Tag: book blog

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.”

Paper Girls, Volumes 1-6

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Rating: ⭐⭐⭐
Author: Brian K. Vaughan
Genres: Graphic Novel, Sci-fi
Pub. Date: Apr. 2016 (read Mar. 2022)

I don’t usually write reviews for comics, but I read the entire 6 volume series over 3 days, so I wanted to say a little something about the series as a whole. Paper Girls isn’t new, it’s been around long enough that the series was finished before I ever started reading it. It seems like a lot of people have read it because of Saga’s fame, but it doesn’t have as good reviews as Saga, so I was sitting on reading it for a long time. Ultimately, I decided to give it a go because I found the entire series at my local library and I’ve always thought the artwork for the series looked gorgeous!

I heard it was a bit confusing to read, but I didn’t find it that bad. Saga’s always been a bit confusing and jumped around from character to character, so while I didn’t know exactly what was happening in Paper Girls, it wasn’t as difficult to follow as I thought. Plus it was made easier by the fact that I really liked the 4 main characters. 

Paper Girls is about 4 girls from the 1980’s who accidentally get catapulted into a different year when time travellers infiltrate their town on Halloween. They’re sent to the future and spend the next 6 volumes hopping around through time trying to get back to their reality. They meet people from other worlds and even get to meet future versions of themselves. The only thing I didn’t quite grasp was how the whole time travel thing gets initiated in the first place, but it was a fun romp through space and time, so I was able to overlook it.
 
The characters are all around 12 years old I believe, which I thought was a bit young, but it has really strong stranger things vibes and I really liked the artwork and time period. I didn’t like the homophobic slurs that are written into the text, I know the authors were trying to make it indicative of the time period, but I don’t think it was necessary, nor did I really think if fit the character of the paper girls. 

My favourite volume was Volume 3 because I really liked Wari. There are a lot of other side characters that come and go throughout the series, but I wish there had been more consistency between some of these characters. For example, I liked that Wari returned and that we got several versions of Erin and Tiffany, I thought they were really strong. But then some of the other characters seem to only be there briefly and I’m not sure they added a lot to the text. I’m struggling to remember all their names now, but thinking of the old woman (Charlotte?), the Prioress, and the other character on the front of Volume 5 (is it implied that this character is a future version of Mac? because that was never clear to me, but would make her inclusion more important). Otherwise I didn’t think any of these characters really added much.

Anyways, it’s a weird series of course, but I did like it. It’s not a long read and worth it is you want something fun!

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.

People We Meet on Vacation

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Rating: ⭐⭐⭐⭐
Author: Emily Henry
Genres: Fiction, Romance
Pub. Date: May 2021 (read Mar. 2022)

So many people told me to read Beach Read, but I just had a feeling this was the one for me. I’m still planning to read Beach Read, but after a slew of enemies to lovers books recently, I really wanted to read one about friends to lovers because I had a sneaking suspicion I would really like it. And I did!

This book is a lot more subtle than some of the other romances I’ve read, but it’s the one that felt the most real to me. Poppy was a more relatable character – as sexy as the enemies to lovers trope was in books like The Love Hypothesis and The Spanish Love Deception (and as compelling as those plots were) – I do really think this is the better book. Every person I’ve ever loved has been my friend first and there’s something so lovely reading about two people that genuinely like each other. 

People We Meet on Vacation is about two friends, Alex and Poppy, and their relationship over the past 12 years. They’ve been friends for a long time and even though they live in different cities, they’ve always taken the time to travel together once a year… until something happens on their most recent trip and they don’t talk for 2 years. Poppy realizes she misses Alex and invites him to take one more trip with her, to which he agrees.

This book is subtle and I liked that about it. It’s not as quick paced as some of the other romance books I’ve read because the present day storyline is constantly interrupted to return to one of their past trips. This slowed the pacing down initially, but as you progress further into the book, you realize this friendship is not quite the relationship you thought it was. There is just as much romance in the development of their friendship, because it never really is just a friendship. Just-friends don’t bring this kind of complicated conflict into your other relationships and you can’t help but root for these two people to be together. 

I say this is a subtle book because it is also very much about loneliness and allowing people the space to say and be who they really are. Poppy and Alex recognize that love isn’t always the most important part in a relationship. Relationships are also about making the space for your partner to communicate their needs and being willing to compromise on your life together. That two individuals still need to take the time to work on their own shit before they can be what the other person needs. I felt like this had a lot more maturity and that they had the kind of solid foundation that a successful relationship would be built on.

I also liked that both characters were well developed and flawed. I really think Alex is one of the strongest love interests. To talk about romance we must acknowledge that they are primarily written by women, for women, and so the men are often a bit more fantasy than most of the men I’ve met in real life. We read romance for the escapism of it – because we are human and we want to read emotional stories about people falling in love. But so many of the men are almost so perfect in their love for the protagonist they become caricatures. Alex felt very real, like someone I could honestly fall in love with myself. He’s quiet and a bit weird. He has anxieties and he’s afraid to put himself out there. He knows what he wants, but isn’t quite sure he deserves it and recognizes the ways in which he’s not willing to compromise. 

Likewise, Poppy is chasing after something she thinks she wants without realizing that it’s really that she’s running away from something instead. We’re sold this ideal and she thinks filling her life with travel and new people will make her happy – that it will compensate for the inadequacies she felt when she was younger. We all like to think our bullies go on to make nothing of themselves, but they are just flawed people too and we are only holding ourselves back by trying to prove ourselves to them later. If you make decisions based on the way you are perceived by someone else, you are still not living for yourself. Was it unrealistic that two friends could be so blind for so long? Maybe, but these two people wanted such drastically different things that I could believe it. 

It’s also a subtly sad book that made me reflect a lot. I really wasn’t sure if we were going to get a happy ending or not. I wish the author had dedicated a bit more time to the ending because she introduced several new themes in the last 50 pages about self care and compromise, that I really would have loved to see explored further. So overall I really liked this book, perhaps even more than The Love Hypothesis. I did rate that one higher because it was so compelling and I couldn’t put it down, but I do think this is the better story. The other books I read were that fun, all-consuming love, this was gentler, but it also felt a lot more real. It’s nice to get swept up in a love story, but it’s also nice to sink into one, and that’s what I feel like I did with this one.  

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.