Tag: 2022 publication

A Hundred Other Girls

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Rating: ⭐⭐⭐
Author: Iman Hariri-Kia
Genres: Fiction
Pub. Date: Jul. 26, 2022 (read Apr. 2022)

Thanks to Harper Collins and Netgalley for gifting me with an early e-copy of this book. I attended HCC Frenzy’s first adult fiction preview on upcoming new releases for summer 2022 and was stoked to receive an arc of A Hundred Other Girls, which was really hyped up.

It’s impossible to talk about A Hundred Other Girls without comparing it to The Devil Wears Prada. Granted, it’s been MANY years since I read The Devil Wears Prada, but the similarities are immediately obvious. A Hundred Other Girls is definitely a much more contemporary version of this classic and I loved that it features a Persian-American protagonist and displays all kinds of minority identities and relationships throughout the story.

Noora is an aspiring writer not long out of college who lives in New York and runs her own moderately successful lifestyle and culture blog. She wants to be a journalist and aspires to one day write meaningful think pieces for magazines, of which Vinyl is at the top of her list. She’s a bit down and out on luck and is currently sleeping on her sister’s couch to help make ends meet when she interviews for an executive assistant position with none other than the Editor-in-Chief of Vinyl, Loretta James.

As you can probably guess from the comparisons to The Devil Wears Prada, Noora lands the job and Loretta turns out to be a certifiable nightmare. Vinyl is currently in the midst of an internal war between the digital and print versions of the magazine and Noora’s job quickly becomes her entire life as she gets constantly dragged by Loretta, motivating her to get naively involved in the underground war taking place at Vinyl.

First off, I should state up front that I didn’t like The Devil Wears Prada, so I’m not sure why I was so motivated to read this one. I think it was mostly because of Noora and I wanted to experience New York through the eyes of a Persian-American protagonist. I wanted to love A Hundred Other Girls, but I have to admit that I didn’t. I feel like the author had all the right elements, but overall I thought the plot was just a bit basic. I wanted this to challenge my thinking and provide new perspectives, but I thought it was a bit oversimplified and not as revolutionary as I’d hoped.

Loretta was really the worst and I felt like the author kept trying to make us somehow empathize with her despite her terrible actions. I don’t care how much Loretta might have championed certain causes or impacted the print industry – she was an asshole and it’s never okay to rationalize treating people like shit. I understood why Noora kept working there (money and exposure), but I lamented for her mental health because being treated this way could not be worth it.

I will say that the author is a pretty good story teller. Despite being frustrated with the content, I did not struggle to read this book and was engaged throughout the entire story. The writing flows well and Noora is still a very relatable character. I just wanted more from it. I didn’t buy that Noora would get such a good reception after writing one think piece (that’s really just not how the world works) and I would have loved to be more engaged in the piece that she wrote.

I picked this book up because I wanted to understand the prejudice and micro-aggressions Noora had been working against her entire life. I would have loved for the writing of her think piece to be more central to the novel. To understand her own lived experiences and get insight into how she interviewed and developed the piece into something so meaningful. As a reader, it was hard for me to be impressed by her work without getting the opportunity to experience it. I understand the point the author was trying to make, but I feel like she only just scratched the surface of the issue and that body hair should have been a lot more central to the story if that’s the first piece that Noora decides to write.

I did like the ending of the book, I felt like it was a bit unconventional, but I was glad to see Noora stand up for herself. Like I said, I think all the elements were there, I just wanted the author to develop stronger themes. It was a compelling story, but I finished the book questioning what my key takeaways are supposed to be. But as always with a book like this, I want to acknowledge that this perspective may mean the world to someone else and that there is always value in telling diverse stories. I didn’t love it, but it’s a fresh take on a modern classic and I still liked it better than The Devil Wears Prada, so don’t be deterred from checking it out!

One Italian Summer

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Rating: ⭐⭐.5
Author: Rebecca Serle
Genres: Fiction, Romance
Pub. Date: Mar. 2022 (read Mar. 2022)

This book was a bit of a bummer for me. I’ve seen some really excellent (and some not so excellent) reviews, so I was a bit on the fence, but impulsively decided to give it a go. The book did improve throughout, but I knew almost as soon as I started reading it that I wasn’t going to love it.
 
