leahtylerthewriter's reviews
462 reviews

"Grief was not a line carrying you infinitely further from loss. You never knew when you would be slingshot backward into its grip."

Seventeen-year-old Nadia's grief over her mother's suicide lulls her into making sloppy choices for herself. But when her dalliance with Luke, the preacher's son, results in pregnancy, she trades in the baby for her college-bound future without a second thought. The ripple of her abortion spreads throughout the years and permeates every relationship both Nadia and Luke have, both with others and with each other.

I love Bennett's writing. I could crawl inside her worlds and stay for much longer than the pages allotted to me. This book examines mothers from every angle: the motherless teenagers Nadia and Aubrey whose loneliness bonds them together, Nadia's belief that her unplanned existence caused her mother the misery that ultimately led to her death, Luke's pious mother who does not hesitate to procure her son's freedom from an unworthy girl, the chorus of church mothers who meddle and judge the comings and goings of everyone else.

What Bennett achieved by peeling back the layers of choice and consequence, selfishness and desire, love and duty, yielded a profound result. Tackling not only religion but abortion in her first novel was a bold move and she executed it with sensitivity and comprehensiveness. Each point of view felt valid and represented. I would have liked a little more access to Nadia, for she was a cold and sad girl I struggled to bond with, even in her later years. But ultimately this was a stellar debut and I will be eagerly following Bennett's career.

"The absence seemed to be leaking out of its tidy, assigned storage space, seeping into the complicated, mysterious landscape of the rest of me."

Jane is a young woman residing somewhere between mentally ill and generationally haunted. Alternating between the unreliability of her present-day reality and flashbacks to her mother's childhood experience surviving a Japanese interment camp, Guthrie weaves together a rich, sorrowful tale about choice, circumstance, injustice, and the ways people cope with loss.

I finished this book feeling flat and estranged. Mentally, I felt for Jane. The supernatural rumblings were compelling, the interment camp experience gut-wrenching, Jane's struggle to find her footing as an adult easy to identify with. But my heart was not in her story. Perhaps there were too many threads being pulled or I've read too many books as of late and need a reading break. It's entirely possible the problem was me but this one just didn't grab me.

"You know when life is just about as confusing as it can possibly be? And then you think to yourself 'Well at least it can't get any worse than this.' Then life is like, 'Huh, really, you think so? Huh?' And then just to prove you wrong it gets even more freaking confusing than it was before."

Felix is a seventeen-year-old queer trans virgin with brown skin. He's worried he's just too much for other people to take. Or perhaps its his fear of rejection that's keeping him from putting himself out there, his fear of getting hurt. As he embarks on one last high-school summer session, hoping to win a scholarship to Brown, life opens up in a multitude of ways and forces him to confront things about both himself and others that will forever shape his world.

Ahh, the pain of adolescence is so real! Callender did an excellent job of sucking me back into the insecurities of youth and the struggle to understand oneself. Felix is searching to find a comfortableness in his own skin, understand where he fits in, seeking the experience of loving and being loved. All normal stuff every kid goes through, and he's got a bucket of extra challenges sitting on top. I felt for Felix and was rooting for him the entire time. Callendar's depiction of the trans experience was refreshing and clear and revealing and important. I appreciated the deep glimpse into a life I simply don't live, as well as the similarities shared by all who survive the human condition. Felix Ever After expanded not only my heart but my mind in a heartwarming and informative way.

That being said, I absolutely hated the end. It got a bit too soapbox and wrapped up a little too neat.

"I will never be someone that is effortlessly good. It'll always be hard work for me. And I'm not that strong."

Jane is eighteen, pregnant, and one confused girl. A pizza-delivery driver, she becomes obsessed with a customer as she slowly unravels.

I did not enjoy reading this book. It was not the right time for me to be reading a book about depression. At times the narrative seemed pointless and other times it made me angry. Then I got to the end and sobbed like a baby so obviously Frazier did something right. I can't remember the last time I cried like that, maybe at the end of Pachinko. I read so many books that evoking that sort of emotion in me takes some serious plucking.

I usually start my reviews with a quote but don't have one for this book because I raced through this suspense thriller tripping over myself to get to the next part to see what happens next! Yes, I loved it. I don't read a lot of suspense so when I do and it delivers, I am a happy kitten.

