2018 book 127

Seanan McGuire's Night and Silence
For a while there, I had grown disenchanted with this series, which kept throwing curveballs instead of coming to any sort of conclusion. But now I am just leaning into it, which is good, because this twelfth volume of the Toby Daye series has curveballs galore (it also has way too many characters, so the plot occasionally screeches to a halt so there can be exposition about something that happened several books ago). Anyway, in this one, Toby's daughter has been kidnapped . . . again. And the usual band of misfits is on the case! As ever, the sea witch remains my favorite character, but the whole team is great (I at first typed “a lot of fun” but several of them are dealing with PTSD at this point so maybe not). B+.

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A review copy was provided by the publisher. This book will be released in September.

2018 book 126

Vanessa Hua's A River of Stars
Well, this was pretty GREAT. It's centered on a young Chinese woman, pregnant, whose married boyfriend sends her to the US to have their baby--and then she decides to find a new life for herself. I did have to keep putting this down because I was dreading all the bad things that COULD happen, but things progressed in a way I didn’t expect. I did find the very end a bit disappointing, but this is still a really engaging story about immigration and motherhood. B+.


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A review copy was provided by the publisher. This book is available now.

2018 book 125

Gail Carriger's Competence
After my last couple of reads, I was in the mood for something on the fluffier side, which this decidedly is. It's part of the Custard Protocol series, but instead of focusing on the girl from the first two, it centers more on her best friend Primrose, who I found much much more interesting (and adorable). Or maybe I was just more invested in the romantic plot here, seeing as it involves a WERELIONESS!!! Get it, girl! (Which applies to both of them, really.) Prim's twin brother gets more to do here and is more interesting as well, and I enjoyed the friendships between the three of them. This one was also funnier than its predecessors, particularly every scene that involves a fez. Anyway, I liked this a lot, it was very cute and fun, check it out if you like adventures on floating dirigibles and vampires and lady romances and found families. A/A-.

2018 book 124

Tana French's The Witch Elm
This is French's first stand-alone (outside her Dublin Murder Squad series) and it feels . . . unexpected. It’s the story of a man in his late 20s, a happy go lucky guy with a good job and a great girlfriend. Everything goes his way. Until a burglary in his apartment leaves him with a traumatic brain injury and other assorted issues, and he goes to live with his uncle who's dying of cancer, and a skull turns up in the garden. French builds up to all that, though. I will say that I did find the narrative voice very compelling, and the mystery was interesting enough, but a very ugly scene at the end felt out of place to me and kind of turned me off. I understand WHY it’s included, I suppose, but it didn’t work for me. It just left me feeling a bit disconcerted. I guess this is more of a psychological portrait than a straight mystery, and it is well written, but I don’t think I’ll be revisiting it. B+.

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A review copy was provided by the publisher. This book will be released in October.
Content warning for threats of sexual violence and a lot of other violence.

2018 book 123

Joanna Cannon's Three Things About Elsie 
I actually finished this last night on the plane, but still haven’t decided how I feel about it. It’s centered on an 80-something woman in an assisted living facility in England, who has fallen and is waiting to be rescued, and in the meantime is narrating her recent adventures—starting with the arrival of a new resident, who she’s convinced is someone who supposedly died in the 50s, using a false name for nefarious purposes. This is an interesting portrayal of dementia, and the parts from the POVs of two of the facility's staff round out the picture. And I like the little connections Cannon makes throughout the story. But I just found the ending to be a bit muddled, despite having guessed one aspect of it on page three. Not to say I wasn’t crying about it on an airplane (apologies to the teen girl next to me), and I didn’t need the story wrapped up in a bow, but I’m not sure it actually made sense. Still, pretty entertaining and touching stuff. B+.

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A review copy was provided by the publisher. This book is available now.

2018 book 122

Martha Wells' Exit Strategy
In the fourth (and final?) Murderbot novella, Murderbot has to go on a RESCUE MISSION!!!! Ugh, I love this series, Murderbot is such a great character and Wells does such a good job with the action and plotting. If you are someone who is maybe not into hard sci fi but like the Becky Chambers books, this is definitely a series to look into. I can’t wait to see what Wells does next. A/A-.

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A review copy was provided by the publisher. This book will be released in October.

