January 2, 2023
New From Here by Kelly Yang
New From Here is a fantastic realistic fiction novel written by the extremely talented Kelly Yang. The story is set primarily in San Francisco during spring 2020 when three Chinese-American siblings, Bowen, Knox and Lea, move from Hong Kong to the US amid the beginnings of the COVID19 pandemic. Check out my full review here
January 3, 2023
Even When Your Voice Shakes by Ruby Yayra Goka
This book tells the story of teenager, Amerley, the eldest of 4 siblings living in Ghana and trying to provide for her family. Her father has abandoned them and her mother is battling depression, causing Amerley to need to drop out of school, take in community alterations by hand, and constantly try to make ends meet for her family. When a distant relative makes an arrangement with her mother to help pay for school fees and living expenses for her sisters and pay for fashion school for Amerley, it is a hard deal to pass up. Amerley will have to move away for two years and work as a servant, after the two years is complete her tuition for fashion school will be paid in full and she will have the opportunity to make a living and provide for her family in the future. Amerley doesn't want to leave home and worries about both her family and leaving her boyfriend behind, but eventually agrees that it is what is best for everyone. Life isn't easy at the house she now lives and works at, but it isn't horrible either, at least at first. She and another servant begin altering clothes and Amerley is asked to help babysit another woman's baby part time so she is able to save up a bit of pocket change and buy her own sewing machine. The lady of the house, Rosina, and her children also give all of their unwanted clothes and other personal items to the servants, so Amerley is able to give her siblings and mom new clothes and other gifts. When she goes back to visit home her friends and family think she has changed, but Amerley feels the same as before she left, until a terrible incident occurs one evening that changes Amerley's life forever.
There are some difficult parts, especially later in the book surrounding rape and societies views of victims of rape. The main character, Amerley, explains the views from her village around rape, which include victim blaming. She said "In Teshie when someone got raped... they would say she should not have been out late or worn whatever it was she had worn". This reminded me of similar sentiments in another book I recently read, How You Grow Wings by Rimma Onoseta which was set in Nigeria. In that book the main characters' father warns them to never go somewhere where someone might later say "what was she doing there in the first place". While not as forthright as the discussion of rape in this book, it demonstrates a similar view, that it is the woman's responsibility to prevent herself from being in situations or wearing clothes that might cause her to be raped.
I enjoyed this book, it was well written and a fairly quick read. It reads like a memoir, which is a genre I love, but it is actually a fiction story. I really liked that the author was a young woman from Ghana. Accord books apparently works with authors across Africa to help them write, publish and distribute their works, that was a really great thing to hear. I would definitely recommend this book to YA fans looking for a diverse story to read by an OwnVoices author. I definitely want to see what the author and other Accord book authors publish in the future! Thanks to Netgalley and the publisher, Norton Young Readers for giving me the opportunity to read and review this book!
January 9, 2023
I wasn't actually supposed to read this book, and it wasn't quite the type of book I normally read, but I'm glad I gave it a shot!
Escape from Magic, by Emily Bybee is actually the 4th in a series, but was relatively easy to read as a stand alone. The story follows Clara, a 17 year old Witch who is trying to hide her magic, star in a school musical and enjoy the last few months she has of freedom before she meets the man she is set to marry once she turns 18. Falling for her co-star, Sam, wasn't part of the original plan, but when everything suddenly starts to fall apart and her 3 year old niece is now at risk, Clara and Sam try to find a way to silently disappear, together!
The story starts out as a YA romance that has very minimal paranormal references. She uses a spell to change the mind of the girl who wanted the lead role or to order chocolate cake to her house from around the world. Nothing too crazy and the perfect book for me. But about 30% into the story things take a turn when she runs away. It then is kind of a survival in the woods story which was also pretty interesting. The book lost me shortly after that though, when Clara is discovered by "the council" or the people in charge of the witches. The second half or so of the book is about fighting/killing witches and putting spells on people and fantasy is really not my thing. I did stick with it, though I was definitely fairly confused, and I think that for a fantasy/paranormal-loving reader this would be a great book! I thought the writing was good, there was a good amount of detail and I kept thinking "this would make a really cool movie" so I was able to follow the story and visualize things fairly well even though this is not my comfort zone for reading comprehension haha.
