Category: book recommendations and reviews

This is going to be a short post tonight, because I’m tired and don’t have a ton to say. A couple weeks ago, I read Hidden Figures by Margot Lee Shetterley. This is the book the movie was based on. This is one of those rare cases where I actually saw the movie before I read the book, but seeing the movie first didn’t dampen my enjoyment of the book, because they’re both great in their own right.

The book follows a group of African American women mathematicians working at NASA from World War II through the 1970s. It highlights their work as computers for NASA and their contributions to airplane developments during WWII and then their work on the first spaceships that put men into orbit and then sent them to the moon. But it also focuses on their struggles with racism and sexism throughout these turbulent decades in history.

Hidden Figures is really a fascinating book. It goes in depth on all the topics, but it didn’t feel like it was focusing on too much. The book also covers so much more than the movie. I had no idea Hidden Figures had anything to do with WWII. And that scene in the movie where the main character is struggling to find a bathroom she can use is only a couple of sentences in the book.

It was certainly dry at times, and I admit I struggled to keep all the women straight (I kept mixing up the various women named Mary). And I wish the Apollo 13 incident was given more than a passing reference, but that was probably thanks to the weight it was given in the movie.

The long and short of it is that the book and movie are very different beasts, but I enjoyed them both, and I particularly enjoyed the book. If you’ve seen Hidden Figures but haven’t read the book, or if you enjoy science history books, I definitely recommend you give this book a try.

Back in March, I read Firefly Lane by Kristin Hannah. It wasn’t my favorite book in the world, but I was invested enough that I got the sequel, Fly Away, out of the library and read it in May. As I said, I wasn’t a huge fan of Firefly Lane, so the bar for the sequel wasn’t terribly high. Still, I was disappointed. Let me explain.

As with all my reviews, this will be spoiler free, but as with my other reviews of sequels, I might not be able to avoid spoilers from the first book. Fly Away is kind of a strange book in that even though it’s a sequel, it could also stand on its own. So if you want to read Fly Away on its own, stick around, but there will be spoilers from Firefly Lane. At least one very major one, anyway. If you’re interested in reading Firefly Lane without spoilers, this isn’t the review for you. But you can go check out my spoiler-free review for Firefly Lane here.

Fly Away picks up a few years after the end of Firefly Lane. The beginning is pretty cryptic about what’s happened, but since Kate’s death, Tully and Kate’s husband, Johnny have had a falling out; Tully is now addicted to alcohol and narcotics; and Kate’s daughter, Mara, started cutting herself, became a goth and a druggie, ran away from home with a guy, and is basically living on the streets of Portland, Oregon. Then Tully gets in a car accident, and she’s so badly injured that the doctors put her into a medically induced coma. And so everybody comes together around Tully’s hospital bed, and we go back and relive the events of Firefly Lane and then the last four years from Johnny’s point of view, Mara’s point of view, and Tully’s point of view. Tully is having a sort of out-of-body experience and Kate’s spirit is guiding her through her memories. Kind of some magical realism for you there. Tully’s mother comes back into the picture too, and we get the story of her life and Tully’s life from her point of view.

I’m doing a poor job of describing this. I’m sorry. The back cover says the book is about the three women, Tully, Mara, and Tully’s mother Cloud and how they come together, which isn’t much more concrete, and it completely ignores Johnny, who’s a huge part in the book.

As with Firefly Lane, Kristin Hannah’s writing is great. She has such a powerful way of evoking emotions in her scenes. Some of the ambiance of Firefly Lane was lost in this book, because it’s pretty much set in the modern time in a hospital, but the setting is still really strong throughout. I didn’t find the characters to be as compelling as I did in Firefly Lane. Without Kate, everybody just fell apart, and most of the book is them bemoaning the fact that she’s dead. I’m not trying to be unsympathetic or insensitive or anything. I understand that this is a book about grieving. But when it’s coming at you from every character for the whole book, it gets to be too much like whining. Like after a certain point (and I think four years is past that point) you have to pick yourself up and live your life right?

I think part of the problem with the characters, and a big part of my problem with the book, is that it was trying to stand alone as its own book. You could pick up Fly Away and read it without reading Firefly Lane at all. Unfortunately, this means there’s a lot of recap of Firefly Lane, like the first third of the book at least, and it means a lot of the feelings about Kate and her death come off as heavy-handed. If you read Firefly Lane, you grew to know and love her. But if you didn’t read Firefly Lane, then you didn’t get to know her, and her death is only meaningful to the characters. To make up for this, I guess, we get a ton of how wonderful and perfect Kate was and how much everybody loves her. But since I did read Firefly Lane, it felt like Kristin Hannah was trying to force Kate’s wonderfulness down my throat. And I don’t like having anything forced down my throat.