2018 book 121

Becky Albertalli and Adam Silvera's What If It's Us
Aaaaaaahhh this was SO CUTE. It’s about two teen boys who meet-cute at a post office in NYC, with each author handling one boy's POV. Obviously I was all in on Albertalli's excitable musical theater nerd, but Silvera's more insecure and quiet guy (secretly writing an epic fantasy novel starring himself) won me over big-time too.  I am often not into YA romances because they are predictable and overwrought, but this avoids a lot of those traps, and even if it didn’t, the world needs more YA romances with queer kids. Race and class issues come up as well, and I also appreciated the way the authors depicted the characters' friendships. Super cute all around. A/A-.

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A review copy was provided by the publisher. This book will be released in October.

2018 book 120

Sara Gran's The Infinite Blacktop
A big YAY for a new book in Gran's Claire DeWitt series, about a troubled woman who is the world's best detective, with some eccentric methodology. (That makes this series sound quirky, but really it is dark and weird and wonderful.) In this one, someone is trying to kill Claire, and she has to figure out who, and why. This is interspersed with flashbacks to earlier in her career, when she is working on a cold case involving a dead artist, as well as flashbacks to her childhood as part of a group of Girl Detectives. I really hope Gran is planning more in this series, because I find it completely captivating. A.

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A review copy was provided by the publisher. This book will be released in September.

2018 book 119

Alice Hoffman's Practical Magic
The library finally added a ton of new e-books this week, but this book (and its new prequel) both became available from my holds as well, and I was in the mood for a story about witchy sisters. I was sure I had read this years ago, but can find no evidence that is true, and I'm not sure I've seen all of the movie either. Anyway, it wasn’t quite what I was expecting; I liked that most of it focused on the family relationships, but found the romances to be a little much. I wanted more witchiness though! Accept your destiny as witches! B.

2018 book 118

Busy Philipps' This Will Only Hurt a Little
I have read a lot of memoir/essay books by funny ladies, and often they do have very funny parts, but others fall flat on the page (I imagine the audiobooks are better). This one, however, was GREAT. I am a long-time fan of Philipps (and have been rewatching Cougar Town lately to boot) and her narrative voice here comes across as a very honest conversation (and is also very funny). It gets super real at times—I cried at least twice when she was talking about her very relatable and awful teen years. And all her showbiz stories are great and hilarious. Unsurprisingly, James Franco IS an asshole, and Michelle Williams is a sweetheart. I still have never seen Dawson's Creek but I loved hearing her talk about North Carolina! AND did you know she co-wrote Blades of Glory? Anyway. All those stories were great, but her writing style draws you in so much that you are viscerally angry when she is angry, and devastated when things don’t work out for her, and cheering when they do, even the smaller things. It’s really well done and I can’t wait to see her upcoming talk show. A/A-.

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A review copy was provided by the publisher. This book will be released in October.

2018 book 117

Thea Lim's An Ocean of Minutes
This was an extremely interesting and well-written book, but also it was a major bummer in a lot of ways. It centers on a young woman in 1981 who time travels to the future to save her boyfriend from a flu pandemic (too complicated to explain in a brief review), and he promises to find her when she arrives in 1993. Except she instead arrives in 1998, where she is basically an indentured servant to the corporation that sent her there. (If I didn’t already think capitalism was a corrupt system, this book would have convinced me very quickly.) This is all interspersed with flashbacks to her relationship. I wish there had been more to the ending sections—I think there was a bit more story there to tell—but I found the ruminations on the past to be effective.  Still, like I said, a lot,of this was a big ol' bummer, don’t buy the hype that this is the new Time Traveler's Wife (that book is a bummer in an entirely different way). Content warning for attempted rape. B/B+.

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A review copy was provided by the publisher. This book is available now.

2018 book 116

Emma Straub's Modern Lovers
It is always a joy to reread something for book club and have it still be totally great and engrossing, and this one was. I think Straub is an underrated author because her books are marketed kind of as beach reads, but her stories and characters are a lot less flimsy than that label implies. This novel centers on two families in Brooklyn and their interpersonal crises—teens and adults alike. There is also a lot of talk of the food scene, the music scene, movies, yoga, families, love, etc etc. I just loke this book a lot and think everyone should read it.

