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Books I've finished in the last several weeks:
You're My Kind, by Claire Lydon is a lesbian romance that I may have gotten as a freebie via the BookBub email list. At the beginning of the story, the protagonist still misses the ex who walked out on her without a word several years ago, and also has trouble trusting anyone because if Justine could do that, so could anyone. The tone is sweet, but it felt like a little too many of the necessary conversations were not just offstage, but of the form "Maddie, Justine did X" and "Justine, Maddie says Y." Yes, the genre promises the reader a happy ending, but the author is expected to supply it, and this has a bit of the tone of "meanwhile, back at the ranch..."
No Love for the Wicked, by Jessica Cage, is a fantasy set mostly in a world where most people have magic. People are divided into Lights and Darks, which is somehow innate but also everyone is told which they are in high school. There's a romance plot, between two people who meet as adults, mixed in with the assignment to do a series of arbitrary-seeming things to save the world. The plot is driven partly by the protagonist/narrator's mother having carefully not told her the Very Important Prophecy about her. On the other hand, it gets some points for having the heroine who decides to die to save, well, everyone actually die at the end of the book (though she is reincarnated as a dragon in an epilogue). This was via a StoryBundle of fantasy books by BIPOC authors, and was clearly spell-checked rather than proofread, based on homonyms and missing words.
The White Mosque: a Memoir, by Sofia Samatar. Someone recmmended it, and I liked her novel A Stranger in Olondria, so I got this from the library.
The White Mosque is a linked collection of many short pieces about Samatar's family; Mennonite history; and her own life, built around a visit/pilgrimage to Uzbekistan in search of German Mennonite history. The "white mosque" of the title is a Mennonite church in Uzbekistan, built in the late 19th century. Samatar talks about having a Somali father and a white American mother, and looking for a place in a religion that still thinks of itself as ethnically (north) German, although most Mennonites today are people of color who live in Africa, Asia, or Latin America.
Samatar thinks and writes about memory, and about what missionary work does for, and to, the people doing it and those they're trying to convert. And numerous other topics, including the Aral Sea, a failed end-of-the-world prophecy that led some of those Mennonites to what is now Uzbekistan, and the history of photography and movie-making in Central Asia.
The book feels a bit like long strings of beads, making something but not a straightforward narrative. This shouldn't have surprised me; A Stranger in Olondria wasn't a linear narrative either. The acknowledgements describe the book as "creative nonfiction," saying some living people's names have been changed but the stories are as true as she can make them and the places are real.
I'm Glad My Mom Died, by Jennette McCurdy, is good but not pleasant reading. It's a memoir by a former child actor. There's a lot about her being a parentified child, including that she was expected to make her mother happy by, among other things, never having a different preference than her mother about anything, even favorite colors.
Current reading: The Thursday Murder Club, by Richard Osman, which feels relatively light so far. And I'm still (slowly) rereading Always Coming Home.
You're My Kind, by Claire Lydon is a lesbian romance that I may have gotten as a freebie via the BookBub email list. At the beginning of the story, the protagonist still misses the ex who walked out on her without a word several years ago, and also has trouble trusting anyone because if Justine could do that, so could anyone. The tone is sweet, but it felt like a little too many of the necessary conversations were not just offstage, but of the form "Maddie, Justine did X" and "Justine, Maddie says Y." Yes, the genre promises the reader a happy ending, but the author is expected to supply it, and this has a bit of the tone of "meanwhile, back at the ranch..."
No Love for the Wicked, by Jessica Cage, is a fantasy set mostly in a world where most people have magic. People are divided into Lights and Darks, which is somehow innate but also everyone is told which they are in high school. There's a romance plot, between two people who meet as adults, mixed in with the assignment to do a series of arbitrary-seeming things to save the world. The plot is driven partly by the protagonist/narrator's mother having carefully not told her the Very Important Prophecy about her. On the other hand, it gets some points for having the heroine who decides to die to save, well, everyone actually die at the end of the book (though she is reincarnated as a dragon in an epilogue). This was via a StoryBundle of fantasy books by BIPOC authors, and was clearly spell-checked rather than proofread, based on homonyms and missing words.
The White Mosque: a Memoir, by Sofia Samatar. Someone recmmended it, and I liked her novel A Stranger in Olondria, so I got this from the library.
The White Mosque is a linked collection of many short pieces about Samatar's family; Mennonite history; and her own life, built around a visit/pilgrimage to Uzbekistan in search of German Mennonite history. The "white mosque" of the title is a Mennonite church in Uzbekistan, built in the late 19th century. Samatar talks about having a Somali father and a white American mother, and looking for a place in a religion that still thinks of itself as ethnically (north) German, although most Mennonites today are people of color who live in Africa, Asia, or Latin America.
Samatar thinks and writes about memory, and about what missionary work does for, and to, the people doing it and those they're trying to convert. And numerous other topics, including the Aral Sea, a failed end-of-the-world prophecy that led some of those Mennonites to what is now Uzbekistan, and the history of photography and movie-making in Central Asia.
The book feels a bit like long strings of beads, making something but not a straightforward narrative. This shouldn't have surprised me; A Stranger in Olondria wasn't a linear narrative either. The acknowledgements describe the book as "creative nonfiction," saying some living people's names have been changed but the stories are as true as she can make them and the places are real.
I'm Glad My Mom Died, by Jennette McCurdy, is good but not pleasant reading. It's a memoir by a former child actor. There's a lot about her being a parentified child, including that she was expected to make her mother happy by, among other things, never having a different preference than her mother about anything, even favorite colors.
Current reading: The Thursday Murder Club, by Richard Osman, which feels relatively light so far. And I'm still (slowly) rereading Always Coming Home.
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