Book Roundup

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!

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!