Tag: goodreads

What You Want To See

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Rating: ⭐⭐⭐⭐
Author: Kristen Lepionka
Genres: Mystery, Thriller
Pub Date: May 2018 (read May 2018)

Okay, so DO NOT read the synopsis of this book! Fortunately I did not read the synopsis because I loved the first book in this series and knew I wanted to read this anyways (and because I hate having even one thing ruined by the synopsis). But I was just reading through some other reviews of this book and one mentioned that the synopsis ruins almost the entire plot of the book and when I went back and read it, I actually couldn’t believe how much the synopsis steals away from the reader! Shame on you publisher/whoever writes these things!

Anyways, Roxane Weary and Kristen Lepionka are fabulous and that’s pretty much all you need to know. Ignore the synopsis and pick up a copy of her first book The Last Place You Look, because it is great! I was not disappointed with this book either.

Roxane Weary is a bi-sexual private investigator who is struggling to move on with her life after the death of her father on the job as a police officer. She had a complicated relationship with her Dad, which later developed into a complicated relationship with her Dad’s partner and her ex-girlfriend. She mostly just tails adulterous spouses, but when her most recent tail, Marin Strasser, is shot on the street, she can’t help but get dragged into the murder investigation that just doesn’t seem right to her. Despite warnings from the police force to mind her own business, she continues her investigation into Marin Strasser and her tangled web of acquaintances.

I really liked Roxane in the first book because she was complicated without being too cliche. She is a bit of an alcoholic, but she’s not really destructive and she knows her shortcomings. I became just as invested in her personal life as I was in her cases and I really liked how Lepionka grew her relationships in this novel and the development of some of the secondary characters. I was so done with Catherine after the last book and Lepionka somehow made me kind of like her in this book? Plus I loved that she kept Shelby in this story, which I was totally not expecting, and I think really added to the development of Roxane’s character.

This book had a strong mystery element too. I did kind of see the ending coming on the last book, but this book kept me totally mystified throughout. Lepionka actually answers several questions for us early in the second half of the novel, which is surprising in a mystery novel, but she still leaves other questions unanswered to keep you intrigued while simultaneously escalating the drama in the story.

Kristen Lepionka is also fantastic at making you mad. You know the term ‘righteous anger’? That is what Lepionka is so good at making you feel. I was so enraged in the first book when the police threw Roxane in prison and basically ignored her and all her rights, and parts of this book were also rage inducing. I hate nothing more than when female characters are ignored or dismissed, and the author’s use of subtle sexism in both of her novels is so effective because it is so accurate and I can immediately relate with Roxane and her frustration because literally every woman has been ignored or dismissed or belittled at some point in her life.

To conclude, I really liked this and now I am just really sad that I will have to wait again for the next book. Book 3 already has a name on goodreads though!

Aristotle and Dante Discovers the Secrets of the Universe

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Rating: ⭐⭐⭐⭐
Author: Benjamin Alire Sàenz
Genres: Young Adult
Pub date: Feb. 2012 (read Apr. 2018)

Yay! I loved this!

I’ve been having a lot of success with YA lately. For awhile I thought I’d maybe finally outgrown the genre, but there’s still some really great contemporaries out there! This was the second book in my monthly challenge to read 3 award winning books. This was one of the soft spoken books that isn’t very plot driven, but develops some really beautiful characters.

Aristotle and Dante Discover the Secrets of the Universe is set in 1987 in El Paso, Texas. It’s summer and Ari, who has never been very good at making friends, is trying to pass away the time on his own when he meets Dante at the local pool. Dante seems to get a long with everyone and is well liked, but he’s never really been great at having friends either and the two boys strike up a friendship. Ari struggles to connect with people and is frustrated by his parents refusal to talk about his older brother who has been in prison for most of his life. Dante has a close relationship with his parents, but he struggles with his identity – who he is, what he loves, and what it means to be Mexican.

Like I said, it’s not a plot driven novel, although it does have some shocking plot elements that push the story forward. But ultimately it’s a coming of age story about friends, family, and identity. I love YA books that have a strong family element, especially one that built around understanding and love, rather than conflict and rebellion, which I’d say is probably more popular in YA. I love Ari and Dante’s parents in this book and the relationships that they all built with one another, how they developed and grew over the course of the book. In some ways it felt like a slow-build kind of book, but at the same time I found it hard to put down.

I don’t want to give any of the story away, I think it’s a good book to go into blind. I did and I really enjoyed the experience.

The Underground Railroad

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Rating: ⭐⭐.5
Author: Colson Whitehead
Genres: Historical Fiction, Re-imagined History
Pub Date: Aug. 2016 (read Apr. 2018)

This book is breaking my heart…. because I didn’t love it…. I didn’t even really like it.