One Italian Summer tells the story of 30 year old Katy Silver, who has just lost her mother to cancer and has in turn, lost a piece of herself. Her Mom was her best friend and she doesn’t know how to move on without her. The two women were supposed to take a trip to Positano, Italy together, a place that was special to her mother Carol, but unfortunately she passes away before the trip and Katy decides to go to Italy alone to try and heal her broken heart. However, while in Positano, something magical happens and the 30 year old version of Carol stumbles into Katy’s holiday, bringing truths to light that Katy never realized about her mother.

It’s a book about love and grief, so I was ready for an emotional and moving read, but sadly, the writing style just didn’t work for me. I don’t want to totally slam on the book because I can see how some people might love this, Serle definitely crafts a very vivid portrayal of Italy in her writing, but the style was so straight forward and matter of fact that I was left feeling like I was reading a dull travel diary rather than the emotional, grief-stricken self discovery story that I was hoping for.

To put it simply, the writing is boring. Everything about this was a classic example of telling instead of showing. It’s overwritten and I thought we got so many details that were just unnecessary. If you’re looking for a good detailed itinerary of what to do in Positano, this is great, but I wanted to go on an emotional journey with Katy and that just wasn’t happening. I found it extremely hard to relate with Katy and the whole narrative was a bit insufferable. Everything about Positano is incredibly beautiful, from the scenery, to the sunsets, to the food, to the luxury hotels – so it’s hard to empathize with a bunch of faux-sad white people living a dream holiday. We’re told about Katy’s grief, but we don’t really experience it. 

It also comes down to Katy being a pretty unlikeable character. There’s nothing wrong with a good unlikeable character, but Katy is not intentionally unlikeable. I believe we’re supposed to like and empathize with her, but it’s very hard because she seems totally unaware of her privilege and it’s hard to buy that a 30-year old woman would be this out of touch with reality. One of the key themes is centered around how Katy and Carol are best friends and Katy’s discovery that, surprise, her mother actually had a life before and outside of her. She’s shocked by this 30 year old version of her mother and spends so much time in awe of the ways in which her mother is both the same and different. I’m sorry, but what 30 year old woman is unable to imagine that their mother might have had a vibrant life before them? Plus I thought the whole my-mom-is-my-best-friend thing was a little tired.

A lot of women love their moms and would consider them a best friend. But come on, mother-daughter friendships are still going to be based on a totally different foundation than peer-to-peer friendships and I would it extremely unrelatable that Katy didn’t have ANY friends outside of her Mom and husband. She mentions one girlfriend in passing, but as far as I can tell, she has no other friends, so that’s probably why she’s so shocked to find out that her mother actually had a life before her. So mostly Katy just read as juvenile and bit dense to me.
 
The one thing I did like about this book though was the exploration of the erasure of women through motherhood. It’s something I’ve been thinking about a lot as more and more of my girlfriends have children. I’ve been noticing that some of my friends almost seem to disappear into motherhood. They’re still them, but all of their passions and interests have become secondary to that of being a mother. Their children become their number one priority and personality. I’m not saying it’s necessarily a bad thing, I just personally find it very scary because I have a lot of things that I’m passionate about and the idea of losing or having to give up those things in motherhood is one of the primary reasons I delay it. Some people are able to find a good balance between being a mom and being a woman with your own dreams, but it seems it’s easy for who are before being a mother to get lost in the chaos of parenthood.

What Katy is grappling with more than anything is the loss of who she thought she was and the fear of having to suddenly be her own person. Her mom was a comfort to her because then she never had to think too hard and her suddenly realizing that her mother had her own hopes and dreams is scary for her. The realization that our parents can want things for themselves beyond the hopes and dreams they have for us. I don’t fault children for this, but it’s hard to watch a grown woman suddenly figuring this out.

The other issue I had with this book was with the romance. I won’t get into it to avoid spoilers, but I thought it was an interesting choice to give a married woman a love interest. We’re told Katy and her mother are best friends, but we’re not shown it. Likewise, we’re told at the beginning of the novel that things aren’t really working out between Katy and her husband, but we’re not told why and we’re definitely not shown it either. We’re just told that she’s so depressed over the loss of her mother that she has no interest in any of her other relationships, which is really only her marriage because she has no other friends.

Anyways, the only other thing I’ll say is that the book has a bit of a twist, which I thought was well done. I really should have seen it coming, but I didn’t. Unfortunately, none of the positives were really enough to outweigh the negatives and I wouldn’t recommend this book. But if you like it and Rebecca Serle’s writing, then all the more power to you! It did have some very evocative descriptions of Italy, but the writing style along with Katy’s immaturity make it a pass from me.

