Month: May 2018

Review: The Female Persuasion by Meg Wolitzer

Review: The Female Persuasion by Meg Wolitzer

Faith Frank hired me, originally, based on nothing. She took me in and she taught me things, and more than that she gave me permission. I think that’s what the people who change our lives always do. They give us permission to be the person we secretly really long to be but maybe don’t feel we’re allowed to be. -Greer

Synopsis
The Female Persuasion tells the story of Greer Kadetsky whose life turned out nothing like she expected. She was supposed to go to Yale and yet finds herself at the local college, Ryland, where a chance encounter with Faith Frank—feminist icon—changes the trajectory of her life. It is this meeting and subsequent relationship that provides Greer the scaffolding of the life she builds for the next decade, informing who she is as a person, providing her the job that starts perfectly yet leads her to a moral crossroads. Interspersed with Greer’s chapters are stories from her friend Zee, Faith Frank, and boyfriend Cory. In these we see Zee build her own life, independent of both her parents and Greer; how Faith became The Faith Frank; and what it means to love your family and do “women’s work” through Cory. Even without a Trumpian figure, The Female Persuasion explores, with a casual wit, how it feels to live with and navigate through current gender politics.

Conflicted
I listened to the audiobook of The Female Persuasion with conflicted feelings—I found the characters interesting, the dialogue between characters snappy, and the writing fresh. Told from several points of view, The Female Persuasion gave me points I could connect in most of the characters.  I could also understand why the major characters were making the choices they were making—which isn’t to say they made only good choices. Rather, Wolitzer’s characters stayed true to their development such that they made choices consistent with who they were as people. At the same time, I felt this niggling discomfort each time I turned the audio back on in that the book, while engaging, fresh, and snappy, also had a glaring hole in it. The Female Persuasion might more accurately be titled The White Female Persuasion. While this review will be centered around the almost exclusively white lens here, I want to be clear that this is still a book I enjoyed and one I’d read again. I don’t regret the time I spent on this book and the writing style and voice pushed Wolitzer’s prior book, The Interestings, up my TBR list. Because I think it is important to recognize the limitations of works we enjoy, this review will be more negative than usual, particularly for a book that I gave 4 stars. Essentially—this review focuses on what cost The Female Persuasion that last star.

I should also note that there are many people who knew me as recently as five years ago who will find this critique out of place coming from me. To be transparent in where I’m coming from—I’m a relatively recent arrival at the Feminist camp as a refugee from complementarian evangelicalism. I am not well-versed in the scholarship. I’m aware that the concept of intersectionality within feminism was introduced by bell hooks, though I’ve not (yet) read her works. There are things I may get wrong in this review or, more likely, my critique here will be necessarily somewhat surface level—both because I do not have the foundation to make this a true critical analysis and because you’re here to read a book blog, not a ten page seminar paper. I welcome any critique you have—any point you think I’ve missed—as well as any books you think I should read. The only comment that isn’t welcome today is a defense of White Feminism.

Limitations
So why do I feel like the The Female Persuasion is a story limited to a White Feminist perspective? There are, in fact, a few characters of color, though with one exception, they are typically limited to peripheral characters—at Loci for example, Wolitizer mentions at least one woman as being of color but that description is where the representation ends. These women do not engage in any dialogue in the scenes in which they appear that raises any points related to how women of color have experienced injustices differently, how their layers of race and possibly class have made their experiences of sexism different. The only character who could be considered a person of color whose viewpoint is directly presented is Cory—Greer’s boyfriend who is a first-generation American of Portuguese descent. (A quick Google search indicates there’s an ongoing debate about whether people of Spanish and Portuguese descent who are not from Latin America “count” as white or not. I’m not about to wade into this debate. For purposes of this discussion I’ll “count” him as being of color since he is presented as having what is typically considered the immigrant experience—his parents don’t always speak great English and work traditionally menial jobs, like housekeeper. He also changes his name from “Duarte” to “Cory” to sound less ethnic.) Zee is Jewish, though how this might have impacted her experiences with sexism doesn’t really come up.

