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May 2, 2021 By Melanie Sweeney 2 Comments

April Reading Roundup

April was a pretty fantastic reading month for me. So many great romance novels came out this month, and I read them aaaallll (okay, not even close to all, but many), including some not-new releases. I read nine books, all as audiobooks. (As always, I apologize if any quoted selections have the wrong punctuation as they are transcriptions from the audio.)

A blue book cover the says The Intimacy Experiment and Rosie Danan with a bearded man and a woman in a red dress standing on either side of a podium. — *Fleabag* had Hot Priest. Now we get Sexy Rabbi.

One of my favorite books of 2020 was Rosie Danan’s The Roommate, so I was very excited about her follow-up, The Intimacy Experiment, which follows Naomi, adult performer turned sex positive start-up co-founder, and Ethan, a young rabbi looking to boost membership at his struggling synagogue. Naomi wants to teach more formally about modern intimacy and sex, but so far, academia wants nothing to do with her because of her past. But Ethan sees the value in her ideas and thinks the class will attract younger people, who will hopefully then give the synagogue a try. The higher ups, however, aren’t totally on board with the class or Naomi’s history.

The story unfolds over the weeks-long seminar, each class focusing on a particular aspect of intimacy, neatly telegraphing the romantic trajectory between Naomi and Ethan upfront. I love it when the framework of the plot is explicitly and expertly woven into the story as part of its content. It’s what I love so much about Beach Read, which begins with, “I have a fatal flaw,” and uses the POV character’s job as a writer to use the fundamentals of plot and character, the language of stories, in her interiority to illuminate character growth, romantic development, and the story of the book itself.

In The Intimacy Experiment, we learn early on that the course will cover seven milestones: how to find a partner, a first-date framework to assess if you like the person, communication, integrating your partner into your life, physical intimacy, delving deeper into your past and future, and, finally, how to break up. If you read much romance, you know already that a breakup or separation will come at some point, so the laid out trajectory doesn’t exactly spoil anything, but it serves as a constant source of background tension, a reminder, as Naomi and Ethan fall in love, that their happily ever after isn’t a sure thing – a nice little trick to work against the genre’s promise of an HEA or at least a Happy For Now. It also rachets up the anticipation for the fun stuff. (There is legitimate steam here, folks. But like The Roommate, it’s also incredibly heartfelt and sweet.) And when the book exhausts its framework, when the seminar ends, we don’t know what will happen next. It’s a clever structural choice that elevates the book.

Naomi has had to develop a thick skin to survive, and she uses that shield to handle people’s judgment, doubt, and rejection as she pivots to speaking and teaching about intimacy, but a big part of her seminar – and a big part of falling in love – is learning how to be vulnerable. We learn early on that Naomi is pulled toward things that are self-destructive – drinking sugary sodas, drags on cigarettes even though each inhale shortens her life. “There was something about flirting, just a little – the tiniest sip – with her own destruction that appealed to the darkness in her.”

Later, she reveals to the class, “‘I, for example, consistently fall for people I know I can’t have, as a way of avoiding opening myself up to love,” and admits, ‘knowing your weaknesses doesn’t make you immune.’” This is a thinly veiled admission to Ethan, with whom she thinks a relationship would be impossible because of her history, because she’s “not Jewish enough,” because her reputation would be too big of a hurdle for them. She thinks of herself as dynamite at one point – “no great tragedy when dynamite destroyed itself, not when that was exactly what it was designed to do.” In other words, vulnerability is hard for Naomi, and seeing her choose to override all her self-protective instincts and truly open herself, not just with Ethan, but with the class, with the synagogue, with the world at large, is honestly quite moving.

Part of Naomi’s journey is also re-connecting with her Jewish faith. I really appreciate that, while Ethan’s invitation to have her teach at his synagogue helps her start that journey, she seeks further mentorship from a different rabbi at a different synagogue altogether, and it is 100% a choice she makes for herself, not something Ethan pressures her to do, nor something he instructs her in. Ethan accepts Naomi exactly as she is from the beginning, all facets of her, from her previous work to her faith. He also experienced a deepening of his faith after losing his father a handful of years earlier, which led him to leave his job as a physics teacher and devote his life to his faith.

This book is ambitious in how it portrays sex and sex work, how it tackles intimacy and romance alongside religion, and in its deep empathy for its characters. It’s also honestly not a bad guide to modern relationships. Sometimes, books with a premise like this avoid actually giving you the meat of the class the character is teaching (or the book they’re writing, or whatever), but pieces of Naomi’s lectures are on the page, and there’s some pretty great stuff in them, especially the lecture on surviving a breakup.

Like The Roommate, the emotional depth here might be surprising just based on the jacket summary, but these two books together really cement for me Rosie Danan’s aesthetic and talent as a writer – she explores a whole range of emotional and physical intimacy with authentic care. You don’t have to read the first book to start this one, but I highly recommend both.

Content warnings here for mentions of anti-Semitism, revenge porn, verbal sexual harassment.

A blue book cover with an illustrated man towing a woman through water in an inner tube with tropical trees and a bird in the background. The title says Shipped in cursive, and the author, Angie Hockman, is printed below.

Next up is Angie Hockman’s Shipped, which one blurb described as The Hating Game meets The Unhoneymooners – a pretty accurate description. If you liked either of those books, you’ll probably enjoy this one.

Henley works for a cruise company and cannot stand Graeme, the social media guy who works remotely and who once received credit for work that was hers. Now, they’re up for the same promotion, and in order to better prepare for their presentations, they must go on one of the company’s cruises to the Galapagos. This is a classic enemies-to-lovers workplace romance in which we get Henley’s POV exclusively, so our understanding of Graeme evolves along with hers, very much like The Hating Game, right down to the fact that the “enemy” isn’t actually an asshole to the main character and then magically changes his behavior once they get to know each other. He’s more an enemy-by-misunderstanding.

