Book Review: Furiously Happy by Jenny Lawson

Title: Furiously Happy: A Funny Book About Horrible Things
Author: Jenny Lawson
Enjoyment Rating: **
Source: Digital Copy
Content Alert: frank conversations about mental health

In Furiously Happy, Jenny Lawson, aka The Bloggess, writes frankly about her mental health challenges, which include anxiety, depression, and a host of related issues.

Okay, okay, I know I'm going to draw some ire here, so I'm taking a deep breath and forging ahead. I'm not a regular reader of Lawson's blog. I never read her first memoir, Let's Pretend This Never Happened. I have never had some of the mental health problems that Lawson has had. So I'm not her target audience. But this book kept coming up in every "Recommended for You" feed, and I bought it. I was reading Brene Brown's Daring Greatly at the same time, and in that book, Brown talks about vulnerability and about how sharing too much too soon with people whose trust you haven't earned can backfire. And that's exactly what this book was for me. I think that for some people, those with whom Lawson has established a rapport over years, this book would be fabulous, but for me, it felt like too much, too soon. The details of all of her fights with her husband, Victor, the incredibly detailed conversations she had with herself, which are things her regular readers would probably love, just annoyed me. So this book would be fabulous in the right hands, but her willingness to put everything out on the table was too much too soon for this reader.

Book Review: Daring Greatly by Brene Brown

Title: Daring Greatly: How the Courage to Be Vulnerable Transforms the Way We Live, Love, Parent, and Lead
Author: Brene Brown
Enjoyment Rating: **
Source: Audible
Content Alert: some mild language

I absolutely adored Brene Brown's Rising Strong when I read it a few months ago. Even though Rising Strong works well as a stand-alone book, I still got the sense that I was missing part of the story because I hadn't read Daring Greatly (because you have to dare greatly before you can rise strong). I had loved listening to Rising Strong so much, mostly because Brene Brown narrated it perfectly. She was telling her own story and I could hear the vulnerability in her voice when she wanted to show vulnerability, I laughed along with her jokes, and felt kind of like a girlfriend by the time I got to the end of that book. I was SO disappointed to discover that Brown did not narrate Daring Greatly. And to make matters worse, the narrator's voice was so flat. She sounded bored the entire time. A really great audiobook can greatly enhance the word on the printed page. A really bad audiobook can ruin it. And unfortunately, the narration ruined Daring Greatly for me. I knew the information was important for me personally as a parent, a leader, and just a good adult, but I never wanted to listen to this book. I gritted my teeth and got through it, but the things that would have seemed a little endearing had Brown narrated the book herself (like the way she constantly refers to her earlier works) annoyed me in this version. I feel that the book is at least a solid 3-star book on the printed page, but I can't give the audiobook more than two stars.

Book Review: Hold Me Closer by David Levithan

Title: Hold Me Closer: The Tiny Cooper Story
Author: David Levithan
Enjoyment Rating: **
Source: Digital Copy
Content Alert: language, conversations about sex

If you read David Levithan and John Green's novel Will Grayson, Will Grayson, you probably remember Tiny Cooper, the enormous gay football player who loves musical theater almost as much as he loves both Will Graysons (one platonically, the other romantically). The most heartfelt parts of WG, WG come during the production of Hold Me Closer, Tiny Cooper's life in musical theater format. If you ever wanted the script for the entire play, Levithan has now provided that for your reading pleasure.

Okay, so I know a forty-year-old woman is not David Levithan's target audience. I get that. I also get that when kids become caught up in the world of a story, they want as much of that story as possible. That's why my kids will spend their hard-earned allowance on the Gods and Monsters supplement to the Rick Riordan books. But this is the second Levithan book in a row I've read that I expected to advance a story I really enjoyed (the other being Another Day) that basically just recapped the story from another perspective. This might work for a fifteen-year-old fanboy, but it doesn't work for his mother. In fact, it just feels lazy.

