Book Roundup

July 1, 2021 By Melanie Sweeney Leave a Comment

June Book Roundup

An orange block with three book covers for Seven Days in June, The Road Trip, and Very Sincerely Yours and a block of text that says Melanie's June Book Roundup.

We are halfway through 2021! Can you believe it? If things continue as they have gone thus far, I’m on track to read about 120 books this year, which, as a historically slow reader, kind of blows my mind. (I still read slowly. Audiobooks help, but I also simply read for more hours of the day than I used to.)

I’m also about to run out of space in my reading journal, which has unfortunately been discontinued, so if you have any recommendations for great ones, let me know. Otherwise, I’ll be stuck using a regular journal and formatting the pages in some fashion… Real problems, I tell you.

This month, I read ten books, primarily in audio. #AudiobooksCount #AudiobookDefenseLeague

As always, I’ve transcribed the excerpts below. I did my best to punctuate them accurately, but I apologize for any mistakes.

My standouts also happen to all be June releases, so place your holds now if you’re a library patron as these are all pretty hot, new titles.

An aqua-colored book cover with an illustrated young man and woman leaning on opposite sides of a red Mini Cooper with luggage inside. She's wearing overalls and has short, purple hair. He's in khaki shorts and a white t-shirt with brown hair, looking over the roof of the car at her. The title is The Road Trip in script at the top with the author, Beth O'Leary printed at the bottom. The tag line reads, "This is going to be one bumpy ride." — Look at the fresh summery vibes in this cover

My first favorite book this month was Beth O’Leary’s The Road Trip. I was looking forward to it after loving her debut, The Flatshare, and I liked this one even more.

The setup here is pretty great. Addie and Dylan broke up almost two years ago. Now, they’re each on their way in separate cars to a mutual friend’s wedding in Scotland. Romance reasons place Dylan’s car directly behind Addie’s near the start of the trip, and he accidentally rear-ends her. They, along with their passengers (Addie with her sister and another acquaintance, Dylan with his best friend, Marcus), wind up all cramming into Addie’s Mini Cooper to complete the long drive to the wedding.

One fiasco after another slows them down, prolonging the awkward reunion and forcing them deal with unresolved feelings. And the tension isn’t only between Addie and Dylan. Addie has about as much emotional baggage with Marcus, who played a key role in the events of the past. Through yo-yo-ing timelines, we get the full story of Addie and Dylan’s relationship and breakup alongside their present-day ill-fated road trip.

First of all, I’m a sucker for second chance romances. I don’t always love how heavy these books can be on flashbacks or full-on Then and Now timelines, but I do enjoy the unfolding of details about what went wrong the first time and getting to see the characters change to make it work this time. It’s the dark night of the soul or low moment but right there at the beginning of the book. There’s something deeply uplifting, when the story is handled well, about seeing what is usually just that last stretch where they have to make amends, change their ways, etc. as the meat of the story.

Early in the book, once they’ve begun the drive together, Dylan thinks, “If one could harness secrets for energy, we wouldn’t need petrol. We’d have enough grudges in this car to take us all the way to Scotland.” This right here is my catnip. Secrets, grudges, and no way to avoid them!

This particular book hits these buttons for me, but it also does something a little more complex in how it uses Marcus. Marcus is charismatic, wealthy, and loyal, and he and Dylan have been through some experiences that have really bonded them. Their friendship is also toxic and co-dependent. Dylan’s take on Marcus is this: “He brings out the bravery in me. With Marcus by my side, I’m somebody. The sort of man who throws caution to the wind, who defies his father, who chooses [to study] poetry when he ought to know better.”

It’s clear in the past storyline that whatever Marcus does to augment Dylan’s life, he also pretty easily influences and leads Dylan around. Prior to Addie, the two men slept with the same woman, essentially sharing her and highlighting a lack of boundaries in their friendship. When Dylan gets serious with Addie, Marcus grapples with the changing dynamic in his own relationship with Dylan in ways that undermine Addie.

I was pleasantly surprised by this nuanced portrayal of not only such a unique male-male friendship within a romance novel, but also the acute representation of the toxic aspect of it and how forgiveness plays out in more than the romance. Dylan asks Addie when you should give up on a person, and she replies easily, “When they’re bad for you.”

It’s not that simple in Dylan’s eyes. But we learn that, in the present storyline, Dylan and Marcus went through their own breakup of sorts after things fell apart between Dylan and Addie. Marcus is so central to Dylan as a character and to what happens between Dylan and Addie that it really feels like the book is about the whole triad rather than just the couple. I found it very complex and satisfying.