As I recall, the only place where a person of color comes close to engaging in any kind of discussion about intersectionality is Zee’s African-American coworker, Noelle. When they first meet, Zee is in a Teach-for-America-esque program in Chicago. Noelle is, understandably, skeptical of Zee’s qualifications as well as her commitment. This one section from Zee’s perspective in conversations between these two women is where race becomes a topic. And yet, it is a topic removed from the larger feminist discussion. Zee fits into the larger narrative as a character study of feminism—she is an example of the plethora of Gen-Y woman learning to stand on her own in this “Man’s World.” Her experiences of moving across the country to start something new felt familiar to me, the way it will to many women my age. And yet, the way race is slotted into Zee’s story, it’s done in a way that manages to separate the discussion from Zee’s experiences as a feminist. The introduction of Noelle would have allowed Wolitzer to have even just one character voice what it is like to live as both female and black and yet this never really happened. Zee is the most minor of the major characters and Noelle a missed opportunity within Zee’s development.

My Life On the Road
This omission in The Female Persuasion was made all the more noticeable to me having just finished Gloria Steinem’s autobiography, My Life On the Road. Steinem discusses early in the book travels around India and learning about what community organizing looked like there. When the National Women’s Conference took place in Houston in 1977, she described the efforts expended before and during the conference to make sure that women of color had their experiences and voices heard, including working with various groups within others—for example of Chicanas and Puerto Rican women who both had much in common and unique needs and concerns—to make sure that women of all groups were represented in the compiled list of recommendations made by the conference. Even though I had not listened to The Female Persuasion yet, I was struck over and over by Steinem’s diverse experiences, her insistence on being where the people were, not being the leader, and deliberately including women of diverse backgrounds. While Steinem is by no means perfect, she is generally recognized as having values and positions that are deliberately inclusive of women of color and different classes. Though it started slow, I found her autobiography fascinating and worth the Audible credit.

So then back to The Female Persuasion. As I noted when I started, I enjoyed this book. I could see myself in Greer and Zee (though Faith seemed a watered down feminist icon to me after Gloria).   While the writing wasn’t particularly fancy or “literary,” it was snappy in the way my friends and I are when we get going. And yet, there is this glaring hole. For me, as a white cis-woman, I am not directly harmed by the omission of women of color, except to the extent that only seeing people like me means I’ll never be exposed to stories unlike my own. There isn’t anything that I noticed that was stereotypical or trope-y, women of color just aren’t really there.

Doing Better
And yet, like the catchphrase “silence is violence,” absence is a problem here. It is far too easy as a white female reader to never read a story featuring a woman of color. I can pat myself on the back for being a feminist and enjoying this feminist book and never realize that I’m only imbibing stories of White Feminism. It is easy to purposefully or even inadvertently avoid being exposed to the ways that race and class intersect with gender to make harder for women at these intersections. To an extent then, it is incumbent on writers and artists who produce art that appeals to women, like The Female Persuasion, to intentionally produce diverse works and for publishers to publish and market them. While it was far from a perfect book, Jodi Picoult’s Small Great Things strikes me as a good example here—many of the people who read mass-produced contemporary fiction like Jodi Picoult probably aren’t reading a lot of hard-hitting stories that discuss the ugliness of white supremacy and what it is like to be black today. And yet, Picoult knew she had a platform and Small Great Things was the result.

At the end of the day, I truly enjoyed The Female Persuasion and think it deserves much (if not all) of the hype it is getting. I look forward to seeing what Wolitzer does in the future and hope that in future books, she features more diverse stories and characters.

Notes
Published: April 3, 2018 by Riverhead Books (@riverheadbooks)
Author: Meg Wolitzer (@megwolitzer)
Date read: April 26, 2018
Rating: 4 stars

Review: Text Me When You Get Home by Kayleen Schaefer

Review: Text Me When You Get Home by Kayleen Schaefer

I received a free e-version of Text Me When You Get Home from Dutton Books via NetGalley. I’m grateful to Dutton and NetGalley for their generosity in providing a copy for me to review. All opinions are my own.

“Text me when you get home” is not an aggressive rallying-cry like the anti-Donald Trump, pro-woman “This pussy grabs back,” but it does mark a sea change. It’s a way women are saying, through our care for each other, that our friendships are not what society says they are. We’re reclaiming them. We’re taking them back from the shitty words they’ve been smothered by for way too long:

Women can’t get along.
They’re probably lesbians.
Women who say they like each other are lying. What a bunch of catty bitches.
Women ditch their friends when they meet a guy.

What we’re doing by holding each other close in whatever ways we can is lifting our friendships out of these stereotypes. We’re not going to let the kinds of relationships we want to have be undermined any longer.

When I look back on my early life, I am not one of those women who can identify a string of close girlfriends. I fully admit that I was not the easiest child to be friends with—my social skills weren’t great, I was intensely competitive over intellectual things, and—quite frankly—holier-than-thou. For most of the first three decades of my life, religion provided a set of rules to follow. I was not a rule-breaker. Rule-breakers are bad.

