Book Review: Be Frank with Me by Julia Claiborne Johnson

Title: Be Frank with Me
Author: Julia Claiborne Johnson
Enjoyment Rating: ***
Source: Audible
Content Alert: A little bit of sex but a pretty clean read

M. M. Banning sprung to fame in the 1970s when her only novel topped the bestseller charts. But the adulation was too much for Mimi, and she retreated to a mansion in Bel-Air, and never published another book. More than thirty years later, she's taken in by a Ponzi scheme and her publisher sends Alice to keep tabs on Mimi and help care for Frank, Mimi's nine-year-old son so Mimi can write another bestseller.

While Be Frank with Me is fascinating on many levels (who hasn't wondered what the rest of Harper Lee's life has been like, for example?), it's Alice's relationship with Frank that is at the heart of the book. Although Frank is never labeled with anything, he seems to have Asperger's (he doesn't enjoy other kids, is obsessed with vintage clothes and old movies, doesn't sleep at night, and is comforted by tight pressure). While Mimi (who is unusual and difficult herself) adores Frank, she's also a little wary of him. But I loved watching Alice fall in love with Frank as the novel progressed. Also, there's a lovely twist at the end of the novel that is exactly the opposite of what I was expecting.

Book Review: The Heart Goes Last by Margaret Atwood

Title: The Heart Goes Last
Author: Margaret Atwood
Enjoyment Rating: ***
Source: Audible
Content Alert: sex, language

At a time in a dystopian near future, the Earth has fallen to ruin. Like many of their peers, Charmaine and Stan, who formerly had steady jobs (she had a college degree and worked in a nursing home), now live in their car, surviving on donuts, never knowing when their next shower will be. When they learn about Consilience, a utopian development, their desire for stability overrides any concern they might have about the place, even though part of the condition of living there is that they voluntarily surrender themselves to a prison every other month. Soon they find themselves involved in all sorts of entanglements (romantic and more nefarious), until they wonder if life on the inside is all it's cracked up to be.

Before I read The Heart Goes Last, I would have told you that I loved Atwood's realistic fiction (The Blind Assassin is one of my all-time favorite books), but was less a fan of her speculative fiction (yes, I appreciated The Handmaid's Tale, and I think it is one of the best book club/literature seminar books because it's so much fun to discuss, but it's not where I'd naturally gravitate). This book is dark, funny, and profoundly weird. It's also really memorable. While the experience reading it wasn't as enjoyable for me as some of Atwood's other novels, I'm still glad I read it, and would love the chance to talk with other people about Atwood's purposes for creating this story.

Book Review: Home is Burning by Dan Marshall

Title: Home is Burning: A Memoir
Author: Dan Marshall
Enjoyment Rating: ***
Source: Digital Copy
Content Alert: So. Much. Swearing. Some sex. Some illegal drug use. And a sad, slow decline ending in the death of the author's father.

Dan Marshall was a twenty-five-year-old Berkeley grad, living in LA, with a sweet job and a hot girlfriend when his father, Bob, a marathon runner who had never been sick a day in his life, was diagnosed with ALS. To complicate matters, Dan's mom, Debi, had been living with stage-four lung cancer for more than a dozen years, and she'd had a relapse and needed more chemo. So Dan and his brother Greg moved back home to take care of their parents. Home is Burning is the account of Dan's year living at home in Salt Lake City, taking care of his parents.

I would imagine that if I lived in New York or Los Angeles, seeing my city through the eyes of authors and filmmakers would become commonplace. But Salt Lake City is not a popular setting for books and movies. And when it does appear in film (like in High School Musical, it's often masquerading as someplace else). For me, the fact that Home is Burning takes place in Salt Lake made it so much more enjoyable. I could not, in good conscience, give this book a higher rating, because it seemed to operate only on the emotional levels of shock and sadness, but I really enjoyed reading it. The high school Marshall attended is Olympus, my kids' rival high school. They walk in the same canyon where I run trails, and they even stop and get drinks at Shivers, where I'm a frequent visitor at the drive-thru. At one point, Marshall named his street, and you'd better believe I opened Google Maps on my phone and, like a true creeper, found out where the street was. Turns out I run within half a block of his house at least three times a week. So the fact that the book takes place in my backyard was novel and thoroughly enjoyable. Not quite as enjoyable was the fact that Marshall is constantly referring to the damn Mormons or the f&^%ing Mormons. I know that part of his bravado was intended to show his fallibility as a character, but the fact that Marshall and his family seemed to hate the Mormons so much for I'm not sure what other than being squeaky clean Mormons got at the heart of one of the biggest tensions here in our city. I think that also made this book more important and significant as a local reader, even if it was less easy to brush off the comments because I recognize how it plays out in our city from day to day.

