This book really grew on it.  It started so slowly. The third or maybe fourth Iranian book this year, I found the initial development of backstory to be tedious.  But, somewhere along the way, I was gripped by the storytelling and really appreciated the way the characters grew into complex relationships that intertwined and made seemingly horrible people understandable. And of course all of the trauma caused by all of the things that happen during times of resistance and revolution and revolt.  I ended up really appreciating the story, the romances, the family dynamics, the politics, the heartaches, the life choices people make...really well written, well plotted, and well edited.

​Recommend.

This is an odd little read.  The concept of the book is really intriguing.  There are two stories and you can read either one first. If you have the paper version, you flip the book upside down to read the second story.  It is such a cool concept, especially when within the story there is a book that is a a dairy in the back behind a printed book.  

It is also a complex murder mystery with intergenerational secrets held by an erudite family. It is hard to keep up with the story and I lost track of some of the characters and plot strings.  Although the books are set 50 years apart, they are intricately linked together as the first book holds the key to solving the murder in both the first story and the second.  I do love a clever premise and I usually appreciate a really complicated storyline, but this one lost me one too many times, especially as I was trying to figure out how the two books went together. Maybe I just wasn't patient enough, but the constant games and unreliable narration definitely worn on my attention span.

Very clever, but not recommended.

If you liked Daisy Jones & The Six, you will probably love this book.  It is written in that same interview style, in this case for a documentary film about the main characters.  It feels a little choppy in the beginning as you get to know the characters and figure out who is telling which parts of the story, but once that clicked, I just could not stop reading. 

The foreshadowing was so suspenseful and just when you thought that everything was wrapping up, there was a whole new era in their lives to come--which is one thing I do like about audio books in particular: If you aren't watching the screen, you have no idea if you are 5 minutes or 5 hours from the end.  With a paper book, you always know how much farther you have to go.

I appreciated the flawed characters. Their abusive childhoods and drive to be elite athletes, even when the established sports organizations didn't want them or were only interested in exploiting them.  The relentless focus on winning, not just for the main characters, but for all of the athletes and coaches, and the complexity of their lives when the competition wasn't just on the ice.  I was so captivated by the motivations of the characters, but also their complexity.  No one was all good or all bad.  Everyone had depth.  

The plot itself was complicated enough to keep me focused, the writing was solid, but the character development was what I jut couldn't look away from. I love the unexpected, untraditional ending that felt way more in line with the developed story than a conventional love story epilogue.  

​Recommend.

A intergenerational tale of trauma and resilience, this is a book that I probably should have liked a lot more than I did.  From the healing midwife to the witch trial to the women who raised children alone without men to the women who helped women end unwanted pregnancies to institutionalization of spirited women, the story took every trope from this genre and spun it out as far as it could go and beyond.  I felt like I have just read so many variations of this same story and that this one didn't really have anything new to offer. I know it was written to try to get me to feel the empowerment of survival, but I just didn't feel that. I mostly felt the tedium, the exhaustion of intimate violence, handed down generation after generation against women who did not fit the feminine expectations.  I think the book tried to do too much and as such there wasn't enough character development.  I might have liked it better if it slowed down, maybe covering one generation per book and made it an extended series where each lifetime and personality was explored more in depth and with more detail. There was so much here, I sometimes lost track of the characters only to go back and realize that the person I couldn't remember was newly introduced without any clear indication that was happening.
​
​Not recommended.

particular the way that wealth leads to the abuse and trafficking of vulnerable women. 

​Recommend.

This tale builds an alternate reality that defies all rules of physics and common sense, setting a scene in which a parallel world exists of creatures who collect regretted decisions, turn them into birds and cage them. In that world, destiny is tattooed on a baby at birth and there is not free will or choice. It is fueled by the collection of regretted choices that people in this world don't want to or can't bear. They give away the memory of the choice in exchange for freedom from the weight of that choice.

Against this odd backdrop. the adventure is when the worlds collide and the characters explore what a life in which you did or didn't have choice would be like.  The fantasy of the story is quite odd as they jump through puddles that connect space and time, fly on origami cranes, and encounter zombie babies.  

I mostly did not find the fantasy world enthralling enough to overcome the too-obvious symbolism in the book and I didn't find the philosophical reflections about choice and destiny to be enough to overcome the lackluster worldbuilding.  For sure, there were lovely moments and some of the interpersonal relationship development was well done.  I can see how folks find this "enchanting," as the book cover suggests. I was just never really captivated by it.