Thanks to Katie and Brey PA for reaching out and asking for a few more people to read this book, otherwise I probably wouldn't have given it a try and I liked it a lot more than I expected to. I would definitely recommend this book for YA and adult readers who enjoy paranormal/magic/witch themed stories with some YA romance thrown in.
January 10, 2023
Friends, Lovers and the Big Terrible Thing, by Matthew Perry
My book club has been on Hiatus for a while but one of the members and I decided we wanted to keep reading and chatting about books, so we decided to read Matthew Perry's memoir since we both love Friends. I wasn't really sure what to expect with this one. I'm glad I read it, but it was not a quick and easy read. With a focus on his battle with addiction, the book reads like you might expect a life of an addict may feel like. Things are all over the place, there are periods of time that seem hazy and others that are described in perfect detail. There were stories that were almost impossible to follow and accounts of hallucinations and dreams that made it difficult to see what was real and extremely personal details contrasted with vague descriptions of relationships or big life events. I said to my friend "it's like there were all these loose strings and almost none of them were tied up at the end".
I learned a lot of really cool things about one of the stars of my favourite TV show, got a glimpse of a world that not many people were able to witness first hand, but I also was completely lost for the majority of the book. I think this book would have been really great documentary. Being able to see the stages he went through would definitely helped keep story lines under control. Writing in at least somewhat chronological order would also have helped. That's the trouble with reviewing memoirs though, this is his story and he told it in the way that best represented him, even though that meant a scattered, rambling story that only maybe makes sense at the end. I'm glad I read it, and I do think Friends super fans definitely should but if you're not a memoir fan to begin with, this will be a hard one to stick with!
January 11, 2023
Doc Showmance By Zoe Forward
This one was a fun contemporary romance that I read with Xpresso Book Tours. Check out my full post here:
January 19, 2023
Me and My Missing Buddy*
By: S A Gensch
This one is coming out tomorrow!!
Synopsis:
Steve has gone missing without a word to anyone. His best friend, Mitch, knows the obvious answer is Steve's abusive father had something to do with it. Everyone else seems to believe Steve has run away.
Mitch knows his best friend too well, and refuses to accept that answer. Now he may have to find a way to prove what he knows. But...there is more going on around Steve's disappearance than Mitch had realized.
My opinions:
Unfortunately I couldn't get into this one and DNF'd it. I wasn't a fan of the writing style so I worried about the other book by this author I am set to read and review later this month. I actually found that one a lot better though. I did a bit of digging, and apparently this book is actually a republish of a previous book by this author. The author said their writing came a long way between the first and present version, but it still wasn't quite for me.
January 20, 2023
The Orphan Collector
By: Ellen Marie Wiseman
I FINALLY finished this one. I started this book several months ago... let me check goodreads, yes, September 11th... wow. Well it was a library book, and if I were to think back in time to that month I was probably exhausted, being too optimistic about my fall reading goals right after summer, oh and I had been engaged for less than 2 weeks... Yeah there was no chance I was finishing a library book before it needed to be returned. So I debating buying it, but I found it on Amazon Prime reading. Perfect. Then guess what I found when I reorganized my book shelf a few months ago?! I. OWNED. A. COPY. I can't believe I almost bought a brand new copy of a library book that was free on prime AND sitting on my TBR shelf... David would probably be quite mad if he were reading this, but I doubt he is so, I get to avoid this lecture!