Book Review: Circling the Sun by Paula McLain

Title: Circling the Sun
Author: Paula McLain
Enjoyment Rating: ***
Source: Digital Copy
Content Alert: sex

Based on the life of real-life aviatrix Beryl Markham, Circling the Sun opens with her pioneering trip across the Atlantic from Europe to North America (the hard way, where the winds weren't favorable), yet the book isn't about her career in aviation at all. Rather, the book focuses on the early years of her life, growing up in Kenya with her father (after her mother returned to England with her brother), carving out a career as a successful jockey, and negotiating romantic and business relationships with men.

McLain has a lovely command of the English language (she has an MFA in poetry, and it shows), and uses it to show the conflicts within Beryl-- her restlessness, her desire to be free like the Kipsigis boy she grew up with, and wild like the horses she struggles to tame. The story also makes Kenya come alive and thrum with romance (Isak Dinesen, author of Out of Africa, appears in Circling the Sun as the third point in a love triangle with Beryl and Denys Finch-Hatton). I wonder if McLain romanticizes Markham at all-- she seems entirely sympathetic to some difficult choices she makes (particularly leaving her only child with his grandparents) and seems to gloss over an affair she had with Prince Henry during the period. All in all, an interesting, if somewhat simplified portrayal of someone who appears to have been an even more interesting and complex person in real life.

Book Review: Pretty Girls by Karin Slaughter

Title: Pretty Girls
Author: Karin Slaughter
Enjoyment Rating: ***
Source: Digital Copy
Content Alert: sex, language, violence-- this is a book for grown-ups

It's been twenty years since Claire and Julia's sister Lydia vanished without a trace after leaving a bar near the University of Georgia, where she was a student. In that time, Claire has gone on to marry a man who became a tech millionaire, and Lydia spent time in and out of rehab, on welfare, and raising her daughter as a single mom. The sisters don't talk at all, until Claire's husband, Paul, is murdered before her eyes in an Atlanta alleyway. After the funeral (wake cut short by a break-in), Claire reaches out to Lydia to help her get a sense of her situation, and soon they're back on the trail of finding Julia. The book is incredibly dark, with lots of scary scenes (Paul may have been involved in making rape and torture videos marketed on the dark internet), and some truly evil characters.

It's been a few weeks since I finished reading Pretty Girls. Sometimes I think it's lazy of me to let some time elapse after finishing a book before reviewing it, but often that time helps me see how much I remember a book. I figure that if I can't remember a book after only three weeks have passed, it probably wasn't all that good, even if I found it engrossing in the moment, and that's the case with Pretty Girls. At the time, I couldn't wait to see what really happened to Paul, and if Claire and Lydia could escape with their lives, but weeks later, all I remember is the discomfort I felt when I Slaughter described the places where the torture of women took place.

Book Review: The Last Anniversary by Liane Moriarty

Title: The Last Anniversary
Author: Liane Moriarty
Enjoyment Rating: ***
Source: Audible
Content Alert: swearing (a pretty clean read)

Three years after Sophie Honeywell broke Thomas Gordon's heart, he calls her out of the blue and wants to meet. She knows he isn't eager to get back together, since he and his wife recently had a baby, but the truth is even more shocking than that situation would be-- Thomas's elderly aunt Connie died, and left her her home on Scribbly Gum Island (on the Hawkesbury River near Sydney, Australia). Aunt Connie and her sister Rose became famous in the 1930s, when they reported making a visit to their only neighbor on the island, to discover that the couple had disappeared without a trace, leaving their infant daughter behind. Connie and Rose named the baby Enigma and raised her as their own. Moving to the home of the Munro Baby Mystery complicates Sophie's boring, ordered life, and brings her right into the hearts of Connie's family.

