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.

Now, this is a well crafted novel.  The plot, the characters, the writing...it has it all.  Breadcrumbs laid out at the beginning are revisited at the end, characters grow and change and remain flawed, and things happen in unpredictable, but plausible ways.  The side quests, the small moments of interactions between characters, and the way it all comes back together in soft, satisfying ending just really struck a chord with me.  

I love a story about friendship and this is a great story about complex friendships. Childhoods steeped in pain, each for a different reason, lived side-by-side in the same town, isolated from each other and yet right there together.  I found it so powerful.  

​Recommend.

It would be hard for this book to contain a more stereotypical gay uncle character who ends up the primary caregiver for children without significantly altering his lifestyle  It might have been over-the-top in places, but it was so celebratory of the Guncle's relationship with the children, the way he stepped in to care for them in his own unique, non-traditional way while they were all three grieving the loss of the children's mother that it feels ridiculous to criticize the use of the trope.  I found once I let myself let go of rolling my eyes at the things like wearing the kaftan, having cocktails in the afternoon, the throuple next door, and so on and let myself just enjoy the story of a quirky relative who steps in to care for children in need, I did in fact just enjoy it.  Set against the background of traumatic grief over the death of loved ones, it really is just a sweet story of an unusual family doing what needs to be done to meet the needs of kids. Despite the background, it is mostly funny and light.

​Recommend.

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.

In child abuse prevention work, we often talk about how important it is to teach children that they should not keep secrets. We distinguish between secrets and surprises.  Secrets eat away at you and causes harm, but surprises re something that you share when the time is right, like a birthday gift.  This book really explores how family secrets can tear families apart, ruin relationships, and ruin lives while at the same time recognizing that sometimes big secrets might need to be kept to keep people safe. In a climate where being trans (or an undocumented immigrant or having had an abortion or being a survivor of child sex abuse, for example) can be dangerous, more and more people are keep things secret in a way that was more common in the 1980's and earlier.

The book is about a family with a trans daughter in a town where they decide that isn't safe.  They relocate as a family and decide she is going to be stealth, not telling anyone she is trans and living life as if she was cis-gender, as if she had been identified female at birth.  The entire family is tasked with keeping this secret, including that daughter without fully thinking through the implications of how that would play out, even in a progressive city.  

As a young adult book, it is a decent read.  The ending is both not really an ending, but also too neatly tied things up in a way that seemed both unsatisfying while also too being too clean.  I am not sure how to explain that better, other than to say it left me unimpressed.  

I will say that while there were a variety of things here that fell a bit flat, there are so few narratives about trans kids, particularly in the context of supportive families navigating really tough issues and particularly in stories without a traumatic ending for the trans character, that I am going to give this a soft recommend.

​Recommend.

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.

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.

For the first half of this book, I was entirely unimpressed with the book. I did not like the characters. I was horrified by the whole premise where the addict kills his kid when he drives drunk on morning. I hated how the author played with emotion, making me simultaneously hate the guy, but also eel so sorry for him and his situation.  The relationship with his wife, his mother, his father, and his mother-in-law, all portrayed with raw pain and in the first act, this just felt like a poor attempt to manipulate the reader.

But, about half-way through the book, everything shifted for me. I had no idea what was coming, so I didn't know what I was getting into.  I think is is probably why I ended really liking this book a lot.  I want to preserve that for you if you are going to read it, so spoiler alerts ahead here...

SPOILER ALERT!!!!!!


This is essentially a book about the need for prison reform.  It is absolutely heartbreaking to experience the incarceration of an addict whose trauma is killing him.  The brutality of prison, the lack of services, the sexual abuse, the psychological torture, all of it was raw and complicated.  This unlikeable guy, who killed his kid, who lied to his wife, who is passive aggressive and narcissistic, and who lacks significant insight into his psyche doesn't deserve what happens to him in prison--no one would.  There are moments of joy and connection, but those are outweighed by layers and layers of pain, bad luck that just compounds and is heartbreaking -- up to the end when COVID hits the prison.  

END SPOILER ALERT??

Sad from start to finish, this is worth reading for the thought-provoking analysis of the criminal responsibility in an era of retribution.

​Recommend.

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