2018 book 115

Becky Chambers' Record of a Spaceborn Few
YAY, new Becky Chambers is here! The third book in her Wayfarers series focuses on a disparate cast of characters, all part of the Fleet that left Earth whenever it left Earth, who still live in their human enclave. They include Tessa, a working mom and sister of the captain from the first book; Isabel, an aging archivist (with a sassy wife! and an alien visitor!); Kip, a restless teenage boy; Sawyer, a frustratingly stupid twenty year old; and Eyas, a young woman who is the scifi equivalent of a funeral director. There are also dispatches from the aforementioned alien visitor. I had trouble keeping everything straight at first, but eventually I got into the swing of things, and really enjoyed this. It’s maybe not as cohesive a story as the first two—the characters do intersect here and there, but the overarching plot is more about family and home in a vaguer way. But like I said, I liked this a lot and definitely recommend it. A-.

2018 book 114

Jo Walton's Tooth and Claw
It's been long enough since I last read this that I didn't remember any of the details, which meant it was time for a reread. This is sort of your Victorian-esque story--inheritances, family squabbles, romance, lawsuits, lack of options for women, parsons, manners, etc--except all the characters are dragons! It’s all very entertaining, often very funny, and occasionally very sad. I like all the relationships between the siblings, though, and there are some good partnerships to root for. A-.

2018 book 113

Peng Shepherd's The Book of M
Well, here is a great concept AND gripping writing all in one. In this post-apocalyptic story, some sort of phenomenon is spreading across the world where people first lose their shadows, then their memories--and their confusion warps the world around them. The story focuses on a few characters--a man and his wife, holed up in a resort outside DC--and her shadow has just vanished. There's also a young Iranian woman in Boston, an Olympic-hopeful archer; and a man whose amnesia, caused by a car accident, pre-dates the current crisis. Parts of this are very tense and parts are very sad, but I was totally engrossed the entire time. A/A-.

2018 book 112

Caroline Stevermer's A College of Magics
This is one of those books I’ve seen recommended many times over the years, but for some reason had never read (even though I like the series Stevermer co-wrote with Patricia Wrede a lot). It was pretty good! It’s about a girl, technically the duchess of her home nation, but her uncle has been ruling in her place, and now he’s forcing her to go to a far-off magical boarding school (I will say the world building here is a bit odd—it’s like Europe exists, and Shakespeare and Marx, but there are some extra countries in there somewhere? It was distracting). Anyway, there is some good friendship stuff here, and some of the political and magical shenanigans were interesting, but I did think this dragged a bit, and I had mixed feelings about how things wrapped up. Solid book but I don’t know if I’ll revisit or read the sequel. B/B+.

2018 book 111

Victoria Goddard's Whiskeyjack
The third Greenwing and Dart book wraps up a lot of the ongoing storylines (but I feel,there is still more story to tell, and I’ll read it if the author writes more), with some great friendship stuff, great family stuff, magic, scholars, codes, poems, etc. I found these books to be really fun and pleasant reading, so if you are looking for something gentle, but not boring, give these a shot. A/A-.

2018 book 110

Carrie Vaughn's The Wild Dead
The second book in Vaughn's Bannerless series, about a woman who deals with crimes and disputes in a post-apocalyptic society, is maybe not quite as good as its predecessor, but is still very entertaining. In this one, she’s training a new young partner, and they’re sent to deal with a disputed over a rickety old house—when a body washes up on the shore and suddenly it’s a murder investigation. The mystery is pretty easy to figure out, but I like the characters and world building here so much that I didn’t even mind. More post-apocalyptic mysteries, please! A-.

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A review copy was provided by the publisher. This book will be released on July 17th.

2018 book 109

Victoria Goddard's Bee Sting Cake
The second book in Goddard's Greenwing and Dart series is more of the delightful same, as our protagonist has a visit from a university pal, gets involved in figuring out more of the town's magical mysteries, AND has dealings with a dragon and its riddle. There is some good action here, but mostly this is a funny and gentle series, and I like it very much. A/A-.

2018 book 108

Jasmine Guillory's The Proposal
Omg, how does Jasmine Guillory write the cutest, sweetest, most heartfelt, and funniest books! In this one, a woman is at the Dodgers game with her boyfriend—who proposes via Jumbotron. But they’ve only been dating a few months, it’s not serious, and he doesn’t even spell her name right! So of course she says no. Luckily doctor Carlos (a character from Guillory's previous book) is at the game with his sister and they pull off a rescue. And one thing leads to another and it is all super cute. I hope the author writes books about every single character in all of these books, because they are all so likable and fun. A/A-.

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A review copy was provided by the publisher. This book will be released in September.