I always note favorite lines or moments in a reading journal, but this book is odd in that it wasn’t hugely quotable for me despite being very funny and sharply insightful. The humor often comes from relatable asides from the POV characters, things that genuinely made me chuckle to myself, as well as from the disjoint of “straight man” POV characters dealing with somewhat absurd people and situations. Overall, it’s a funny book that also goes to some heart-wrenching places.

Content notes for mental illness, sexual assault, stalking, and toxic relationships, but even with some heavy themes, this is an uplifting summer read.

A book cover with a beige envelope in the background and an illustrated man and woman, sitting atop a large red typewriter. She has a short brown bob hairstyle and wears a yellow dress with blue shoes. He has brown hair, a blue suit jacket and tie, and gray pants with a pop of yellow socks. The title is in script across the top in red and blue lettering: Very Sincerely Yours. The author's name, Kerry Winfrey, is print at the bottom in red. — “You dress like hot Mr. Rogers.”

Next up is Kerry Winfrey’s new release, Very Sincerely Yours, which actually reminded me a little bit of Beth O’Leary’s first book, The Flatshare. This one also gives us a main character, Theodora, aka “Teddy,” who has just gotten out of a relationship with hallmarks of emotional abuse, including damaging criticism and forced isolation from her friends.

Teddy is strengthened by those same friends in the aftermath of the breakup, and she embarks on a mission to do something that scares her every day in the hopes of rediscovering herself and finding some direction. She also begins to email the host of Everett’s Place, a local children’s puppet show, who happens to look, as one side character notes, like “a hot Mr. Rogers.”

Everett has his flaws – mainly, he’s a workaholic and a perfectionist, and his drive to make his show a success sometimes back-burners his relationships – but he is a refreshing male main character in that he has emotional intelligence and relationship skills that are typically coded feminine. He is a hero who doesn’t need to be saved, fixed, or trained to be on equal emotional footing and able to love the heroine well.

I have a theory about a crop of newer heroes like Everett, but my main guess about why they work (for me anyway) is that these dudes don’t require as much effort from their potential romantic partners. Often, they are the ones helping the heroine get her messy life back on track. In other words, they are doing the work heroines (and real-life women) have been doing forever. They have solid support systems in friends and family. They go to therapy. They can talk about their feelings.

In Everett’s case, he straight-up teaches children how to manage their emotions in healthy ways. He takes his role very seriously in his daily life, not just when he’s on camera. In a moment of self-doubt, when he feels unfulfilled but can’t figure out why, he tells himself, “Buck up, you idiot,” but quickly backtracks “because he would absolutely destroy someone who told any of his child viewers something like that.”

Instead, he tells his reflection, “It’s okay to feel your feelings.” It doesn’t solve his problem, which is more complicated than what a lot of his viewers need help with, but it’s a nice moment where we see a man treating himself tenderly and earnestly exploring his deeper feelings, even though it feels kind of unnatural at first, and I don’t know, I find that remarkably beautiful. This is something we could afford to normalize.

By contrast, Teddy has been mired in her ex’s criticism and neglect. “When I was with Richard,” she confides to Everett, “I didn’t ever feel like he was really listening to me when I talked, or like he valued what I said. It seemed like I was some sort of instrumentation for him, like a hood ornament on the BMW of his life. And when I saw your show for the first time, I couldn’t get over the way you talked to kids, like they mattered. Like you saw them all for the people they were, not for the people you thought they should be.”

This book really sings during Teddy and Everett’s email exchanges. They’re snappy and funny and playful, and they lay an honest and authentic foundation for their relationship. I particularly love when Teddy feels anxious about joining her boss at her jazzercise class – a new thing that scares her – and Everett first muses about going to the class himself. He ponders whether a very tall man like him would be unwelcome to the women in that space – another moment of self-awareness and empathy – then shifts to encouragement, writing, “I hope you gain so much strength through jazzercise that you’re able to dropkick your shitty ex in the face.”

A book cover with a blue background and pink and red blobs over a black and white photo of a Black man and woman. He embraces her from behind, face turned down toward her shoulder, and her head leans back against him. The title is printed in white: Seven Days in June. The author, Tia Williams, is printed in teal. — “She was a fire he’d started ages ago…”

My last great read this month was Tia Williams’s Seven Days in June. I know writers aren’t supposed to write about writers, but as one myself, I’ll admit to loving it. My favorite romance is still Beach Read, also a book about two writers, and this one is a great new title in that vein. And hey, it’s also a second chance romance!

