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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.

January 1, 2021 By Melanie Sweeney Leave a Comment

20 Books I Loved in 2020

I’m not going to write a whole thing about what kind of year this has been because y’all already know. But I will say that this was the year I fully embraced reading romance, and I give it a lot of credit for helping me get through the uncertainty and anxiety of these past many months. Stories of joy, of vulnerability, of identity, and yes, falling in love made me laugh, smile, swoon, and sometimes cry. They make up the bulk of my list.

First, shout out to audiobooks for making my reading life possible.

I was going to stick to just my top 10 books, but I loved too many, and I’ve leaned hard away from restraint this year. It just doesn’t serve me anymore. We all deserve a little indulgence in our lives. So here are 20 books I loved in 2020 in no particular order, except like the first few, which are definitely at the top.

Beach Read by Emily Henry

She’s a romance writer, and he’s basically Guy from Your MFA and her old college nemesis. They strike up a challenge to write in the other’s genre, which also prompts them to guide each other through their process. She takes him on a bunch of fun, romantic dates, and he lets her in on his research and interviews. It’s beautifully written with sparkling dialogue, tight pacing, and evocative language. Josh also read it, and he said it was funny and made him want to write again. If you’re coming from literary fiction or women’s fiction, this would be a great first foray into romance as it’s also on the more grounded, realistic end of the spectrum (aside from one coincidental plot point that makes them neighbors early on for ~RoMaNcE rEaSoNs~). This was one of the rare books that I started all over again right after I finished it and purchased the paperback. And the audio is wonderful.

Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel

Early in the pandemic, I felt pulled to read a pandemic book. Morbid curiosity, I suppose. It just so happened that my friend, Chris, had recently read it, and then on a whim, without realizing I was interested in it, he sent me a copy. It’s a sprawling novel that covers multiple POVs and long spans of time, beginning with a pandemic and following a traveling theater company, people stranded in an airport, a cult leader, while weaving in the past. I almost never cry while reading books. I can count on one hand the times I have. But this one got me multiple times. If you can’t tackle it right now because it feels too close to reality, I get it. But I will say that this book is deeply human, fundamentally hopeful, and cathartic to read.

The Hating Game by Sally Thorne

I don’t know if I first read this book in 2020 or 2019, but I definitely read it multiple times this year. This is the tropiest, swooniest, funniest romance I’ve probably ever read. It is pure joy. Lucy and Josh are rivals working at a book publisher that has just merged from two distinct companies into one. They play various games to get on each other’s nerves like the staring game and, when things really escalate, the HR game. They’re up for the same promotion, naturally, but as they compete with each other, they also, you know, fall in love. It’s a prime model for enemies to lovers, and it has a really distinct first person narrator in Lucy. It is my ultimate comfort read.

99 Percent Mine by Sally Thorne

This one seems to be a hit or a miss for people For me, it’s a hit. The intricate layering of character and plot is so masterful in this book that I studied the text from a writing viewpoint and broke down all the ways I think it works. In true Sally Thorne fashion, the first person POV is distinct and almost claustrophobic — you have to read for a while before you see it working, but the payoff is *chef’s kiss*. Darcy has been in love with her childhood friend and best friend of her twin brother, Tom Veleska, for basically her whole life. The perfect man, she calls him. Now he’s leading the renovation on her recently deceased grandmother’s house. If you read only one Sally Thorne, go with The Hating Game, but if you like that one, maybe give this one a try.

The Roommate by Rosie Danan

Okay, listen. The premise of this book is going to sound… silly? smutty? Just… hold your judgment. Clara moves across the country to finally try to make a go of things with her long-time friend and crush. She’s supposed to be moving into his house, but when she gets there, he’s going on tour with his band and has gotten her a different roommate named Josh. And Josh is… a porn star. When I tell you this is one of the most emotionally deep romances I read this year, I mean it. Also, I low key learned a lot about the porn industry?

You Deserve Each Other by Sarah Hagle

I don’t know what it is about this book exactly, but it felt very different from anything else I’ve read. These two are engaged to be married, but somewhere along the way, they’ve fallen out of love and are now actively sabotaging the wedding, hoping the other will be the one to call it off. It’s lovers to enemies to lovers, and it’s funny and moving and hopeful.

Call of the Wild + Free by Ainsley Arment

I read this right after we decided to homeschool our kids, and I credit it with eliminating my anxiety and bolstering my confidence, much like finding the right mom friends helped me find my footing in motherhood. It’s on the crunchier, gentle parenting, free range side of the spectrum. It made me feel well-equipped and excited to tackle homeschooling but ALSO to more deeply connect with my kids.

Bringing Down the Duke by Evie Dunmore

This is the first book in a series called The League of Extraordinary Women, so you know it’s feminist AF. It’s a historical, and the heroine is a blue stocking in one of the first classes of women admitted to Oxford. She’s also a suffragette, (as is the heroine of the second book, A Rogue of One’s Own, which is also great). She spars with and then falls for a young duke who has the power to actually change the laws restricting so many women. It’s very funny and smart.

