Category: Reviews

Our Favorite Books of 2019

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Happy New Year’s Eve! And what a year it’s been! Anna’s highlights were starting work full time, getting married, and adopting her dog! Alexis started her MFA program, got a short story accepted for publication, and adopted her cat! 

Here are some of our favorite books of 2019:

Anna:

The Glass Castle by Jeanette Walls

Small Fry by Lisa Brennan-Jobs

Normal People by Sally Rooney

We Are Okay by Nina LaCour

Long Live the Tribe of Fatherless Girls by T Kira Madden

The Witch Elm by Tana French

In the Woods by Tana French

Borne by Jeff VanderMeer

City of Ghosts by Victoria Schwab 

Burial Rites by Hannah Kent

The Goldfinch by Donna Tart

 

Alexis:

Children of Blood and Bone by Tomi Adeyemi 

The Wildlands by Abby Geni 

Airborn by Kenneth Oppel

The Book of Dreams by Nina George

A Court of Mist and Fury by Sarah J. Maas

The Scent Keeper by Erica Bauermeister 

Grim Lovelies by Meghan Shepherd

Etta and Otto and Russell and James by Emma Hooper

Gods of Jade & Shadow by Silvia Moreno-Garcia 

The Island of Sea Women by Lisa See

City of Ghosts by Victoria Schwab

Florida by Lauren Groff

The World That We Knew by Alice Hoffman

 

Here’s to a great 2020!

 

Review: The World That We Knew by Alice Hoffman

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Alexis:

Despite the fact that the characters were a little too distant and one dimensional for my taste, this was still a five star read for me. Hoffman’s writing is haunting, beautiful, and lyrical. I love magical realism, and this book is a wonderful mix of magical realism, historical fiction, and folklore.

The book focuses on Lea at the beginning of WWII during the Nazi regime. Lea’s mother’s one goal is to keep her daughter safe, so she does the unthinkable: finds Ettie, the daughter of a rabbi, to create a golem, a powerful magical creature/person made from clay, who is to protect Lea at all costs.

This is a Holocaust story, and Hoffman doesn’t shy away from the horrors that the Jewish people of Europe faced. But I love the way Hoffman weaves small beauties into the story, especially with the relationship of Ava (the golem) with the heron. The heron was a beautiful symbol throughout the book. Out of all of the characters, I actually felt like I connected with Ava the most.

This is a survival story, so while I prefer to get into the heart and soul of the characters, the distant POV felt right with the atrocities the characters face in the story. Hoffman focuses on what it means to be human, and what it means to survive.

VERDICT: 5 stars

Review: Erotic Stories for Punjabi Widows by Balli Kaur Jaswal

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Alexis:

Hi, everyone! I know Anna and I have been MIA for a while, but with me being in grad school and Anna freshly married, we’ve been a little busy! Thankfully, it’s my Thanksgiving Break (no pun intended) so I actually have some fun reading time. Now, to jump into the review…

I had the opportunity to go to a reading by Jaswal, and I’m so glad I did! I got to hear her read from this book, and it really helped bring the characters to life.

Nikki is a British woman, the daughter of Indian immigrants. When she drops out of law school and then her father dies, she starts working as a creative writing teacher. However, she quickly realizes that most of the Punjabi widows who signed up for the class can barely read English.

By the book’s title, you can probably tell where this is going. I love Nikki’s character, and I respect her trying to straddle her traditional Indian community with her modern British community. Her sister, Mindi, is a good foil to Nikki, as she searches for an arranged marriage throughout the book.

Overall, there is a lot of humor in the book, and I enjoyed the characters and the widows’ stories, as well as the glimpses we get of their inner lives. This book isn’t fast paced, and because of that, we really get to know Nikki as a character. By the halfway point, more community tensions start appearing that add another layer to the book.

I really liked the first ¾ of the novel, but the last quarter was a little too melodramatic. A lot of the events that happen feel very soap opera to me. And since the rest of the book rings very true, this threw me off a bit. And because of that, I knocked this review down to 4 stars.

VERDICT: 4 stars

 

 

 

SPOILER below:

I also found Nikki’s reaction to the gossip about Jason too overblown. She knew that the gossip the widows spread isn’t always 100% reliable, and yet she takes their gossip and just assumes the worst of Jason. I like the Pride & Prejudice style letter that he writes to her, however!

Review: City of Ghosts by Victoria Schwab

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Anna: If you’re looking for a spooky middle-grade read this fall, City of Ghosts is the book for you! Cassidy Blake isn’t a normal girl: after a near-death experience, she can see ghosts and move between the ghost and human world.

I really liked Cassidy as a protagonist, though I did think her relationship with her parents was a little lacking and hope it is developed more in the sequel. Edinburgh is also the perfect ghostly backdrop to this story. Honestly, this would have terrified me as a kid. 

VERDICT: 4 stars 

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Harry Potter re-read: The Sorcerer’s Stone!

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Anna: I finished my re-read of The Sorcerer’s Stone, rather The Philosopher’s Stone, and it felt so good! I got the 20th anniversary Hufflepuff edition at Blackstone’s when I studied in Oxford. 

This was such a nostalgic read. I’d forgotten the little differences between the book and the movie. There’s something equally heartwarming and heartbreaking about innocent little Harry who is just learning about the Wizarding World, and I loved re-living the beginning of Harry, Ron, and Hermione’s friendship. I’m also amazed by the foundation JK builds in this book,  as there is so much foreshadowing to events and characters in the later books. 