What would have been a natural friend group among my peers at church constantly felt like an exclusive clique. I had no problem finding someone to sit with or hang out with during youth group events. But I would quickly come to discover during these events that I typically wasn’t invited when one of the girls wanted hang out one-on-one with someone or even in a smaller group. I was a second-tier friend, never best-friend quality. But for my proximity and attendance at the various church youth group events, even this semblance of having female friends likely would have nearly disappeared.

In high school, I did have friends I considered at the time to be close friends. Looking back, I can see that much of what prevented these friendships from being deeper was my own issues, including their legitimate fear of my judgment if they confided in me what they were doing or feeling. (Sex! The horror.) I didn’t realize at the time that these friendships were essentially one-sided. With my confiding in them but their being unable to return the trust. The result of this kind of relationship was the severing of these friendships once we went to college. I’m not sure I spoke to any of the girls I thought were my friends again after that, outside of running into them somewhere. Indeed, when I visited my parents in the years after high school, the only friend I ever made a point to see while I was home was male, my friend since first grade.

College was an improvement, with deep friendships at the time with two women in particular. And yet here too, “friends forever” didn’t last. I probably haven’t talked to these two women in almost ten years. While I have stayed in contact with two other women, the friend I have stayed closest with since college is, again, male. He is the person I always make a point to see when I visit my family.

It is only as a thirty-something woman that I developed the kind of female friendships Schaefer celebrates in Text Me When You Get Home: The Evolution and Triumph of Modern Female Friendship. I have my ride-or-die, show-up-at-my-house-at-midnight-if-I-call women now. We have a group text that is active at least once a day. They quite literally saved me when I was leaving my abusive ex-husband several years ago.

But Tell Me About the Book
While Text Me is, as the title indicates, a study of modern female friendship, it is equally a memoir. Schaefer grounds her exploration into the evolution of what female friendship means within her own experience. My experience detailed above (minus the oppressive influence of religion) is similar to Schaefer’s experience detailed in the book. Like Schaefer, I saw other women as my rivals. There was a scarcity of attention—adult approval, male gaze, teachers’ accolades—and girls were my competition. As an adult I can see that this is entirely untrue but it has taken decades to learn.

Schaefer dissects her time spent in high school, college, and shortly after having her priorities, time, and even relationships centered around men. This resonated with me as well. Having felt like I was being left out of deep female friendships that other women around me seemed to have, it was easy to fall into thinking that I was just better friends with guys. In many ways it was a comfort to me to see that Schaefer experienced this too—that in her job as a journalist and in her early adult years she also fell in this trap. One of the dangers here, as Schaefer identifies, is that as you center your life around male approval, you grow farther and farther from other women. This doesn’t even require that you have close male friendships instead—merely feeling like you have to be the kind of woman that your male acquaintances and coworkers approve of often means you have to seem to not be “girly” or like other women. This desire for male approval turns into pushing other women away. It was on the one hand heartening to see my experiences set out so clearly by another woman and sad to look back and see how so much of my struggle and feeling alone didn’t have to be this way. I made choices and this is my bed to lie in, yes, but these were also many of the choices society was pushing me to make at that time.

This book is, however, also about the evolution of friendships. After lamenting her male-centric experiences in the first few decades of her life (and providing the context and referencing studies that explain why she felt this way), Schaefer discusses the recent phenomenon of women delaying marriage and the role female friendships are playing for these women.

Lighter Nonfiction
As far as literary value goes, I found Text Me interesting and engaging, but much of the material stays fairly surface-level. (This isn’t necessarily a problem—many people don’t want to read an academic work and I mention this more so that you know what you’re getting if you pick this one up). For example, Schaefer discusses the myth of the mean girl and its uses to divide girls but stops here. She doesn’t take the analysis much farther, though this would be an opportunity to explore how society’s insistence on dividing women from each other is a tool of patriarchal power structures whose existence is ensured when women are separated from each other. Given how Schaefer structured her book, however, this level of critique would feel like a tangent. While she cites a variety of sources from interview quotes of starlets to published academic papers, the studies cited are centered around Schaefer’s personal revelations which makes the book both more personal but also, by necessity, less academic. There are endnotes so for readers who want to explore a topic more fully, that is an option.

Text Me is also absolutely peppered with pop culture references—while Schaefer details her experience as well as those of other women she personally talks to, the almost the entirety of the rest of her examples derive from pop culture. She cites Leslie Knope’s love of Ann Perkins as well as the women of HBO’s Big Little Lies. In discussing the history and evolution of friendships, she cites older television shows as well, yet even these I had mostly heard of. While this was effective for me as a thirty-something reader in 2018, it does make me question the longevity of this book.

