This is an odd, odd story. I just do not know what to make of it.  It is built like a post-apocalyptic narrative, but it isn't exactly that since civilization wasn't really destroyed in the way that one normally expects from that kind of world building.  Instead of the world being destroyed by technology, there is a vaguely referenced allusion to an uprising of robots who turn on the humans who created them and then [instead either non-existent or forgettable details] happens that causes robots and humans to live without contact with the other for many years.  This is the story of the robot who is sent to check in on the humans and the human the robot encounters.  What ensues is a philosophical reflection between the two of them about the meaning of life, the role of work in ones life, and the value of the  intimacy of friendship in a world that allows for complete solitude. It had the feel of two college freshman who have just taken Intro to Philosophy and are thinking through the classic philosophical reflections for the first time and are Very Into It. I didn't not like it. It was gentle and sweet, especially since it was set in a world that had this massive conflict and was entirely reshaped by that. Sometimes the optimism felt forced, or desperate even, like those first attempts to rebuild the world from the "I think therefore I am" premise.

​Overall, I think I put it in not not recommended.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Typically, I am not a big fan of stories told via a series of letters, so this book had a lot to over come and, small spoiler alert, it did not.  It started just really disjoined and boring and this went on for a really long time-- at least half the book.  I dutifully plugged along wondering what all the hype was about.  

And then, all of a sudden it got really interesting.  The unlikeable main character started to show some likeable qualities and I started to have some compassion for her. An aging attorney, losing her sight, she is a prolific writer of letters and emails to friends, family, acquaintances, and authors. The story unfolds as these letters are written, making it a one-sided narration. For most of the second half of the book, where we watch her explore her grief over the loss of her child, is heart wrenching and compelling.  The problem was that once she unloads the horrific secret she has been holding about that death, I was just unimpressed and found it someone misogynistic.  The book itself has a tread of distain for her commitment to her career, at the cost of being the kind of parent that society expected her to be.  That the ultimate conclusion of the book reinforced those stereotypes--that a working mother is inherently negligent and her children will suffer or even die because of that--just didn't sit right with me. I am surprised how many professional women are drawn to this book, but perhaps that is the internalized message we have all received that career women are terrible moms.  No thanks.

​Not recommended.