Book Review: Between You and Me by Mary Norris

Title: Between You and Me: Confessions of a Comma Queen
Author: Mary Norris
Enjoyment Rating: **
Source: Audible
Content Alert: some mild swearing

There are some kinds of books that simply don't lend themselves to being made into audiobooks. Comic books and math textbooks, for example, have such important visual components that the transition to an audio format would require extra descriptions, and a lot would still be lost in the translation. You might not expect that a memoir would suffer from the same fate, but Mary Norris's Between You and Me is definitely a book where the audiobook feels like a pale imitation of the original. Yes, it's true, there are lots of places where Norris tells engaging stories about her life as a copyeditor for The New Yorker. The book is completely irreverent, and she tells hilarious stories (the story about her obsession with #1 pencils was my favorite). However, there are lots of places where she's talking about how the printed word appears on a page. When she talks about the placement of commas, for example, this listener was totally lost. Although I'm an editor, I'm much more a big-picture (or is it "big picture"?) kind of person, and I tend not to care much about the minutae of grammar. In that sense Norris's book felt both pedantic and like I finally started to understand why some people care so dang much about when to use "who" and when to use "whom." If you pick this book up, you'll probably enjoy it, but listening to it often left me frustrated and confused, which is not the feeling you want a reader to have when attempting to demystify grammar.

Book Review: Her by Harriet Lane

Title: Her
Author: Harriet Lane
Enjoyment Rating: **
Source: Digital Copy
Content Alert: I think there was some swearing and maybe some sex, too. And the end is disturbing.

Nina and Emma don't seem to have much in common when they meet on the streets of London. Although they're close to the same age, Nina is almost free from the responsibility of mothering her nearly-grown daughter, and her home and career as a successful painter make her enviable. Emma, on the other hand, is having her second child on the wrong side of forty, and she's still finding her footing in her career and her marriage. You'd be more likely to find some sticky crackers than an original painting in her home. Yet somehow the two women are drawn to each other and develop a friendship.

I found Her on my Kindle just after finishing the Whitney books and threw myself into it in an attempt to read something new and cleanse my palate. Imagine my surprise when after reading a few pages, the story started to sound vaguely familiar. I skipped to the end, and, sure enough, I'd read and finished it a few months earlier. Basically, this book was so forgettable that I couldn't remember I'd read it. The ending was both predictable and almost unimaginably horrible, challenging the reader's conception of Nina all the way through. In fact, the final act of the book makes the rest of the book feel completely unbelievable-- I'm not sure that any seemingly sane woman would exact vengeance in the way Nina does in the final pages of Her, especially after she and Emma have spent the last year building a relationship.

Book Review: Remake by Ilima Todd

Title: Remake
Author: Ilima Todd
Enjoyment Rating: **
Source: Digital Copy
Content Alert: violence

Nine belongs to a society where children are raised in groups of ten, and when they reach the age of seventeen, they're able to choose their gender, their career path, and other aspects of their personality. However, as Nine is on the way to be assigned, the plane she's on crashes, and she washes up on the shore of a small Polynesian island where people retain the gender they're born with and live in families. Nine has to decide whether to go back to the old ways, or to embrace life as she experienced it on the island.

I'm not really sure what to say about Remake. On the one hand, I thought the mechanics of the story were pretty good. It was definitely a story that kept me reading and made me think. However, the subtext of the story seems to be that traditional families are superior to other types of families, and that the ability to choose something like gender leads to the downfall of society.

Book Review: Cured by Bethany Wiggins

Title: Cured (Stung #2)
Author: Bethany Wiggins
Enjoyment Rating: **
Source: Digital Copy
Content Alert: violence

I feel like I'm coming into this novel at a disadvantage, having never read Stung, which presumably sets up the dystopian premise of the series, that a bee flu turns people into beasts, and the same bees no longer pollinate crops, so everything is scarce. Sounds like a fascinating premise, right? In Cured, the protagonists of the first novel, Fiona and Jonah, hook up with some neighbors, Bowen and Jacqui (who goes as Jack and pretends to be a guy for safety's sake), to spread the cure that saved their lives and look for their mother. Along the way, they run into Kevin, who may be either their savior or the one who undoes their mission, and prevents thousands from being cured along the way.