Like many of Moriarty's books, The Last Anniversary centers on domestic dramas. Sophie worries that she should have settled for Thomas, because she's 39 and her biological clock is ticking. Thomas's sister Grace seems to have it all, including a crippling case of postpartum depression. Parents squabble with their children, and secrets come out. And, eventually, the Munro Baby Mystery is solved. I figured out the mystery about halfway through and enjoyed watching it tumble out. Moriarty does a lovely job managing many characters and serious themes with a lightness that works, but in this case, some of the near misses of the story (particularly Grace's story) made me squirm as a reader, and I'm not sure how Moriarty's resolution to Sophie's childlessness plays to today's audience, since the book was published ten years ago. A picky aside-- the chronology of the story doesn't seem to work here. If Enigma is 74, it seems unlikely that her grandchildren would be nearly 40.

Book Review: The Short Drop by Matthew Fitzsimmons

Title: The Short Drop
Author: Matthew Fitzsimmons
Enjoyment Rating: ***
Source: Digital Copy
Content Alert: violence, incest, sexual abuse, swearing

Gibson Vaughn, ex-con, ex-Marine, and hacker extraordinaire is experiencing life on the skids. He's lost his job and his family when a powerful man from his distant past hires him to look into the decade-old disappearance of Suzanne Lombard, the girl who was like a sister to him growing up and whose father is the current vice-president.

When Vaughn accepts the job, the body count commences. If you're looking for an adrenaline rush, The Short Drop is a book with lots of plot twists, an enemy who is always ten steps ahead of the game, and violence that seems senseless at times. It's the kind of book that I read quickly and enjoyed at the time, but that I hardly remember a month later. I wish that Vaughn's character had been developed more. Most of the story hearkens back to the time when Suzanne disappeared (which happened shortly before Vaughn's father's apparent suicide) and Fitzsimmons does a nice job delving into the questions of the past, but I was curious about what motivated Vaughn in the present. I read that The Short Drop is to be the first book in a series. I hope that readers will continue to see Vaughn grow, and I know that Fitzsimmons has lots of adventures planned for the future.

Book Review: Notorious RBG by Irin Carmon and Shana Knizhnik

Title: Notorious RBG: The Life and Times of Ruth Bader Ginsburg
Authors: Irin Carmon and Shana Knizhnik
Enjoyment Rating: ***
Source: Audible
Content Alert: a clean read

Before picking up Notorious RBG, I didn't know all that much about Ruth Bader Ginsburg, one of the nine justices who serves in the US Supreme Court. I mean, I knew she leaned to the left, liked to work out, and fell asleep during the State of the Union, all of which made me feel a sense of kinship with her, but I didn't know much about her beyond that. Notorious RBG changed that. It helped me see RBG not as a woman who got where she is in life because she prioritized career over family, but as a woman who delighted in marriage and motherhood, and was inspired by her relationships to fight for the rights of women. When I read obituaries (which I often do), I'm struck by how often the circumstances of someone's life lead them down a particular path. While Ginsburg married right out of college and had a baby on a military base within a couple of years, she also had a uniquely supportive spouse, and his cancer treatments while they were in law school meant that she only had one child for many years. While his condition likely felt devastating to the young family, in some ways they also enabled RBG to give more attention to her career than she may have been able to do had she been raising a larger family. Notorious RBG humanizes Ginsburg, and gives equal weight to quirky things about her private life (she's apparently really good at doing pushups) and the significant achievements in her public life. This is a quick read, and one I enjoyed.

Book Review: Carry On by Rainbow Rowell

Title: Carry On
Author: Rainbow Rowell
Enjoyment Rating: ***
Source: Digital Copy
Content Alert: language, lots of boys kissing boys

If you read Rainbow Rowell's Fangirl, you probably remember Simon and Baz. Cath, the protagonist of Fangirl was obsessed with Simon and Baz, two of the main characters in a Harry Potter-esque series by Gemma T. Leslie. Cath wrote fanfiction in which Simon (Harry) and Baz (a mashup of Ron and Draco Malfoy) finally got it on in their final year at boarding school. In Carry On, Rainbow Rowell writes her version of what happened in that final year-- including evil wizards, vampires, magic, and lots and lots of kissing.