At seventeen, Eva and Shane, both in the throes of pretty rough childhoods, meet and share an intense week together. They fall fast and hard, only to split just as quickly under traumatic circumstances. Now, as adults, they are both successful writers. He’s a literary darling. She has a rabid fanbase for her fourteen-title paranormal erotic romance series. By chance, they reunite at a book event and realize the passion they once had is still there, mixed in with unresolved hurts. The bulk of the book takes place during the week of this reunion with several glimpses into the week from their past.

I have never dropped more bookmarks than I did in this book. It has so many great quotes, and there’s an entire scene I’d transcribe in its entirety in my reading journal if I had the space. I can’t share from that scene (if you’ve read it, it’s the café scene when they first talk as adults) because it would spoil one of the book’s main plot twists, so instead, here’s an example of something I love in books about writers, when things get a little meta: “‘I’ve changed.’ His confident smile made it believable. ‘I think this is what writers calls a character arc.’”

Also, this bit of wisdom from a side character: “Prose before bros.”

This book tackles so many Big Things. Eva struggles with chronic, debilitating migraines that she masks as much as possible to do book events and to parent, even when she has to “mother from bed.” Eva articulates the differences between what women in the industry have to do versus men – being present on social media, networking, doing events, while Shane can disappear and stay relevant. At one point, when her series gets optioned for a film adaptation, she has to deal with a prospective director wanting white actors to play her Black characters. Both Eva and Shane have deeply traumatic histories encompassing addiction, self-harm, sexual harassment and assault, neglect, etc. Eva has worked very hard to end generational trauma for her own daughter. Shane has similarly put in the work to get and stay sober and make a meaningful difference in the lives of kids like him. They are both messy in authentic ways, but they are trying.

Audre, Eva’s daughter, is an unexpected standout character. She brings a lot of levity and heart to the book. It’s clear that Eva’s determination to give Audre a life of secure attachment and love has resulted in a girl with exceptional emotional intelligence and the related vocabulary to go with it. She is a perfectly delightful blend of wise-beyond-her-years sage to adult and child characters alike – she has a hilarious side hustle as a therapist to her prep school peers – and TikTok savvy tween who dresses to express her moods and still needs her mom. She steals every scene she’s in, and I’d frankly read a whole book of her doling out life advice.

I love this moment when she and Eva are arguing, and Audre declares that she only does art because she’s great at it, but it’s not her real dream. “My dream is to be a celebrity therapist, possibly with a nail salon franchise, which you’ve never supported BTW.” It’s a moment that reminds Eva and the reader that Audre is still a child despite her confidence and adult vocabulary.

The central romance is really beautiful, of course, and there’s an interesting structural choice in the final chapter/epilogue that I’ll be thinking about for a while.

There it is, folks. My June Roundup. I hope July and the second half of the year bring you some wonderful reads!

June 2, 2021 By Melanie Sweeney Leave a Comment

May Book Roundup

May here in Texas has been rainy with no reprieve on the horizon, but while my kids have gone a little stir crazy, it’s been pretty good for reading books. I read fifteen books, including romance, women’s fiction, a pretty great middle grade fantasy novel, and two nonfiction books about homeschooling. Let’s dive in!

An illustrated book cover for Float Plan with a sailboat on the ocean over a yellow background. A man with a prosthetic leg and a woman face each other from opposite ends of the boat. — If you have pandemic-fueled wanderlust, you’ll love this trip through the Caribbean!

I kicked off the month with a book I’m pretty certain will end up on my Best of 2021 list this December, Float Plan by Trish Doller. Ten months after Anna’s fiancé dies by suicide, she sets out on the sailing trip he planned for them to take through the Caribbean. She struggles through a rough first leg of the trip and realizes she needs to hire a more skilled sailor to help her hit every island stop on Ben’s detailed itinerary. Enter Keane, an expert sailor whose prosthetic leg has limited his opportunities but not his ability on a sailboat. He offers to help Anna for a drop-off later in the trip. (Also, *alert* he’s Irish.)

Okay, so first, be warned there is a suicide note on page one. I was skeptical about how a romance was going to develop from this beginning in a way that felt believable and, frankly, okay. Anna’s grappling with Ben’s suicide is not a minor part of the book, and while I think Doller takes great care in handling the subject matter, the characters do occasionally have thoughts about Ben’s suicide that are realistic and emotional, if not always entirely free from judgment. I don’t read these as authorial judgments, given the sensitivity elsewhere in the writing.