I felt pretty lost from the beginning of the novel. In Wiggins's defense, most of the problem was mine-- I was trying to read quickly, and since I didn't have a great understanding of the world she created and wasn't willing to take the time to read between the lines to figure it out, I never felt especially compelled by the story. I did feel compelled by Jack's character, as a former fat girl who lost weight in order to pass as a boy, we get to see her come to terms with both her body and her intelligence as she decides whether or not to give herself over to love. All in all, Cured was not my favorite read, but perhaps the problems had more to do with me than with the author.

Book Review: Kiss Kill Vanish by Jessica Martinez

Title: Kiss Kill Vanish
Author: Jessica Martinez
Enjoyment Rating: **
Source: Library Copy
Content Alert: Violence, drug use, some mild language

Valentina, a spoiled rich girl living large in Miami has no idea that the Monets and Van Goghs hanging on the walls of her home were purchased with drug money until the moment she watches her father order her boyfriend to murder someone. Despite her love for the boyfriend, Emilio, Valentina runs. Although she has never done more for herself than fix a sandwich, she's somehow able to escape to Montreal, find a job and an apartment, all while eluding the mob.

The plot of Kiss Kill Vanish feels larger than life, and the book certainly has an epic, outsize quality. The main strength of the novel is the snappy pacing-- the chapters end in a way that make you want to keep reading. The premise of the novel, that Valentina manages to escape from her father's clutches, isn't especially believable considering her lack of life experience, and although she's not as bratty as her sisters are, she's pretty bratty. She may have the savvy to hide from a mob, but she doesn't have the savvy to stay away from scary dudes while doing it. She goes from her 23-year-old hit man to a creepy artist to his even creepier brother and back again. I wanted to see Valentina free from all of the guys when the book ended. I can see that Martinez has some great writing chops (and liked other books I've read better) but Kiss Kill Vanish felt too big and implausible to be a winner for me.

Book Review: Tomorrow We Spy by Jordan McCollum

Title: Tomorrow We Spy (Spy Another Day #3)
Author: Jordan McCollum
Enjoyment Rating: **
Source: Digital Copy
Content Alert: violence

Talia and Danny have finally tied the knot and when Tomorow We Spy opens, they're on their honeymoon in Paris, half a world away from Talia's job as a CIA operative in Ottawa. But it's not too hard for a spy to track down another spy, and before Talia and Danny can even visit the Louvre or kiss on top of the Eiffel Tower, they are sucked into a mission, this time with Danny (an aerospace engineer by day) as the operative being sent into Russia. Talia, being Talia, is jealous and nervous for her new husband, so she insists on posing as his translator so she can keep tabs on him, and then when they realize they have been double crossed, she has to work to keep them both alive.

Oh Talia, I had such high hopes for you as a character in I, Spy. I loved your voice and thought it was refreshing that you were a little neurotic. But lady, you're just as neurotic two books later (or is it five? It depends on whether or not you've read all of the prequels). In order for a series of books to satisfy me as a reader, I like to see a character grow and change, and I would especially expect to see growth when Talia marries Danny, but she's just as insecure and jealous in this book as she was in the first book. It's cute for one book, but wearing after a bunch of them.

Book Review: Walking on Water by Richard Paul Evans

Title: Walking on Water (The Walk #5)
Author: Richard Paul Evans
Enjoyment Rating: **
Source: Digital copy
Content Alert: A clean read

In the first book of Richard Paul Evans's The Walk series, Alan Christofferson loses his wife and his business and decides to walk across the country to get his head back in shape. Walking on Water is the fifth book, and Alan is still walking. When the book opens, he's almost to the Florida state line, and then he gets the call to come home to see his dying father. I was glad for the reprieve from all of the walking. When Evans writes about Alan walking, we know exactly what he ate for every meal of every day, and how well the food sat after he ate it. We know all about the pebbles that worked his way into the shoes, and about every single car that passed him as he walked. Or at least, it feels like we got those details, because the books are incredibly heavy on detail. The book is strongest when it delves into the family history of the Christofferson family, and suddenly the walk to Key West gains some significance. But all in all, this series felt a lot like a grueling walk from one corner of the country to the other. I hope Alan flies home.