I'm not entirely sure how I feel about Carry On. On the one hand, I think the idea of the book (that's she's telling her version of a story she created for another character to write fanfic about in another book) is pretty fascinating. On the other hand, I think the book draws so many obvious parallels to Harry Potter that it's hard not to compare the two, and the objectives of Rowell and Rowling are very different. While Harry and Ginny Weasley liked each other, their romantic relationship definitely took a back seat to the action and adventure and magic in the 4,224 pages of the Harry Potter books. By contrast, Carry On is 522 pages, and it contains ten times as much kissing as all of Harry Potter. Not that I don't like kissing-- it just seems that Rowell sets herself up for comparison with Rowling, and the comparatively small size of Carry On makes it nearly impossible for the kind of immersive experience someone gets from Harry Potter. So anyone looking for the book to be epic adventure might be a little disappointed. If you're looking for epic love story between teenage boy vampire and the wizard who was supposed to save the world, then you won't be disappointed.

Book Review: The Day We Met by Rowan Coleman

Title: The Day We Met
Author: Rowan Coleman
Enjoyment Rating: ***
Source: Digital Copy
Content Alert: swearing

Claire is 40, the head of the English department at her high school, and the mother of two girls, a teenager and a toddler, when she's diagnosed with Alzheimer's Disease. She's lucid enough to recognize what she's losing-- time with her daughters, and her love for her husband, who feels like a stranger, but she finds refuge in her memory book, a scrapbook where she records the important events of her life. Claire's story in The Day We Met is tragic, yes, but it's also complicated and sweet and infused with love. Her daughter's secondary story about meeting her biological father for the first time and choosing the path for her own future adds richness to the main story.

I applaud Rowan Colelman for being able to create an enjoyable, light, moving story about a difficult topic. I appreciated the shifting narratives, and the way that she manages Claire's moments of lucidity amidst her growing confusion. I also love the ending, with its resolution to a mysterious love story. But the most impressive thing about the book comes in the author bio, in which we learn that Coleman has five kids, including toddler twins. And she's written ELEVEN books. I want to give The Day We Met a five-star rating just for that accomplishment.

Book Review: Days of Awe by Lauren Fox

Title: Days of Awe
Author: Lauren Fox
Enjoyment Rating: ***
Source: ARC
Content Alert: Some sex and swearing

In the last year, Isabel Moore's life has fallen apart: her best friend died under mysterious circumstances, she and her husband separated, and her only daughter morphed from a lovable child into a preteen she barely recognizes. Isabel is still haunted about all of the babies she lost, and she wonders if she'll ever feel normal again.

Days of Awe is a book about grief, forgiveness and understanding, and I felt that the book was at its strongest when Isabel was trying to figure out her relationship with Josie. Fox does a nice job going back in time to scenes when Josie, who was complicated and fractious and pretty difficult, was alive and juxtaposing those with Isabel's present. I felt that the story of the end of Isabel's marriage was less strong. There didn't seem to be anything cataclysmic that brought the couple to divorce (which I think is realistic) but the possibility of their reconciliation (which they hinted to several times early in the novel) wasn't resolved. Her new budding new relationship wasn't entirely satisfying either, mostly because Isabel hinders herself so much. I think the character development in Days of Awe is realistic and well-done, but that didn't always make it enjoyable.

Book Review: Malice at the Palace by Rhys Bowen

Title: Malice at the Palace (Her Royal Spyness #9)
Author: Rhys Bowen
Enjoyment Rating: ****
Source: Audible
Content Alert: Although the book opens with a sex scene, it's actually a pretty clean read

If you've been reading my blog for any length of time, you know that I'm a sucker for Rhys Bowen's Her Royal Spyness books. The series focuses on Georgie, a lesser royal, trying to scrape by in London with no man and no means of support in the 1930s, and usually ending up solving some kind of major crime, sometimes despite herself. The nine books in the series have ranged from delightful and refreshing to rushed and sloppy, and Malice at the Palace is one of the better books in the series. The queen (Georgie's great-aunt) asks her to live at Kensington Palace to act as a companion to Princess Marina of Greece during the weeks before her marriage to Prince George (George and Marina's were actual people whose wedding took place in November 1934). When Georgie discovers a body on the palace grounds her first night there, and learns that the dead woman was one of many who had relationships with the prince, her loyalties are torn-- does she want to know who killed this woman?

