Review: The Wonder of Lost Causes by Nick Trout

If you are a dog person, you know what magic dogs are. They are love wrapped in fur. They make bad things more bearable and good things simply joyous. Finding the right dog for you is completely wondrous and will change your life forever. But if you're a dog person you already know this and probably already have a dog (or several). But what would you do if you couldn't have a dog? If your child had a life threatening disease that made a dog a bad idea? If your apartment didn't allow for dogs? If you were a single mother so overwhelmed by the thought of caring for a dog that having one was just a bridge too far? What if all of this was true and then your terminally ill child meets the dog of his heart, the ugliest dog ever, one that was clearly abused and battered, and you watch as they become a vital piece of each other. What do you do then? In Nick Trout's heartwarming new novel, The Wonder of Lost Causes, this is exactly the case.

Kate Blunt is a veterinarian at a financially struggling dog shelter. But unlike most vets, she doesn't have a menagerie at home, despite the shelter being a limited, aka kill shelter, because her eleven year old son Jasper has cystic fibrosis, a terminal, genetic lung disease. Kate's a single mom, Jasper's dad has never been in the picture, and she can't risk her boy's health nor can she take on one more responsibility no matter how much Jasper has always wanted a dog. And then the ugliest, most unadoptable mutt ever lands at the shelter and Jasper falls in love. Whistler has been terribly abused and has run off from several previous "forever homes" but he clearly has a connection with Jasper, who claims that he can understand what Whistler is feeling because Whistler is telling him. Kate can't quite bring herself to believe in telepathy between her son and this dog but as Whistler's fourteen days at the shelter start counting down, she can see the tight bond they've formed. And she sees the way that Whistler has changed Jasper, making him more willing to embrace and enjoy life in the moment. But there are so many hurdles to keeping Whistler, their no pets allowed apartment, Jasper's illness and frequent hospitalizations, and finally something big, something from outside of their control.

The story is told by both Kate and Jasper in alternating chapters so the reader sees each perspective, the innocent and hopeful child as well as the pragmatic and overwhelmed adult. The first half of the novel is a slow negotiation between mother and son, building the backstory, and showing the distance and loneliness both Kate and Jasper feel without close friends and emotionally closed off from family, the second half turns into a tear jerking roller coaster ride followed by an epilogue that feels a little too much like Trout needs to reassure the reader this isn't a tragedy so the narrative tension is somewhat uneven. There are certain plot lines that start and then are dropped (Kate's boss needing to speak with her urgently, Kate taking Jasper's Adderall to cope with this stressful life) and some that are too easily resolved (Kate's family issues, Whistler's ownership) but it's generally a sweet, heartwarming story with the beautiful message to live life without regrets, to recognize and hold onto love in whatever form it comes, and to always be open to possibility. This is a dog story; this is an adoption story; this is a love story. Readers looking for a sweet tale of a boy and his (potential) dog, of a mom learning to let go a little, and of the wisdom of animals and children will want to grab their Kleenex before they open this one but they'll likely find it quite satisfying.

For more information about Dr. Nick Trout and the book, check our his author website, look at the book's Goodreads page, follow the rest of the blog tour, or look at the reviews for others' thoughts and opinions on the book.

Thanks to Trish from TLC Book Tours and Harper Collins for sending me a copy of this books for review.

It's Monday! What Are You Reading?

This meme is hosted by Kathryn at Reading Date.

Books I completed this past two weeks are:

Bent but Not Broken by Don Cummings
CinderGirl by Christina Meredith
The Death of Noah Glass by Gail Jones
The Chelsea Girls by Fiona Davis
Autopsy of a Boring Wife by Marie-Renee Lavoie

Bookmarks are still living in the middle of:

Smoke by Dan Vyleta
Coco Chanel by Lisa Chaney
The Resurrection of Joan Ashby by Cherise Wolas
The Bottom of the Sky by Rodrigo Fresan
A Breath of Snow and Ashes by Diana Gabaldon
The Confessions of Young Nero by Margaret George
A Moveable Feast edited by Don George
The Wonder of Lost Causes by Nick Trout

Reviews posted this week:

An American Marriage by Tayari Jones
Bent but Not Broken by Don Cummings

Books still needing to have reviews written (as opposed to the ones that are simply awaiting posting):