Book Review: My Name is Bryan by Stacy Lynn Carrol

Title: My Name is Bryan
Author: Stacy Lynn Carrol
Enjoyment Rating: **
Source: Digital Copy
Content Alert: A clean read

Bryan is a recent high school graduate with his whole life ahead of him when he's paralyzed in a cliff jumping accident on a church-sponsored camping trip. Despite these challenges, Bryan forges ahead with his life, marrying, going to college, having children and a successful career, all while bound to a wheelchair with diminishing use of his hands.

Stacy Lynn Carroll says that My Name is Bryan is "based on a true story," but the book includes photos of Bryan (who is Stacy's father-in-law) and his family. It feels a lot more like a biography in narrative form than something that is "based on" a true story. I remember being in my MFA classes and my professors saying that writers who try to write fiction based on real life have a hard time changing how things really happened, even when it makes a story better. This is a case where I feel like the author is too close to the source. She doesn't take risks with the story or the narrative and seems to have the audience (family) in her sights at all times. This story is inspirational and the mechanics of her writing are fine, but I think it would have been a better read for me if I knew what it was (a family story) when I went into reading it.

Book Review: Porcelain Keys by Sarah Beard

Title: Porcelain Keys
Author: Sarah Beard
Enjoyment Rating: **
Source: Digital Copy
Content Alert: violence and abuse

Since Aria's mother, a Julliard-trained piano teacher, died several years ago, the teenager has been hiding her grief and caring for her alcoholic father, who beats her if he catches her playing the piano. So she's pretty miserable until she meets her new next door neighbor, Thomas, who helps her follow her passions and ignites some new ones. Then tragedy strikes, and Thomas disappears from her life. She has to pick up the pieces and try to reconstruct a new life without him in it.

Did you read If I Stay? What about the sequel Where She Went? If you take away the whole hovering-over-the-body aspect of those books and just focus on the Julliard-bound teen whose family died, and mash it up so it's actually the boyfriend's whole family who died, then basically you have Porcelain Keys. The book reminded me so much of If I Stay that I couldn't help but compare them at every turn, and it usually wasn't in favor of Porcelain Keys. The characters seem drawn with such broad strokes, and I wasn't sure that I wanted Aria and Thomas to get back together in the end, or believed that their relationship was portrayed as being strong enough to withstand the absence that Thomas took from Aria's life.

Book Review: Lined with Silver by Roseanne Evans Wilkins

Title: Lined With Silver: An LDS Novel
Author: Roseanne Evans Wilkins
Enjoyment Rating: **
Source: Paper copy
Content Alert: violence, but otherwise a clean read

Sondra is a successful family attorney, rising up the ranks of her Utah firm, when her sister Nikki, asks Sondra to act as a surrogate for the embryos Nikki and her dying husband, Brad created before his chemo. Sondra wants to help her sister, but she's worried about what her clients will think of a pregnant unmarried attorney representing them, so she takes a trip away for the weekend to think about her options. On the flight,  she reconnects with Zack, a boy she crushed on all through high school. He has his own reasons to want a quickie marriage, and less than 24 hours later, they are legally husband and wife. But will love come for these two as well?

This book was one I wanted to skim, but I felt like a rubbernecker at a bad accident and just kept reading. Very few books offend me, but this one did. From the "An LDS Novel" tagline to the unedited feel of the book to the girl who feels like she has to be married to be a surrogate for her sister because of a judgy culture to the absolutely horrendous ending (okay, so I'm going to spoil it here and just say that Wilkins solves the problem of Sondra's growing affection for the babies she's carrying and her worries that she won't be able to hand them over to their parents by KILLING OFF the parents in an accident). Then the last chapter of the book focuses so much more on the romantic resolution than on the death of those characters. Lined With Silver was just a trainwreck of a book, albeit one I took a bit of a secret pleasure in watching.

Book Review: Broken Smiles by Tara Mayoros

Title: Broken Smiles
Author: Tara Mayoros
Enjoyment Rating: **
Source: Digital Copy
Content Alert: A clean read

Laidan is a humble folk singer who hits it big, and before she's even quite aware of what's happening, she's one of the biggest pop sensations of her time. But after two albums and tours, some of the unresolved issues of her past catch up with her, and she takes off (right from the stage at the Grammy's) to volunteer with Rafe, an American doctor working in rural China. Pretty soon, Laidan's broken smile begins to heal, and Rafe and Laidan fall in love, but Rafe has no idea who Laidan is back home, and she's not sure if he would want her if he did know.