Some side stories I really enjoyed with this one are the relationship between Henley and her sister, who tags along on the cruise, and the acknowledgment on the page of how humans’ interactions with the wild world affect it. There’s an author’s note at the end, further addressing this, and as someone who has recently been doing a lot of reading about climate change and thinking about my specific location on the Gulf Coast, I really appreciated how she wove her convictions organically into the story in a way that didn’t feel preachy or like the hidden point of the book. I have recently been thinking about how the stories we consume in books, TV, and movies rarely reflect warming and the changes we are currently living through and will continue to live through, other than apocalyptic/extreme scenarios, so this was a real bonus to me. It’s still more about conservation of places and species “out there,” but the way conservation plays into the story as a whole feels reflective of our world now, not ten or twenty years ago.

Henley is a very hard worker who struggles to find balance in the rest of her life. She wants her work to speak for itself, to be valued for her ideas, and to earn the promotion because of her efforts, just like she wants others (Graeme) to be evaluated for the same things, but it’s clear that her boss has a better rapport with Graeme. With her, he talks down to her, calls her cutesy nicknames, and casually touches her inappropriately. She feels she is constantly working to prove herself.

So, when Graeme fibs about being a beginner at snorkeling so he can join her, partly because he knows she has anxiety about deep water after a childhood near-drowning incident and partly because he wants to hang out with her, and she realizes he is actually an experienced scuba diver, she accuses him of “bringing the outfield in.” She explains that in gym class, when a girl came up to the plate, the boys would all walk in, not expecting her to hit as hard or as far as the boys. Without giving too much away, I like how this thread of the story is handled, even once we realize that Graeme is not the enemy she thinks he is.

The best part of an enemies-to-lovers story is, of course, the snappy banter, which is delightful in this book. Not only do we learn that Henley’s combativeness with Graeme actually means something deeper to him; but we also get funny/sexy exchanges like this one:

“‘How do you feel about me?’ I whisper.

‘Usually? Irritation and an urge to shove a whipped cream pie in your face. But also desperation, desire, and fuck, I want to kiss you.’”

Content warnings for loss of a parent by terminal illness and mentions of an ancillary abusive relationship.

An illustrated cover with the title, The Flatshare, and author, Beth O'Leary running vertically down the middle, bisecting an image of a man and woman with their feet and heads cropped off. — There was Only One Bed.

A friend recommended Beth O’Leary’s The Flatshare with the heads up that it centers around an emotionally abusive relationship – not the central romance, obviously. Having experienced a similar relationship myself in the past, it brought up some old memories and feelings for me, but I appreciated how authentically Tiffy’s story was conveyed, particularly how she needs distance and time away from the relationship to even begin to understand the dynamic and what it was doing to her and how the residual effects of gaslighting and being otherwise manipulated continue to disrupt her post-relationship life.

Remarkably, this book didn’t feel heavy to me, despite the subject matter, and though I was skeptical about how quickly Tiffy might wind up in a new relationship while still healing from the previous one, I thought a lot of care was given to that journey. The romance with Leon develops very gently, first establishing friendship well before romantic interest, and she has other sources of support besides him, including friends and a therapist.

For perhaps the full first half of the book, in fact, Tiffy and Leon don’t even see each other in person. He works nights as a hospice nurse, so he rents out his one bedroom flat for the off hours, returning during a typical workday shift to sleep. (He sleeps at his ill-fated girlfriend’s place on weekends.) This is technically the Only One Bed trope. They do share the bed, but they are never in the same place at the same time. Even so, she takes the left, and he takes the right.

I love the scene when Tiffy arrives and realizes, for the first time, what exactly this flatshare setup will look like. “I look at my lovely, tie-dyed blanket lying across the foot of the bed, and all I can think is that it really clashes with Leon’s duvet cover, which is manly black and grey striped, and that there’s nothing I can do about that because this is as much Leon’s bed as mine, whoever this Leon man is, and that his semi-naked or possibly fully naked body sleeps underneath that duvet. I hadn’t really confronted the logistics of the bed situation until this moment, and now that I’m doing it, I’m not enjoying the experience.”

One of the highlights of this book for me is how it explores the intimacy of sharing a space, even when the other person isn’t in it. Tiffy and Leon leave each other notes, so they do have an avenue to get to know one another – and Tiffy is quite forthcoming and open, which helps – but they also observe things about each other based on their belongings – how they take their tea, whether they were in a hurry when they left, etc. They cook and bake for each other, leaving leftovers to make life a little easier for the other. Leon, who is usually pretty reserved with both his feelings and his words – even his narration is in clipped statements and fragments – begins to share some of his life in the running conversation on papers strewn about the flat.

Leon finds all of Tiffy’s belongings a little overwhelming, particularly all her throw pillows, lava lamp, and the colorful dresses she leaves hanging around everywhere, though he concedes space to her he hadn’t realized he would need to give her, and he comes around to like her bean bag chair. Tiffy’s discovery of a bag full of scarves under the bed briefly takes her to a funny, if dark, place: “there was quite a large number of scarves in there. At least ten. What if he stole them? Shit, what if they are trophies of the women he murdered? Maybe he’s a serial killer. A winter-based serial killer who only strikes in scarf weather.” (He’s not.)

There’s a nice secondary story about Leon’s brother, who calls the flat occasionally from prison. Ironically, this brother helps propel the romance beyond what Tiffy and Leon are initially capable of despite being even further removed than they are from each other. Leon and his brother also have some understanding of emotional abuse, having witnessed their mother endure similar relationships, which gives them both some insight into Tiffy’s experience. I appreciated this exchange, when Tiffy has a panicked reaction to growing physical intimacy with Leon, a residual trauma response, and he assures her it isn’t her fault. “‘Well, I did date him. Voluntarily.’ My tone’s light, but Leon frowns. “Relationships like that stop being about voluntarily very quickly. There’s lots of ways someone can make you stay with them or think you want to.’”