This problem was compounded by the structure of the book. It felt like the book was going in circles. We have a bunch of point of view characters, and we go over the same events from all of their points of view. It’s kind of a cool idea, but it just didn’t work for me. It got redundant.

I will say that I enjoyed Cloud’s section, because I did not expect her story, and she had some great character development. I will say that on top of everything else going on in the book, Cloud’s story, which is tragic, is a little much. Like she could have just had a disagreement with her parents over something stupid. Happens all the time. We didn’t need, well, all that. But finally some character development!

But I wanted to see Tully develop as a character in this book too, because I felt like she didn’t have any character development in Firefly Lane. I do think there is some character development for Tully, but it’s kind of crammed into the ending of the book, and any development she had in the four years between Kate’s death and her car accident, which isn’t much, feels unearned because it’s told in flashbacks.

All this comes down to the fact that I just don’t think the structure of this book worked the way Kristin Hannah intended it to. Or maybe Kristin Hannah’s contemporary stuff just isn’t my cup of tea. But beyond the construction of the book, it was a very heavy book. It felt like we were cramming every bad way to handle grief into one group of characters. This is a grim book. We have addiction, cutting, family estrangement, rape, institutionalization and forced electroshock therapy, and I could keep going. And like I said about the characters grief feeling like whining, it just got to be too much doom and gloom.

Okay, this has become a lot more ranty than I intended it to, so I’m going to stop here. If you’ve gotten this far in my review, you can probably guess that I was not a fan of Fly Away at all. Kristin Hannah’s good writing doesn’t really matter. As I said with Firefly Lane, though, this is not my typical genre of reading, and I’m pretty sure it’s not the genre for me. I know a lot of people who absolutely loved Firefly Lane, and maybe they would like Fly Away too. I hope this review is helpful if you’re deciding to read Fly Away, and as always, if you’ve already read it, I’d love to know what you think.

A few weeks ago, I read Us Against You by Fredrik Backman. This is the sequel to Beartown, which I raved about to you guys earlier this month. In case you couldn’t tell from that post, I absolutely loved, loved, loved Beartown. And I have been dying to get Us Against You out of the library since I finished it. Once I got my hands on it, I plowed right through it in about two days, and that was on top of bar studying. I couldn’t put it down.

And now, finally, I’m passing on my thoughts to you. There won’t be any spoilers for Us Against You in this post, but since Us Against You is a sequel, there may be spoilers for Beartown. I will do my best to keep them to a minimum, but if you haven’t read Beartown yet (and you should go do that right now), you’d be better off checking out that review (over here).

Us Against You picks up right where Beartown left off. Kevin and his family are moving away. Peter has kept his job, for now. Maya is recovering from the trauma of being raped, as much as she can recover from that. But Beartown’s best hockey players have left to join the team in the neighboring town of Hed, and politicians are arguing that the district doesn’t need two hockey teams and they should focus their resources on only one of them. For the people of Beartown, this is taken as a huge threat, because hockey is pretty much the only hope they have as a town. The book really focuses on the growing rivalry between the two towns over pretty much everything, but primarily about hockey.

This was a really good book. The writing was amazing, and there were some really powerful scenes. And I either loved or loved to hate all the characters.

The thing is, for me, the book didn’t have the same power and poignancy as Beartown. I was expecting another slam dunk amazing book. And don’t get me wrong, Us Against You is really great, but it wasn’t Beartown. I’ve been trying to pin down what exactly was missing from this book for the last few weeks, and I’m still not entirely sure why I don’t like it that much (my brain has also been full of contracts and torts, so I’m not at my best for literary analysis right now). The best I’ve come up with is that Us Against You doesn’t feel as focused or pointed as Beartown. Beartown told the story of how the town reacts to Kevin raping Maya, and yes it’s from the whole town’s point of view, but it’s really focused around this single event and its fall-out. Us Against You revolves around the same characters, and some new ones, and many many events as the rivalry between Beartown and Hed builds. As I said, the writing is great, the characters are great, and the feelings are so real, but it felt more scattered than Beartown.

I think another part of my disappointment is that Beartown has such a perfect ending, and I really didn’t need a sequel. And while I was totally willing to stick with these characters and see what happens next, I wanted any sequel to be as amazing as Beartown. A tough act to follow, certainly, and for me, Us Against You didn’t quite measure up.

