Everything I Read & Where I Read It: September 28-October 5
I'm ready for leather jacket weather
It was 80 degrees this week in New York. I got a leather jacket from a cool vintage store and I haven’t gotten to wear it ONCE. Not once.
Great Black Hope by Rob Franklin
I read Great Black Hope mostly in Montreal, where I carried it to a coffee shop while Scott was running. I got a chia pudding and sat near three McGill students who were viciously gossiping about a professor.
This book took me a while to get into: it meandered, like its main character. Eventually, though, I settled into the pace and found myself really loving the commentary on race, class and sexuality. This was the best kind of societal commentary: not preachy, just well-observed and thoughtful. 4.5/5 stars.
Heartwood by Amity Gaige
This reminded me heavily of God of the Woods–search and rescue, Northeast, multi-POV, gruff but kind-hearted female detective–so if that one worked amazingly well for you, you’ll probably like this.
Heartwood deployed a few of my least-favorite approaches in telling this story. First of all, I think multi-POV stories are weak unless they’re done extremely skillfully. This book had one totally unnecessary storyline that sapped the story of urgency. Also, I really, really don’t like when authors rely heavily on physical descriptors in lieu of committing to actually developing characters. That crutch was everywhere: the lost woman is tiny (physically weak but strong-willed), her trail friend is massive (comforting, lumbering, maybe a little dumb but sweet). And don’t get me started on the female detective. How many times do we need to hear that she’s very tall and very strong? I swear, her body is mentioned every other page when she’s narrating. WE GET IT. She’s big (solid, masculinized, lone wolf)! Enough already!
I feel like I should add that Heartwood was easy to read. I think that’s the point of multi-POV: it feels like characters are chatting with each other. And despite feeling like she was saddled with an unnecessary degree of body-consciousness, I really did like the female detective the best. Her mentality around search & rescue was cool. 2/5 stars.
Maggie; or, a Man and a Woman Walk into a Bar by Katie Yee
I got this one out of the Bookmobile at my new job. That’s right, my new job employs a Bookmobile to drive around and provide free books. <3
To be clear, I love woman’s-life-falls-apart-and-she-slowly-pieces-it-back-together books. And this woman’s life really falls apart. An affair, divorce, breast cancer–she’s going through it. On paper, this book should be an easy 5/5 for me. And parts of it did work well for me. I liked the narrator’s relationship with her best friend: a call anytime, go to doctor’s appointments together, she’ll raise my kids if I die kind of relationship. I liked her descriptions of her husband, the lists detailing his habits.
In other ways, I was let down by this book. I found the main character to be remote both emotionally and logistically. Like, what was she actually doing with her days? Mostly living in the past, in her memories of the beginning of her relationship with her husband, I guess. And this book had one element that was immensely frustrating. As a reader, you’re waiting the whole time for one particular scene between the husband and wife. I was practically salivating over the prospect of this conversation. And it never happened. I can’t think of any compelling reason–like, some concept or commentary–why it would be meaningful to omit it. 3.5/5 stars.
Open Throat by Henry Hoke
Everyone and their mother told me I would love this book. I didn’t know it was a novel in verse–I started it at 9pm on Sunday and finished it before I fell asleep.
I really like when a book’s narrator is both skillfully drawn and naive–usually a child or just an unjaded adult–and this book fits squarely in that category. A gay mountain lion is, as it turns out, a pretty unjaded, novel perspective from which to see LA. I loved basically everything about this book: the mountain lion’s attempts to interpret the people he interacts with, calling a car a “long death,” the mountain lion’s visit to Disney with his short-term caretaker, Little Slaughter, the book’s length. We love a short, well-done book. 5/5 stars.