Broken Smiles was one of the less engaging romances I've read lately, mainly because it didn't meet the expectations of its genre. For the first half of the book, as we follow Laidan's rise to stardom, I wasn't sure who her romantic interest would be. For a long time, I thought she would fall for her bodyguard. While I thought the story was sweet, I also had a hard time rooting for someone who was pretty dishonest about who she was in the real world, and it made me not care too much if Rafe chose her or not.

Book Review: All the Finer Things by Stephanie Connelley Worlton

Title: All the Finer Things
Author: Stephanie Connelley Worlton
Enjoyment Rating: **
Source: Digital Copy
Content Alert: Domestic abuse

Megan lives in a penthouse apartment, has beautiful clothes, a gorgeous car, an adorable baby, and she's married to one of the most prominent plastic surgeons in Southern California. But her husband also abuses her regularly, and one night, after a particularly bad beating, she takes her baby and the cash she's stockpiled and makes a run for it, landing in a sleepy small town where her Audi and her designer jeans make her pretty conspicuous.

That doesn't sound so bad, right? And the premise of the story is pretty good-- a spoiled rich girl who has to make it on her own in a small town. But every single character is painted with incredibly broad strokes. The evil husband is badder than bad-- he's not just abusive, but adulterous, alcoholic, and gambling addicted, and possibly interested in murder. Megan is a spoiled rich girl who allowed everyone else in her life to make her choices for her (first her mother and then her husband) until she had a child. Ammon, the love interest, is almost too good-hearted to be true. A little more nuance would have gone a long way with this story.

Book Review: Jane and Austen by Stephanie Fowers

Title: Jane and Austen
Author: Stephanie Fowers
Enjoyment Rating: **
Source: Digital Copy
Content Alert: a clean read

Take all of the characters from Jane Austen's novels, change their names slightly, and throw them together at a hotel in San Diego for a wedding celebration. Add in another bunch of place names, very slightly different (as in misspelled) from Austen's originals (like "Brightin Beach," which reminded me of a child who only could have been born in Utah and made me want to gag). Finally, throw into the mix a girl named Jane and a boy named Austen. They're truly mismatched-- she a starry romantic and he a practical MBA student, but this is a romance novel, so love will conquer all.

Okay, so this is going to sound less diplomatic than perhaps it should-- can everyone just lay off on the Jane Austen remakes? I think most people agree that Jane Austen was pretty much the best at writing smart romances that were really cultural commentaries. Chances are that if you try your hand at modernizing or rewriting or I-don't-really-know-what-this-is-ing to a Jane Austen story, you're going to fall significantly short of the original. That doesn't mean that there aren't the Cluelesses of the world, but Jane and Austen is not a Clueless. Fowers provided a directory in the back of the novel to show draw the parallels between characters in Jane and Austen and in Jane Austen, but I decided I didn't really care enough by that point. A little less madcap, a little less cutesy would have gone a long way with this story.

Book Review: Blackout by Robison Wells (Whitney Finalist 2013)

Title: Blackout (Blackout #1)
Author: Robison Wells
Enjoyment Rating: **
Source: Library Copy
This book would be rated: PG-13 for violence

A virus is spreading across the United States, infecting teenagers. No, it's not mono, because this virus gives people special powers. The type of power depends on the person, but the result is that some people are using the powers to try to overthrow the government and wreak havoc and the government is responding by rounding up every teenager in the country, putting many of them in a concentration camp in the Utah desert.

I was very hopeful while reading the first few chapters of Blackout. The initial scenes, with the bad guys destroying the Glen Canyon dam, and the high school dance at a rural Utah barn made me hopeful that the whole book would have similar strong setting and past-paced action, but once the characters were rounded up, the story fell apart for me. Furthermore, there were too many competing voices and narrators to differentiate, especially since the characterization was not especially strong, and Wells seemed to rely on the characters to tell the story instead of showing it in scene. This one felt more like a first draft than a well-edited, well-considered finished product.