Rules of Surrender by Christina Dodd
The Magnetic Girl by Jessica Handle
Oh, Tama! by Mieko Kanai
The Red Address Book by Sofia Lundberg
The Immortalists by Chloe Benjamin
Exposure by Jean-Philippe Blondel
Here I Am! by Pauline Holdstock
All You Can Ever Know by Nicole Chung
Miss Blaine's Prefect and the Golden Samovar by Olga Wojtas
Ways to Hide in Winter by Sarah St. Vincent
The Book of Delights by Ross Gay
The Archive of Alternate Endings by Lindsey Drager
Granny’s Got a Gun by Harper Lin
White Elephant by Julie Langsdorf
At Briarwood School for Girls by Michael Knight
The Optimistic Decade by Heather Abel
All Ships Follow Me by Mieke Eerkens
Like This Afternoon Forever by Jaime Manrique
Gravity Well by Melanie Joosten
Motherhood So White by Nefertiti Austin
America's First Daughter by Stephanie Dray and Laura Kamoie
Dear Baba by Maryam Rafiee
Saint Everywhere by Mary Lea Carroll
All Systems Red by Martha Wells
Tonic and Balm by Stephanie Allen
Black Light by Kimberly King Parsons
In the Shadow of Wolves by Alvydas Slepikas
The Queen of Hearts by Kimmery Martin
CinderGirl by Christina Meredith
The Death of Noah Glass by Gail Jones
The Chelsea Girls by Fiona Davis
Autopsy of a Boring Wife by Marie-Renee Lavoie

Review: Bent but Not Broken by Don Cummings

If you have ever had or been around a baby boy, you probably noticed as soon as he discovered his penis. Hands down the diaper, fiddling with this most intriguing of toys. And this fascination (fixation?) doesn't seem to abate much as boys grow up. Perhaps the only thing that eclipses the penis in importance as most boys grow up is the idea and then the reality of sex. But what happens when a man is faced with penis problems? Of course there's Viagra or Cialis but impotence is not the only ill that can befall a man. In Don Cummings' honest and open memoir, he discusses his experience living with and treating Peyronie's disease, a condition where scar tissue and/or plaque build up in the penis causing a painful penile curvature.

Cummings is a middle aged, gay man whose hitherto perfectly normal, average penis suddenly becomes curved, making erections painful and sex with his partner all but impossible. Cummings definitely identifies himself very much in terms of his sexuality and sexual life. He is very focused on his looks and his perceived desirability to others. The unexplained onset of this condition leaves him reeling and searching for answers not only to how it happened to him but also how to fix it. Without his ability to have sex, who is he really?

Cummings shares very honestly about the emotional turmoil this is putting him through and details the excruciating sounding (thank heaven for numbing medication!) physical treatments he undergoes to try and combat and prevent the calcification of the plaque causing the bending and constricting of his penis. But in addition to his treatment experience, the failures, the successes, and the acceptance, he also weaves in details from his childhood, memories of growing up, coming out, his sexual experiences along the way, and the stress of Peyronie's on his many years long relationship with his boyfriend and eventual husband. The memoir can be a little overly graphic such as when his penis becomes too bent to achieve penetration or when he details a specific sexual encounter and he uses a lot of penis slang I thought was only the purview of middle school boys: rocket, rod, tube steak, tuber, member, Celtic tiger, etc. There is no doubt that this condition was incredibly hard for him (pun intended), especially given his heavily weighted focus on himself as a sexual being. He comes across as a little arrogant and certainly cocksure until Peyronie's strikes, when his repeated assertion of his previous desirability becomes more a plea than a certainty. Perhaps as a woman I will never understand the central importance of the penis to any man, but especially to a man like Cummings who knows its measurements before and after being afflicted, who has felt like he wielded it as a gift during his sexual prime, and who is so intimately and emotionally connected with his penis. In fact, the most relatable piece of this memoir to me was that this condition appears to be related to Dupuytren's contracture, a condition my dad had in both of his hands, the surgical repair of which was apparently quite painful. Does this mean I need to warn my sons to watch their penises even more than I suspect they already do? Cummings' memoir may aim to take away the shame or embarrassment about penis imperfections and to raise awareness about issues we rarely or never discuss but I still suspect my boys would rather not have this conversation with their mother.  In any case, although I didn't love it, this is an occasionally funny, informative memoir on a topic I never would have known about otherwise.

For more information about Don Cummings and the book, check our his author website, like his author page on Facebook or follow him on Instagram or Twitter, look at the book's Goodreads page, follow the rest of the blog tour, or look at the reviews for others' thoughts and opinions on the book.

Thanks to Trish from TLC Book Tours and Heliotrope Books for sending me a copy of this book to review.

Waiting on Wednesday

This meme was hosted by Breaking the Spine and is meant to highlight some great pre-publication books we all can't wait to get our grubby little mitts on. I'm choosing to continue the tradition even though she has stopped.

Blackberry and Wild Rose by Sonia Velton.

The book is being released by Blackstone Publishing on May 7, 2019.

The book's jacket copy says: Set in eighteenth-century Spitalfields, London, Blackberry and Wild Rose is the rich and atmospheric tale of a household of Huguenot silk weavers as the pursuit of the perfect silk design leads them all into ambition, love, and betrayal.

