Written from the perspective of a young girl born to a Danish mother and deployed American serviceman, the story unfolds as the narrator lands in Portland, Oregon, in the 1980s to live with her father's mother and sister.  So much nuance here as she discovers what it means to be Black in the US, first living with her parents in Chicago and then living in Portland.  From the beginning, it is obvious that she has experienced a trauma. Her mother is dead, her father is absent, and she spent a long stint in the hospital. 

As the story unfolds, we learn snippets of her past, as she grows up an outsider living with her grandmother, not Black enough or white enough, her quest to find her place is a beautiful coming of age story and neatly demonstrates how little trauma was understood in the 80's.

​recommend.
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This YA coming of age book was a surprise hit with me. Set in Brooklyn, it is a raw coming of age story that demonstrates the complexity of urban violence in the lives of teens.  Sneaking out with friends to a party you aren't old enough to go to, spats and disagreements with friends, and intricate family dynamics transcend the time and place of the setting and the overlay of how the character with Tourette's Syndrome is treated by others add compelling depth.  That he takes up knitting to manage his ticks was a favorite plot point for this long-time knitting advocate.  The scene where his brother tries to steal yarn for him at the fancy yarn store was heartwarming and heartbreaking all at the same time--which is always one of my favorite book moments.

​Recommend. 

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This is a sequel to My Name is Lucy Burton, which I read as part of my 2017 reading challenge. That was a year when I had categories of books that I was reading from and I can't remember which category this fulfilled.  I had trouble finding books to fill those lists the few years that I did that and started asking for recommendations, which is how I ended up ditching that list and just taking recommendations for my yearly booklist. 
In any event, I did not write reviews back then, so I decided to reread My Name Is Lucy Barton after reading the first chapter of this book in order to remember the backstory.  In retrospect, this wasn't necessary to appreciate this story, but it did help connect many of the relationships in the book.
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And there are a lot of relationships in this book.  There are a ton of characters and the history between them is complicated. I often felt like I do when I visit friends in a close-knit community or try to join a new group of people who have been tight for a long time.  There are all these backstories that touch on each other and it is hard to keep up with how they all touch on each other.  This makes the details of the book hard to keep track of and sometimes I would be well into a new storyline before I realized these were the same people from another storyline. In many ways, this is the magic of this series. It really makes you feel what Lucy Barton's small town life with judgy, hurtful people was like--and not just for her.  Those who bullied her, those who were indifferent to her, and those who saw and helped her in big and small ways are all portrayed sometimes in sympathetic ways, sometimes not, and most often in both ways at the same time. 

There is so much depth here, so much hurt. Child sex abuse and sexual assault play prominent roles as they play out in families and relationships in ways that fill in the backstory for many characters. It is the story of kids who were bullied and kids who did the bullying and kids who were both bullied and did the bullying and how this plays out in their adult lives.  The emotion of childhood trauma, indeed sometimes of torture, is on painful display here--told with a perspective that conveys deep empathy for the damage done and the damage done to the people caused the damage.  It is heart-wrenching the whole way.

Recommend.

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Louise Erdrich does not disappoint in this sweet novel about a book lover with complex relationships, searching for family, while being haunted by her past and the past of others. It is complex, but I was easily drawn into the layers of stories.

And what booklover does love a book that talks about books and drops the names of titles like they are celebrities? Set in a bookstore to a large extend, I particularly loved that this was perhaps the first novel to incorporate the pandemic into its storyline and it was done exquisitely, with such emotional detail. 
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I just really loved this story.

Highly recommend.

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Set mostly in Edinburgh, this is a layered book with a multi-generational story that unfolds when the mental health facility where Esme has been living for decades is being closed.  Her great-niece, who was oblivious to her existence, is the next-of-kin contacted and the story to understand Esme's -- and by extension the whole family's--life history unfolds.  With themes addressing intergenerational family dysfunction and the control of rebellious women, I found the book engaging and charming.

