infection by John Green (audiobook)

 genre: non-fiction

I remember learning, years ago, that the illness I kept reading in my classic novels called "consumption" was actually Tuberculosis. It blew my mind, that this Romanized death was in actuality an infectious disease. From that point I knew that TB had been around as a THING for a long time but until I read this book, I had no sense of the SCOPE. I loved learning about how TB has truly impacted global history not just in the epidemiological sense but in complete societal shifts. This disease has literally changed the world. 

 John Green takes all of the big and upsetting ideas about TB and sprinkles in between the stories of intimate devastation about individual people whose lives have been turned upside down by this bacteria. It is full of compassion and hope, while being bluntly honest about the injustice that exists between people who can afford care and people who cannot - and how this divide is both socioeconomic and racial. Millions of people are dying from a disease that is curable and it is up to us to decide that it matters. This is an excellent and informative book, narrated beautifully by the author.

The Maidens by Alex Michaelides (audiobook)

 genre: thriller

As a successful therapist, Mariana Andros is very in tune with human nature. And when a friend of her niece Zoe is found murdered, she can't help but become emotionally involved.  Back in Cambridge, where her own love affair with her beloved late husband Sebastian started, Mariana is pulled into the mystery.  What's the deal with this secret collegiate society of women?  And could Zoe's professor of Greek Tragedy be involved?

This is a psychological thriller that, while keeping me guessing, also had so many plot holes in the end, in my opinion.  It kept my attention and the writing was fine.  I do enjoy a good university mystery and I was surprised by the twist at the end but I had a hard time BELIEVING it.  Like I had to suspend my disbelief too much and it didn't click into place like the best kind of mysteries do.  Having already read the Silent Patient, I did enjoy a couple Easter eggs in there but in the end, this was more atmospheric than good.