Anticipated Reads for Spring 2022

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I’m a little bit late posting this – my Anticipated Reads for Winter 2022 covered new releases from January to March, so my goal for this post is to cover new releases from April to June. So some of these are already out, but there’s so many great new releases coming out this season that it’s a little overwhelming! Here’s some of the books I can’t wait to pick up – what’s on your list?

Fiction

People Person

Author: Candace Carty-Williams

Pub. Date: April 28

[Things get complicated when five people who don’t have anything in common are forced to reconnect with the absent father they never really knew]

Yerba Buena

Author: Nina LaCour

Pub. Date: May 31

“The debut adult novel by the bestselling and award-winning YA author Nina LaCour, following two women on a star-crossed journey toward each other”

Nightcrawling

Author: Leila Mottley

Pub. Date: June 7

“A dazzling novel about a young black woman who walks the streets of Oakland and stumbles headlong into the failure of its justice system–the debut of a blazingly original voice that “bursts at the seams of every page and swallows you whole”.”

Counterfeit

Author: Kirsten Chen

Pub. Date: June 7

“For fans of Hustlers and How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia, the story of two Asian American women who band together to grow a counterfeit handbag scheme into a global enterprise–an incisive and glittering blend of fashion, crime, and friendship.”

Historical Fiction

Memphis

Author: Tara M. Stringfellow

Pub. Date: April 5

“A spellbinding debut novel tracing three generations of a Southern Black family and one daughter’s discovery that she has the power to change her family’s legacy.”

Four Treasures of the Sky

Author: Jenny Tinghui Zhang

Pub. Date: April 5

“At once a literary tour de force and a groundbreaking work of historical fiction, Four Treasures of the Sky announces Jenny Tinghui Zhang as an indelible new voice. Steeped in untold history and Chinese folklore, this novel is a spellbinding feat.”

Take My Hand

Author: Dolen Perkins-Valdez

Pub. Date: April 12

“Inspired by true events that rocked the nation, a profoundly moving novel about a Black nurse in post-segregation Alabama who blows the whistle on a terrible wrong done to her patients, from the New York Times bestselling author of Wench.”

Last Summer on State Street

Author: Toya Wolfe

Pub. Date: June 7

“For fans of Jacqueline Woodson and Brit Bennett, a striking coming-of-age debut about friendship, community, and resilience, set in the housing projects of Chicago during one life-changing summer.”

Mystery/Thriller

Portrait of a Thief

Author: Grace D. Li

Pub. Date: April 5

“Ocean’s Eleven meets The Farewell in Portrait of a Thief, a lush, lyrical heist novel inspired by the true story of Chinese art vanishing from Western museums; about diaspora, the colonization of art, and the complexity of the Chinese American identity.”

In the Dark We Forget

Author: Sandra SG Wong

Pub. Date: June 21

“With jolting revelations and taut ambiguity, In the Dark We Forget vividly examines the complexities of family—and the lies we tell ourselves in order to survive.”

Romance

Book Lovers

Author: Emily Henry

Pub. Date: May 3

“One summer. Two rivals. A plot twist they didn’t see coming…If Nora knows she’s not an ideal heroine, Charlie knows he’s nobody’s hero, but as they are thrown together again and again, what they discover might just unravel the carefully crafted stories they’ve written about themselves.”

You Made a Fool of Death with Your Beauty

Author: Akwaeke Emezi

Pub. Date: May 24

“New York Times bestselling author and National Book Award finalist Akwaeke Emezi (they/them) reimagines the love story in this fresh and seductive novel about a young woman seeking joy while healing from loss.”

Other Genres

Time is a Mother

Author: Ocean Vuong

Pub. Date: April 5

“In this deeply intimate second poetry collection, Ocean Vuong searches for life among the aftershocks of his mother’s death, embodying the paradox of sitting within grief while being determined to survive beyond it.”

An Arrow to the Moon

Author: Emily X.R. Pan

Pub. Date: April 12

“Romeo and Juliet meets Chinese mythology in this magical novel by the New York Times bestselling author of The Astonishing Color of After.”

Finding Me

Author: Viola Davis

Pub. Date: April 26

“Finding Me is a deep reflection, a promise, and a love letter of sorts to self. My hope is that my story will inspire you to light up your own life with creative expression and rediscover who you were before the world put a label on you.”

