the index of self-destructive acts

This book had a great first act, a good second act, and a little bit of a slow third act. The Index of Self-Destructive Acts became a tale of who the reader hates the most as the story progresses between characters. I’m not sure what it says about me as a person that by the end, the only character I could muster any sympathy for was the old white man who’d been cancelled for saying something deemed racist on ESPN. (Not that that was the cause of my sympathy, but at least he had dementia. The rest of the characters were making their terrible decisions in full possession of their faculties.)

One key takeaway from this book was a NEW, obscure baseball stat. Baseball loves a good obscure fact, and the index of self-destructive acts was a new one to me that I will certainly be tallying in the future with a freshly sharpened pencil. (Just kidding, I am not that guy.)

The setting was pleasant in that it was set in the historical time period of the Obama administration. Weirdly, it felt like it was “set” there, too, not just that the author had written a book before 2017. I mean, it was released in 2020 so maybe he did, but that’s not what it felt like. It felt like historical fiction set in the history of a decade ago.

I should have guessed from the title that this book would be about a lot of people unwinding their lives into tangled messes. (It was like watching all the disaster Poldark ensemble but without Demelza to cheer on—and frankly, she is the show.) There is no hero in The Index of Self-Destructive Acts, and there’s no anti-hero. There’s just a lot of people facing tough times and temptations and stress and making selfish or foolish or naïve (or illegal) decisions while you watch and turn the page to see what fresh horrors await.

Ok, I’m being a little dramatic, but they do a lot of stupid (extremely believable) things.

One note: I thought the author did a good job of portraying what I would assume is a lot of people’s experience with an extra-marital affair: a huge letdown. It wrecks your life, and the only thing that really captured your attention in the first place was the sneakiness. There’s zero payoff, just cost.

Since there was no one to cheer for in this story, I felt like the end dragged. I wasn’t waiting for revenge or vindication or certainly for any love to be requited. It was a slow burn of just waiting for the author to stop telling the story. Very little climax or conclusion. There were just no more words at the end. And then it was over.

the mountain between us

LOVED this book. Nothing had me glued like this since Project Hail Mary and Dark Matter. I love a good adventure, and this was a fantastic adventure. All of the stars.

You get over the fact that Ben’s a surgeon and survival expert pretty quickly because that’s why he and Ashley stay alive at all after the plane crash to begin with. So essentially, instead of “oh sure he just happens to have a knife,” you understand that you yourself would already be dead (“if I’m dead, you guys have been dead for weeks” dwight schrute).

It becomes less of an everyman-survival epic and more of a what-if-Bear-Grylls-and-I-survived-a-plane-crash-together story—and that’s ok, because you realize it would probably look a lot like this.

I haven’t seen the movie, and I’ve heard it ruins something very specific (avoiding a spoiler) so I’m going to say I won’t watch it and then instead watch it very begrudgingly in a few months.

This book caught my attention and held it so much that I read it from 9 pm until 1 am, then again from 5:30 am (when the baby woke up) until I was finished around 8:30 am.

I promptly threw it at my husband and announced, “You have until dinner to read this or I’m telling you the entire thing and spoiling the story which you will love.” He’s very smart, so he read it cover-to-cover immediately as well. He also loved it, although he did a bunch of math like a weirdo to determine how long Ben’s little campstove could have lasted and he swears Charles Martin overestimated.

The Mountain Between Us is more than the survival. It’s not just the backstory. It’s not just the “what if’s”. This book is just a perfect balance of everything that makes you tell yourself “one more chapter” and not put it down. Aside from having a very powerful pro-life message, it also has a very pro-marriage message which you infrequently find in books with any kind of romantic tension. You can truly love and hate the characters because they are real people.

Don’t read this on a plane (I mean, or do, maybe you live on the edge), but I loved every page of this book. And it has a great dog! Napoleon! The writing paces with my favorite slow-down-and-speed-up feeling where time passes endlessly for the suffering character in a paragraph or two, but you can also live in a moment for two full pages. I love that experience. Kudos to Charles Martin. This book is a masterpiece.

before we were yours

If you haven’t read more of my blogs, you won’t know I’ve been a foster parent for over a decade. So I tend to try and avoid books like Before We Were Yours since they can feel either (1) really personally devastating or (2) overly saccharine with a false happy ending.