My favorite romances often have a central thread of grief woven through them. What can I say? I’m a sucker for angst. This one explores that range of pain and happiness thoroughly and with acute insights. Anna begins by following Ben’s itinerary to the letter, so it’s no wonder that every mile she sails, she considers what the trip and her life would have been like with him. “The never knowing is lodged in my heart like a stone, a constant dull ache that throbs during moments like these, when I wonder what our future would have been.” But over the course of the trip, she starts to deviate from the plan. She goes places that weren’t on his list and bypasses others entirely and eventually understands “how sadness and happiness can live side by side within a heart, and how that heart can keep on beating.”

The only way I think the romance part of this works is as a slow burn. It’s a very slow burn, and I was glad for it. It’s also one of the few romances I’ve read where I thought the two characters were very well matched and wanted them to make a relationship work while also being entirely okay with them going their separate ways if that was the outcome. A huge portion of the book is centered around Anna’s journey through her grief and toward finding her own way in the world, gaining true competence at sailing and overall self-sufficiency. She needed Keane after that first rough solo journey, but she truly comes into her own, and it’s so empowering to read.

I knew there would be a point when they fought or separated for whatever reason, (spoiler alert, I guess?) as is usually the case, but while that dark moment often reads as loss, depression, pain, and darkness, this book opens up in a truly breathtaking way. I was so moved and so willing to go anywhere Trish Doller wanted to take me, both through her vivid descriptions of the Caribbean and on the emotional ride.

And it looks like she’s adding at least two more books to this fictional world. I can’t wait to see what she writes next.

An illustrated book cover that lists Emily Henry, the author, at the top, and People We Meet on Vacation across the middle. It's a bright orange cover with green palm trees and two figures reclining in pool lounge chairs. — It speaks to me.

My most-anticipated book of May was Emily Henry’s People We Meet on Vacation. I went in with tempered expectations because I didn’t want my love of Beach Read to make me disappointed by an otherwise great book, and that was a good call. It didn’t push Beach Read out of my favorite spot, but it definitely earns a place in my top reads for this year so far.

Poppy has “Millennial ennui” despite having a great career and her life basically in order (“My life turned out how I hoped it would, and now I just miss wanting something”), and her solution is to repair her decade-old friendship with Alex by going on one of the annual summer trips they used to take before something happened in Croatia two years ago and they stopped talking. The story unfolds with yo-yo-ing timelines, splitting between the current summer and summers past, so we see their friendship grow and change while present-day Alex and Poppy navigate what feels like a point of no return. This trip will likely change everything.

The best part of an Emily Henry book is the crackling banter between her main characters. The things they say to each other, usually funny in the moment, get further mileage as call backs and inside jokes, ones that bond them to each other but also bring the reader in on the dance in a rare, magnetically intimate way that feels a little like falling in love yourself. One such inside joke: on a past trip, a gallery employee tries to sell them a $21,000 bear sculpture they could never afford, arguing that “when art speaks to you, you find a way to make it work,” and after that, the question, “Does it speak to you?” becomes the criteria for every bizarre or embarrassing souvenir they might buy.

But these little jokes also pay emotional mileage. Present-day Poppy worries, “It’s possible that all those little moments that meant so much to me never meant quite the same thing to him. It’s possible that he didn’t reach out to me for two years because, when we stopped speaking, he didn’t lose something precious the way that I did.”

There is also weirdness deeply embedded into the characters, a weirdness that endeared them to me immediately and which gives the book a warm and tender essence. This is a weighted blanket in book form. When Poppy role-plays picking Alex up in a bar, he tells her he doesn’t live around here, and “even if I did, I have a cat with a lot of medical needs that require specialized care. Makes it hard to get out.” This, it turns out, is true. And the cat’s name is Flannery O’Connor, which probably gives you a good glimpse into the academic-minded “study in control” that is Alex Nilsen.

“I love when you get weird,” Poppy tells Alex, speaking for us all. He replies, “You make me weird. I’m not like this with anyone else.” Don’t we all want to be seen as our strangest, most uninhibited selves and loved for it? Don’t we all want to know someone so well that we get a version of them reserved only for us?

This book is swoony as hell is what I’m saying. It speaks to me.

A yellow book cover with a heart and DNA strand below it. Christina Lauren is listed at the top and The Soulmate Equation at the bottom. — Would you want to know if your partner was your genetic soulmate??

I was saving Christina Lauren’s latest release, The Soulmate Equation, so I’d have a likely solid book to fall back on when needed, but I gave in and read it right at the end of the month. No regrets!