I want to be one hundred percent clear. I liked Us Against You a lot. It’s a great book. It’s just hard to read it without comparing it to Beartown, and when I compare it to Beartown, I was disappointed. It didn’t add anything to my love of Beartown. In fact, it kind of detracted from my love of Beartown. While I will continue to recommend Beartown to everybody in the world who hasn’t read it yet, but I’m not sure I’d recommend the sequel. For me, Beartown was perfect on its own.

A couple weeks ago, I read The 7 1/2 Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle by Stuart Turton. This book had such a cool concept, and a great title, and I really, really wanted to love it. Unfortunately, there were a few things that didn’t quite pull together, and it didn’t work as well for me as I wanted.
The book starts with our protagonist waking up in a forest with no memories. He barely has time to orient himself when he witnesses a murder. He stumbles out of the woods and finds an old manor, where he is apparently been staying because he’s been invited to a homecoming party for Evelyn Hardcastle, the daughter of the wealthy family. (No, the dead woman in the woods is not Evelyn Hardcastle.) As we progress through the book, we learn that our protagonist is trapped in some kind of game, masterminded by this really creepy guy called the plague doctor. Our protagonist will live the same day eight times, each time in the body of another guest of the party. His goal is to solve the murder of Evelyn Hardcastle which will occur at 11:00 PM. If he fails to solve the murder, all his memories will be wiped and he will start again. And there are others like him in the manor house, trying to solve the murder. The first player to solve the murder will be released.
See? Really cool concept, right?
So we follow our protagonist—his name turns out to be Aidan—through the eight days as he gains allies, discovers enemies, tries over and over again to just prevent Evelyn Hardcastle’s murder, gets killed quite a few times himself, and investigates Evelyn’s murder. This was a really fast book, and as I’ve already said, I loved the concept. Stuart Turton also had this writing style that personified everything, and it was really cool, and I liked it a lot.
Now to dive into the problems I have with the book. No spoilers, I promise.
First, each of Aidan’s hosts has both advantages and disadvantages. Some are intelligent but not very physically capable. Some are really fit and great for running around the manor, but they have poor impulse control or they’re violent. And as Aidan progresses through the eight days, his hosts’ natural personalities become harder to control. This is all well and good. But one of his hosts (I think it’s the third or fourth), is a person of size, and the fat shaming in the book at this point is really egregious. I understand the need for some physical description, and Aidan is bound to notice some things more in a body type he’s never experienced before. I also understand the point that this character can’t get around as quickly as some of Aidan’s other hosts. This host turns out to be the smartest of them all, though, and I kind of feel like the author was trying to avoid the fat shaming criticism by giving the host a good quality. But the problem is the descriptions themselves. Every time the character does anything it’s described in great detail, and the tone of and word choice in the description is disgusted. Yes, this character might be smart, but the predominant aspect of his character that we’re meant to walk away with is that he’s grossly fat. And this was not okay with me.
Next, the mystery in this book was really complicated, and there were a lot of characters, and a lot of these characters had very similar names. Like there’s a Harper and a Carver and a Carter, and then there’s a Darby and a Daniel and a Doctor Dicky and a Donald (I think?). It got confusing, to say the least. Now I admit I don’t read a lot of mysteries, but when I do, I like to be able to attempt to solve them on my own. And when we reach the ending, I like to be able to look back and say “ah, I see how this works.” I couldn’t do that with this book. We just followed Aidan as he solved the mystery, and then he explained it to us, and even with his explanation I don’t know how he figured it out. This left me feeling kind of disappointed.
Finally, it’s implied throughout the book that Aidan has been trying to solve Evelyn Hardcastle’s murder for years and has been through these eight days many, many times. And each time, even though he loses his memories when it’s over, he grows as a character. It is revealed at the end what the point of the game is, and I actually think it’s a really cool concept. The problem is all of Aidan’s, and everyone else’s, character development happened before the book started, and we’re just seeing the end point, rather than a complete arc. We can’t appreciate how Aidan has grown and changed over the course of the book, because when the book starts he has pretty much finished his growing and changing and now he’s just putting the pieces together.
For me, The 7 1/2 Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle had a really cool concept some great writing and a pretty solid plot. But the ending really didn’t work for me, and that dragged the rest of the book down.
I know a lot of people really like this book, so as always take my thoughts with a grain of salt. You know the kinds of books you like to read. If you give it a try I’d love to know what you think, and if you’ve already read it, do you agree with me? Or do I just not understand mysteries?