When Esther Thorel, wife of a master silk weaver, rescues Sara Kemp from a brothel, she thinks she is doing Gods will, but her good deed is not returned. Sara quickly realizes that the Thorel household is built on hypocrisy and lies and soon tires of the drudgery of life as Esthers new ladys maid. As the two womens relationship becomes increasingly fractious, Sara resolves to find out what it is that so preoccupies her mistress

Esther has long yearned to be a silk designer. When her early water colors are dismissed by her husband, Elias, as the daubs of a foolish girl, she continues her attempts in secret. It may have been that none of them would ever have become actual silks, were it not for the presence of the extraordinarily talented Bisby Lambert in the Thorel household. Brought in by Elias to weave his masterpiece on the Thorels loom in the attic of their house in Spitalfields, the strange cadence of the loom as Bisby works is like a siren call to Esther. The minute she first sets foot in the garret and sees Bisby Lambert at his loom, marks the beginning of Blackberry and Wild Rose, the most exquisite silk design Spitalfields has ever seen, and the end of the Thorel households veneer of perfection.

As unrest among the journeyman silk weavers boils over into riot and rebellion, it leads to a devastating day of reckoning between Esther and Sara.

Review: An American Marriage by Tayari Jones

This book has won so many awards and received so many accolades that it hardly needs my voice. This is a good thing because despite really loving previous books by Jones, I did not love this one. It is every bit as well written as the others but I could not connect with it, could not understand or sympathize with the characters, and found myself wanting to lecture one of them for pure selfishnesss and poor choices. Not a good combination to be sure!

Celestial and Roy have only been married for a year when Roy is wrongfully accused and convicted of raping a woman in a hotel. As he serves his sentence, wife Celestial is serving an unjust sentence of her own, stripped of her husband and the life they had planned. Celestial is a child of privilege, having parents who made it through hard work into the African American upper middle class in Atlanta and who have given their only daughter everything she ever wanted. Roy was raised in a small Alabama town with loving parents but not a lot of money. Together Roy and Celestial are in the black professional class and have good prospects for the future until Roy's accuser is believed over his well-spoken but stiff wife who was with him the entire evening in question. All of a sudden, their lives are completely derailed. Roy goes to prison and Celestial eventually starts a boutique filled with art piece dolls that she's made. Roy has no choice but to wait to be reunited with Celestial but how long can she wait, especially with her life-long best friend André waiting in the wings?

Much of this is told through letters, perfect considering the distance between Celestial and Roy both in terms of physical geography and in terms of legal status. Most of the letters are between the two of them but there are some others interspersed as well to complete the picture. Roy is probably the least complicated character because he must endure the loss of everything he cares about, his liberty, his wife, his marriage. Although Celestial's uncle is trying to get him out, he essentially has no recourse once he is declared guilty. He is honest about his emotions, the rage and the despair he faces, and about the pieces of his life where he was not entirely free of blame in their marriage. Celestial, however, was entirely unsympathetic to me. When Roy is sentenced to years in prison, Celestial is also sentenced to a life she never wanted or chose. But she had the ability to move on without considering Roy too terribly much. Her frequent assertion that she and Roy barely knew each other when he was arrested sounded like nothing more than a flimsy excuse to move on. It's not like they met each other the day they married so she certainly had more than that one year to go on in terms of his character and their relationship. The fact that her parents supported her, making her dreams come true and shielding her from any other hardship, made her even less sympathetic since she suffered only the smallest of emotional hardships during Roy's incarceration. In fact, Jones' creation for her of a doll making career, even if it was "art," just further infantilized her as a character. In leaning so heavily on André, the friend whose advances she'd long ago spurned, she took the easy, selfish road.  There's a revelation late in the book where Roy gave her permission to do something she wanted to do anyway so that she wouldn't feel all the guilt herself that I just can't accept of a woman who truly loved her wrongfully incarcerated husband and intended to create a long term life with him.  As for André, well he's milquetoast with Celestial and if you consider him Roy's friend, well, with friends like that...  The only character I actually liked in here? Celestial's father, who shoots straight with her and mirrors many of my thoughts on the one big life choice he knows of her making.

I spent most of the book frustrated and not at the right things. Yes, I was frustrated by a justice system that failed this man so spectacularly but I also wanted to yank Celestial by the hair and tell her to get herself straight and do the right thing. Jones is an amazing wordsmith and she highlights some really important, broken aspects of our culture but I was too annoyed by the narrative to pay as much attention to the larger message as I should have. Obviously others, not least of which many prize committees, entirely disagree with me. Maybe you will too. In fact, I hope you will because I don't wish my reading experience on anyone else.

Thanks to LibraryThing Early Reviewers for sending me a copy of the book to review.

It's Monday! What Are You Reading?