Jess is a freelance statistician and single mom who is starting to feel lonely despite having a charming kid, engaged and loving grandparents, and one of the best friends I’ve seen in a book in a while. Dr. River Pena is a geneticist and CSO for an emerging company, GeneticAlly, which predicts soulmate matches from genetic markers. (I’m summarizing, but it’s real science-y!) Jess finds River uptight and rude, but his sample (it’s just saliva!) gets flagged as a diamond level match with her. The algorithm gives them an unheard of 98% likelihood of lasting happiness together. Despite River’s scientist skepticism, this is his life’s work, so if the algorithm is wrong about him and Jess, it could threaten everything. He and his company’s executive board ask her to spend some time getting to know River, hoping to confirm the findings, and to be available for PR that would use their match to boost the company, which is about to go public.

It’s pretty hard to pull off a modern story that hinges on fate, or in this case, seemingly iron-clad science. What I love about this book is that the characters routinely ask the big questions. If you love someone, but you find out your compatibility rating with them is low, would it change how you feel about the relationship? Or, in Jess and River’s case, does a high number sway you to feel something you otherwise wouldn’t have been open to? How much weight do you give the algorithm, and how much choice is left in the face of something so persuasive?

I love that River identifies right away what Jess’s priorities are, how she operates, and what she needs. When she winds up in a bind and every other person in her orbit can’t step up like usual, he tells her, “I want you to call me for help without an apology on the tip of your tongue.” They are attracted to each other physically, but he marvels at her competence at her job, too. They share a respect for the honesty of good data.

I also love the friendship between Jess and Fizzy, her romance novelist best friend, who mines daily interactions for material and pushes Jess to not feel guilty for wanting just a little bit more for herself beyond her work and her child. She’s the one who convinces Jess to enter her sample into the database in the first place. Their relationship feels just as fated to me as Jess’s relationship with River, unconditional and iron-clad, but also, as becomes important with Jess and River, too, a chosen relationship. I laughed out loud when Jess confesses to Fizzy, “I’m lonely, and I feel like such an asshole complaining, but you’re always going to be a bigger asshole than I am, so I can complain to you.” We all need a Fizzy in our corner.

Instead of writing in-depth about one more book, I want to quickly shout out some other titles I really enjoyed this month.

A blue, illustrated book cover for Talia Hibbert's Act Your Age, Eve Brown, with a lavender-haired woman embracing a man, the suggestion of sheet music trailing behind her. — “Surprise! I live here.”

I laughed hard and often at Talia Hibbert’s latest Brown Sisters book, Act Your Age, Eve Brown, and in fact transcribed an entire scene about the invasion of ducks in a pond that ends with the hero exclaiming, “Christ, woman. Read a waterfowl blog!” Someone somewhere needs that tattoo. The gist is that Eve needs a job, and after doing poorly in the interview for a chef position at a B&B, she accidentally hits the potential employer with her car. She winds up working for him and living on the property, and he never stops reminding her that she HIT HIM WITH HER CAR.

An illustrated book cover of Seekers of the Wild Realm by Alexandra Ott with a young girl summoning green magic and looking at a white dragon among trees. — Magic. dragons. and challenging gender norms. A perfect combination.

My kids and I also really enjoyed Alexandra Ott’s Seekers of the Wild Realm, which is a middle grade book about a girl who wants to be her village’s first female seeker and a boy who trades her the training she’s been excluded from in exchange for her help with a baby dragon he’s not supposed to have. There are dragons, magic, and beautiful friendships – and no super scary parts for sensitive hearts. The next book will be out in a couple weeks, and we’ll definitely be reading that one, too. We are currently reading her other series, Rules for Thieves.

A book cover for The Brave Learner by Julie Bogart with the subtitle, "Finding Everyday Magic in Homeschool, Learning, and Life" and a photo of a young child sitting on a colorful staircase. — There’s a free journal that pairs with the book on her website, too!

And finally, I’ve seen Julie Bogart’s The Brave Learner recommended all over the place in homeschooling circles, and I finally got my hands on a copy. Whether you homeschool or teach children in a more formal setting or are a parent whose kids are educated primarily outside the home, this book is so valuable! We often say that we want our children to love learning, but Bogart interrogates that claim early on in the book and argues, “When adults ask kids to love learning, they’re asking children to find academics pleasurable so that adults will be relieved of the obligation to nag.” What we really want, usually, is for our kids to joyfully cooperate with what we have already planned for them. But education isn’t something we should do to our kids. Bogart gives practical tips for fostering that elusive love of learning by meeting kids in their own interests, letting “way lead to way,” and inviting them in with mystery, surprise, enchantment, and more. I recommend it whole-heartedly.

On to June!

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!