I definitely can’t speak for anyone besides myself on how authentically this represents emotional abuse in a romantic relationship, but it worked for me, and it reaffirmed just how grateful I am for the same friend who recommended the book. She saw a lot of what I went through, and even though we fell out because of that relationship and choices I made, we’ve since reconnected. I’ll never know just how hard it was for her to witness that or to decide how best to be my friend when I wasn’t ready to leave, but she was one of few sources of absolute joy and love and security to me amidst a dark time, and I can’t imagine how much harder it all would have been without her. So, not to get too emotional in this book review or anything, but to the people who are there, who see, who remember when we’ve gotten all turned around and can’t even tell what’s true about anything anymore . . . you are everything.

Obviously, there’s a big content warning here for emotional abuse but also stalking. The circumstances of Leon’s brother’s imprisonment and some brief mentions elsewhere in the book include racism.

A bright yellow illustrated book cover of Life's Too Short by Abby Jimenez with a man in slacks and a button down at the top right, reaching for a heart, and a woman in black pants and a red shirt at the bottom left. A dog pokes through the second O of the word TOO. — Love this book. Hate that they didn’t capitalize the T in too.

Finally, and in keeping with the content warnings and the big emotional content, I have to talk about Life’s Too Short by Abby Jimenez. This is the third in a series, though it also stands alone, and according to the author’s note at the end, the main character, Vanessa, was modeled after a real-life YouTuber with a terminal illness. In the book, Vanessa has a genetic strain of ALS, and since it can’t be tested for, only diagnosed by ruling out other diseases based on progressing symptoms, Vanessa opts not to spend her life worrying about whether or not she has it (though she has a possible early symptom) and instead live as fully as possible, which means travelling and posting to her YouTube channel about her adventures to help raise money for ALS research. She already knows that if she develops clearer symptoms of the disease, she won’t seek treatment since there isn’t a cure, and medicines and trials bought her older sister, who died from the disease, very little time while affecting the quality of the time she did have.

Does this sound like an impossible romance? I was tempted to seek out how this one ended. I remembered an absolutely heart-breaking minor character death in another of Jimenez’s books, and even though this is billed as a romance, I wasn’t certain there would be an HEA. I don’t want to spoil the ending here, but as I was reading and imagining the various ways it might end, I considered that notion of happily ever after as well as happy for now. I completely understand why the promise of a happy ending matters to readers of the genre, so this is not at all a criticism of either the genre or its readers, but I started to think, what does it say that someone with a terminal illness is such a tricky protagonist for a romance? (And here I mean the genre definition of romance, not Nicholas Sparks types of love stories where the characters die at the end…) Does it suggest that people who live with a terminal illness aren’t worthy of love, or that their love is any less beautiful or important than someone who may live well into old age (or may not because life is unpredictable)? Does it make a difference if their hand dealt is still bad but they at least survive through the final page of the book?

I’m also a total outsider to the terminal illness/disability community, so I hesitate to review this book and make any assumptions about how Vanessa’s illness and her choices (and Adrian’s reactionary feelings and choices) do or don’t reflect the experiences of those with similar conditions. There’s more here, too, that treads similarly tricky waters, including Vanessa’s younger sister’s addiction, her father’s hoarding, and Adrian’s anxiety and control issues. Content warnings abound, in other words! But for what it’s worth, my own personal reading of this book overall is that it is deeply emotional, that it does a lot of work to earn the ending I thought it was going to have as well as the one I didn’t (how’s that for cryptic), and it is thankfully very funny to offset some quite heavy content.

Also, the meet cute in chapter one is essentially lifted straight out of my fantasies from when my kids were babies. (Mild spoilers in this paragraph and the next, so skip if you don’t want them!) Vanessa has just become the temporary guardian of her infant niece, and the baby’s crying leads Adrian to knock on her door at 4am to ask her to somehow quiet it. Of course, this woman he’s never spoken to before is on the brink of a breakdown because she has tried everything already. She tells him off and slams the door in his face. But Adrian, who has a strong compulsion to fix things and heart of gold, knocks again, and here’s where my fantasy was translated directly onto the page:

“I made a give it here motion with my hand. ‘Give me the baby.’

She stared at me.

‘Go take a shower. I’ll hold her.’

She blinked at me. ‘Are you kidding me?’

‘No, I’m not. You obviously need a break. Maybe it will help.’”

Listen, I realize that it’s unrealistic and inadvisable to let a stranger into your apartment to hold your baby in the middle of the night, but in the safe hands of a romance, this is literally the pinnacle of swooning for me. Once, when my twins were babies, and my oldest was a toddler, I carried my inconsolable babies out into my front yard after hours of them crying, praying a nice neighbor would come out and help me do something, so I felt this on a deep level. (Shockingly, they did not.)

There’s some really poignant wisdom in this book as well, like this gem from a side character: “‘Took me a long time to realize that just because you don’t recognize the fight they choose doesn’t mean they’re not fighting.’”

Oh, and if you’re an audiobook listener, the narrators on this one, Zachary Webber (a long-time favorite of mine who just gets better and better) and Christine Lakin, are so good. Such an emotional story really needs narrators who can handle it, and they were great choices.

Not a bad selection for my birthday month! The May release I’m most looking forward to – and probably everyone else so I will maybe shut up about Beach Read – is Emily Henry’s People We Meet on Vacation. Happy May reading!

April 1, 2021 By Melanie Sweeney 2 Comments

March Reading Roundup

Another month, another roundup.

In March, I read eleven books, which included some romance, YA, literary/speculative fiction, and nonfiction. Here are my favorite March reads. (As usual, the quotes below have been transcribed from audiobooks. I did my best to get the right punctuation, but there are likely some discrepancies.)

A blue and purple book cover with Kate Clayborn in yellow print and Love at First in white script. At the bottom is a skyline of Chicago with one building with more detail than the rest -- a blue facade, lit windows, and red hearts floating up. The tag line says, "It only takes a moment." — It’s called *Love at First* because you’ll be in love by the first chapter.

