The Last One at the Wedding by Jason Rekulak (audiobook)

 genre: mystery

When Frank's daughter Maggie tells him of her impending marriage, he WANTS to be happy for her.  After several years of estrangement, he's so thrilled that she's inviting him to come that he can almost ignore that little voice in the back of his head that tells him something isn't right.  When he arrives at the beautiful lakeside venue for the wedding, it's made abundantly clear that Maggie's new in-laws are in a whole different stratosphere of wealth and it isn't long before the questions keep piling up.  Why does Maggie's fiance, Aiden, seem so withdrawn and evasive?  When will Frank get to meet Maggie's future mother-in-law?  And could what the people in town about Aiden possibly be true?

This isn't my usual fare, as we know, I'm trying to stretch myself into the mystery genre somewhat. I listened to this one quickly, it definitely captured my attention right away and I there were all kinds of twists that I didn't see coming.  So, the plot itself, actually, was pretty thrilling.  But man, the characters in this book just did nothing for me.  Frank, our main character, is a pretty frustrating human, a real "man's man" that sometimes super got on my nerves.  There is a subplot with a sister and her foster child that, while it ended well, was also quite uncomfortable on more than one occasion in ways that were both annoying and off-putting to me.

I don't think I can give it more than three stars, but it kept my attention enough that I feel like I want to keep giving mysteries a try.

A Song to Drown Rivers by Ann Liang

genre: historical fiction/retelling

Xishi's life has been scarred by war.  Even in her tiny riverside village, her losses have been heartbreaking.  The fact that she has a beauty that is unmatched hasn't taken the edge off of the pain she's felt.  So when Xishi is given an opportunity to exact revenge on the kindgom that wreaked such destruction, she is willing, even if that means becoming an infiltrator and a spy as a concubine in an enemy palace.

This retelling of a Chinese legend sounded super promising - and I am glad that I at least have the idea of Xishi in my mind.  But I wonder if the "real" Xishi was a more complex character than the one here in this book.  Her dialogue often came off as rather simpering, even when she is supposedly with her true love, the man who recruited her to be a spy in the first place.  The entire weird love triangle situation here didn't particularly work for me - the king that Xishi is seducing is a one dimensional fop with a brutally violent streak, so it was hard for me to ever really either his or Xishi's emotions when it came to "romance."

I think I just had to suspend my disbelief too many times.  Too many questions popped into my head while I was reading that didn't get answered, leaving plot holes that frustrated me. At the same time, I did want to finish it - so I think that even beyond this, I did still want to know how it ended.  Of course, I didn't particularly love the ending either, so.  There you go.  2.5 stars rounded up to three for being interesting enough to keep me reading until the end and for introducing me to a Chinese legend.  

The Hedgewitch of Foxhall by Anna Bright

genre: young adult fantasy

Ffion's choice to do magic her own way has left her a wandering witch in the forests of Wales.  But when the magic in her kindgom starts failing and the old creatures disappear, she has to try and do SOMETHING.  She isn't the only one worried about the magic - two prices are trying to secure their own country's borders, knowing that the loss of magic has to be dealt with.  The throne will have to belong to someone - if they still have a country to rule and the magic to do it.

This is the kind of fantasy/romance that sucks me right in.  The unfamiliar names and places took a while to keep straight but I did feel absolutely drenched in a fantastical Wales of long ago.  Ffion is a really interesting character and I loved how she looked at the world and her place in it, I loved how her magic was so tied to the natural environment.  The only reason this gets four stars instead of five is that the love triangle felt strangely complicated and yet not quite believable at the same time.  Don't get me wrong, it kept me up reading in the dark with my booklight to finish, it just didn't quite flow for me.  A solid and really fun four star read for people who love magic and quirky main characters and historical fantasy.  Glad I tried it.

The Age of Magical Overthinking by Amanda Montell (audiobook)

 genre: nonfiction

I've read two other books by Amanda (Cultish and Wordslut, so I checked this one out because I liked those other two.  This one is a little harder to wrap my brain around - and it feels more like a collection of essays than a cohesive book, but it was still an enjoyable listen.  It reads like a podcast, honestly, using her own life experience and some interviewing of experts to talk about cognitive biases.  She's got a quirky sense of humor and while sometimes it felt TOO introspective to be straight up non-fiction as opposed to memoir, in the end, I feel like her stories did help make her point.  I like thinking about the human brain and why we do what we do, so it gets three stars for encouraging me to be more aware of the choices I make and why I'm making them.