Anyway. The reason for that little backstory is that there was no reason this book needed to take me 4 months to read, but it also wasn't because I didn't like it either! The Orphan Collector is set in a major city (Boston maybe?) during the major outbreak of the Spanish Flu in 1918. The story alternates between main characters Pia and Beatrice (aka Nurse Wallis). Pia is 12 years old and essentially an orphan when the flu claims her mother while her father is fighting overseas. She must make difficult decisions in an attempt to care for her twin baby brothers, Ollie and Max. When she is completely out of food she knows she must leave the babies alone at home but worries they might get into something without her there to protect them. She places them in a little cubby and runs out to find something to eat, but the flu hits her while she is out and she never makes it back to save them. Meanwhile, Beatrice is mourning the loss of her son Wallis and late husband. She sees her neighbour Pia leave her house during the lockdown and is livid. She already hates the German immigrants for stealing her father's job, allowing a child to go out in this dangerous time makes her even more angry at Pia's mother. When she breaks into the apartment and finds Pia's mother deceased and the twins in the cubby, she decides it is best if she takes over their care. Things go from bad to worse when Pia wakes up from her flu in a makeshift hospital and is then brought to an orphanage without her brothers. Beatrice manages to get a nursing uniform and an idea, if the babies helped her get over Wallis, maybe she can help other mom's get over their losses. She quickly takes on a role of Nurse Wallis and begins stealing and selling babies. When she learns about orphan trains, she also begins stealing older orphans with European origins and sending them on the trains (without potential parents arranged) using money from the baby stealing to fund her "good efforts" to rid the city of immigrants.
Beatrice and Pia cross paths several times throughout the story, sometimes without one of them knowing, but the question of Max and Ollie is not answered until the very last few pages, making this a real page-turner and not the least bit predictable. I really enjoyed this book, especially the last 1/3 or so of it. The pandemic experiences were of course relatable, and the awful views towards immigrants and people experiencing poverty were sadly not so different from what we hear today, clearly history repeats itself. I would definitely recommend this book for any histfic lovers who want a good pandemic story, and you know I love a good orphan/adoption/foster book, so this one is definitely one I'd recommend in that category too! I've heard mixed feelings about Wiseman's other books, but I am definitely interested in checking them out.
January 21, 2023
I had a lot of run reading Crash by Tamara Lush! It is the perfect romcom for anyone wanting characters with real substance and relatable backstories.
Evie is a young, recent college grad who is struggling to make ends meet through her low paying internship. Things are especially difficult because she has found herself in a role of single mom to her teenage sister after their parents tragically died in a car accident. With her sister's graduation on the horizon and big expenses like college and science camp tuition, not to mention her internship coming to an end in just a few weeks, it is easy to understand why Evie is feeling a little extra stressed. So stressed that it's not surprising that she forgot to deliver an important document to one of the most important people in the company, and that when she does deliver it and gets mistaken for another secretary she doesn't clue in to his mistake until she's spilling coffee on him! She's pretty sure she's about to get fired, but actually, her boss Alex has something different in mind... a proposal of sorts... and the potential to solve all of Evie's financial worries. Too good to be true? Maybe. You'll have to read it to find out!
I loved that this book covered so much more than a simple fake relationship trope story, but dove into so many other themes. Evie has a fear of elevators after her parent's accident, she has financial worries beyond the usual college graduate debt, responsibilities for raising a traumatized teenager, career ambitions that feel out of her league, she's realistically inexperienced in the bedroom (um, she's been a little busy adulting...), and balancing multiple low paying jobs despite having a college degree because in 2023 that diploma is worth little more than graduating high school but significantly more expensive. Alex comes from a privileged background, but the story also unveils his own insecurities, challenges and ambitions, making him an easy character to root for despite how different he and Evie are.
This book is technically the second in a series, but for the most part it was easy to read as a standalone. From what I gathered, the first book is also about a fake relationship between Alex's sister and her now husband. It kind of bothered me that his sister's name was Savannah and they live in Georgia, but that may have been explained in the first novel, and is definitely not that big of a deal lol!
I would absolutely recommend Crash and I'm excited to share that it comes out this week! So go preorder your copy now so you have it on the 24th, you'll definitely want to get reading right away. Meanwhile I am going to go track down my own copy of the first book, Drive so I can find out what happened to Savannah's fake relationship that led to getting married and having kids.
Thanks to Rachel Wu at WattPad Books for sending me this awesome novel!