The first book I read was Kate Clayborn’s latest, Love at First, which is a contemporary romance that pays homage to Romeo & Juliet while doing its own, beautiful thing. When Will’s estranged uncle dies and leaves him his apartment unit, Will’s plan to turn it into a short-term rental sparks a feud with Nora, a resident who is determined to keep the tight-knit building exactly the same. She tries to scare him off with annoying (but harmless) pranks, but as he renovates the old unit and charms the other residents, Nora, who has loyally preserved her late grandmother’s apartment as it has always been, seeks Will’s help in making some small updates to her own place. This book checks so many boxes: found family, a lovely secondary romance, enemies to lovers, kittens . . . The title ties into a piece of wisdom that I won’t spoil, but reader, I gasped when it was imparted.

I particularly liked Will’s arc. At one point, in his perspective, we get this bit of insight: “Nothing was complicated when you had an enemy. It was you versus them. And you versus them stopped you thinking about the other problem, which was usually something more like you versus you.”

What is Will’s problem? Part of it is that, after overhearing criticism that he is reckless, rash, and selfish as a kid, he has spent his life trying very hard to prove that criticism wrong. He becomes a doctor – one with impeccable bedside manner. “I’m a responsible person. I’m a practical person. His own words now, the ones he’d used to win Nora, to stop the feud over the apartment. He’d meant them. Of course he had. They were the same words he repeated to himself every day for years until he’d believed them, until he’d become them. Will who works late. Will who stays even-tempered. Will who puts everyone else at ease.” He tries so hard to be balanced, to not give in to the more intense impulses he has struggled to eradicate from his personality. Naturally, though, Nora brings that intensity straight to the surface.

If you tend to lean toward more literary fiction but are wanting to give romance a try, this book is a good gateway. Kate Clayborn’s writing here is so smart, lyrical, and tender.

A book cover with a snowy treescape and hazy silhouettes of people among them. In big orange letters, it says ROAD OUT OF WINTER and ALISON STINE.

I read my next book by complete fluke. A friend tweeted, asking for book recommendations, and after plugging my go to comfort book, Beach Read, I scrolled through the other suggestions and came upon Alison Stine’s Road Out of Winter. It was so gripping, I listened to the audiobook nearly without stopping, which I never do because I have three kids, and they always need things. But I stayed up late to finish it because I simply couldn’t stop.

This is a climate apocalypse book set in Appalachia. The twentysomething protagonist, Wylodine, has been tasked with keeping her mom and mom’s boyfriend’s illegal pot farm running in their absence. When an unending winter descends upon the region, Wil sets out West with a handful of seeds and the hope to reunite with her mother and/or find someplace more hospitable for growing. She takes Greyson and Dance, two young men from her town, with her. Along the way, they pick up a young mother, Jamey, and her daughter.

Alison Stine gets a couple of things really right with this book. One is gender and how Wil navigates her world. Ever aware of the dangers men pose to her because she’s a woman, Wil has to weigh whether to take Greyson and Dance along with her, has to calculate different dangers than they do, and intentionally dresses her body in the bulky clothes of cold weather and hard labor, not just for practicality, but also to fend off unwanted attention. When an unknown man turns up injured on her property in the beginning of the book, we see her caution: “It was just me out here. Me and this man. I heard Lobo’s voice in my head, telling me not to be stupid, not to be a girl about this, not to trust anyone.” But later on, for Jamey and her daughter, Starla, Wil goes against her own best interests to protect them.

The other thing that rings true to me is how the catastrophe itself unfolds slowly and with surprising mundanity, even when, as the novel opens, it reaches a tipping point. It’s not a sudden, finite apocalyptic event. Instead, winter comes one year and simply never ends. It’s not until the second time spring and summer don’t return that the people begin to accept their new normal. “In August, people in town, when I shopped for groceries and fertilizer and diatomaceous earth, had finally stopped saying, ‘What a ridiculous year. What an unusual year. This is one for the record books.’ By August, it wasn’t funny anymore.”

Not only does everyday life change gradually in this perpetual winter, but this is a place where systems and safety nets have already failed. “There had been suffering here forever, even before the cold came. Long ago, we had been forgotten in the holler, forgotten and left to make it on our own with no jobs, no hope of jobs. Now, cold wrung the worst from us.” The schools close. No government agencies or extra law enforcement come in to keep order, to help the people. This is a place already abandoned, just as, when climate change truly begins to reshape our lives, there will likely be many places just like this that will be hit hardest by now-unthinkable failures of systems and infrastructures, places that will be written off as casualties of large-scale climate disaster.

A white book cover with simple black text that says "The Uninhabitable Earth Life After Warming" and "David Wallace-Wells" over a picture of a bee lying on its side.

I loved Road Out of Winter so much it finally gave me the push I needed to read David Wallace-Wells’s The Uninhabitable Earth. This book is not for the faint of heart, but it does give an essential and exhaustive overview of the kind of world we will live in as the Earth warms. Here in Houston, we already see the effects in increased severity of hurricanes and floods. Many of us have already begun to grapple with climate change in our daily lives, the anxiety brought on by a heavy rain, the foreboding of the next hurricane season. I think about our future here on the Gulf Coast nearly every day. When we move, probably in the new few years, it will be entirely because of climate change.

I dropped forty bookmarks in this book. It covers so much information, including a section on climate apocalypse narratives, which I found particularly interesting. “Complicity,” he writes, “does not make for good drama,” and “when we can no longer pretend that climate suffering is distant, in time or in place, we will stop pretending about it start pretending within it.” At this point, he notes, we will see slapstick comedies and rom-coms set against a backdrop of the new climate reality. This is something I have been thinking a lot about as a writer and a person who does see the world changing around me but not yet reflected in media except in explicit (but futuristic) apocalypse narratives. At some point, it will be hard for me to watch shows and read books in which the characters never, in their daily lives, confront the effects of warming.

David Wallace-Wells covers the effects we will see here in the US – fires, drought, flooding, extreme weather events – but he emphasizes that it will be the places that contribute the least to warming that will suffer some of the earliest and most extreme impacts, bringing up climate justice and some people’s calls for reparations to these countries from the biggest warming contributors. He writes that, “climate change may unleash as many as a billion migrants on the world by 2050.” As we start to address upticks in routine catastrophic weather events, wildfires, food shortages, and shoreline erosion in the US, we will also have to decide how we will handle these climate refugees, which places we will protect or rebuild from damages and how much we will invest in them, what sacrifices we are willing to make to take meaningful action. The costs of renewable energy technology have fallen in the last twenty-five years, but, he points out, “Over the same twenty-five years, the proportion of global energy use derived from renewables has not grown an inch. Solar isn’t eating at fossil fuel use, in other words, even slowly; it is buttressing it.”

