In the genre of self-improvement books, this one is better than most.  Written by a woman who miraculously recovered from cancer after a well-documented near-death experience, she tries very hard not to blame people who don’t recover, even though the entire premise of the book is that you can heal your body by shifting your focus from being egocentric to seeing yourself as being part of the universe.  Perhaps if this is the first such book you have read, the concepts might be new and interesting, but I didn’t really take much away from it and I still felt like she was judgmental of people who die from diseases that in theory can be cured by reducing the stress in one's life.  I just don’t know that I believe this ability to separate oneself from the hard parts of life to be the key to a better life or community.  To me, it feels judgey and a bit narcissistic.  
Not recommended.

A bridal industry retail employee reconnects with her first kiss when he shows up at her work with his fiancé to pick out invitations to his wedding.  It will come as no surprise that he is also a wealthy, hot businessman who is being taken advantage of by his bride-to-be.  Nothing to see here.
Not recommended.

This magical fantasy novel by the wildly popular Nigerian-American author, Nnedi Okorafor, is the second of third of their books that I have read and not loved.  The plotting is complicated, which I often love, but I have never left zASsfeeling like I understood the magic parts of the book.  For sure, she develops a fantasy world with some intriguing characters and tells a good story, but I came away from this one, too, with a sense that I was missing something in the story itself.  Even given that many of the themes resonated with me, I was not able to immerse myself in the world she created.  This also meant that I wasn’t able to predict anything that was coming, which isn’t inherently a bad thing, it just made me feel like the story telling style left too many secrets unanswered.  It makes it feel unbelievable and choppy when this happens and like I have gotten left behind in the telling.
Not recommended.

​This is like a Halmark Christmas movie in a book, except there is no Christmas.  It is the high powered business woman, traveling for work, falls for the guy, but she's in Boston and she lives in California.  Just no.  Not recommended.

This is an historical fiction about a matriarchal community in Korea where some of the women are free divers, holding their breathe in very cold waters to bring up food for their families and to sell.  It chronicles several generations through various historical events, including being caught up in a war they did not care about.  The storyline is really interesting. Especially since I knew nothing about this community or the history of the area.  I read a translated version, since it was written in Korean.  I want to think that when read in Korean that the writing was better because in the English version, I found the writing wanting, particularly in the lack of nuanced vocabulary.  Often, I suspected that the original probably had more to say than the simplified English I was reading.  It also includes graphic description of violence that were particularly brutal to read.  Other than that, I liked this book and recommend it based on plot, not prose.
Recommend

This is another huge novel over 800 pages and almost 30 hours of listening.  It was not what I was expecting with the title.  It turned out to be my favorite genre of book--the intergenerational story, although this is not told in a sequential timeline, making it sometimes hard to piece together. It was like a feminist, modern Roots, with rich character development.  Of course, no story of Black women in the States can be free of the brutality of sexual assault in the context of slavery and its legacy.  Men's experience of slavery, both Black and white are depicted in its rawness, too, but more as experienced vicariously through the eyes of the women characters who lived with these experiences indirectly.  So much of this book is phenomenal.  Its depictions of racism and misogyny were interwoven into the narrative without pause.  The lasting effects of child sex abuse and the complexity of its impact on family dynamics is expertly portrayed here, as is the narratives around how those unresolved traumas play out in different ways from addiction to over-achievement. 

There were sections that I felt could have been skipped or edited to be more concise since there were parts where I lost track of the story and even when I went back and situated it felt like it wasn't so much that I wasn't following it so much as that it was extraneous.  But even with this fault, it is well worth the read.

Recommend.

Part of the free series, I thought I would try a second one, but actually enjoyed this one less than the Muffin Top one I just finished.  I don't know what it is about these books that are off, except that they feel so formulaic and predictible.

​Not recommended.

Yet another fake-date to fill-in-the-blank-event story, which is just so overdone and this one, while it had some fun moments and wasn't not entertaining, just really did not bring anything new or particularly fun to the table.

​Not recommended.