January 22, 2023
Group By Christie Tate
January 23, 2023
Today is my half birthday and my kiddos were so confused when I told them today at school. I said "Oh, it's my half birthday, I'm 31 and a half" and they said:
"It's your birthday?"
"You're 31?"
"My Mom is 40"
"What is a half birthday?"
Is it just me or was this not totally a big thing when you were growing up? I definitely remember talking about being "and a half years old" and everyone being mildly excited on their half birthday. Maybe this is just a sign I'm getting old that 9 year olds no longer do something I did 22 years ago?
Dyslexia and Me
by Onyinye Udokporo
This memoir tells the author's experiences growing up with Dyslexia, and both the challenges and strategies she encountered throughout her education. Udokporo grew up in England in a family with strong ties to their Nigerian heritage. Her learning difficulties became clear early in her schooling when she really struggled with spelling. She was a hard worker, a trait that was fostered by her parents, and extremely resilient, and managed to succeed in school even when her disability was undiagnosed. Udokporo includes a variety of discussions related to Dyslexia, disability awareness, self-advocacy, strategies for success for students with learning disabilities, experiences as a black female with a disability, and dispelling myths about learning differences. The book is fairly short, is well-written and well-researched and offers many important points for readers to consider, including challenging assumptions or beliefs about Dyslexia and other disabilities.
One thing that really stuck out to me on this one was a discussion around a statistic. Udokporo said that while males are more frequently diagnosed with Dyslexia than females, this does not automatically mean that Dyslexia is more common in males. She explained that there could be a variety of reasons males would be diagnosed more frequently than females, such as differing expectations about female and male education. It reminded me that statistics are just conclusions and assumptions about data and depending where the information is coming from, those assumptions could be drawn out or simple facts. It also made me think about all of the things that we hear are "more common in boys", including several other learning differences such as ASD or ADHD. We know ASD is a spectrum and that ADHD presents differently in females, so do either actually occur more often in males? Or does diagnosis happen less frequently or accurately in females?
I also found her discussion on Dyslexic role models interesting. Udokporo described her feelings and confusion when adults told her to think about famous people with Dyslexia such as Albert Einstein, a deceased white physicist. It made me think about how often we do this to children, especially with Einstein. How many people actually relate to him or see him as a role model? Probably not that many children in this millennium. While a hot topic in education right now is having a classroom library that reflects the diversity within your classroom (and something that I totally agree with but struggle with due to having a budget of exactly $0, but that is a story for another day), it made me realize that I should also offer a variety of diverse role models when designing lessons.
Definitely a great read for anyone with a connection to Dyslexia. Thanks to Netgalley and the publisher for giving me the chance to read this great book!
January 24, 2023
The Highly Sensitive Person's Guide to Dealing with Toxic People
By Shahida Arabi
I'm actually pretty impressed with my success lately with audiobooks. I have been trying to listen to them before I go to sleep as it is definitely a better alternative to having a bright screen on the TV, but is (sometimes) interesting enough to distract me from my anxiety and insomnia and help me fall asleep. I have learned a few things about myself as an audiobook listener:
1) my preference for non-fiction goes from preference to almost necessity. Following a story does not work when I have to listen only
2) interest level is an important consideration, but if it is too interesting, I need to switch to print because I'll never fall asleep.
3) occasionally I actually want to go to bed so I can listen to my audiobooks (this is a real shocker. Maybe I'm almost ready for podcasts?)
Anyway, I learned lots from this book. I am most definitely a highly sensitive person. I always think of my friend Joanne when I hear/read/write that term, she and I spoke about it quite a bit in the past and she really normalized something that I have struggled with all my life. Whether it comes to sensory sensitivity or emotional sensitivity, I'm easily triggered or thrown off by changes in my environment or taxing social situations. One thing that I found really insightful in this book was the discussion on Narcissism and the impact that just being around someone who has Narcissistic tendencies can have on someone who is highly sensitive. Whether it be advice related to dealing with situations or just background information about being a highly sensitive person, I think that the author wrote a really well thought-out and carefully crafted book. I would definitely recommend this book (I'll have to send a message to my friend!) as well as the audiobook version, as it was easy to listen to and the narration was well done!