If you can get through the opening section, which felt to me like a sheer tidal wave of doom, the rest of the book is manageable – maybe because you acclimate to the horror? I did find most of it alarming, but often, my anxiety spikes came from worst case projections, which were then followed up by best case and most likely scenarios. There is some balance here, in other words, and, somehow, little crumbs of hope. What I did not find in this book – and it does not surprise me, given how thoroughly Wallace-Wells lays out the necessity for big systemic changes, led by governments and enforced in industry – was anything practical I could do on a personal level to make a significant difference, short of pressuring my representatives.

Still, I did not expect for my anxiety and fear about how our world will change to morph into deep gratitude to be alive right now on this beautiful, bountiful planet as we will never experience it again.

A pink book cover with an astronaut floating in the center behind white text that says, "IN THE QUICK" and "KATE HOPE DAY" — Isn’t this a gorgeous cover?

My last March book is Kate Hope Day’s In the Quick, which, like Love at First, is an homage/retelling. This one updates Jane Eyre by setting it in space! For real! And I’m not mad about it.

Listen, I don’t usually read reviews before I dive into a book, so I did not know this going in, and while I’m familiar with Jane Eyre, I didn’t remember it well enough to have caught some of the early hints, so I was a little slow in realizing what I was reading. Even when curiosity led me to some blurbs that compared it to Jane Eyre, I thought it was a stretch until I got deeper into the book. Despite my having missed the connections initially, the story and the main character, June, do hold their own. While it probably adds a layer of enjoyment to know and like Jane Eyre, I don’t think that’s necessary to appreciate this book.

June is the niece of Peter Reed, whose innovative fuel cells power an expedition of National Space Program astronauts aboard the ship, Inquiry. He dies shortly after launch, and then the fuel cells fail, stranding the team in space. Soon, communication is lost as well. Around the same time, twelve-year-old June, with a gifted mechanical mind similar to her uncle’s, is sent to the boarding school named after him, where she trains to become an astronaut. While struggling to catch up with her older peers in the program, she also seeks answers about what happened to Inquiry and how to fix the fuel cell, even after everyone has assumed the team dead. At eighteen, she goes on her first mission to a space station, where she figures out that the Inquiry team is likely still alive. Not long after, she goes to the pink planet, a moon base, to join James, one of her uncle’s protégés who was part of the team that developed the fuel cells, and together, they work to solve the problem with hopes of rescuing Inquiry.

Sometimes, I had questions about how this fictional world compares to our real world – when and where we are, for example – and I ended up wanting more at the end of the book, but what I loved most about this book was how deeply immersed we are in June’s mind. So much of her puzzling out mechanical problems echoes creative processes I’m familiar with, especially when she is a child, and her ideas surpass her ability to articulate and execute them. At twelve, she invents a mechanical device to carry items up stairs to help her aunt, but when the first model doesn’t work right, June has to confront the difference between what’s in her head and her ability to create it. “It was uncomfortable, this gap between my idea and this thing I’d made.” Without getting bogged down in all the details of the fuel cells or the other projects June works on, we still get enough specific language about the work to feel that that it’s real. Ditto things like less familiar effects of zero gravity on June’s body, which point to either niche expertise or exhaustive research on the part of the author. I’m pretty convinced that Kate Hope Day, like June, possesses a particular brilliance herself.

Before he dies, June’s uncle asks again and again, “What does it do?” and this becomes an anchor, the refrain that brings her back to the most basic essence of a thing. As a child, she observes her uncle with his students, their democratic but competitive, overlapping, impassioned conversations. She has pored over their notes, a series of questions, answers, arguments, each written in their own hand, as they tried to imagine all the potential problems with the fuel cells during their inception.

When June works with James to reimagine the cells, these are some of the most beautiful passages of the book, showing June and James’s intellectual equality, their balletic collaboration, the short-hand they’re able to speak with each other because their minds work the same brilliant way. It reads a little like falling in love. In these moments when Kate Hope Day dives so deeply into the workings of June’s mind, whether working alone or with James, I feel as though I have entered into some kind of shared fugue state with her/them. Rarely have I seen such an accurate rendering of that headspace, the creative mind at work, making incremental progress, doubling back over previous ideas, turning the subject like a prism under light.

I also want to give a shout out to Rebecca Lowman, who narrates the audiobook. Her performances are always lovely, and this one is no exception.

***

If you’ve been reading these roundups, you may be wondering where my book-inspired art is for this month. (Probably not, haha.) I didn’t make any. I will have to get back on it in April.

Speaking of April, there are so many exciting romances coming out this month and next. I’ll definitely be reading Rosie Danan’s follow-up to The Roommate, The Intimacy Project, as well as Sarah Hogle’s newest, Twice Shy, both of which drop on April 6th. Then Sally Thorne’s Second First Impressions on the 13th. Maybe when Emily Henry’s People We Meet On Vacation comes out in May I’ll finally stop pushing everyone I know to read Beach Read. Maybe.

Anyway, I’m looking forward to some very happy spring reading, and I wish you the same! As always, come yell with me on Instagram (@microaffections) if you read any of these books.

March 2, 2021 By Melanie Sweeney 2 Comments

February Book Roundup

My February began right after a loss in my extended family and continued on with little health issues in my immediate family, fighting among our pets, a catastrophic winter freeze here in Texas that left us without power and water for about 22 hours (ultimately, we were far luckier than so many others!), and, for me personally, a brief run of just-okay books. But a few books stood out, and more so this month than most others, I really, really needed them.

I read seven books in February, but I’m going to include in my roundup one that I finished on January 31^st because I didn’t have time to fit it into last month’s, and I just really loved it. This month’s books were a mix of romance, literary fiction, and nonfiction.