I forgot to post the week before last and this past week I was driving all over the country taking my youngest child on college visits so not much reading or reviewing was accomplished. This meme is hosted by Kathryn at Reading Date.

Books I completed this past two weeks are:

Metis Beach by Claudine Bourbonnais
Saint Everywhere by Mary Lea Carroll
All Systems Red by Martha Wells
Tonic and Balm by Stephanie Allen
Black Light by Kimberly King Parsons
In the Shadow of Wolves by Alvydas Slepikas
The Queen of Hearts by Kimmery Martin

Bookmarks are still living in the middle of:

Smoke by Dan Vyleta
Coco Chanel by Lisa Chaney
The Resurrection of Joan Ashby by Cherise Wolas
The Bottom of the Sky by Rodrigo Fresan
A Breath of Snow and Ashes by Diana Gabaldon
The Confessions of Young Nero by Margaret George
The Death of Noah Glass by Gail Jones
A Moveable Feast edited by Don George
Bent but Not Broken by Don Cummings

Reviews posted this week:

The Girl Who Smiled Beads by Clemantine Wamariya
Red, White and Royal Blue by Casey McQuiston
Metis Beach by Claudine Bourbonnais

Books still needing to have reviews written (as opposed to the ones that are simply awaiting posting):

Rules of Surrender by Christina Dodd
The Magnetic Girl by Jessica Handle
Oh, Tama! by Mieko Kanai
The Red Address Book by Sofia Lundberg
The Immortalists by Chloe Benjamin
Exposure by Jean-Philippe Blondel
Here I Am! by Pauline Holdstock
All You Can Ever Know by Nicole Chung
Miss Blaine's Prefect and the Golden Samovar by Olga Wojtas
Ways to Hide in Winter by Sarah St. Vincent
The Book of Delights by Ross Gay
The Archive of Alternate Endings by Lindsey Drager
Granny’s Got a Gun by Harper Lin
White Elephant by Julie Langsdorf
At Briarwood School for Girls by Michael Knight
The Optimistic Decade by Heather Abel
All Ships Follow Me by Mieke Eerkens
Like This Afternoon Forever by Jaime Manrique
Gravity Well by Melanie Joosten
Motherhood So White by Nefertiti Austin
America's First Daughter by Stephanie Dray and Laura Kamoie
Dear Baba by Maryam Rafiee
Saint Everywhere by Mary Lea Carroll
All Systems Red by Martha Wells
Tonic and Balm by Stephanie Allen
Black Light by Kimberly King Parsons
In the Shadow of Wolves by Alvydas Slepikas
The Queen of Hearts by Kimmery Martin

Monday Mailbox

I took my youngest on college visits this spring break and I came home to an appalling number of books but many of them are up for consideration for Great Group Reads so I can't post them. Trust me when I say they look amazing. But the ones that came for review or just because that I can post look equally amazing. This past week's mailbox arrivals:

Bent but Not Broken by Don Cummings came from TLC Book Tours and Heliotrope Books for a book tour.

A memoir by a man afflicted with Peyronie's Disease, which is painful and causes a curvature to the penis, I am curious to read something so honest about a body part that we don't often discuss.

Waisted by Randy Susan Meyers came from TLC Book Tours and Atria for a book tour.

A novel about seven women who are the subjects of an extreme weight loss documentary, I am eager to see how fighting back against the exploitation of the filmmakers empowers these women.

The Wonder of Lost Causes by Nick Trout came from TLC Book Tours and William Morrow for a book tour.

A novel about what happens when on old and ugly dog arrives unexpectedly in the life of a single mom veterinarian and her chronically ill son, I'll bet this one will make me need tissues galore.

The Children's Bach by Helen Garner came from me for myself.

About a family, two parents and two sons, one of whom has autism, when a friend arrives with three charismatic companions, this novel sounds both threatening and promising.

Dictionary Stories by Jez Burrows came from me for myself.

Short stories based on words and sentences found in the dictionary, this promises to make my little word nerd heart sing.

Far Flung by Cassandra Kircher came from West Virginia University Press and Shelf Awareness.

These essays about nature and the wild, written by a former employee of the National Park Service, look completely fascinating.

Brides in the Sky by Cary Holladay came from me for myself.

I couldn't resist this based on the title and the old timey picture on the cover. Add in the themes of sisterhood and migration and I'm sold.

Yellow Stonefly by Tim Poland came from me for myself.

A fly fishing story with a female protagonist? Color me intrigued for sure!

Madame Victoria by Catherine Leroux came from me for myself.

A female skeleton was never identified despite facial reconstruction and knowledge of where she came from based on the food she ate so Leroux imagines twelve different stories for this forgotten women. Sounds cool, right?

If you want to see the marvelous goodies in other people's mailboxes, make sure to visit Mailbox Monday and have fun seeing how we are all doing our part to keep the USPS and delivery services viable.