Intersectional Experiences
It should also be said the Schaefer is white and this is her memoir. She makes an obvious effort to discuss pop culture featuring minority characters including Girlfriends, Living Single, Insecure, and The Joy Luck Club and even has a short section pointing out the lack of representation of friendships of women of color in pop culture. She devotes several pages to the friendship between Oprah Winfrey and Gayle King. And yet, the limitations of Schaefer and her friend circle as well as the under-representation of women of color on major television networks and in movies means the vast majority of Schaefer’s discussion and examples are centered around white women. In the next week I actually have a post planned to discuss Meg Wolitzer’s most recent book The Female Persuasion and its limitations of being centered in White Feminism, particularly as contrasted against Gloria Steinem’s autobiography. Which is say, that as a reader I try to consider things like the whether authors acknowledge the varied experiences of women of color and consider how the intersection of things like race and class make the burdens of being a modern woman that much heavier.

I don’t feel like Schaefer does present women of color often, and yet I perceived in her writing that Schaefer knew this was a limitation of her work and acknowledged where she could that women of color have different experiences and yet are less widely represented and considered. I think Text Me is a book that will appeal mostly to white audiences because it may be harder for a woman of color to see herself in Schaefer’s repeatedly white examples, and yet this isn’t a function of Schaffer’s blindness or willful indifference to this limitation.

Conclusion
I really enjoyed Text Me When You Get Home and blew through it in a few days. It was easy to read, particularly for a nonfiction book. I felt like Schaefer presents a story that will seem familiar to many women my age and the book is more effective for this connection. Schaefer made significant points about the way we socialize girls to dislike other girls and how women perpetuate their estrangement from other women by seeking male approval (difficult to fight given that positions of authority are often occupied by men), yet these points are largely made through her personal recollections or television examples. It was an interesting technique that could have gone off the rails but worked. I found the pop culture references to be mostly well-used though I also see how these may turn away some readers who would prefer to see more academic studies and less HBO.

Text Me made me really look back and see how my relationships with girls and women evolved in my own life over the last three decades. Looking back at the way I treated women who I wanted to be friends with, I’m left thankful for the women I have now—Ritz, Shelby, Brittany, Sarah, Elora, Rachel. For Paige, Erica, Kelly, Sara, and Carly—I’m sorry for the countless times I wasn’t a good friend to you when we were younger. I hope that in the years since Mount Pleasant, CHHS, and William & Mary that you found your ride-or-die women. Text me when you get home?

Notes
Published: February 6, 2018 by Dutton Books (@duttonbooks)
Author: Kayleen Schaefer (@iknowkayleen)
Date read: May 6, 2018
Rating: 3 ¾ stars

Featured Image and Photo credit: rawpixel

Review: Rainbirds by Clarissa Goenawan

Review: Rainbirds by Clarissa Goenawan

I received a free version of Rainbirds on CD from Penguin Random House via LibraryThing. I’m grateful to Penguin Random House and LibraryThing for their generosity in providing a copy for me to review. All opinions are my own.

 

“Remember this, Ren. Sadness alone can’t harm anyone. It’s what you do when you’re sad that can hurts you and those around you.”

Synopsis
Rainbirds follows Ren Ishida on his journey to the fictional, remote town of Akakawa in the wake of his sister’s murder. What should be a short trip to wrap up her affairs becomes an escape for Ren—an escape from the expectations and failures of his own relationships in Tokyo and into the life of the sister who hid so much from him over the last decade. Ren stays in Akakawa, taking Keiko’s job and moving into her rooms in a local house. The farther he steps into Keiko’s life, the darker things become, until it isn’t clear that Ren himself will survive the trip unscathed.

Genre
This is a book that perhaps was mis-billed for me. That is to say, I expected a thriller going into the book—the beginning chapters set in motion the story of a grieving brother, come to the small town where his sister lived and was recently murdered. Ren is on a quest to find his sister’s killer, though he quickly comes to realize he didn’t know her nearly as well as he thought. While this plot provides the scaffolding for the book, at its heart, Rainbirds is less a noir mystery and more a character study into grieving Ren. That said, the noir feel remains—this may not be a noir thriller but it starts dark and stays dark. Throughout the book, I had the feeling of impending storm clouds—an expectation, a crackling of electricity in the air, the surrounding foggy darkness. If you like dark, slightly creepy literary character studies, don’t let the early chapters turn you off. This book may be right up your alley.