The Simple Wild by KA Tucker

Calla, a sort of shallow city girl, flies to rural Alaska to reconnect with her estranged father before he dies from cancer. He’s a bush pilot, and so is Jonah, his surrogate son, who hates Calla on sight. (If you’re sensing that I’m a sucker for a good enemies to lovers story, you’re on to something.) Calla comes to love the Alaskan wilderness and works through some big family and identity issues, but of course, she was always going to leave again, and her father’s illness is terminal. So yeah, it’s sad at times, but it’s handled with sensitivity, and the angst is earned.

The Worst Best Man by Mia Sosa

She’s a wedding planner who was once left at the alter, and now she’s trying to grow her business with an opportunity to be the in-house wedding coordinator for a big hotel, but to get the job, she has to work with her ex-fiancé’s brother and best man. There’s some fake dating, an Only One Bed situation, and a lovely cinnamon roll hero in this one.

Well Met by Jen DeLuca

Do you want your romance set at Renaissance Faire? This one follows a heroine helping her older sister and niece following a bad car accident, which leads her to join the local Ren Faire as a chaperone for the niece. There, she meets the grumpy English teacher running the whole production who bristles at every small improvement she tries to make and seems to judge her every move. But once she understands why he has such a tight hold on the Faire, she changes her mind about him. Bonus: it’s a series, and book 2, Well Met, is already out.

Long Shot by Kennedy Ryan

Technically, I think I read this one on like December 30th of 2019, but it won a Rita award, and it’s an ambitious book. The story puts domestic abuse and violence on the page, so please consider whether this is a book for you or if you need more info before you take it on. The romance, obviously, does not occur between the same couple as the abuse. It’s also a sports romance. The couple is essentially destined to be together, but their paths diverge, and when they cross again, she’s with someone else. I wouldn’t trust just any writer to tell a story involving domestic violence that also has an HEA, but I did feel like Kennedy Ryan handled it sensitively. This is also the first in a series. The second book, Block Shot, is also good.

The Bromance Book Club by Lyssa Kay Adams

I rolled my eyes a little at the premise of this book (and series). It’s about a group of guys who read romance novels and help each other learn about toxic masculinity and how to be worthy of and honest in all of their relationships. I’m just saying, at times, that struck me as some high fantasy. Did I always find the guys’ wokeness and commitment to their education believable? No. But it’s presented with enough skepticism from other characters to kind of pull it off. Anyway, believability aside, all three of these books have some surprisingly profound emotional moments and A+ dialogue. The first book is a second chance romance between a pro baseball player with a lifelong stutter and his wife whose life has gotten swallowed up by his job and their kids.

How to Raise a Wild Child: The Art + Science of Falling in Love with Nature by Dr. Scott Sampson

This is the only book on my list by a man, and it may very well be the only one by a man that I read all year. Men. I don’t miss them. Back in the fall, when I was trying to navigate homeschooling and reading all this research about the importance of time in nature for kids, I literally googled “how to love nature” because I’m… not a big fan of Houston in August. This is the book that came up in my search. It has some practical tips for introducing more time, and more meaningful experiences, in nature to your kids. Also, have you ever watched Dinosaur Train? Scott Sampson is THE Dr. Scott the Paleontologist.

The Boy, the Mole, the Fox, and the Horse by Charlie Mackesy

This is the book we all need to get through this year. I’m not sure if it’s technically a children’s book or not. It has beautiful illustrations and a lovely message about resilience and friendship and difficult emotions, and I bawled when I read it to my kids the first time.

Love Her or Lose Her by Tessa Bailey

Another second chance romance with a heroine who yearns to open a restaurant and really make something of herself and a hero who has closed off to her and hopes handling practical needs is enough to fulfill his duty to someone he fears has outgrown him. It’s the second in the series. They’re all good, but I felt like this one did the heaviest emotional lifting of all three.

Girls & Sex by Peggy Orenstein

I can’t say I enjoyed reading this, but it certainly opened my eyes to what girls today are dealing with when it comes to sex. I’ll probably revisit this one a little further down the road.

When He Was Wicked by Julia Quinn

Well, I couldn’t very well put all the Bridgerton books on this list, but yes, the series is good, and if you liked the Netflix show, I think you’ll like the books. The show will never have dialogue as sparkling as JQ’s. This is the most depressing book in the bunch, which is absolutely on brand for me. Francesca Bridgerton’s husband dies. His cousin and very close friend and long-time admirer of Francesca, Michael, inherits his title. Heads up that there’s obviously loss of a spouse but also miscarriage in this one. If you love a guilt-ridden, pining, somewhat self-loathing hero, give it a try.

It’s in His Kiss by Julia Quinn

Book 7 in the Bridgertons series is Hyacinth’s book. There’s an attempted jewelry heist and cross-dressing and a hero with big dad issues, and Hyacinth is the most delightful of all the Bridgerton siblings. Fight me.

Perfect Tunes by Emily Gould

Laura is a budding young singer-songwriter who moves to NYC and strikes some small success in an impromptu band with her best friend, who is beautiful but not really a musician. Meanwhile, Laura has a whirlwind crush/relationship with a musician whose band is just taking off in a big way. Their relationship is short and results in a child, which changes the course of her life. This books is so perceptive about motherhood, friendship, art, and what it’s like to hold onto ambitions and talent for years, never really getting the chance to go all in on them.

So, that’s it! The books that made a big impression on me this year. I hope you also got to enjoy some stories this year. Feel free to yell at me about any of your favorites, and let me know what you think if you read any of my top 20!

Happy reading in 2021!