I no longer include Emily Henry’s Beach Read in my count, but just know that I read parts or all of it again frequently. I’m going to start a book club where we just read that one book, and every time we meet, we invite someone new who has just read it for the first time so we can gush with renewed fervor, and that’s it. That’s the whole club.

My first February book was actually my last January book, but it’s fine. I make the rules here, and I’ll allow it. This is the book I read while anticipating the finality of sad news I knew was coming, a kind of pre-grief, I guess. That week, I needed a hug from a friend, but we were (are) still in a pandemic, so I figured that wasn’t going to happen. It didn’t, technically, but this book, Sarah Morgenthaler’s Enjoy the View was the next best thing.

An illustrated book cover with the title, Enjoy the View, and author, Sarah Morgenthaler. Near the top, a man climbs a mountain, and down at the bottom of a snowy path, a woman stands with a border collie. — Book 3 in Morgenthaler’s Moose Springs series

Coming from an MFA background, I used to be drawn primarily to very serious literary realism. Even as a child, I preferred dramas with real people and believable conflicts over episodic cartoons where there were never any long-term consequences or character growth. In rom-com movies, I used to lament that the sillier, often slapstick or gross-out moments took me right out of an otherwise believable and engaging story.

But I’ve since come to appreciate that romance worlds can be close to our own in reality, and they can lean into fantasy in all kinds of delightful ways. The genre is full of deep character study, resonant emotional arcs, and transformative stories that center the experiences of women and often marginalized people. It is also full of fun and joy and hope. This versatility, I think, is underappreciated, particularly with romance writers who don’t camp out on one end of the spectrum but play across its range.

Sarah Morgenthaler and her Moose Springs books, to me, perfectly thread the needle of moving, emotional romance that maintains a healthy dose of the quirky, fun, and fantastical, never venturing too far toward maudlin or cheesy.

In Enjoy the View, on one hand, there are thrilling, dangerous rock-climbing scenes that remain grounded in character-driven conflict between River, the risk-taking actress-turned-documentarian trying to reshape her career, and Easton, the expert mountain guide charged with keeping her film crew safe on a dangerous climb. On the other hand, there’s also an anthropomorphized, lovelorn marmot who follows Easton up the mountain with heart eyes. Such whimsical animals are part of the Moose Springs world, from a fashion savvy, blind border collie to various local moose. The old me might have scoffed at this combination of silly and serious, but the me of today – and of that week of anticipatory grief – finds it a totally entertaining and delightful mix.

The other thing I loved about Enjoy the View (and the other Moose Springs books) is that the characters don’t spend a lot of time in denial (to themselves or others) about their feelings. River and Easton don’t play frustrating games. Though vulnerable, they don’t hide their hearts too much. They have clarity about their feelings, and they communicate pretty maturely, even when things get tough. Their goals are at odds sometimes, but they are generally good, uncontentious people trying to do right by themselves and each other. What comes between Easton and River are things like her personal drive and subsequent recklessness, in service of her career, making it harder for him to protect her, which is not only his desire but also his job. They are both competent partners on the mountain, despite his role as her guide. They both make mistakes.

I loved this quote from River’s colleague and friend (and apologies if the punctuation is off in any quotes here since I transcribed them from the audio): “’We make movies for a living. We show people excitement and love and romance. We make being afraid exciting and being rescued sexy. But real fear? It’s not sexy. It makes you want to curl up in a ball, hide in a tent, and yell at the people you love. Real fear is awful…’”

While Morgenthaler characters have wonderfully playful, at times straight up weird senses of humor (like, these are actually quirky characters), the suspense side of things is unexpectedly gripping as well. I listened to the audiobook on my daily walks through my neighborhood, and my heart rate spiked higher than normal, and goosebumps broke out on my arms during one particularly hairy scene. Her pacing in these moments is perfection and her language wonderfully vivid. Morgenthaler’s ability to shift from a jealous marmot to life and death is truly an underrated quality.

Easton has all the surface markers of an alpha hero – enormously tall, broody, muscly, very skilled at his job – but he’s quiet, measured, and reasonable — not controlling or a jerk. Even when his emotions run high, he addresses River with honesty about his needs and respect for her as a person with autonomy, strength, and competence in her own right.

Here’s Easton following a dangerous stretch of their climb where they both took risks that scared the other: “’You can make your choices, and I’ll make mine. Hate to break it to you, but if you jump, I’m jumping after you. It’s the way I’m wired.’”

Anyway, I loved it so much I drew Easton and the marmot.

An illustration of a tall, muscular man with a bun looking down skeptically at a marmot that is hugging his leg and looking adoringly up at him on a pink background. — Lovelorn marmots were not on my 2021 reading Bingo card, but here we are.

If you need a book that explores some emotional territory and flirts with high stakes danger with the safety of a happy ending and a heavy dose of joy, Enjoy the View would be a great choice.

Next up is The Ex Talk by Rachel Lynn Solomon, which takes the fake dating trope and turns it up to eleven. In this one, Shay and Dominic are work rivals who, to save their local public radio jobs, team up to host a new show about relationships. The kicker is they must pretend to have dated and broken up, giving them a unique perspective to offer their listeners. They’ve got the chemistry and antagonistic dynamic to pull it off. Of course, their work brings them closer, and soon they’re smack in the middle of an enemies to fake exes to friends to lovers to . . . well, I won’t give too much away.

Shay Goldstein is a messy Millennial who has been at her job in some capacity for years, still feels like she’s faking adulthood despite owning a house, and has been grieving the loss of her father, whose own love of public radio led her into her career. Dominic Yun is the new hot shot at the station. My favorite running joke of the book is that he talks so much about his master’s degree in journalism from Northwestern that he winds up having to donate money via “Dominic’s Master’s Jar” every time he brings it up. If you love NPR, you will absolutely fall for the setting and side characters in this book, which are rendered in lovingly authentic detail. There’s a rescue dog named Steve, too.

Here’s a little drawing I did of the jar.