On to book two!

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Review: The Glass Castle by Jeanette Walls

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Anna: The Glass Castle by Jeanette Walls is the best memoir I’ve read since Educated. If you haven’t read it yet, you should stop everything you’re doing and read it right now.

Jeanette grows up in extreme poverty in Appalachia with an alcoholic father and neglectful mother. Jeanette and her siblings were horribly abused, but the book also details glimpses of beauty and love throughout her life. The book shows how her past and her family continually follow her even when she leaves West Virginia for New York. Most astonishing is Walls’s power of forgiveness. 

I also watched the movie, which I’m happy to report is just as good as the book!

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Review: Vicious by V.E. Schwab

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Alexis:
I adored the first couple of chapters. The way Schwab sets up this alternate reality world, and sucks you in by flashing forward, is brilliant. 

Here’s a synopsis: Victor and Eli start out as college roommates. As seniors, Eli comes up with an idea of working on EO’s for his thesis. EO stands for ExtraOrdinary, a kind of fabled superhero that might or might not exist. This leads both Victor and Eli down very dark, disturbing, dare I say “vicious” and “villainous” paths.

On Goodreads, the world is described as “a gritty comic-book-style world,” which is completely accurate. Schwab’s worldbuilding is one of her strengths; even Lockland University is very grounded, and feels very concrete and interesting. 

I really enjoyed Victor’s love for blackout poetry. It just made him that much more interesting, especially since he always used his parents’ books. And my favorite characters are, of course, Sydney and Mitch. 

The book isn’t linear; it jumps back in forth in time, from 10 years ago to Victor and Eli in college to ten years in the future, after Victor breaks out of jail. In the beginning, this time jump felt clunky, and I was annoyed with it because it was a bit of a chore. However, it did start to flow better and work better about halfway through the book.

My biggest issue with the book was Eli’s character. Victor’s downwards descent was believable, from the many hints we get in the beginning that he has a darkness lurking in him. But Eli’s is a little too sudden, and we don’t really get a build up to him becoming a mass-murderer. I think his faith and “chosen by God” storyline was a little too…on the nose? It was a little too something. I feel like I wanted more depth to him.

There also is definitely a heavy trigger warning attached to this book, for suicide, death, violence…I almost stopped reading it near the beginning because, for a while, the whole book focuses heavily on near-death experiences, and it was a little too heavy, even for me, who enjoys dark storylines. But this is a book about villains, after all, or “anti-heroes.” 

Overall, the writing, worldbuilding, and the frame of the beginning and ending of the book were well done, and I enjoyed the story as a whole. I think the sequel has a lot of potential.

VERDICT: 4 stars 

 

Review: Florida by Lauren Groff

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Alexis:

I feel like this is the first book I’ve read for fun (even though my professor recommended that I read it) in a while! I just finished Florida by Lauren Groff, which I meant to read all of this past summer because it generated so much hype.

I haven’t read a good short story collection in a while, even though I always find them very helpful in writing my own short stories. But Florida was a great read; I love the way Groff writes about the Florida landscape. Each short story is very grounded in place, especially in the first couple of stories. The way she writes about Florida is nostalgic yet haunting. She really focuses on the amount of snakes and alligators crawling around the swampy landscape.

My favorite stories were “At the Round Earth’s Imagined Corners,” “Eyewall,” and “Above and Below.” The first is a coming of age story, full of snakes and snake imagery; the second is a ghost/hurricane story; and the last is about a wannabe professor who finds herself recently homeless.

Most of Groff’s stories lack quotation marks, which adds to the haunting feel of her writing. She definitely has a way with language, and all of her lines feel poignant. Overall, I definitely recommend it!

VERDICT: 5 stars

In the Woods and mood reading!

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Anna: It’s finally (slowly!) feeling a bit more like fall! 

As cooler weather approaches, I’ve been in the mood for crime fiction. This is the second Tana French novel I’ve read in a month. The first in her Dublin Murder Squad series, In the Woods follows Detective Bob Ryan and his partner Cassie Maddox as they investigate the murder of a twelve-year-old girl found dead in the woods…the same woods where Ryan’s two childhood friends went missing years before. I didn’t enjoy this as much as The Witch Elm, but I’ve heard this series only gets better, and I think it’s one I could easily binge this fall.

Are you a mood reader?

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Review: The Wise Man’s Fear by Patrick Rothfuss

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I have a love/hate relationship with this book, and series.

The first 400 pages of The Wise Man’s Fear is long-winded and unnecessary. On the other hand, the second half is plot driven, exciting, and plays a huge part in Kvothe’s growth as a character. But it takes a certain amount of determination to get there!

What bothers me most about this series are Rothfus’s misogynistic, sexualized, and unrealistic portrayals of women. All the female characters are frustratingly one-dimensional, and even the women who are strong in different ways end up being sex symbols.

However, I loved the character development and world building in book 2. The many different places and cultures in this book blew me out of the water. Kvothe grows and matures significantly as a character. He experiences different cultures, meet new people, and proves himself as a multifaceted and complicated character who is more than just full of himself.

Despite my differences with this book, I’m honestly so excited for book 3, if it is ever published!

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VERDICT: 4 stars