Iris and Summer Rose are mirror twins who were days away from being born conjoined when their egg split. Now adults, Iris, the less successful and well adjusted twin who is jealous of her sister's life, agrees to help Summer sail her yacht from Thailand to Sychelles. What could possibly go wrong?

What a juicy, unexpected, twisty family drama rife with suspense that I did not even begin to predict or guess. And the triple twist at the end floored me. I don't want to give anything away so just read it if you want to be immersed in an unreliable narrator who has you hanging on the edge of your seat.

"The problem with Emily and me was we were killing one another. Apart we probably could have managed but the two of us together was a form of suicide. It took teamwork to get your life fucked up so bad."

"Cherry" is Nico Walker's autobiography thinly disguised as fiction. The best description I can give is if Hunter S. Thompson and Hemingway had a Millennial baby, this would be it. It's a drug-fueled frenzy. It's a frank depiction of Army deployment in Iraq. It's a love story about two drug addicts who would rather get high than screw. It's about a privileged white kid who turns into a bank robber to support his habit. It's about people who just don't really care abut life. It's a trip...says my younger self, thinking back to when these kinds of glimpses into a life I hadn't lived were daring and exciting to learn about. As an adult, it kinda just reminded me of my teenage angst. Sardonically funny at times, it was also painful and sad.

I did enjoy Walker's writing style. It was natural and easy, like sitting down and having a conversation with him. He is startlingly honest, which is a refreshing characteristic I respect. But ultimately not much happens, interesting or otherwise, and the ending dragggggged.

This is my book club's pick and it will certainly be an interesting discussion, which is all one can ask for from book club.

"Throughout her life of prejudice, exploitation, poverty, misunderstanding, and disease, she never gave up hope that one day she would find out where she really belonged."

Zintkala Nuni, known as Lost Bird, (1890-1920) was an infant who survived the massacre at Wounded Knee, South Dakota and a 4-day blizzard before being discovered shielded under the frozen body of her dead mother. General Colby, in SD on a cleanup mission, took an interest in her and after kidnapping her a few times from Lakota families, adopted his "war trophy" and delivered Zintkala to his suffragette wife, Clara Bewick Colby.

That's the premise of this biography that was supposed to be about Zintkala Nuni's life but was far more about Clara Colby. A contemporary of Susan B Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Clara attempted to "civilize" her adopted Native daughter and find a place for Zintkala in White society. Needless to say, it didn't go well.

This book took me 4 months to finish and for a multitude of reasons pissed me off. I was hungry to learn about Zintkala and instead found myself reading about the White suffragette experience. There are lots of those books around, painfully little about Zintkala. General Colby was an incredible asshole. Zintkala was treated to the ignorance of the day, that her nature was uncivilized and skin color made her less than. Like many people who are separated from their communities, she never found the place where she fit in. And at the end of the day, the book was about her adopted mother, not her.

Perhaps there wasn't enough documentation to craft a biography and historical fiction would have been a better way to tell Zintkala's story.

"Growing up in this town, I had long ago learned that the savagery of a man named Mohammed was rarely questioned, but his humanity always had to be proven."

Nora, a Moroccan American classical composer, returns to her hometown in California's Mojave Desert following the death of her father from a hit and run. Seeking answers about both his death and life, and attempting to come to terms with her grief, she is pulled back into the small-mindedness of a community she thought she had long since left behind.

I loved the premise and the interwoven relationships involving a multicultural cast of characters in this National Book finalist. "The Other Americans" portrayed a true slice of the America I am from. That alone made it an enjoyable read.

Unfortunately Lalami's execution left me a little wanting. The large number of point-of-view characters was distracting, as was the depth of so many different back stories that weren't relevant to the plot or main storyline. This, coupled with a number of unresolved or unanswered threads, kept me from fully latching on to or rooting for any one of the people in this book. Also, I thought it was an interesting choice to have a deceased character answering for things that were happening after their death.

Point of view is one of the most powerful tools an author has, and I experienced a number of issues regarding Lalami's choices. I did experience this as a page turner, for I certainly wanted to know what happened, but found the end predictable. I will certainly read more by this author, who is quite a skilled storyteller, but would love a focused story that digs deeper and not as wide.