Recommend.
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I have to say that I love a good story about friendship and this is a good story about friendships.  Two women at a point in life where they are each struggling with academic careers and family, grief and loneliness, their unlikely meeting becomes the backdrop for this sweet novel.  For me, the added bonus of being set in Oregon and Seattle adds a fun local flavor to the story. There are several subplots, including addiction and recovery and parenting a child with autism in the 1990's. 

The entire book is told in the context of bird facts. One of the women is an ornithologist, so her love of and connection to birds provide metaphors for human relationships, which I initially found gimmicky, but it grew on me as the plot of the story unfolded to be more complex than it initially seemed. Ultimately, I think it worked, particularly as birds were generally woven into the storyline in multiple ways.  It reminded me a bit of The Overstory in this way, but unlike that book where I felt like I just didn't like and appreciate trees enough to love the book, I didn't feel like my lack of love and appreciation for birds mattered.

I thought the writing here was well done and the story was well plotted, with lots of backstory overfolding in ways that did not distract from the current timeline.  I particularly loved how the flawed characters were presented with so much compassion, particularly around the topic of alcoholism.  

Recommend.

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I will preface this by saying that I am not a fan of horror, either in books or movies, but part of this project is that I read and finish every book and in this case, even though the bottom line is going to be a Not Recommended label, I have to say that I thought and talked about this book a remarkable amount for not recommending it to anyone. 

This book is about truly awful, abusive mothers with borderline personality disorders who torture and haunt their children, even after their death.  The lack of clarity about whether the haunting is real or a shared delusion as a result of the trauma these mothers inflicted on their children, step-children, and children-in-law, is truly horrifying and the book in general was, indeed, horrific. 

That said, the ending was so clever and the cleverness of the ending only adding to the horror of the story.  Although it is a full book, it had the pacing and feel more in line with that of a short story, including the way the ending of the story lands with the slow realization of what is happening having the feel of The Gift of the Magi or The Lottery. 

If you are a fan of horror, then this may very well be for you, but I can't really recommend it otherwise. I did give serious thought to a Not Not Recommendation, but ultimately decided that it really was just too disturbing for that.

Not recommended.

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This is a series of essays written loosely written around the concept of her experiences with her body, exploring disability, cancer, pregnancy, mothering, and autonomy. There is a lot to like here. Her discussion of using a wheelchair as a child and how this impacted her relationships with peers and others was insightful and provided a unique perspective.  The author is Irish, which put her discussion about choice and control over reproductive decisions in the context of the 12 women a day who, on average, left Ireland to terminate a pregnancy until abortion was finally legalized in 2019. This part of the book I found particularly interesting and covered topics that are not typically part of the American dialogue.

I found the first essays to be the best, with some of the later ones becoming a somewhat repetitive, which is I think a common flaw in essay collections that I wish editors would deal with before they release a compilation like this.  I would have recommended the book, but this dwindling of quality by the end had me finishing the book with much less enthusiasm than I had up until the somewhere in the middle and also a little bored.
Not not recommended. 

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I really enjoyed Beyond the Cerulian Sea and so I was disappointed that I did not love this book.  I really don't like being spoon fed morality in my novels and this one left nothing up to interpretation.  The metaphors and symbology were just too obvious and the pionts felt like they were being rammed down my throat at some points.  I obviously think that having trans representation in fiction is important and powerful, but my underlying take away from this book was that only magical beings (read Queer) can take care of magical kids and magical beings can only depend and trust magical beings. I can understand where this mentality comes from, but I just think that there is a lot more nuance than what this books allows for.  I found it pretty depressing, rather than inspiring, and a letdown.  The first book took quite a while to grow on me, but once it did, I was all in.  This one had the benefit of my coming in really excited for it and just progressively getting more and more let down as it went on.

Do not recommend.

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I somehow missed that there was not just one, but two new Hunger Games books and a new movie since I last visited this series.  What a treat it is to read a series where the books hold up on their own and don't invite a cliffhanger so you have to get the next book to feel a sense of closure.  Both of these books, which are prequels to the original trilogy, were really well down and worth reading.  I love that we aren't spoon fed the analogies to modern politics, but the complexity of the relevance is nevertheless there.  

Highly recommend both of these.

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