Having the information in this book probably makes it worth reading.  The writing is rough.  Much of the book feels like a 5 paragraph essay, where there is a vague opening paragraph that tells us what the essay is going to tell us, then spends three paragraphs with introductory sentences giving an overview of the forthcoming paragraph, and then a paragraph summing up what has been told to you.  It is unfortunate that this format means the material in the book has been made into a book instead of into a long essay.  So much of the book should just have been cut.  I was so bored as paragraphs, maybe chapters, were spent telling us that we should came about indigenous folks from Central and South America without telling us why or giving us the details of the ways in which they have been oppressed and excluded.  The points in the book where we finally got to the details of these things were really interesting.  But getting there was so painfully slow going that what I really want is for everyone to spend time learning about the topic, but in a different, more efficient format.

Not not recommended.

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 started off as a pretty typical adoption story memoir about inter-racial adoption in the PNW, but turned into a really compelling story of family, love, and what-could-have-been.  Instead of a tidy tale about how the early 80's white adoptive parents didn't appreciate how racist small town Southern Oregon was and how they didn't address her cultural heritage, we got something quite different. I wrongly anticipated this was going to be a Holt International-type fraud case that I have read quite a bit around.  I was so surprised to find that while the first part read that way, that is not where the story went at all.  Even the first part, which was almost a stand alone story of childhood longing to belong, was way above average in terms of writing and I found it neither trite, nor self-absorbed. Her compassion for her adoptive parents is evident and complicate and was really moved by the nuance of that relationship--even in the first part of the book.
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As the progresses and she explores connection with her birth family, the story is not what she--nor the reader-- expect. It is both simpler and more complicated, but the ultimate question about whether she was "better off" having been adopted out is never presented as an easy one. The relationships with the birth family unfold in much the same way as the rest of her relationships, with depth and emotional layers that are so often left out of memoirs like this that have an agenda they want to develop.

Recommend.

 YA romance at its absolute best, I can image that I would have loved this book even more if I was a foodie, too.  As it was, it was just a lovely, light read about two young gay guys in, the unlikeliest of romance novel settings, St. Louis.  An oenophile and a epicure from different backgrounds, questioning their life choices and their ties to family, while falling for each other.  For lack of a better term, the book is like the chef's kiss of summer beach reading.

Reading this on the heels of The True True Story of Raja The Gullible, I think I appreciated the sweetness of this book even more. The Iranian experience of Queerness in the 1960-80's in Iran as opposed to the Iranian-American experience of Queerness in the 2020's is jarring and reminded me just how much progress has been made and how much of it we have still been able to hold on to.

​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 am on a roll of just really good reads and this one was just no exception.  Where the book starts is absolutely not where the book ends up and I did not see that coming!  The suspense!  The twists!  The unreliable narrator & all the unbelievable things that happen take buying a house in a tight market to a hold new level of competitive. I just don't even know why I liked it, but it definitely pulled me in and kept my attention. One of those train wrecks you can't look away from or stop reading about.  I don't even know what just happened there. And I should not have liked it so much.

Recommend.

One of the things like I love about is project is coming to a book with absolutely no expectations of what is to come.  At first, I did not realize this was a memoir at all and I didn't realize until I had finished it that it had been out for more than a decade before I read it.  The early part of the book in particular was written like my favorite type of intergenerational novel, where we look at family history and weave a story together from there.  Here, the author develops the story of the two sides of his family during WWII--this Japanese grandparents who are removed from Vancouver and sent to Alberta, losing everything they worked for and built during their time in BC and his Scottish grandfather who, at the same time, was fighting for Canada in Japan and who was ultimately a prisoner of war there.  This part of the book is excellent.  I particularly love how he does not shy away from the horrors of the Canadian government, not just in how they treated Japanese-Canadians and Canadians born to Japanese immigrants in Canada, but also in how they made decisions about young white Canadians fighting in the war.  It was a juxtaposition that we do not often see setup like this and I found it captivating.  

There are times in the book where I felt like a stronger editor could have been more aggressive with the delete key as the story slowed to more genealogical narration than storytelling for a bit, but just after I started to lose interest and couldn't track the minor characters being mentioned, the story jumped to the story of his own parents and his childhood, which was very different that the earlier part of the book. Here, the loss of his mother to addiction was painful in its descriptions of how that impacts a child and a family.  His struggle in his relationship with her could have benefitted from more forgiveness of his younger self and less blame for choices he made in those terrible circumstances when he was still quite young.  My heart ached to remind him that none of that was his fault and it wasn't his job to take care of her when she was drinking. For a book about forgiveness, I wished it had more of that theme in there.

The theme of forgiveness, though, is well played here as the grandchild of very different set of grandparents who were able to look beyond the racial conflict that ruined their young adult lives by a government that expelled them or sent them to war.  At the end of the book, the commentary on how you can hate what happened and wish it hadn't while at the same time understanding that the author is who is because of those decisions is reflected on at a time when he is working in government and finds himself in the very room where earlier prime ministers and advisors made the very decisions that led to those horrors with what appeared to be very little regard for the impact on his grandparents and the generations that followed.  

I am having a difficult time deciding if I recommend it or not, but only because of that one section that was just kind of boring. All in all, I think it is worth reading--when you get to that part, maybe just skim it or speed it up.

​Recommend.

PS. I am marking it as a war novel, even though it isn't, but this is because it is written about war in a way that feels like a novel, so folks that enjoy those stories are going to appreciate those parts, I think.

This is a collection of short stories about immigration to the US from India.  I didn't realize that they were entirely independent stories, so I kept waiting for the individual stories to come together in some way or to relate to the others in a more cohesive way, so the ending came as a complete surprise to me since that never happened. I found that a huge disappointment, perhaps because none of the stories have endings so the entire experience of writing this book left me feeling abandoned--like when a friend moves away, closes their Facebook, and you entirely lose touch with them.  For that reason, even though I enjoyed the stories and found the themes they explored to be thought-provoking, I would have liked it to come together in some nice tied up way. It is one of the things I love about books, that they have an ending.

​Not recommended.

​Spoiler alert: You cannot rape someone into not being vegetarian anymore and hitting someone struggling with mental health isn't going to cure them. The protagonists husband and father didn't get this memo and the fact that her entire family turns on her in an effort to force or trick her into eating meat was horrifying.  The story starts off strong, quickly taking a dark turn into abuse and control that illuminates how that extends to women's bodies.  The cultural pressures to conform depicted here in South Korea plays out differently in North America, but isn't entirely different at its core.
END SPOILER ALERT

This book stayed with long after I read it. It was hard to read and it was painful to reflect on.  In the end, I am recommending it, but with a strong note that I know it will not be for everyone.