I don't know if I've ever stated this on the blog, but in my mind, I've equated the Her Royal Spyness and the Maisie Dobbs series. Right now, they take place at a similar place and time in history (London in the 1930s), and both involve female sleuths. I've always thought as Her Royal Spyness as Maisie Dobbs lite. And while this may be true, maybe now it's only because Maisie Dobbs has taken such a dour turn. While Georgie was pretty silly in the early books, she has matured, as have many of the characters (with the exception of the infuriating Queenie, her maid), and this book in particular feels on point historically, especially as it takes on the issue of unwed mothers during the period. Malice at the Palace is a pretty fun read, with a little more gravitas than some of its predecessors.

Book Review: What She Left Behind by Ellen Marie Wiseman

Title: What She Left Behind
Author: Ellen Marie Wiseman
Enjoyment Rating: ***
Source: Audible
Content Alert: Psychological abuse, some swearing

Izzy is seventeen, and has been living with relatives or foster parents for a decade, since her mother killed her father and was sent to prison. When her newest foster parents get Izzy involved in a history project at a recently-closed mental hospital, Izzy gets captivated by the story of Clara, an apparently healthy eighteen-year-old girl who was institutionalized in 1929. Through coming to understand Clara, Izzy gains insight into her mother's motivations, and begins to gain some hope for her own future.

Wiseman does a lot of things right in What She Left Behind: both Izzy and Clara are interesting and complicated, and their alternating narratives are nicely balanced and subtly parallel. The book is also painstakingly researched, and the view of mental hospitals in the mid-20th century is pretty heartbreaking.  What I didn't like about the novel is that many of the supporting characters are very flat. We never really understand what motivates Clara's parents to lie about her mental state and have her forcibly committed. I mean, we understand that they're upset that she has fallen in love with the wrong kind of man, but who has their daughter put into a mental hospital (basically worse than a jail) for that offense? I didn't find their actions believable. I was similarly annoyed by the bullies at Izzy's school, who seem in the thrall of a single mean girl (why?) and whose offenses go way beyond just razzing the new girl. I could go on with the staff of the mental hospital as well. If the characters were more nuanced, or at least their horrible actions were more clearly explained, I think I would have liked this book a lot better.

Book Review: Modern Romance by Aziz Ansari

Title: Modern Romance
Author: Aziz Ansari and Eric Klinenberg
Enjoyment Rating: ***
Source: Audible
Content Alert: Holy cow, I must be getting old, because it seemed like every other word in this book was the f-word. And if the title didn't clue you in, this book is basically all about sex.

Comedian Aziz Ansari and sociologist Eric Klinenberg look at the ways that dating and falling in love have changed in the modern era, focusing a lot on how technology (texting, online dating, tinder, and the like) and a prolonged period of early adulthood have changed relationships. Much of the research for this book was collected during Ansari's standup routines over the last few years.

First of all, the content of the book is fascinating. I met my husband in 1993, when we were both freshmen in college, and we got married in 1997, about a week before I got my first cell phone. It's amazing to me that although I'm not all that much older than Ansari, my dating experience could not have been more different. Ed and I met when we were eighteen, decided we liked each other, and the rest was history. According to Ansari, dating is a lot more complicated than that now, and social media and online dating muddy the waters and add some anxiety to what is, for many, an already anxious process. Ansari actually had members of the audience come up on stage and read their texts from potential romantic partners to the audience so everyone could give them feedback on subtle messages and subtext. Brilliant, right?

I've spent the summer watching Parks and Recreation, at the request of my teenage daughter. Unlike Annie, who is on her third watch of the show and can bust through an entire season in a weekend, I'm a little slower. I'm halfway through season four, and I go through phases where I adore Tom Haverford and where I loathe Tom Haverford, played by Aziz Ansari. I know that Tom Haverford and Aziz Ansari are not the same person, but in Modern Romance, I got the sense that Aziz Ansari is someone Tom Haverford would like to become, if he could get out of Pawnee, Indiana and into standup comedy clubs all over the world. I guess what I'm saying here is that I think I would have liked Modern Romance better if it had a little less Tom Haverford in it. A little less smooth music, a little less jokeyness, a little less f-bomb. The dating stuff? Fascinating. But Ansari plays the audiobook with a very heavy hand.