Waiting on Wednesday

This meme was hosted by Breaking the Spine and is meant to highlight some great pre-publication books we all can't wait to get our grubby little mitts on. I'm choosing to continue the tradition even though she has stopped.

The Behavior of Love by Virginia Reeves.

The book is being released by Scribner on May 14, 2019.

The book's jacket copy says: Doctor Ed Malinowski believes he has realized most of his dreams. A passionate, ambitious behavioral psychiatrist, he is now the superintendent of a mental institution and finally turning the previously crumbling hospital around. He also has a home he can be proud of, and a fiercely independent, artistic wife Laura, whom he hopes will soon be pregnant.

But into this perfect vision of his life comes Penelope, a beautiful, young epileptic who should never have been placed in his institution and whose only chance at getting out is Ed. She is intelligent, charming, and slowly falling in love with her charismatic, compassionate doctor. As their relationship grows more complicated, and Laura stubbornly starts working at his hospital, Ed must weigh his professional responsibilities against his personal ones, and find a way to save both his job and his family.

A love triangle set in one of the most chaotic, combustible settings imaginable, The Behavior of Love is wise, riveting, and deeply resonant.

Review: Métis Beach by Claudine Bourbonnais

If you wrote your autobiography, what would be in it? Would it be a sweeping epic or a mundane recitation of boring sameness? Mine would definitely be the latter. I'm not famous, have never run afoul of the law (well, aside from a speeding ticket or two), haven't been involved in historically significant events, and usually have a pretty cordial relationship with family and friends. The same cannot be said of the main character in Claudine Bourbonnais' epic novel, Métis Beach. His life makes for a catalogue of the changing mores and attitudes of second half of the twentieth century in this expansive novel.

In his fifties, Roman Carr is the writer and creator of the famous satirical show called In Gad We Trust. It is designed to entertain and offend in equal measure and although the show is a hit, Roman has been able to fly mostly under the radar, at least until the story opens. Telling his own story, Roman goes back in time to his life in Métis Beach on the Gaspé Peninsula, a town he fled as a teenager many years before. Born Romain Carrier, he and his father worked as caretakers for the English Canadians who had large summer homes in the area until one evening when everything went wrong for the young man. He flees the judgment of his father and the English community, ending up in New York City for several years before a terrible tragedy sends him out to San Francisco and then Hollywood. Along the way, he meets his best friend, has an affair, learns about feminism, protests Vietnam, and embraces humanism. His experiences lead him to develop his TV show, exposing the sordidness, greed, and hypocrisy of organized religion and present it as a microcosm of America. As protests against his show grow, a surprise from his past shakes his firm belief on certain social rights, tempering his stances and making things far less black and white. And then the strident patriotism of the immediate aftermath of 9/11 happens, throwing his life and relationships into even greater turmoil.

The novel is epic in scope, taking on an absolute litany of issues: feminism, protest, freedom of speech, religion, radical evangelicalism, abortion, class, capital punishment, the draft, mental health, greed, and patriotism. It's simply too much. And while Roman did and saw many things in his life, he is rarely the driver of his own life. He is buffeted around by the multiple women who loved him, the one who hated him, and the people in his life who found him to be an easy mark to manipulate. He had to endure narrow minds at almost every turn although the characters who saved him are generous and giving. Roman narrates his own story, sharing each piece of his life, looking back at the pieces as distinct sections relating to a certain person or people in his life rather than the significant events of the time. For all the issues and historical events contained here, in the end, this is a story of people, of the family you make and the friends you love. By the end of the novel, I was fatigued by Roman's life when I think I was meant to be sympathetic to this astute observer of society and the litany of tragedies in his life. This is not a bad novel, far from it, but it erred on the side of everything but the kitchen sink in the making of its point.  If you're a fan of epic novels, you may feel differently than I do.

Thanks to the publisher for sending me a copy of the book to review.

Review: Red, White and Royal Blue by Casey McQuiston

We here in the US have a sort of conflicted relationship to royalty. We are fascinated by them but we are also proud of our successful rebellion against them. We are definitely conflicted. As is one of the main characters (at least to start with) in Casey McQuiston's charming new romance novel, Red, White and Royal Blue.

Alex Clairmont-Diaz has his life trajectory pretty well planned out. His mother is the President of the United States. His father is a Congressman. He is a political science student who has his own political aspirations and is thrilled to be helping out on his mother's reelection campaign until he can launch his own campaign in a few years. When Prince Philip, the Queen of England's oldest grandson gets married, Alex and his sister June attend the wedding. Normally this wouldn't be any more than a blip in his life but Alex intensely dislikes Philip's younger brother Henry and everything in left-leaning Alex rebels against royal privilege and the spectacle of this royal wedding. Then Alex gets a little drunk and he and the handsome but bland Henry start bickering, ending only when the two of them inadvertently crash into the wedding cake. In order to combat the subsequent bad press and rumors of Alex and Henry's deep dislike of each other, the two are ordered to spend time together and fake a friendship. As Alex gets to know Henry, he discovers that there's a lot more to the proper, buttoned-up prince than he thought and they become true friends. And then they become more. But they have to hide their relationship from a homophobic world that won't accept a gay prince or a bisexual first son.