A Year to the Day

Author: Robin Benway

Pub. Date: June 21

“National Book Award–winning author Robin Benway returns with an ambitious I’ll Give You the Sun meets Every Day story of love, loss, and sisterhood told in a reverse chronological narrative that will claim a permanent home in your heart.”

The Maid

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Rating: ⭐⭐.5
Author: Nita Prose
Genres: Mystery
Pub. Date: Jan. 2022 (read Mar. 2022)

The Maid was my Book Club’s pick for March. I admit I wasn’t super enthused for it because mysteries aren’t generally my favourite, but it had good early reviews, so I was intrigued. Unfortunately, very little about this book worked for me and it was not popular in our book club discussion.

The Maid tells the story of Molly Gray, a young 20-something woman raised by her grandmother and working at an upscale hotel as a maid. In her work, Molly mostly blends in with the shadows, but when she discovers one of the hotel guests dead in his bed, she is catapulted into the limelight and her awkward social demeanor makes her one of the prime suspects. 

Let’s start with talking about the writing style. It wasn’t my favourite, but it reminded me a bit of Eleanor Oliphant is Completely Fine, with less charm. It’s never stated outright, but Molly struggles with how to interact in social situations and I think the reader can assume she likely falls somewhere on the spectrum. Her grandmother played a large role in helping Molly navigate the world, but has recently passed, leaving Molly struggling both socially and financially. As the protagonist, I thought the writing style suited Molly’s voice, but sadly the characterization and storytelling were lacking. 

Molly grows a lot throughout the novel, learning about herself and others around her as several new people enter her life to help her through the police investigation. But while she supposedly grows as a person, her growth didn’t feel organic or natural to me. The entire story happens in the span of 5 days and was too neatly packaged for me to buy into it. Molly has struggled her entire life with social interactions and suddenly at the climax she has all these revelations about how other people react. I thought this to be super unlikely if she has struggled her whole life with reading people and I didn’t think it was a particularly good message, as if people on the spectrum can suddenly change the way they see and interpret the world.

But my biggest problem with the book is that the plot is just not very sophisticated. For a mystery novel, I found it to be incredibly boring. I wanted the mystery to be clever and have lots of twists and turns, but the author reveals almost everything to us upfront! It’s clear that there’s something sinister going on in the hotel, we don’t necessarily know who the murderer is, but we know who the key suspects at the hotel are, so it’s not a stretch to see where the story is going. Arguably there are a few twists towards the end of the book, but even these fell flat to me. So before I get into discussion about this in the spoiler part of my review, I’ll just say that I wouldn’t recommend this book because unfortunately it’s lacking in both plot and characterization. 

Okay, now for SPOILERS.
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What drove me nuts at the end is that this whole book is marketed and sold as a “closed door mystery novel” reminiscent of Agatha Christie. People love these kinds of books and it’s a great premise. So WHY IN THE WORLD is the murderer not someone from inside the hotel! It’s such a cop-out and just read like lazy writing to me. The author hands us Rodney and Giselle on a silver platter as suspects in the drug scheme at the very least, but even if they didn’t commit the murder, there were still lots of other suspects – from the hotel manager, to Cheryl, to Juan Manuel, to the other maids, and of course, even Molly. I was just flat out annoyed that the author decided to make the murderer someone from outside the hotel. It’s disappointing and it’s not clever. I could understand why Molly would want to protect Giselle (if she was the murderer), but I really don’t see why she would protect Ms. Black. She had no reason to keep this information secret.

Then there’s the unnecessary twist near the end where Mr. Preston appears to reveal that he is Molly’s grandfather?! It wasn’t totally clear to me if this was the case, but I don’t think it added much to the novel and it actually, if anything, made me more sad because it means Mr. Preston likely only ever wanted to help Molly because she was his granddaughter and not just because he happened to like her. Also the whole lawyer bailing Molly out of jail thing seemed super unlikely to me.

Finally, my friend at book club brought up an excellent point about the very end – why on earth was Charlotte questioning Molly on the stand? Molly was no longer a suspect, she was only a witness, so she would have been questioned by either the prosecution or the defense (for Rodney), neither of which Charlotte was likely to be representing. It’s a small detail, but it does highlight the lack of forethought that seems to have gone into the novel. I just didn’t think the plot was sophisticated enough. It was too easily resolved and the character growth too easily realized. It had the potential for a good story, but sadly, I just don’t think this author is there yet. 