Book Review: Real Moms by Lisa Valentine Clark

Title: Real Moms: Making It Up As We Go
Author: Lisa Valentine Clark
Enjoyment Rating: ***
Source: Digital Copy
Content Alert: A clean read

Back when I was an English major at BYU, there was a girl in a lot of my classes who was all the things I wished I was-- she was beautiful, confident, smart, and hilarious. I know this because she commented frequently in class and because I also knew she was in the "The Garrens," a comedy troupe on campus. So when I saw that she'd written a book, I thought, "why not?"

Twenty years later, Lisa is still adorable, smart, and funny. The things she has to say in Real Moms about parenting five kids are not putting herself in the position of a parenting expert, but as someone trying to draw lessons from real life. It was a fine, fun read, as long as the reader isn't expecting to be more than entertained. The book is pretty short and I enjoyed it while I was reading it, but several weeks later, I barely remember anything other than that there are plenty of ways to be a good mom, that motherhood requires improvisation, that moms shouldn't lose themselves to their kids, and that hard work is more important than natural smarts.

Book Review: Elsewhere by Gabrielle Zevin

Title: Elsewhere
Author: Gabrielle Zevin
Enjoyment Rating: ***
Source: Digital Copy
Content Alert: A pretty clean read

Liz Hall is fifteen-- never been kissed, never driven a car, when she runs a stop sign on her bike, gets plowed over by a taxi, and dies. Soon, she finds herself in Elsewhere, which is basically an afterlife. Life in Elsewhere is pretty much exactly like life on Earth (people have jobs, live in houses with flush toilets, and obey the laws of the land) except that residents of Elsewhere age backwards. So Liz has fifteen years in Elsewhere, and when her time is up, she'll be a baby, ready to be reborn on Earth (strange concept right?-- are you still with me). Liz feels pretty gypped by the fact that her life is over before it really began, and after spending some time mourning and trying to communicate with people back home (strictly forbidden, btw) she gets on with her (after) life, finds a job and a boyfriend, and works at figuring things out.

I adored Zevin's novel The Storied Life of AJ Fikry, so I think my expectations for this book were quite high, even when I learned that this was YA speculative fiction (that's what you'd call it, right?). Elsewhere is totally unlike AJ Fikry, and it felt more like an experiment with a place, and what kinds of interesting twists on our life Zevin could make in Elsewhere than a great story about Liz and the people she loves. It's a fine read, but not one that kept me up in the night wanting more.

Book Review: The Sharper Your Knife, the Less You Cry by Kathleen Flinn

Title: The Sharper Your Knife, the Less You Cry: Love, Laughter and Tears at the World's Most Famous Cooking School
Author: Kathleen Flinn
Enjoyment Rating: ***
Source: Paperback Copy
Content Alert: Perhaps some mild swearing

American Kathleen Flinn was in her thirties and living the dream of working as an executive in London when she was laid off from her job. In the ultimate case of turning lemons into lemonade, Flinn decided to take the opportunity to change her life and finally move in with the guy she was dating long-distance, while indulging in her lifelong dream of attending Le Cordon Bleu, the world-famous cooking school in Paris. Then she wrote all about it in The Sharper Your Knife, the Less You Cry.

While chef training is notoriously challenging and hazing is seen as part of the experience, Flinn's experience at Le Cordon Bleu is mostly positive, focusing on Paris, friends, and her blossoming romance. Sure, some of the recipes are weird or disgusting, the chefs can be unforgiving and uncompromising, but that's to be expected. This book is more of a love story than a war story. It's definitely one that made me want to get in the kitchen, go to Paris, and nurture love and friendships.