This modern day romance is a complete delight. Not only do Alex and Henry move from enemies to lovers but Alex must first recognize and accept who he is. Both of them have to decide whether they want to conform to what the world wants of them or if they will be true to themselves. Their growing relationship, presented through texts and emails is sweet and tender but also snarky and hilarious and filled with witty banter and honest expressions of love and struggle. The outside world also presents an obstacle to their love story. Alex doesn't want his sexuality to cost his mother reelection, especially since his biracial identity (his father is Mexican-American and his mother is white) has already been an issue in the past, and Henry is weighted with the centuries long traditions and expectations of royalty. Their respective obligations to their families are enormous but the intrusive and scandal-hungry press is also a deterrent. Alex is occasionally frustratingly immature but both he and Henry are so beautifully human and sympathetic as characters. The secondary characters here are as funny and as endearing as Alex and Henry are. There is a cuteness and lightness to the story that belies some heavy issues (homophobia, sacrifice, love, and being true to oneself to name a few) and the story ends up wonderfully, achingly hopeful. If you can read this and not finish wanting to be these men's friend, I just don't know about you. McQuiston has written an enchanting romantic comedy that will have you reading with a smile on your face and I'd enthusiastically recommend this to all contemporary romance readers.

Waiting on Wednesday

This meme was hosted by Breaking the Spine and is meant to highlight some great pre-publication books we all can't wait to get our grubby little mitts on. I'm choosing to continue the tradition even though she has stopped.

Pride, Prejudice, and Other Flavors by Sonali Dev.

The book is being released by William Morrow Paperbacks on May 7, 2019.

The book's jacket copy says: It is a truth universally acknowledged that only in an overachieving Indian American family can a genius daughter be considered a black sheep.

Dr. Trisha Raje is San Francisco’s most acclaimed neurosurgeon. But that’s not enough for the Rajes, her influential immigrant family who’s achieved power by making its own non-negotiable rules:

· Never trust an outsider

· Never do anything to jeopardize your brother’s political aspirations

· And never, ever, defy your family

Trisha is guilty of breaking all three rules. But now she has a chance to redeem herself. So long as she doesn’t repeat old mistakes.

Up-and-coming chef DJ Caine has known people like Trisha before, people who judge him by his rough beginnings and place pedigree above character. He needs the lucrative job the Rajes offer, but he values his pride too much to indulge Trisha’s arrogance. And then he discovers that she’s the only surgeon who can save his sister’s life.

As the two clash, their assumptions crumble like the spun sugar on one of DJ’s stunning desserts. But before a future can be savored there’s a past to be reckoned with...

A family trying to build home in a new land.

A man who has never felt at home anywhere.

And a choice to be made between the two.

Review: The Girl Who Smiled Beads by Clemantine Wamariya and Elizabeth Weil

Genocide. When you read that word, you probably think of the Holocaust. But that is certainly not the only genocide in recent memory. There's the Armenian genocide, the Cambodian genocide perpetrated by the Khmer Rouge, and the Rwandan genocide which pitted the Hutu against the Tutsi. And these examples are probably not the only ones, they're just the ones I came up with off the top of my head. I learned about them in various history classes and read about the genocides and their aftermath in books like Baking Cakes in Kigali and In the Shadow of 10,000 Hills. But both of those, wonderful as they are, are fiction. Clemantine Wamariya's The Girl Who Smiled Beads is a memoir, an actual lived experience by a girl too young initially to understand the terror that forever changed her life.

In 1994, when war came to Kigali, Clemantine's mother told her fifteen year old sister Claire to take six year old Clemantine and flee to relatives where the child and the teenager would hopefully be safe. But eventually the men came there too and Clemantine and Claire had to flee again, and again, and again. These children of war sought safety in seven different African countries, living and moving on from refugee camp to refugee camp, trying to build a life over six long and hunted years before finally being granted asylum in the US. They fled war and unfriendly authorities both, witnessing great acts of kindness and unimaginable atrocities. They lost contact with their family, never knowing if their parents and other siblings were alive or dead. And even in the relative safety of the US, Wamariya didn't feel settled, living with her sister and her sister's family only at weekends and with sponsors during the week.

