BOOK REVIEW ROUND UP – VOLUME 3 ISSUE 10

The Hunting Wives
Author: May Cobb
Publication Date: May 2021
Genre: thriller, mystery
Method: hardcover BOTM

I can’t help myself, I love rich white women and their unrelatable drama. It’s giving Big Little Lies and Desperate Housewives vibes. Fast paced, juicy, over the top, salacious, and scandalous, jam packed with a cast of selfish and idiotic characters who are just fun to read about. This isn’t the world’s most clever or well crafted mystery novel, but it was easy to fly through which it’s insanely short chapters. I didn’t really see the twist coming, but it also didn’t really impress or shock me. Like I remember thinking, “oh, that makes sense.” Not a new all time favorite, but nothing wrong with it, 3.5 stars. Definitely interested in picking up May Cobb’s newest release, My Summer Darlings

Mean Baby: A Memoir of Growing Up
Author: Selma Blair
Publication Date: May 2022
Genre: memoir
Method: audiobook via TPL

Picked this up on a whim knowing next to nothing about Selma Blair, aside from hating her in Legally Blonde as a preteen. I went into this memoir knowing I was less interested in her experience and fame in Hollywood and more intrigued by Selma’s experience with multiple sclerosis

Definitely an emotional read, Selma crying while narrating equates to me crying while driving. I was fascinated by Selma’s ability to articulate her MS symptoms, even decades before her diagnosis, “It was a fitting role for me because, for years of my life beginning in my twenties, I often had the sensation that my arms were on fire. The feeling would come and go inexplicably: a tingle all the way down to my fingertips like tiny electric shocks, then a burning so intense I felt I might combust, then gone. Though it nagged at me, I never said anything about this to anyone, not even my mother. It was just one more mystery about my body I didn’t understand.”

Selma is very up front and honest about her mistakes in life, “I’ve come to understand its all part of the process of learning how to be human, and no repeats. Please.” And her experiences with grief, “Someone once told me, that grief is love you can no longer express.” Overall, a classic celebrity memoir, full of growth, beauty, struggle, and triumph

And We Rise
Author: Erica Martin
Publication Date: February 2022
Genre: poetry, young adult
Method: hardcover borrowed from TPL

This poetry collection exploring the Civil Rights Movement is powerful, impactful, and packs a punch with beautiful and brilliant use of white space that serves as both a history lesson and jumping off point for much needed conversation in the 2020s

Favorite piece, 1960: The same people who mock, beat, & kill us, slater on sticky lotion and fry their pale skin, outside, in the sun, inside, under a lamp, just to look dark, like us

All Adults Here
Author: Emma Straub
Publication Date: May 2020
Genre: fiction, contemporary
Method: audiobook via TPL

I love these slice of life stores. It’s like we the reader have been dropped into someone’s life, peering through a small window, given permission to observe and learn from the characters for a short while. This just feels like real life, I don’t know how else to articulate. I loved the commentary on aging, death and dying, self discovery, identity, and normative gender roles

I just finished annotating my physical copy, having listened to the audiobook, and I’m realizing I just love this author’s writing style. The praise at the end of the novel says it all, and more eloquently than I ever could: “Emma Straub is master of human emotion. From her debut story collection to her latest New York Times best selling novel, Straub’s fiction is defined by a thoughtful balance of warmth and with that makes it at once sharp and addictive, entertaining and wise. With prose that is funny, tender, expertly observed and packed with wisdom; and characters suffused with humor and humanity, their relationships flawed and resilient and ringing with truth.”

Comparable titles: A Little Hope, A Man Called Ove, Eleanor Oliphant is Completely Fine, and Olympus Texas, all of which I’ve rated 4 to 5 stars
Buzzword Readathon: June selection

It Ends With Us
Author: Colleen Hoover
Publication Date: August 2016
Genre: romance, contemporary
Method: paperback

I was hesitant to pick up this book given the last two Colleen Hoover books I read were 2 and 3 stars, yikes. But this is extremely hyped up across book tok, bookstagram, even friends in my life super love this book. Literally, 7 people I know gave in 5 stars on Goodreads. But hot dog, happy to report I liked this one, I like I even loved it!

Here is where I acknowledge I’m a hypocrite because I claim to have hated Ugly Love because I couldn’t stand the primary relationship/romance, preferring a side romance more, thus the low rating. But with It Ends With Us, I have to put my foot in my mouth because the primary romance was problematic and the secondary romance was heart flutters. I think this Colleen Hoover reading experience was better for me this time around for two reasons. Firstly, I skipped the audiobook and opted to just read the paperback copy I had and secondly, this novel isn’t a male-female dual perspective, which is what I really didn’t like in Ugly Love and November 9

What this story gave me that other romance novels don’t, is a male character to fall in love with and root for. It’s rare that I ever ~feel~ much for a character, but Atlas Corrigan, we are ready for your happy ending. And we don’t have to wait very long because the follow up novel, It Starts With Us, releases in October! I’m 1000% picking that up