Book Review: Everything I Know About Love I Learned From Romance Novels by Sarah Wendell

Title: Everything I Know About Love I Learned From Romance Novels
Author: Sarah Wendell
Enjoyment Rating: ***
Source: Paper copy
Content Alert: Some swearing, discussion of some racy bits from romance novels

For the last few years, I've been trying to overcome my prejudice against romance novels. This isn't really that hard, because I enjoy reading them. What is hard is admitting that I enjoy reading them. I've decided to embrace that fact, and decided to educate myself a little more about the genre. I turned to Sarah Wendell, who, along with Pop Culture Happy Hour podcast host Linda Holmes, have been instrumental in helping me nudge myself out of the closet and proclaim myself a lover of the HEA (Happily Ever After, in romance-speak). In Everything I Know About Love I Learned from Romance Novels, Wendell draws on her own vast experience as the co-creator of Smart Bitches, Trashy Books, a website dedicated to romance reviews, as well as an online community of romance readers. Wendell uses her online community and her relationship with romance authors as primary source material for the books, asking these readers and authors what they've learned from reading romance. The book is fun and enlightening, especially the parts about how romance novels teach women to navigate conflicts, to be more assertive in relationships, and to be smarter about sex. I also added a dozen or so books to my reading list. It's also a quick read-- I read the entire thing one night when I was putting Rose to bed.

Book Review: Some Girls by Jillian Lauren

Title: Some Girls: My Life in a Harem
Author: Jillian Lauren
Enjoyment Rating: ***
Source: Kindle
Content Alert: This is a book about life in a harem, prepare yourself accordingly

At the age of eighteen, I worked at a photography studio and made $5.25 an hour. When Jillian Lauren was eighteen (a year or two before me) she joined the harem of Prince Jefri of Brunei and was paid in Cartier watches and Dolce and Gabbana dresses. Some Girls is a memoir that recounts the events that led up to Lauren's decision to join the harem (difficult family life, dropping out of NYU, working as an exotic dancer), her time living in Brunei (which is a lot of what you would expect-- complicated female friendships/rivalries, isolation, conspicuous consumption, loneliness, and disordered behaviors resulting from all of the above), and her reintegration into life back in America.

I was interested in reading Some Girls because Lauren writes a lot about the process of writing the memoir in her second memoir, Everything You Ever Wanted (which is such a beautiful book that I think I may be judging this one a little harshly in contrast). She writes at length about the fallout with her family from how they're portrayed in the memoir, and I wanted to see if what she said about them was really bad enough to provoke years of silence (and I can see how they would be sensitive, and how she would want to tell her story in the way she does). This story didn't move me as much as her other story, probably because this one didn't parallel my own life in the same way. The book is currently being made into a movie, and I think it will be a good one, and it's an interesting book worth reading.

Book Review: Inside the O'Briens by Lisa Genova

Title: Inside the O'Briens
Author: Lisa Genova
Enjoyment Rating: ***
Source: Kindle
Content Alert: Swearing, maybe a (not graphic) sex scene

When Joe O'Brien starts dropping dishes at the dinner table, or seems a little more short-tempered than usual, his family doesn't pay much attention to it. As a Boston police officer and the patriarch of a clan of four adult kids, Joe, in his mid-forties when the book opens, just chalks everything up to stress. But when he develops more troubling symptoms, he agrees to see a doctor, who diagnoses him with Huntington's Disease, a genetic, fatal neurological disorder, and then gives him the even more devastating news: his children each have a 50% chance of inheriting the disease. Inside the O'Briens, written by Lisa Genova, a Harvard-trained neuroscientist and author of Still Alice (for which Julianne Moore won an Oscar this year), focuses much of its attention on Joe's kids, and how each of them process their own relationship with the disease as they watch their father display more symptoms.

Genova knows how to create an engaging story and to get at the emotional heart of an issue. I feel a little bit like her modus operandi as an author is to pick a disease (Alzheimer's in Still Alice, Huntington's in Inside the O'Briens) and to write a novel about how that disease drops a bomb into the lives of the family who confronts it. I'm not sure I like that strategy (is it too didactic?), but I won't argue that it's effective. I was particularly invested in Katie, the youngest daughter, who feels that her life is on hold until she knows whether or not she too has the genetic markers for the disease. I think Genova definitely accomplished her goal of humanizing Huntington's Disease and raising public consciousness surrounding it.