So 2.5 stars from me – not a favourite, nor would I recommend.

Black Girls Must Be Magic

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Rating: ⭐⭐⭐
Author: Jayne Allen
Genres: Fiction
Pub. Date: Feb. 2022 (read Feb. 2022)
Series: Black Girls Must Be Exhausted #2

This is going to be a hard review to write. I was pleasantly surprised by Black Girls Must Die Exhausted last year and was really excited to rejoin Tabitha Walker for another book. I was immediately surprised by the length of this one though. BGMDE is considerably longer than BGMBM and I was concerned that some of the pacing issues from the first book would bleed into this one. Because this is a sequel, I really can’t talk about it without getting into spoilers, so I recommend checking out my review for BGMDE instead of this one if you haven’t already read it. Spoilers Below!
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The main thing I didn’t like about BGMDE was that it ended too quickly. The author ties up a lot of plot points very quickly that I thought would have made a great starter for BGMBM. But instead, Allen jumps ahead in this book in a way that I thought was pretty jarring. What I liked about Black Girls Must Die Exhausted is that it dealt with complex themes with no easy answers. Tabby has a limited period of time in which to have children, but because she doesn’t have a partner who is ready to have kids, she basically has to freeze her eggs at the expense of the down payment for her future home.

When we pick up with Black Girls Must be Magic, Tabby has decided that instead of freezing her eggs, she’s going to immediately implant them and do the whole single mother thing. It’s not stated directly, but she now has a house, so I guess we’re supposed to assume that she was able to save her down payment after all. I’m not American, so maybe her healthcare did cover an implant (and it’s stated that she had an embryo implanted, not insemination), but from what I understand, in vitro is just as expensive as freezing your eggs and housing in LA isn’t exactly cheap, so this whole premise didn’t make any sense to me and was potentially lacking in research, but I don’t honestly know enough about it, so I just had to suspend my disbelief and move on.

But what I didn’t like was that the author cut the reader out of this decision making process. The book is not long (only 270 pages), so why not start with this dilemma? Why have one of the biggest decisions Tabby has to make take place off-screen? It didn’t really make sense to me and it made the book feel a little bit less like a sequel. I didn’t think it was great for Tabby’s characterization as it removes one of the key conflicts from the narrative. It was an odd choice from a character and plot perspective.

Which is really my key complaint with this book. I thought the first one offered so much of both: relatable character and plot, it left me wondering what the author was really trying to accomplish with this book. Infertility is a challenging and heartbreaking problem for many people and I didn’t really like that we just brushed over its complexity. But I do think that a single woman choosing to become a single mother is a great plot to explore, so I was still excited to get into that, only to have that plotline go off the rails with that first twist early in the novel. Surprise! It’s actually Marc’s baby.

This changes the entire dynamic of the story and the key points I thought the author was trying to make about choosing motherhood on your own terms. I’d rather see Tabby trying to navigate the world of dating and motherhood as a single parent, with all the judgements and criticisms that comes along with that, than explore the more exhausted trope of surprise pregnancy and re-hash a romance that failed in the first book. It didn’t bother me that Marc was unlikeable, I actually thought that made him more real, I just feel like we’d already done this relationship drama once already and I wasn’t interested in reading it a second time.

So why is this a hard review to write when I’m pretty much just ragging on the whole book? Mostly it’s because I love how much time Allen dedicated to talking about Black hair. I know Allen didn’t write this book for me, but I want to try and do my best to understand the history and complexity that comes with black women’s hair and I thought that was such an important part of this story. I think for white people it’s easy to think of hair as a side story, like, “oh great, Allen is addressing the workplace and cultural double standard of hair”. But that’s the problem – it’s not a side story. Hair is an important piece of culture and identity and it is important for it to be given the gravitas it deserves. The thing that I think makes this series great is that being Black is not the main point of the story, but rather it’s a story with Black characters and everything that comes along with what that means. Last month was Black History Month and I saw a lot of promo about anti-racist, non-fiction, and historical reads – I think these are important – but I also think we need to be reading more authors like Jayne Allen, Candace Carty-Williams, and Brit Bennet, who are writing Black stories, not necessarily Black history. 

So while I don’t think that this was a great book in terms of structure, pacing, and characterization; it still matters because Allen is addressing something that we don’t see all that often in popular fiction. Maybe I didn’t love the love interest or some of the plot choices, but it’s important because it is a book about a successful Black woman, and that is a story I do want to read.