January Wrap Up #2

Since I've last updated you, I've read 7 things.

I read Such a Fun Age by Kiley Reid. The premise is that a young black babysitter is called to babysit her white charge and while doing so, is accused of kidnapping the child. The story unfolds from there. While that does happen, it does not set up as much of the book as I thought it did. While the author does set up a conversation about race, I felt she did not dig deep enough. It read more like chick lit to me. The dialogue was somewhat cringey to me and most of the characters were very unlikable. I honestly won't remember it in a year. I gave it 3 stars.

Then I picked up my first reread of the year with A Long Way to a Small Angry Planet by Becky Chambers. It was such a joy to revisit the characters as they trekked throughout the galaxy visiting different planets, meeting many species, and learning varied customs. I gave it 5 stars.

I read a poetry collection called Wade in the Water by Tracy K. Smith. I'm not big on poetry but she is coming to an event that I will be attending this year and I wanted to familiarize myself with some of her work. This was weird. Overall, I didn't really care for it. The poems didn't really seem to go together at all. Some were about slavery, some were about motherhood, some were about pollution. I did like one, which was about refugees. I gave the collection 2 stars.

My next read was The Sleepwalker's Guide to Dancing by Mira Jacob. This is family story about a family who moves from India to United States. It is told in two different timelines. In the current timeline (1998) Amina's mother calls her and tells her to come home because her father keeps talking to his dead mother and she's worried about him. Amina flies out, skeptical and suspicious that this may be a ploy of her mother to set her up with someone. What follows is a heart-wrenching family story. The events in the former timeline help you to understand some of the motivations and scars of the current timeline. I will say that for a lot of the book, I was preferring the past timeline because I was really connecting with Amina's brother Akhil. The last 20 pages had me sobbing. I will admit, this is not perfect. There are some pacing issues. But I really connected with the characters and loved being in this world. I loved this book and gave it 5 stars. I will automatically pick up anything this author puts out next.

Speaking of loving the world, I really wanted some more of A Long Way to A Small Angry Planet and so I decided to pick up a short story by Becky Chambers titled "'A Good Heretic" which was published in a collection of short stories called Infinite Stars: Dark Frontiers edited by Bryan Thomas Schmidt. It was a 20ish page story about Mas who was a Sianat we briefly meet on Arun in the first book. Because the story is so short, I will not give any descriptors because it will be spoilers, but I really enjoyed the story and the character of Mas. I gave the story 4 stars. I'd have loved it to be a little longer.

I read the graphic memoir titled The Best We Could Do by Thi Bui. Her memoir was about her family emigrating from Vietnam to the United States during the Vietnam War. This was hard to read. She talks individually about her parents childhood's in Vietnam and Cambodia which were pretty difficult. They were fleeing the Vietnam War with young children in tow and living in a refugee camp. Making a new start in a country where they spoke very little English was quite a struggle for them. This story was well told and the artwork fit with the story. I thought this was a beautifully constructed graphic memoir. I gave it 4 stars and would definitely recommend.

Lastly, I finished I Capture the Castle by Dodie Smith. I have had a lot of people recommend this to me and I had high expectations for this. I was slightly disappointed. I started off loving it. Cassandra is a 17 year old girl writing in her diary about living in an old castle in England. She writes about her odd father, artist-muse stepmother, and sister who longs to marry rich so they can get out of their crippling poverty. They meet two new neighbors who are American and turn out to be rich and also their landlords. Obviously the sister is going to try to catch the eye of Simon (the one who has the money) so she can marry rich. All is going swimmingly and I'm loving the story. Then all of a sudden, Cassandra decides for basically no reason that she loves Simon which provides so much angst. It changed the tone of the book so much and made Cassandra such a whiny character. In addition, she also is mean to a character who is nothing but good to her. I gave the first half of the book 5 stars, the second half 1 star, so an average of 3 stars.

I finished one more book but it was an ARC so I will be writing a separate review coming soon.