Back in March, I read Firefly Lane by Kristin Hannah. This was the first book I read for the National Federation of the Blind Cambridge Chapter book club I joined/helped form. Actually so far it’s the only book I’ve read for that book club because I missed April’s meeting, and I’m going to miss May’s because of graduation. I talked about this book back in my March roundup post, but two months later, I still have some pretty strong feelings about this book, and I just got the sequel out of the library, so I wanted to share my thoughts on this book so that I can talk about the sequel with you all next week.

A quick disclaimer. This book is women’s fiction. Women’s fiction is not my genre. I almost invariably get frustrated and angry with it. So if you generally like women’s fiction, take my opinions with a handful of salt.

A few years ago, I read The Nightingale by Kristin Hannah, and I adored it. It may be one of my all time favorite books, and I’m considering including it in my summer rereadathon. The Nightingale is an absolutely fabulously incredible book, and if you haven’t read it you need to. I tell you this because you need to read it and I also want to explain that I went into Firefly Lane with really high expectations. And I was disappointed.

Firefly Lane tells the story of Kate and Tully, starting when they become friends at fourteen and following them through thirty years of friendship, betrayal, and life in general. Kate comes from a pretty normal, stable home, but she’s a bit of a geek and is having social trouble at school. Tully comes from a broken home, but she’s super popular, so it’s an unlikely friendship, but it’s a strong and close friendship. Tully is definitely the dominant one in the friendship, controlling a lot of what the girls do—and later what they do as college students and then adult women—and Kate goes along with it all. And then, of course, one of them betrays the other.

The best part of the book was the writing. Kristin Hannah is a great writer, and that was 100% reflected in this book. The scenes were vivid, and the emotions were raw. And you could feel the time period in the ambiance of the book, which is one of my favorite things.

I have a number of problems with the book, but my biggest problem is that it felt very tropy, and so it was very predictable. No, I didn’t predict exactly what was going to happen from the very start of the book, but I had a good idea of what was coming before it did, and nothing that did happen was a surprise. And not in a good way. This was compounded by the fact that neither of the girls changed as characters over the course of the book, particularly with their interactions with each other. Now I understand that with certain people, particularly childhood friends, you might always behave a certain way, but in fiction, we expect some character development, and we never see it in this book. Even in the ending, after everything, the characters are still behaving exactly the way they were in the beginning. Kate is still totally accepting of and accommodating to Tully’s flaws. Tully is still running away and also dominating everything.

I am willing to keep an open mind about this going into the sequel, which picks up where the ending left off. Maybe we will see some character development after what happened in the end of Firefly Lane. If that’s the case, it will probably have a redeeming effect on this book. I’ll let you know.

I want to talk briefly about the ending of this book. There’s a betrayal, Kate and Tully get mad at each other, and then a tragedy brings them back together again as friends. I’m not spoiling anything, all that’s on the back cover of the book. The tragedy is possibly the most clichéd thing in the book. I’m not going to say what it is, but you can probably guess. Again, it wasn’t a surprise, but I admit I was balling my eyes out by the end, so it did pack an emotional punch. In the author’s note at the end of the book, Kristin Hannah talks about this same tragedy happening in her own family, and while I completely understand the need to write about it, it felt shoehorned into the book (especially so because it came from a personal experience). I’m not trying to diminish what happened to Kristin Hannah’s family by any means, but I think her personal experience with this aspect of the book hampered the ending of Firefly Lane.

This is a lot of negative commentary on this book, and I could keep ranting about it, but I want to emphasize again that this is just my opinion, and I want you to be able to form your own opinion, if you haven’t already. And as I said before, the writing in this book is great, and I was emotionally invested in the characters, and I do want to read the sequel. So while there’s plenty about this book that didn’t work for me, it isn’t terrible, and if you’re a fan of women’s fiction, this may be just the book for you. In fact, I know a lot of people who really, really liked it.

I have the sequel out from the library now, so I’ll probably be reading that in the next couple weeks, and I’ll be back to talk about what I think then. If you haven’t read Firefly Lane, I hope this review is helpful to you deciding if you want to give it a try. And if you do read it, or if you’ve already read it, I’d love to know what you think.

I’m on Day Four of studying for the bar exam. At first I thought it wasn’t so bad. Then I made the mistake of looking ahead at the rest of the week, and now I just want to curl up in bed and cry.

Rule number one for bar prep: Don’t look ahead.