I picked this for my April Challenge to read 3 award-winning books. This won the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award for fiction, so I had high hopes that I would enjoy this. It’s definitely a good book, I won’t debate that, but it’s just so unbelievably SLOW! It’s only 300 pages and it took me 2 and a half weeks to read. On average I read a book every 3 days, so this felt like the longest slog ever and I actually had to take a break in the middle to read my book club selection because I wasn’t going to finish this in time.

The Underground Railroad re-imagines the network of people and safehouses that helped black people to escape the south and slavery as an actual underground railroad. It’s an interesting concept, but personally I didn’t really think the railroad had any real impact on this story. Whitehead tells the story of Cora, a young slave in Georgia who after being beaten by her masters, decides to try and escape the cotton plantation where she’s lived her entire life. The plantation has a long and sorry history of slaves escaping the plantation, but they were always caught and returned to the plantation to be killed for trying to escape, except for Cora’s mother Mabel, who abandoned her when she was just a girl and was never re-captured.

Cora begins a journey through many states and is pursued by Ridgeway, a slave catcher who still can forget about Mabel, the one the got away, and is determined to catch Cora to right his past failings. She travels through several states and is witness to the kindness and hate of the people around her, sometimes catching a glimpse of like as a free-woman, and other times forced back into hiding as she continues towards her ultimate goal of escaping to the North.

This is an interesting story, as difficult as it sometimes was to read (content wise, which is sometimes disturbing). But I couldn’t get past the pace of the book and like I said, I thought the whole idea of the underground railroad fell flat. It serves to move our story around, but I didn’t actually find the concept that engaging. I would have liked to know more about the railroad and how it came to be – it was obviously built by slaves, like everything else in America at that time – but we don’t learn that much about it. I understand that this is part of the mystery, but I kind of wondered what the point was. Cora could have travelled between states hidden in the back of a cart and the story wouldn’t have really been any different.

There’s not very many high points in the story. The format was interesting, with Whitehead separating each chapter by a different state and separating the states with short chapters from the points of view of some of the minor characters. I had no idea what the point of the grave digger chapter was, but some of the other chapters were interesting. I was intrigued by Ridgeway’s character and found his and Cora’s relationship interesting.

Maybe I’m too dense for this book, but I just can’t get on board. I appreciate what Whitehead did with this book, but I’m not convinced it was worthy of all the awards. I wanted to love it, but it was just so slow and boring. It had some faster paced parts where I would finally get into the story, but then the chapter would end and everything would change up and be boring again. The story just had no momentum – a disappointing read.

Love, Hate & Other Filters

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Rating: ⭐⭐
Author: Samira Ahmed
Genres: Young Adult
Pub Date: Jan. 2018 (read Apr. 2018)

This was disappointing. I picked this from my library’s limited selection of audiobooks because I’ve been having a lot of success with Young Adult audiobook’s lately and I’ve been seeing some buzz about it.

To be honest, I didn’t even look at the synopsis, I just new it was about an Indian teenager who was into film. I didn’t like the Maya’s voice from the beginning and I found her such a whiny narrator to listen to. When I hit the 20% mark and this book was still just a surface level romance novel, I debated DNFing and went back to look at the synopsis. When I realized the main premise of this book was actually supposed to be about a terrorist attack and the struggles many Muslim people suffer to be accepted after any terrorist attack, I decided to stick it out.

I appreciate what Samira Ahmed was trying to do with this book. She addressed several different themes: the struggle of Indian daughters to breakaway from their parents expectations, the struggle of any teenager to pursue a career in something as unstable as the film industry, and the xenophobia and hate against Muslims and those who are “othered” in the United States. These are all great themes and I was interested in exploring the different ways people react in the aftermath of a tragedy and how some people let their hate overcome them, while others fight for those who are marginalized. But I thought the execution in this book was terrible.

Honestly, this was a romance novel with a brief look at some of the themes I’ve discussed above. It didn’t explore any of these themes in any great depth and I thought all of the characters emotions were very surface level. This book had more unyielding parents (I’ve read a lot of books of this nature lately), but the drama felt really forced and not authentic. In theory I understood that Maya’s parents were trying to protect their daughter in a world that is not very kind, but no one used any reason in this book (Maya included), except for her Aunt, and everyone felt extremely 1-dimensional. The main story was ultimately a romance and it wasn’t a very well written one. It was so cliche and I just couldn’t help rolling my eyes through the entire thing. This book just had so much more potential, but it got bogged down with a heavy romance and the author barely explored any of the complex themes she introduced into the story.

Even though this tacked something I haven’t seen addressed much in literature, I would not recommend this book. It was too poorly written and executed. Pick up I Am Not Your Perfect Mexican Daughter, The Nowhere Girls, or The Poet X instead.