This is the story of Wamariya's life, her own experience of "war and what comes after" narrated through the voice of a child. The child's perspective is authentic given that she was only six when her whole world imploded but that perspective sacrifices even the slightest background of the war for those readers who aren't already familiar with it. And perhaps that backstory doesn't matter in the beginning but its lack gives no reference to how huge and tragic this was for so very many, focusing it solely on one young woman and her sister and their personal, horrific experiences. The memoir moves back and forth in time between Wamariya's life in the US and her life trying to survive the horrors of war and displacement, giving the narration a fragmented feel. And although this is a terrible story, one that the reader can hardly believe was perpetrated on anyone, never mind a child, there is something of an emotional remove to it. Maybe this is because Wamariya, understandably, can't or won't fully revisit the horror and it feels terrible to have wanted more depth, but I did. It seems almost trite to say that she is resilient and impressive and incredibly intelligent, scarred and hurt, and yes, lucky, but she is all those things and this memoir is her way of owning all the pieces of who she is. Critiquing a memoir of such tragedy and inhumanity is difficult and this one is no exception. It is an important story, one that I'm glad was told but the confusing back and forth of the narrative line makes it more difficult for the reader to truly comprehend the sheer scope Wamariya's story. The subject matter is interesting but the writing just didn't quite grab me as much I'd hoped.

It's Monday! What Are You Reading?

This meme is hosted by Kathryn at Reading Date.

Books I completed this past week are:

Motherhood So White by Nefertiti Austin
America's First Daughter by Stephanie Dray and Laura Kamoie
Dear Baba by Maryam Rafiee

Bookmarks are still living in the middle of:

Metis Beach by Claudine Bourbonnais
Smoke by Dan Vyleta
Coco Chanel by Lisa Chaney
The Resurrection of Joan Ashby by Cherise Wolas
The Bottom of the Sky by Rodrigo Fresan
A Breath of Snow and Ashes by Diana Gabaldon
The Confessions of Young Nero by Margaret George

Reviews posted this week:

Papa Goose by Michael Quetting

Books still needing to have reviews written (as opposed to the ones that are simply awaiting posting):

The Girl Who Smiled Beads by Clemantine Wamariya
Red, White and Royal Blue by Casey McQuiston
Rules of Surrender by Christina Dodd
The Magnetic Girl by Jessica Handle
Oh, Tama! by Mieko Kanai
The Red Address Book by Sofia Lundberg
The Immortalists by Chloe Benjamin
Exposure by Jean-Philippe Blondel
Here I Am! by Pauline Holdstock
All You Can Ever Know by Nicole Chung
Miss Blaine's Prefect and the Golden Samovar by Olga Wojtas
Ways to Hide in Winter by Sarah St. Vincent
The Book of Delights by Ross Gay
The Archive of Alternate Endings by Lindsey Drager
Granny’s Got a Gun by Harper Lin
White Elephant by Julie Langsdorf
At Briarwood School for Girls by Michael Knight
The Optimistic Decade by Heather Abel
All Ships Follow Me by Mieke Eerkens
Like This Afternoon Forever by Jaime Manrique
Gravity Well by Melanie Joosten
Motherhood So White by Nefertiti Austin
America's First Daughter by Stephanie Dray and Laura Kamoie
Dear Baba by Maryam Rafiee

Waiting on Wednesday

This meme was hosted by Breaking the Spine and is meant to highlight some great pre-publication books we all can't wait to get our grubby little mitts on. I'm choosing to continue the tradition even though she has stopped.

Walking on the Ceiling by Aysegul Savas.

The book is being released by Riverhead on April 30, 2019.

The book's jacket copy says: A mesmerizing novel set in Paris and a changing Istanbul, about a young Turkish woman grappling with her past - her country’s and her own - and her complicated relationship with the famous British writer who longs for her memories.

After her mother’s death, Nunu moves from Istanbul to a small apartment in Paris. One day outside of a bookstore, she meets M., an older British writer whose novels about Istanbul Nunu has always admired. They find themselves walking the streets of Paris and talking late into the night. What follows is an unusual friendship of eccentric correspondence and long walks around the city.

M. is working on a new novel set in Turkey and Nunu tells him about her family, hoping to impress and inspire him. She recounts the idyllic landscapes of her past, mythical family meals, and her elaborate childhood games. As she does so, she also begins to confront her mother’s silence and anger, her father’s death, and the growing unrest in Istanbul. Their intimacy deepens, so does Nunu’s fear of revealing too much to M. and of giving too much of herself and her Istanbul away. Most of all, she fears that she will have to face her own guilt about her mother and the narratives she’s told to protect herself from her memories.

A wise and unguarded glimpse into a young woman’s coming into her own, Walking on the Ceiling is about memory, the pleasure of invention, and those places, real and imagined, we can’t escape.