An illustration of a large, empty jellybean jar with a slit cut in the lid and a Post-It on the front that says "Dominic's Master's Jar" in all caps. There are stickers around the outside. — “This one time, during my Master’s in journalism at Northwestern…”

What surprised me with this book was how well it captured that Millennial feeling of still faking adulthood, how hard it is to make friends after college, and how messy and nonlinear grief can be. Some of my favorite romances are those that pair the swooniest, sweetest, sexiest love story with deep loss like this book does, because both parts of the story complicate and enrich the other. Grief, in this book, is rendered with real care.

Take this beautiful quote, for instance: “The thing about losing someone is that it doesn’t happen just once. It happens every time you do something great you wish they could see. Every time you’re stuck and you need advice. Every time you fail. It erodes your sense of normal, and what grows back is decidedly not normal. And yet, you still have to figure out how to trudge forward.”

My only hesitation with this book was the lie that kicks everything off – that Shay and Dominic are exes. I resisted it at the beginning, not just because I knew it would have to come back to bite them in the butts, but because it also creates personal conflict for each of them — which is also kind of why it works. Shay worries what her father would think of her while Dominic objects to the journalistic ethics of it. Every time I remembered that this lie would ultimately threaten everything, I felt such dread! But the story is so compelling, the characters so well-rendered, and their relationship so beautiful that I was willing to go with it. The fallout does come, and I have to hand it to Solomon. She earns every drop of dramatic payoff. So, if you like a romance with real stakes and big consequences, this may be the book for you.

An abstract blue and black book cover with silhouettes of a bird, key, plane, fish, and leaves. The title is in pink across the majority of the book -- Such a Fun Age -- and the author, Kiley Reid, is listed at the bottom.

My final read of the month was Kiley Reid’s literary novel, Such a Fun Age. This book takes on the relationship between parents and paid caretakers, weaving in race, privilege, feminism, modern emerging adulthood, and female ambition. The first chapter is an absolutely stunning piece of work on its own, setting the stage for the rest of the book.

Alix, an ambitious and image-savvy, wealthy white woman asks her twenty-something, Black babysitter, Emira, to take her three-year-old daughter out of the house late at night during a minor crisis. At the grocery store where Emira takes her, a security guard questions Emira’s relationship to the little white girl in her charge, leading to an escalating confrontation which kicks off the rest of the book.

After the incident, Alix realizes she knows very little about Emira and becomes eager to befriend her, while Emira, aimless, broke, and about to lose her health insurance, feels torn between catching up to her more successful friends and staying with Briar, her “favorite little human,” in a role that makes her feel competent. Meanwhile, the women’s relationship is further complicated by Kelly, a “woke” white man with connections to each of them.

This book is surprisingly funny and heartfelt despite its sharp social observations. Here’s a book where deeply flawed people are rendered with immense empathy. The betrayals are shocking, and at the same time, they come from good (or at least mixed) intentions. If you can help yourself while helping another, is that really so bad? What if you can exact revenge in the name of protecting someone? My feelings were all over the place with these characters. It takes a truly, deeply humane writer to pull off a book where the characters commit everything from petty slights to truly ugly betrayals, and yet, you also understand and even root for them at times.

The real gems here are Emira and Briar. The curiosity, tenderness, and love Emira feels for her charge is the beating heart underneath everything else. I won’t give the ending away, but in a mostly uplifting and well-earned ending, the final image slayed me.

A quote: “There were all these markers of time that would come to mean nothing. Was Emira just supposed to exist on her own at 6:45 knowing that, somewhere else, it was Briar’s bath time? One day, when Emira would say goodbye to Briar, she’d also leave the joy of having somewhere to be, the satisfaction of understanding the rules, the comfort of knowing what’s coming next, and the privilege of finding a home within yourself.”

So that’s it, the books I loved in February. As always, I wish you another month of great reads this March. And, hey, if you want in on my Only Beach Read All The Time Book Club, let me know!

February 2, 2021 By Melanie Sweeney Leave a Comment

January Reading Roundup

Did you set any reading goals this year? Or are you like the many, many people who have struggled to read during… all this? *gestures wildly at everything*

I have never set any reading goals for myself, partly because that sounds like work that might unnecessarily complicate a source of pleasure (I’ve already been to grad school, thanks) and partly because, until recently, I didn’t have a lot of time for reading. But since I’ve been managing to read every day for months now, and since I got this beautiful reading log/journal for Christmas, I thought it would be kind of fun to keep track of my reading this year and share my favorite books.

A yellow notebook on a blue textured background. The notebook says Books on the cover. — My new book journal from 1Canoe2 on Etsy

I am not setting a book number goal, but I do intend to read every day. This isn’t a goal about achieving anything, though. It is truly self-care. If I don’t want to read, I won’t force it or feel bad for not doing it. So far this month, I have read every single day, even the day I had a stomach bug.

I also want to create some art from/about what I’m reading. I started with a drawing for Alexis Hall’s Boyfriend Material and another for Miriam Toews’ Women Talking. I won’t make something for every book, just the ones that spark a creative impulse.

And finally, I want to do monthly roundups of what I’ve read. I’ve decided not to review or list every single book, just the ones that I really want to talk about. My goal, then, is to write up something about four books per month.

This month, I’ve read eleven books, DNFd two, and stopped halfway through one with the intention of returning to finish it another time. They were a mix of romance, creative nonfiction, craft book, and literary fiction. One of the eleven books was an old favorite, Beach Read by Emily Henry, which I actually re-read three times in a row on a particularly bad week. All but two were audiobooks, which is basically the only reason I’m able to read as much as I do. This is an anti-audiobooks-don’t-count-as-real-reading space!

Red, white, and blue book cover with two men, one in a suit and the other in black jeans and a t-shirt. Images from the UK fill various squares in the background. The title is Boyfriend Material. The author is Alexis Hall.