​Not recommended.

This is a strange novel that is hard to classify.  It follows Raja and his mother for 50+ years following the many changes in Lebanon starting in the 1960's. Through times of prosperity and joy to war and devastation, Raja's life as a gay man is filled with times of love and light and some times of darkness and hatred, including extended scenes of sexual abuse. I really don't know what to make of the book overall.  Parts of it gave me a glimpse into a life and a time and a community I hadn't ever read about before, which I always really love in a book.  Part of it was bleak and full of family dysfunction.  The community bullying and othering reminds us how universal those themes are, across time and place and culture.  The sexual abuse was complicated, but explored consent in the context of captivity in a unique way.  The theme of things not always being as they seem from the outside is also well explored here in ways that I haven't developed well in other contexts. Huge bonus points for an ending in which a survivor just embraces his anger, refuses to feel guilty or not forgiving their abuser, and finding their own path of survival that doesn't take anyone else's opinion into account.

It isn't an easy or fast read and it is the opposite of light.  Even when it is openly funny, I find that humor to be harsh.  All of this leads me to a not not recommended, although I know I will be recommending it for some people.

​Not not recommended.

I just realized that I read so few spy novels that I don't even have a category for "spy novels" on this blog.  I do occasionally read them, but it is rare and when I do, I am rarely more than lukewarm on even the best ones.  But this one? I loved it.  Admittedly, I know very little about oligarchs and their lifestyles, about hedge funds and their managers, and about espionage in general, but not knowing much about a topic has never stopped me from finding a book bout that topic to feel unrealistic or overly convenient.  This book did not suffer from that.  What seems like it could have been an entirely implausible, conspiracy theory laden plot felt like a series of events unfolding in real time that felt plausible enough. Part of why this might have worked so well was the writing style that had my adrenaline pumping almost the entire time.  It was a ride and I was definitely there for it!  I lost sleep reading "just one more chapter" a couple of times and I loved that the plot was complex enough to make sure I was paying attention the whole time, while at the same time so well described that I didn't lose track of characters or nuance. 

This is a really great escape read, albeit to a life I don't want at all.

​Recommend. 

I really do not understand the cultural obsession with serial killers and I definitely shy away from books, movies, and shows with these themes.  So, I was surprised when this was recommended for me, especially after I ​started it and wondered what the allure was that led to the recommendation.  Turns out that it was actually a really interesting book, with way mor complexity than I was expecting. I really liked the characters--struggling with their own experiences not only of trauma, but also from the incredible systemic failures of institutions that don't listen to women and don't believe them when they do. Adding to this, the very real phenomena of people showing up that you think are going to help, but actually have their own agenda and just end up causing more harm in their pursuit of that was described here with heartbreaking detail and accuracy.  

It turned out that I ended up really liking this book.  The character development over years of story, moving both backwards and forwards in time during the telling was effective and I was really drawn into the unfolding narrative as it moved from a story that looked like it was going to be about a serial killer, but instead was about the women tangentially impacted by the violence and indifference of so many men in so many ways over the course of a lifetime--and ultimately a story of the friendship of resilient woman committed to exposing the truth about the crime itself, but also everything that happened in its wake.  

It was a great book to read on a trip when I had time to ruminate on the story when I wasn't reading and really sit with its emotional impact.

​Recommend.

For some reason, this 1995 book is having a comeback moment in the spotlight, as I have heard it discussed or referenced in a variety of contexts just before and after having read it, including multiple friends who just read it or have it on the TBR pile.  As a post-apocalypse novel, it is bleak even for the genre.  It was originally written in French so I don't know if the original was written this way, but the translation is stripped of pretty much all nuanced language, making it very harsh.  This plainness matches the tone of the story and the directness of the narrator, but makes the read unusually uncomfortable, independent of the topic.

And the plot is also a harsh landscape of incarceration and then a reflection of what it means to be freed from a jail only to find the world outside desolate.  Echoes of other stories of the end of humanity haunted my thoughts as I read this, while at the same time the world never felt borrowed from other works.  

I was left just so sad. The bleakness of the world rarely lifts. When it does, it is fleeting and it returns to the question or what it means to live ones own life without any expectations or pressures, but also with a sense of meaningful purpose beyond mere survival, alone during times when there there are other humans in your close space and when there is no one at all around.  

Introspective and thought-provoking, I think it is not not recommended just because it left me feeling so empty.  Don't read during a depressive episode.

​Not not recommended.