January 25, 2023
Guncle by Steven Rowley
I am so glad I grabbed a copy of this one from my public library! It is a fun comedy while also handling topics such as childhood trauma, grief and human relationships. When Patrick's sister in law and best friend loses her long and painful battle with cancer, he is called upon by his brother, Greg, to care for his niece and nephew, Maisie and Grant, who are about 9 and 5 respectively, for a few months. Greg had been battling a narcotics addiction exacerbated by easy access to medication while caring for his dying wife, and while the timing was not ideal, rehab was necessary, even more so now that he was a single parent. Patrick is initially very surprised by this request as he is fairly estranged from his family and is a single, gay, former TV star, who has gotten used to living outside LA and avoiding real people. While initially hesitant, he agrees and the story that follows is funny, heartwarming and one that I believe anyone can connect with in some way or another.
Goodreads reviewers shared a variety of characters you might think of as being like Patrick, including Neil Patrick Harris, Sean Hayes from Will and Grace or a gay version of Kevin from This is Us and all of those are great, but he is also an awesome character in his own right, and that is thanks to great writing! Rowley did a fabulous job creating this character of Patrick and slowly revealing a number of important backstories, including his childhood, his time on TV, his relationship with his sister in law, Sara, and his tragic loss of his partner Joe. In fact, all of the characters, including Joe and Sara who were deceased by the start of the story, were really well developed, had their own weird quirks and interesting passions and were all equally loveable in their own way. It was well-written and while there was not a lot of drama or action, the plot had a good pace and held my attention all the way through.
Obviously, the title Guncle refers to Gay Uncle, and so this can be immediately identified as an LGBTQ+ novel, and I think it is a great example of a book that offers a diverse story without being centred around gay rights, homophobia or the many other challenges the LGBTQ+ community faces daily. Those issues are woven throughout the story, but the story is about a guy who takes in his niece and nephew, and that guy happens to be gay. As a result, the book offers a perspective not all readers would have experienced (ie. the definition of diverse) while telling a story that could happen to anyone regardless of background or sexuality. That being said, one of the important reasons behind championing diverse books by Own Voice authors is that there are opportunities for the author to share experiences and perspectives that are different from the reader, and one that really spoke to me in this book was the lack of rights that LGBTQ+ people often have when it comes to their partner's health care directives and decisions. When Joe was receiving life support following a tragic car accident, Patrick was not allowed to be part of the end-of-life care and decision process as he was not seen by Joe's family as a legitimate partner or family member. While this scenario could technically happen to straight unmarried couples, the story made me realize that what I take for granted (that being in a relationship and now engaged to my partner is recognized and accepted by my family, friends and community members) is not always the case for all couples. I cannot imagine being denied access to David if something were to happen to him, and as painful and hard as it would be, I would expect to be at least part of any of those decisions that Joe's family made without Patrick. To not only tragically lose your partner, but also be completely unacknowledged and excluded would be incredibly painful.
I would highly recommend this book for fiction lovers, but especially anyone looking for a comedy that still touches on important real-life moments. I can't wait to check out Rowley's new book, The Celebrants coming out in May!
January 26, 2023
Your Place or Mine
By: Portia Macintosh
I had a lot of fun reading this Romcom. Check out my full post at:
January 28, 2023
Zomerschoon: Beauty of Summer by Wendi Dass tells the story of Anna, a graduate student at Oxford, studying Cryptography. When her advisor experiences a sudden illness, Anna finds herself stuck working with a post-doctorate student she despises. He needs her help to crack a difficult code and she needs his help to finish her program successfully, but will romance and love get in the way?
Anyone interested in the code breakers of WWII era (like Kate Quinn's Rose Code etc) will love the science and mathematics woven throughout this book. Additionally, finding characters with aspirations and academic achievement is rare in romance novels, so this adds a level of maturity the story. Thanks to @katieandbreypa for giving me the chance to read and review this book by @wendi_dass!
January Wrap Up!
*DNF
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