Audio
I have mixed feelings about the audio of this book. On the one hand, I usually enjoy audio of any books set in different countries or with non-American characters. The audio usually adds to the experience, setting forth the cadence of the speech, the different emphasis and pronunciation of what are otherwise familiar English words. And the names and places are almost never ones I could get right without audio—case in point here, the book takes place in the fiction “Akakawa.” If I had to read that, I’d probably have emphasized (very incorrectly) the middle “kak” where the audio narrator pronounced it “Ah-kah-kah-wah” – no kaks involved.

But I digress. Rainbirds seemed like the kind of book I usually love on audio. My issue here, however, was that this book was gloomy in the extreme. I do most of my audiobook listening while driving so the combination of the gloomy mood, melodic male narrator, and almost no action meant that there were times when I had to stop listening. This was, for example, not the book I could listen to while driving three hours home at 1am after a concert and stay awake and alive.

This is not to say that I don’t recommend the audio of this book. The voice of the narrator was well-chosen and it was produced well—I just personally need a little more action in my audiobooks.

Lolita
One of the characters Ren becomes entangled with is a student at his cram school—Rio Nakajima, whom Ren nicknames Seven Stars after the brand of cigarette she smokes (much as Humbert Humbert renames Delores, “Lolita”). Though Rio is not prepubescent, she is seventeen and Ren (though in his early 20s himself) is her teacher. When the two inevitably become sexually involved—I say inevitable because by the time it finally happens it has been so long set up that it’s impossible to miss where this going—it reeks of Lolita. Seventeen is a good distance from twelve and she does attain the age of consent in the book; however, in the process of discovering what happened to Keiko, Ren also uncovers family events that have led Rio to be as damaged as she is. This is not a well-adjusted seventeen year old who happens to be wise above her years. This is a damaged, childlike, aged-too-fast seventeen year old who has no business becoming romantically entangled with her teacher. This entire relationship still bothers me, even though I finished the book over a week ago.

With that said, Goenawan is a talented writer—though Ren tries to avoid scenarios where he would be alone with Rio, the course of events forces the intimate meeting. The set up allows you to sympathize when Ren, even where the idea of a teacher engaging in a sexual relationship with a student is something that you normally think of as a hard line “no.” Though Rainbirds wasn’t ultimately a book I loved, the ability of Goenawan to make me empathize with someone I found morally problematic—during the very scenes I found problematic—makes me want to read her future works.

Connections
The characters were more interconnected than I expected, with the players forming a web—much like small town America, everyone knows everyone and one person is always related to another. These connections also created a bit of a subplot where Ren uncovers and solves another little mini-mystery as he digs for more information about his sister. These chapters could have felt like a tangent; however, learning more about the people in his sister’s life opened doors to him to learn more about Keiko. The diversions were short but worthwhile.

These connections and diversions also provided some unexpected little bursts in the book of “I didn’t see that coming.” The problem for me and why I’ve been sitting with this book is that, for all the little bursts I didn’t see coming, the one I would have wanted—the identity of the murderer and some kind of conclusion—never popped. Instead, the conclusion fizzled, like a balloon slowly leaking air.

Ending (Very, Very Mild Spoilers—No Killer Identified)
Having had more time to think about it, I found the ending ultimately unsatisfactory—Ren does achieve a sense of closure in that he (and therefore the reader) determines whodunit, but by this point, the story had petered out so much, that it felt lackluster. Does Ren even care that he got his answer? I honestly couldn’t tell. He’s discovered something of himself—something perhaps he didn’t want to know. Where the previous connections and reveals crackled, the final reveal felt as if it didn’t matter. If Ren didn’t care that he had his answer, should we?

And here I come back to the thought that perhaps this book was mischaracterized. When I set aside my disappointment over the finish, over the sense that the mystery was no mystery at all, I’m left with a character study. A slow-burn, creepily noir character study into Ren, yes, but more his sister. In searching for his sister’s killer, the person Ren really finds is her, but far too late to do anything about it.

Notes
Published: March 6, 2018 by Penguin Random House
Author: Clarissa Goenawan
Date read: May 2, 2018
Rating: 3 ½ stars

Mini-Reviews and a belated April Wrap Up

Mini-Reviews and a belated April Wrap Up

April Book Drought and Reading
I didn’t think I’d finished terribly many books in April, but looking back finished more than I thought–just almost none of what I planned.  The books I assembled at the beginning of the month wound up being overwhelmingly heavy in theme and tone, so this both slowed me down and caused me to insert some fluffy, unplanned reads to give me a break while keeping my momentum going–that’s a thing other people do, right?