Rule number two: Don’t wake up late and then study until midnight in a desperate attempt to stay on top of things. You will very quickly feel like you can’t possibly go on.

The moral of the story, I seriously need to recalibrate my life yesterday.

But enough about the bar.

Last week, before I started all this studying, I read The Summer Before the War by Helen Simonson, and I want to talk about it with you.

The Summer Before the War follows a young woman, Beatrice, who moves to a small town in the British countryside in the summer of 1914. Her father has just died, and she has a job teaching Latin at the town’s grammar school. A woman teaches French and another woman teaches literature at the school, but apparently it’s unheard of that a woman would teach Latin. So Beatrice faces a few challenges to actually secure her job, and she’s sucked into the politics of this little town. But then World War I begins, Belgian refugees arrive, and Beatrice’s job becomes the least of anyone’s concerns.

This book was a bit of a departure from the usual for me. As you know, I usually read World War II books. I know very little about World War I beyond what I remember from high school history. I might have enjoyed this book more had I known more about the history, but I’m not sure. And whether I knew the history or not, the book just didn’t work for me that well.

Firstly, I found it to be very slow, with a lot of characters, and far too many tea parties. It wasn’t all bad, certainly. There were some moments that were great fun, and I found all the characters to be distinct and vivid, even though there were a ton of them. The writing was good too. And things did pick up in the last third of the book. By the time I finished, I was invested in the plot and the characters, but unfortunately I found it to be very predictable, and I knew everything that was going to happen before it did. Also, while the book followed multiple characters, it was mainly about Beatrice, but in the last bit, it switched over to another character’s point of view and we sort of lost Beatrice until the very end, and that didn’t really work for me.

In the end, this was an interesting book, but I’m not sure I would recommend it. It just didn’t work for me the way I wanted it to. I do hope to read more World War I books, because now I would like to know more about the time period. So if you have favorite World War I books, recommend away. And if you’ve read The Summer Before the War, I would love to discuss it more with you.

Last month, I read Beartown by Fredrik Backman. I read And Every Morning The Way Home Gets Longer and Longer by Fredrik Backman at the end of last year, and I absolutely adored it, so when a book reviewer I like on YouTube recommended this one, I was excited to give it a try. And I was not disappointed. Beartown may be one of my favorites from the whole year so far, and since I’m inching up on the library waiting list for the sequel, I wanted to tell you about it.

Beartown is a dying town in the middle of the forest. The industry has moved away, and they’re slowly losing ground to the trees. Things aren’t developing. Their only hope of survival as a town is their junior hockey team, which is poised to win national semifinals. If they win the national finals, then the hockey league might invest in a school in their town and revitalize everything. But at the after party for the semifinals game, the star hockey player violently rapes the team manager’s fifteen-year-old daughter. We’re not talking about an iffy situation where there’s any question of consent here. It’s violent.

The book is told from the point of view of the town, or rather, all the key townspeople involved in hockey and this particular event, as they deal with the consequences of the rape. The reactions are what you would expect. Half the town villifies the girl, and the other half supports her. But the way this is written, and the focus on the consequences for the town of this one act, is so incredibly well-done.

A quick warning, which you’ve probably figured out, this book is pretty heavy. It deals with rape, and it doesn’t shy away from it. There are some graphic scenes. If that’s a problem, this might not be the book for you.

But this was an absolutely fabulous book. The writing was stellar and vivid and so real. And it dealt with these really difficult issues with sensitivity and realism. Things built up so well, and the tension got so thick it was oppressive. I won’t spoil anything, but the ending was exactly what I wanted it to be. I actually stayed up all night reading this one because once I hit the halfway point of the book, I couldn’t put it down. As I said, this is one of my favorites of 2019 so far, and even though I read it over a month ago, I can’t get it out of my head (in a good way).

The only quibble I have with this book, and only a law student or lawyer would take issue with this, is that it is totally unrealistic for the girl’s mother, who’s an attorney, to be representing her in the case against the hockey player. It just wouldn’t happen. But honestly that’s a small thing and I can ignore it because it lends so many feelings to the story.

Like I said, there is a sequel, and I am really excited to read it, but the book could stand alone quite well (and there’s a distinct possibility that it should. I’ll let you know.).

But really I can’t say enough good things about this book. I never thought I would love a book that is so centered on hockey, but I do. It’s an amazing story, and I feel like everyone should go get a copy and read it. Read it right now.

If you have read Beartown, I would love to know what you thought about it. And if you haven’t, seriously go read it now.