The Selected Journals of Emma M. Lion: Vol.3 by Beth Brower

 genre: historical fiction, epistolary

Emma and her St. Crispian's neighborhood have done it again - amused me from beginning to end.  Not only did I chuckle out loud, several times, there was a tenderness to this volume that hit different, it's a little deeper and allows itself to go to a more vulnerable place, which I REALLY liked.  More underline-able thoughts this time and I am ALL HERE FOR IT.   Things to remember from this volume: a red ticket, a box of photographs, a table of ruffians.  Alas, at this point, I fear I have no choice but to sally forward and read ALL of Emma's journals.

Playground by Richard Powers (audiobook)

genre: speculative fiction

With multiple story lines in far flung places from Chicago to a tiny island in French Polynesia, Playground is a story of the richness of the ocean, the power of games and play to help humans connect and the reality of AI’s ability to change the entire trajectory of human evolution on earth. Told from the point of view of game designers and artists, oceanographers and poets, Playground dares us to look closely at the things in this life that are worth saving.

Playground is my first book by Richard Powers, and so I did not have any expectations for what kind of experience this would be. The truth is that it completely blew me away. I loved the depth and richness of the storytelling, the ways that different threads were woven together, the way it made me almost close my eyes in wonder at the beauty of our planet and I especially loved the exploration of the wide expanse of human experience and invention. All of this is set up in stark contrast to a possible world in which artificial intelligence has become even more perfectly human than we are, with our faults and frailties.

This is not to say that it was an easy listen all the time, there are a lot of characters and a lot of things to keep straight, but I almost felt like he held my hand all along the way, and I never felt truly lost. Having many different narrators definitely helped and even though the ending required more than the usual amount of brain power, I still finished feeling satisfied and almost spent. This is the sort of book that you want to talk about with someone afterwards.

The First Ladies by Marie Benedict and Victoria Christopher Murray

 genre: historical fiction

The two women couldn't have had more different backgrounds.  One, from old money and high society.  The other, the daughter of two formerly enslaved parents.  What Eleanor Roosevelt (wife of the politician and future president Franklin Delano Roosevelt) and Mary McLeod Bethune (civil rights activities and president of of her own college) have in common, though, is a desire to help and to create change.  These common desires will fuel a friendship that last for some of the hardest decades this nation has known.

While the idea of this book didn't quite capture my attention at first, I am once again so grateful for the miracle of book clubs that force me to stretch a little and add something into my reading life that I would have otherwise left behind.   Told from alternating points of view between these two amazing women, this story taught me so much not just about their history but also about the astonishing mountain of prejudice and racism that stood in the way of EVERY TINY THING that Mary and Eleanor tried to accomplish.  I have never spent a lot of time learning about the politics of the 30s, so this was a crash course for me, but the way the story is told, you learn about what's happening as the story moves forward so it didn't bog me down.  It actually felt so important, what these women were trying to do.

The most powerful (and yes, sometimes uncomfortable) parts for me was when Eleanor would overstep or make a racist mistake and Mary called her on it - with compassion, usually, but without ever backing down. Mary knew that she truly deserved the same kind of respect as anyone of any race and it was so important for me to read about her way of interacting with the world. I am embarrassed that I have never heard of her, HOW have I never heard of Mary Bethune? But I finished this book with tears in my eyes, tears of appreciation for what Mary fought for and against and for how she never gave up on this country, despite how it chewed her and spit her out over and over.   

The only reason it's four stars instead of five for me is that the writing just didn't throw it over the top to "amazing" - literarily it's a solid, four star piece of historical fiction that I absolutely would recommend.

Night Watch by Jayne Anne Phillips

 genre: historical fiction

In the secluded hills of West Virginia lives a little family. Even though the War is finally over, Eliza, the mama of this family, is not ok. Twelve-year-old ConaLee shoulders the responsibility of getting Mama to an asylum where Eliza can hopefully rest and heal. The world is not yet a safe place, though, especially in this Reconstruction period, and the road ConaLee has to travel (both literally and figuratively) is filled with with dangers and lost memories.