Review: Papa Goose by Michael Quetting

When I worked at a lake as a lifeguard, one of our duties was to clean up the beach before opening and by far the most common thing we came across to clean up was goose poop. If a flock of geese had been on the beach that morning, the beach was a disgusting slick of green and white goose pellets. We face the same problem in the summer in the yard at the cottage. Goose dung everywhere. Besides the prolific pooping, I've honestly never thought very much about geese and I certainly never considered them as individual creatures with unique personalities or as important subjects in any sort of scientific experiment. If anything, I considered them an annoyance at best and a scourge at worst. But for a year, Michael Quetting, a scientist at the Max Planck Institute in Germany, considered them his family as he raised seven geese from egg to adulthood, a task chronicled in the memoir Papa Goose.

In an effort to find out information about bird (goose) flight mechanics and aerodynamics and real time atmospheric conditions, Michael Quetting fathered seven greylag geese from before their birth, when he talked to them in their incubator to get them used to his voice, to almost a year old.  The geese were raised so that they could eventually be fitted with data loggers to provide scientists with this information.  Quetting was careful to have the small balls of down imprint on him, becoming their acknowledged parent. He describes all aspects of their lives together from their vulnerable youngest days, their development of individual personalities, their learning to fly, and finally to the days that each of them finally leaves his care for the wider world. The story is one of joy, contemplation, and frustration. Quetting documents the daily life of the goslings, sharing the soft, sleepy whistles they make when tired, the snoozing with their papa goose, the happy swimming, their contented dandelion eating, and more. Being with the birds causes him to slow down in his own life and to look at what is important. Of course the experiment, the reason he is raising these seven little creatures is always in the background, at the very least, but even in raising them towards a goal, he finds immense happiness, like the day all seven geese fly with him for the first time, following him in his ultralight. Quetting doesn't shy away from the difficulties he encounters, from a recalcitrant gander to the constant loads of goose poo but through it all, his heart shines through.  He does anthropomorphize the geese occasionally, imagining what they think of him, the horn he uses to call them, and the things he asks of them.  The story is quite sweet and simple in the telling and will likely appeal to animal lovers of all kinds.

Thanks to the LibraryThing Early Reviewers and the publisher for sending me a copy of the book for review.

It's Monday! What Are You Reading?

This meme is hosted by Kathryn at Reading Date.

Books I completed this past week are:

Papa Goose by Michael Quetting
The Optimistic Decade by Heather Abel
All Ships Follow Me by Mieke Eerkens
Like This Afternoon Forever by Jaime Manrique
Gravity Well by Melanie Joosten

Bookmarks are still living in the middle of:

America's First Daughter by Stephanie Dray and Laura Kamoie
Metis Beach by Claudine Bourbonnais
Smoke by Dan Vyleta
Coco Chanel by Lisa Chaney
The Resurrection of Joan Ashby by Cherise Wolas
The Bottom of the Sky by Rodrigo Fresan
A Breath of Snow and Ashes by Diana Gabaldon
The Confessions of Young Nero by Margaret George
Motherhood So White by Nefertiti Austin

Reviews posted this week:

The Baghdad Clock by Shahad al Rawi
An Elderly Lady Is Up To No Good by Helene Tursten
Rock Paper Scissor by Cathia Leonard Friou

Books still needing to have reviews written (as opposed to the ones that are simply awaiting posting):

The Girl Who Smiled Beads by Clemantine Wamariya
Red, White and Royal Blue by Casey McQuiston
Rules of Surrender by Christina Dodd
The Magnetic Girl by Jessica Handle
Oh, Tama! by Mieko Kanai
The Red Address Book by Sofia Lundberg
The Immortalists by Chloe Benjamin
Exposure by Jean-Philippe Blondel
Here I Am! by Pauline Holdstock
All You Can Ever Know by Nicole Chung
Miss Blaine's Prefect and the Golden Samovar by Olga Wojtas
Ways to Hide in Winter by Sarah St. Vincent
The Book of Delights by Ross Gay
The Archive of Alternate Endings by Lindsey Drager
Granny’s Got a Gun by Harper Lin
White Elephant by Julie Langsdorf
At Briarwood School for Girls by Michael Knight
Papa Goose by Michael Quetting
The Optimistic Decade by Heather Abel
All Ships Follow Me by Mieke Eerkens
Like This Afternoon Forever by Jaime Manrique
Gravity Well by Melanie Joosten

Monday Mailbox

Just a single arrival but what a delectable one! This past week's mailbox arrival:

The Printed Letter Bookshop by Katherine Reay came from Thomas Nelson.

With a cover like this, how could any self-respecting book lover not want to read it? That it's about a woman who inherits her aunt's bookstore and the employees who depend on the shop just makes it that much more appealing!

If you want to see the marvelous goodies in other people's mailboxes, make sure to visit Mailbox Monday and have fun seeing how we are all doing our part to keep the USPS and delivery services viable.