The books I finished this month where Monster, Home Fire, The Last Equation of Isaac Severy, Evicted, Pachinko, Queen of Hearts, Salvage the Bones, Crenshaw, My Life On the Road, Meaty, and The Female Persuasion.  The last three of those are on audio.  So for April that’s 2742 pages read and 31 hours, 55 minutes listening.  For the year, 11,344 pages and 146 hours, 18 minutes listening.  Time well spent, I think.

This month was, however, an utter failure for #theunreadshelfproject.  While four of those books were ones I already own (and I bought but immediately read Home Fire so we’re counting it), Amazon gave away something like eight books for free for International Book  Day and I purchased Miss Burma during Independent Book Store Day.  So we’re deeper into the red on the unread books.  But still–five!  I read five books I own.  I may never catch up but it is fun trying.  One should always have goals.

Monster
I came across Monster in a list at the library about books for Black History month, in a If-You-Liked-The-Hate-U-Give-You’ll-Like-This list.  I would agree that it makes a good flight pick along with Dear Martin and The Hate U Give.  The three books consider similar themes and provide alternative sides to a similar experience.  Unlike the other two, however, Monster is the story of a teenager who wasn’t killed by police, but rather has been accused of felony murder for allegedly participating in a robbery gone wrong that left a man dead.  The book is written in first person narrated by Steve Harmon, the child accused of the crime–however, in order to cope with what is happening, Steve presents it as if he is writing a film for one of his classes.  The entire book reads like a screenplay.  This unusual device works, providing the remove Steve need to tell his story while still giving the reader a sense of what is happening around him.  Frankly, it also makes the book incredibly quick to read relative to the page length–I think I finished it in under two hours.  The book won the first Michael L. Printz Award (best book in teen literature), ALA Best Book honors, Coretta Scott King honors, and was a finalist for the National Book Award when it was published.  It was a powerful book, even more so for the unexpected gut-punch in the last few pages.  Just when I thought I could breathe, Walter Dean Myers delivered one last visceral blow that was true to the book and true to how black boys are treated in this country.  It’s not an easy read but one I recommend.

The Last Equation of Isaac Severy
I’ll admit that I was hoping for an adult Westing Game –this wasn’t that.  (Though it’s probably being unfair to hope for another Westing Game.)  This was a fun little diversion–a thriller set in the midst of a highly dysfunctional family after the patriarch dies.  (I guess novels set in well-functioning families don’t typically produce enough plot to merit books?).  Jacobs had a knack for presenting most of the characters in fairly well-rounded ways–even the minor characters weren’t flat or simply plot devices.  As a result I managed to sympathize with almost all of the characters–even the bad actors and hate everyone at some point–kind of how I feel about real people.  No one is perfect, everyone has their own internal motivations, and someone is always going to make a choice that I disagree with.   Though the sub-title of the book is “A Novel In Clues” and the book is about a mathematician, absolutely no math background is necessary to enjoy this book.  It wasn’t the best thriller but it was a diversion when I needed one and may be worth checking out if mysteries are your wheelhouse.  Though there’s a fair amount of death, there’s no gore.

Queen of Hearts
Queen of Hearts is being billed as Grey’s Anatomy in book form.  This is….accurate-ish.  There’s less going on in Queen of Hearts since Martin is working with less space than a Grey’s Anatomy season and the drama is (mostly) in the past, just come to revisit Zadie and Emma.  They’ve had a good run with relatively little drama since their intern years in medical school a decade ago, but that doesn’t make a good book.  Enter stage left, Zadie’s McDreamy from her first intern year, bearing secrets for what really happened ten years ago.  The book was deliciously fluffy and dramatic, had some mystery elements (what really happened that year?), but stayed pretty well in the popular fiction lane.  I was bothered twice by body-shaming comments made about people who were overweight.  This wasn’t surprising giving that Martin is herself a doctor and health professionals often seem particularly prone to assuming size is indicative of health, but was disappointing and distracting.  It also ended a bit too neatly (which is not the same as happily) for me–I think Martin could have left a few loose ends hanging and it would have felt more true to life.  Ultimately, if you’re looking for a fluffy, plot-driven beach read, Queen of Hearts is a good one.

That’s it for my late update.  You reading anything fun for May?  I’d love to hear about it in the comments.

Header Photo Credit: Liv Bruce