I chose this one because it won the Pulitzer last year and I liked the cover.  I didn't really know anything about it but it caught my attention quickly.  Things felt fraught from the beginning, you can tell something OFF but you're not sure what.  Soon, it is all clear, and it's all horrible.  The pain and loss that our poor ConaLee has to face is deeply upsetting and my initial compassion for Eliza helped me stick with this story with a timeline constantly shifting back and forth and time in a way that felt pretty unmooring sometimes.  Once I felt grounded in the story with both characters and chronology, I did guess one of the major plot points but it turns out, I still really wanted to keep reading and find out how it would all play out.  There are parts of this that reminded me in a super vague way, of The Sound and the Fury - with different narrators who can only give us the story from their own way of seeing the world.  I liked that it's about a different part of the Civil War than I usually read and although I can't gush about this, I'm giving it four stars for the history I learned about asylums during the period and for the way it kept me reading.  

Women Talking by Miriam Toews

 genre: contemporary fiction

In a hayloft in a secluded Mennonite community, a group of women gather to make a choice.  Will they continue to be violated and abused by staying in their homes among the men who perpetrated these crimes, will they fight for their children and try create a better, safer world or will they flee and leave behind the only home they've ever known.  It's an almost impossible choice, but for these women, young and old, the status quo doesn't really feel like a true option any more.  A tiny light is flickering and these women, talking together, are going to craft it into a flame.

This book has flooded me with so many thoughts and feelings.  It is horrendous, atrocious, beyond horrible what these women have experienced. The fact that it is based on REAL events makes it ten times worse.  So one part of me is so horrified by the behavior of people who feel they have a sick kind of power that I want to look away.  But our author forces us to LOOK.  LOOK at what people can endure and then imagine how the powerless might go about taking their power back.  And that leads to another part of me that cannot get over the beauty of these women talking, the way they are slowly finding themselves as they say the words to describe what is indescribable.  I had to have a pen at the ready to underline the ways in which ideas about forgiveness and violence and power structures and patriarchy and pain are so perfectly and simply stated.  I loved the narrative structure of the novel, in which the minutes of the women's meetings are written down by an outsider, who also has their own commentary on what's happening.

I can't imagine I will ever forget how powerful this book has been to me.  It touched a deep part that is beginning to find so much solace in reading about women finding their voices, even among the basest abominations. I am giving every kind of content warning for a book discussing this kind of trauma - but also, if you can bring yourself to look in the eye of the horrors that real women have and will experience, I truly urge you to do so.

All the Colors of the Dark by Chris Whitaker (audiobook)

genre: mystery/thriller

Patch with his eyepatch and Saint with her chain-smoking, bus-driving grandma, are two misfit kids that find each other in middle school.  To have a true best friend, it's the greatest gift, especially at that age.  But both of their lives hit a complete trajectory shift when Patch is brave enough to defend a local girl from tragedy - and Saint is left behind.  Both of their experiences will lead to trauma and loss, love and a fierce desire to protect, as well as the kind of obsession that can both taint and color an entire lifetime.

Wow.  I went into this knowing nothing, as I love to do.  Reader, you should know that it is LONG.  Not QUITE too long, for me, but bordering on it.  Yes, it would've benefited maybe from some tighter editing, but when the climax came (me, with my hand over my mouth as I listened, barely breathing) I couldn't think what could've possibly been left out.  All the little details, they matter.  The cast of characters is large and complex and while there is both bone-deep friendship and the love of the family you choose, there is also a deep and complex kind of evil.  The kind that of evil watches you over your shoulder for decades and can't get away from.  

Here is all the things I loved in this book that swirled around to make this the kind of listening experience that lingered in my head: paintings hung in pride of place, honey making, tenacious investigators, the power of memory, the way people can rescue us both from literal catastrophe and from the demons inside us and, most of all, the beauty in a life, saved.

Five stars for how it captured me, in all the ways.

content warnings: lots of adult material in here but no graphic sex