Book Review: Winter Queen by Amber Argyle (Whitney Finalist 2013)

Title: Winter Queen (Fairy Queens #1)
Author: Amber Argyle
Enjoyment Rating: **
Source: Digital Copy
This book would be rated: PG-13 for violence and sexual situations

Ilyenna lives in a world where people die. They get sick. They fight in wars. And while one of the basic facts of life is that everyone dies, it seems that in Ilyenna's world they die more violently, unexpectedly, and quickly than most. So it's no surprise when Ilyenna herself suffers a mortal wound, from which she is saved by fairies, who then require her to be their queen. The problem is that the fairies' winter queen is always cold, hard, and ruthless, and Ilyenna doesn't want to become these things, so she puts her fate in the hands of Darrien and his tribe, the rivals to her own. Darrien is as bad as they come, and wants to make her his in more ways than one while overthrowing her clan. And then there's Rone, her brother's best friend, the man who has her heart.

While Ilyenna is, in many ways, a fantastic heroine (she's super-tough-- don't mess with her), the story as a whole didn't work for me. I know that this has a lot more to do with my own inability to get caught up by most fantasy (and fairy stories in particular) than it does with Argyle's story itself. That said, I found that I had to force myself to keep reading (books with a lot of world building are particularly hard for me), and then I kept getting confused with who the fairies were and who the clan guys were. But the main character is interesting and someone to be admired, and I'm sure that the right audience would enjoy Winter Queen.

Book Review: Replacing Gentry by Julie N. Ford

Title: Replacing Gentry
Author: Julie N. Ford
Enjoyment Rating: **
Source: Kindle
This book would be rated: PG

Marlie is a social worker with liberal ideas from California who travels to Nashville to visit a friend and finds herself in a whirlwind romance with Daniel Cannon, a state senator with political ambitions, twin sons, a dead wife, an overbearing family, and some creepy friends. Within days of their meeting, they're engaged (even though strange things keep happening to Marlie the whole time), and a year later, she has become Marlie Cannon.

Adjusting to life in Nashville isn't easy for Marlie. She keeps putting her foot in her mouth with her political statements. She feels pressure to live up to the standards set by her predecessor and raise her sons. And people all around her treat her like a pariah, well, except for the people who are trying to seduce her.

The book is strange. I like the descriptions of Nashville and of feeling like an outsider in the city (I've spent lots of time in Nashville, and feel like Ford captures the essence of the city), but the book is riddled with grammatical errors, typos, and clunky writing that shows a lack of editing. Furthermore, I wasn't sure if the novel was supposed to be supernatural or not, and I'm not 100% sure that the ending cleared things up. I think that with some good editing, this book could have been a lot better than it is, which is too bad because it has some exciting elements.

Book Review: Emma's Choice by Loretta Porter

Title: Emma's Choice
Author: Loretta Porter
Enjoyment Rating: **
Source: Kindle
This book would be rated: PG

In the opening pages of Emma's Choice, twenty-eight-year-old mom Emma shares a meal at a local restaurant with her husband and two small children. While she stays behind to pay the bill, the rest of the family heads to the car, and gets killed by a texting driver in the parking lot. Emma is, understandably, blindsided by the experience, and she copes by selling all of her belongings and taking off for England, where she gets a job, makes a few friends, and learns to recreate herself as someone who is no longer a wife and mother.

While the premise of Emma's Choice is interesting, I feel that the story itself fell short of expectations. My favorite part of the book is Emma's relationship with her twin brother. He watches out for her over the year that the story unfolds, and their relationship felt real and believable. What didn't feel believable was that Emma would react to the death of her entire family by throwing everything away and taking off for England, or that her friends and family would think this was an acceptable way to behave. I was also bugged by the fact that when Emma does arrive in England, there are immediately two guys Amir and Will, who follow her around like puppy dogs and do her bidding. It's obvious that both guys are totally into her, and I'm not sure if this is the "choice" that is alluded to in the title. I wanted to see a grieving process without so much rebound involved.