I’m currently tearing through books at a slightly alarming pace. Blame Book Bingo. Also, blame the fact that I scheduled three days off to recover from my second vaccine (Team Moderna!), and had minor side effects so now I’m home with a pile of books and time on my hands. Below, please find quick reviews of five books which I’ve recently read.
The Beautiful Ones by Silvia Moreno-Garcia
This book was recently re-released with an absolutely stunning cover. I know they say you shouldn’t judge a book by its cover, but absolutely judge this one by its cover. This cover very much conveys the tone of the book.
The Beautiful Ones is a low-fantasy romance set in a secondary world very much inspired by Regency England. Nina is visiting her wealthy cousins for the season, in hopes that she will land a suitable husband. Well, that’s what her family hopes. While Nina is not adverse to the idea of a husband, she has her own goals and interests to pursue: understanding and mastering her telekinetic gift, and collecting beetles.
Look, I was destined to love this book because it features a beetle-collecting, socially awkward young woman who sometimes talks way too much about insects and other random facts. I am Nina, minus the telekinesis and wealthy cousins. Oh, and I’m already married, thank goodness.
Nina’s love interest Hector is not worthy of her, but whatever. Read the story for Nina, and for Moreno-Garcia’s excellent writing.
(Note: This book definitely hits a lot of romance tropes but there is no on-page sex, so adjust your expectations accordingly)
Embodied (various poets and artists)
Speaking of books and their covers, I bought Embodied because of the cover. There was a really cool holographic edition for Independent Bookstore Day. Plus I love the diversity of the women depicted on the cover.
Embodied is an illustrated poetry anthology with an intersectional feminist focus. Each poem is presented in a fully illustrated format, like a comic book or graphic novel.
While the concept is cool, it didn’t entirely work for me. First of all, I admittedly don’t read a lot of poetry and am not familiar with the nuances of craft that I would have needed to appreciate some of these poems. But more importantly, in order to pair the words with the images, the verses were often broken up, which changed the meter and made the poems even harder to “get”. After each illustrated chapter, the poem is presented in text form, and some poems which completely failed to work for me suddenly came alive when I saw how the poet had originally formatted them.
The Resisters by Gish Jen
I mentioned in my post about Book Bingo that I was concerned about finding a sports-themed book. A day or two later, I was reading a list of recommended books by AAPI authors, and I saw The Resisters by Gish Jen included. It promised to be a dystopian story of automation, AI surveillance, class differences, and baseball. Sporty enough to count as a sports book, sci-fi enough to appeal to this genre reader.
Unfortunately, it was not the book for me.
While The Resisters is ostensibly the story of Gwen, a young woman with a gift for pitching, the entire story is told from the point of view of her father, Grant. This makes sense early in the book, when Gwen is a child and wouldn’t understand a lot of what was going on in the world and what choices her parents had to make in order to try to give her a decent childhood and the ability to play baseball. I expected maybe we’d have a narrator change in later sections. Nope. Grant the Dad remains our POV character for the entire book.
This means that there’s a huge middle section of the book when Gwen has left home and the book becomes an epistolary, with the family corresponding back and forth. We don’t see what is happening with Gwen, we only see what she tells her parents (and what her father discovers from having bugged her dorm room, ugh).
So while The Resisters is a book about baseball and resistance, it’s also largely a book about fatherhood, which is not a theme that resonates with me at all. Other readers may have a different experience. I suspect parents may have more empathy with the themes of the book and the decisions that Grant makes. However, I felt like I was cheated out of Gwen’s perspective in what should have been her story.
Beach Read by Emily Henry
While some Book Bingo boxes are hard to fill, some are almost too easy. For instance, when given a box labeled “Beach Read” why not read a book called… Beach Read?
January and Gus are temporary lake house neighbors. They’re both published authors. And they are also former classmates who shared one sexually charged evening at a frat party which ultimately resulted in nothing.
January writes “women’s fiction.” Gus is a “serious” literary writer. Of course they challenge each other to try writing in the other’s genre in a bid to prove the value of their own genres and try to beat writer’s block. Over the course of the summer, they’ll have to confront their pre-conceived notions of genre limitations and each other.
Beach Read gives you pretty much exactly what you expect. It’s a romance set in a small town. There’s a cast of quirky supportive characters. There’s banter and sexual tension. There’s steamy on-page sex, eventually. There’s misunderstandings and pining. And there’s a happy ending. If you’re looking for something fun to read on your first post-pandemic vacation, or at home on a gloomy day, it’s a good choice.
Fugitive Telemetry by Martha Wells
This is the sixth Murderbot book. If you enjoyed the previous Murderbots, you will enjoy this Murderbot.
Need to know more? Ok, this time around, Murderbot is solving a murder. The book takes place BEFORE book 5. Fugitive Telemetry also sees a return to the novella format after last year’s novel-length Network Effect. It’s a quick read and hits all the usual Murderbot notes.
The publisher is calling this a stand-alone, and while the plot is not directly tied to the over-arching meta story, it’s still full of references to Murderbot’s previous adventures, so you’ll definitely get more enjoyment out of it if you read the books in order.
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