The first book I need to tell you about is also the first book I read this year: Alexis Hall’s Boyfriend Material. Luc, the fame-adjacent son of a British 70s prog rock star, needs a wholesome fake relationship to boost his image following some bad press in order to keep his non-profit job because his antics are costing them donors. The guy he asks to be his fake boyfriend is Oliver, a friend of a friend and a buttoned-up barrister with strict ethics. It’s trope-y and swoony and hilarious — an actually, truly funny rom-com — and in addition to being a pure delight of a book, it has many surprisingly introspective, emotional moments. The characters are complex. The writing is vivid and energetic. I smiled through nearly the entire thing. It was a hell of a first read for the year.

I bookmarked several favorite quotes in this book. Here’s one from Luc, the main POV character, right after he proposes the fake dating setup to Oliver, and it doesn’t go quite as planned: “In his zeal to get away, Oliver collided with one of the potted plants outside the restaurant, just about managing to grab it before it came crashing down, which basically meant he’d spent more time voluntarily touching a ficus than he had me.”

And this one, when Luc shows up with his friends unexpectedly at Oliver’s doorstep following their breakup: “‘They got this idea that if I turned up and told you how much I cared about you that you’d fall into my arms, and we’d live happily ever after. But frankly, they’ve underestimated how fucked up you are.'”

An illustrated bacon sandwich on a light blue plate and pink dotted placemat. — Emotional Support Sandwich

The drawing I did for this book is of the “emotional support sandwich” Luc makes Oliver when he’s having a terrible day.

My next favorite book was Miriam Toews’ Women Talking, which is based on a true story about women and girls in a Mennonite colony who were drugged and raped by a handful of the colony men repeatedly. In the book, a once-expelled but recently returned Mennonite man who spent much of his life outside of the colony, August, gets asked to record the minutes of a secret meeting of some of the women because they cannot read or write. The men who had been involved in the assaults were jailed outside of the colony, but now that they are being bailed out by colony leaders, they will return soon, and the women will be forced to forgive them to maintain the harmony of the group. They hold the secret meeting to determine what they will do — stay in the colony or leave. The entire novel takes place over a couple of days using the minutes as a frame. It is a Socratic dialogue about patriarchy, religion, love, and forgiveness that manages to be surprisingly light and hopeful at times even as the women debate the very real stakes of protecting themselves and their children at the cost of their faith and relationships. I wish I could get everyone to read this book, but obviously, it could also be a triggering read for many, so that’s important to note.

One thing I really like about the women’s conversation is that talking doesn’t typically make a strong plot, but the conversation itself creates the possibility for the women to change their fate, to take action. At one point, they talk about how they don’t have a map, don’t know how to read a map even if they had one, don’t know where they would go if they leave, don’t even know where they are in the world now because they are not educated and are so deeply isolated, and Ona, who asked August to record their minutes, suggests that maybe they can make their own map as they go. They will create the world they seek. They will dream it, draw it, talk it into existence.

A few quotes:
“It’s the quest for power on the part of Peters and the elders and on the part of the founders of Molotschna that is responsible for these attacks because in their quest for power, they needed to have those they’d have power over, and those people are us, and they have taught this lesson of power to the boys and men of Molotschna, and the boys and men of Molotschna have been excellent students. In that regard.”

“There must be satisfaction gained in accurately naming the thing that torments you.”

This meta statement about the women’s “plotting” to leave and the plot of the book: “There’s no plot, we’re only women talking.”

An illustration of two figures facing each other in an open field at sunset. Two tall, skinny trees stand in the background. The female figure is a Mennonite woman in a blue dress who is pregnant. She is facing the man, who stands in the foreground, back to the viewer. — Ona and August

I drew Ona asking August to record the minutes of their meeting the evening before the secret meeting. Later, this scene is revised at the end of the book to reveal more detail, but this was inspired by the version of it in the beginning of the book. “Ona and I avoided the shadows as we spoke. Once, in mid-sentence, the wind caught her skirt and I felt its hem graze my leg. We side-stepped into the sun, again and then again, as the shadows lengthened, until the sunlight had disappeared and Ona laughed and waved her fist at the setting sun, calling it a traitor, a coward.”

A red-orange book cover with the title, "Wintering: The Power of Rest and Retreat in Difficult Times," and the author's name, Katherine May, printed in black over a pale, cream-colored leaf.

Book three is Wintering: The Power of Rest and Retreat in Difficult Times by Katherine May. I feel like this is essential reading for such times as we are living through right now, and I’ve recommended it to, or purchased it for, several people. May interrogates the idea of cyclical seasons, hibernations, retreats, and periods of darkness in both the natural world and in our lives. She advocates for embracing these stretches, using them to attune to and satisfy our inner needs, to rest and replenish ourselves, rather than fighting to return to normal as quickly and painlessly as possible.

Quotes:
“There were times in those early years [of motherhood] when I thought nobody would ever listen to me again, that anything important I had to say was now crushed under the weight of the bag on my shoulder full of nappies and snacks and wipes and changes of clothes.”

“Some ideas are too big to take in once and completely. For me, this is one of them. Believing in the unpredictability of my place on this earth, radically and deeply accepting it to be true, is something I can only do in glimpses.”

A bright yellow book cover with four vibrantly illustrated people facing different directions and white text with author, Emma Straub, and title, All Adults Here.

Then there’s Emma Straub’s All Adults Here, a literary family drama about a widow and her three adult children navigating shifting relationships and roles over time, forgiveness of very old mistakes, having and being fallible parents, and redefining oneself within a family. The story itself is sometimes a bit slow, but the writing, on a sentence level, is gorgeous. I was particularly drawn to the idea that children expect their parents to have all the answers, but often, they/we don’t. Some reviews pitch this book as happy. I didn’t particularly find it all that happy, though it does have a hopeful trajectory.

Quotes:
“Childhood was infuriating this way. She’d felt it over and over when one of her children, all three of them, would inevitably forget the words to a song she’d sun to them 500 times or a book they’d read curled up together six, seven, eight times a day, and then time passed and they had no recollection, and the information was stuck there in Astrid’s head marked as important.”

“Astrid wished that there was a button everyone could push that immediately showed only their good intentions. How much pain that would save.”

So, that’s one month down! What are you reading? What are your reading goals this year, if you have any? I wish you lots of joy in books this year, whatever and however you are able to read.