Stories need a bad guy. And books about foster care and adoption, I find, have to pick a bad guy, too, and it’s usually the sexually abusive foster parents. Not saying it doesn’t happen (of course it does) but that is not something I like to read for fun. Of course, historically, a lot of people want the bad guy to be the birth parents which is often unfair, too. Again, not saying it doesn’t happen (of course it does) but let’s not just jump to conclusions that all kids in the system have terrible birth parents — because they don’t.

I didn’t LOVE this book, but I can see why a lot of people did. It presents the truth/horror of what Georgia Tann did, but allows you a believably pleasant ending by making the HEA primarily about the next generation.

For a book with a lot of historical value, there’s a bit too much cloak-and-dagger mystery with the modern storyline of a grandchild (or IS she?!) trying to figure out her family’s sordid (or SWEET?!) past. I do appreciate that the author was trying to get people to read a fictionalized book on a tough topic, and I’ll grant this flourish of mystery was probably a marketable way to do it.

The book asks some important questions about healing from trauma, foster care, adoption, and poverty. Not many books about adoption and foster care present the good, the bad, and the ugly, and this one does.

The truth is, every adoption breaks up one family—even as it forms another. It’s always bittersweet.

Worth the read, even if I won’t ever rave about it. Too close to home for me to consider much on this topic “entertainment",” but this story still has merit and should be told.

book review: lillian boxfish takes a walk

Lillian Boxfish takes a walk was my New Year’s Day read. (I started it on NYE before our annual costume murder mystery party, 20s themed this year.)

I’ve worked in marketing and focused on writing for most of my 18-year career, so Lillian’s story was especially engaging to me. She was the “highest paid woman in advertising.” Although the sexism of the time with its differentiated pay rates was very briefly covered, most of the story focused on decades of Lillian’s life and the breakdown of her marriage.

The book was a mostly positive look-back over a life spanning war in the 1940s and into the orange-lipsticked 1980s. Getting to know Lillian in various decades and in various parts of her life maturity was fun, but since the entire book takes place in a few quick hours, you keep up like you’re walking as fast as dear aged Lillian.

A bit of a depressing twist at the end, to be sure, left me sad and (just slightly) surprised, but overall the book intended to present a life well lived. It was a creatively mapped journey through NYC with some memorable characters. A highlight for me was a mugging (or near-mugging, depending on your perspective) involving a fur coat.

Lots of rhymes that were cheeky and full of life are included; from the booknotes, I learned they are from a famous advertising woman of that era that inspired the book although the character is entirely fictional.

book review: the book woman of troublesome creek

This book was a roller coaster and not one I loved.

CONTAINS SPOILERS

There were parts of this novel that were sweet, but also some really unpleasant parts (including a sexual assault and a near-sexual assault). Also a disturbing cult and children starving to death in an area that seemed filled with animals and foraging opportunities and not experiencing a drought. I feel like I must have missed why no one was eating?

I thought the topic of Cussy as a blue person was going to be really interesting. However, the story was sick and sad, and the romance itself was a little too contrived for me.

I really questioned the relationships in this story, particularly the main character Cussy’s ongoing relationship with her father after he essentially sex trafficked her. So I don’t know. Plus at the end, you find out that the man she’s in life-long love with has been secretly asking for her hand in marriage and her dad’s been refusing for, literally, zero reason (especially considering the psycho he deliberately married her off to). So I’m gonna go ahead and officially hate her dad, despite the fact that we are clearly supposed to love him and pity him because he’s sick. Nope, bye, dad character.

The handsome-hero-who-loves-the-protag-despite-her-rejection-from-society trope wasn’t what I wanted from this book. I think I didn’t know it was a romance and was expecting more of a story of female empowerment than wedding bells. And for a romance, the HEA was super wimpy because their life is terrible. Ter-ri-ble. So — with historical fiction — I feel like either you gotta go romance and give me an HEA or you gotta go female empowerment and let the dude die so she’s the noble solo hero/cowboy. Otherwise, just write someone’s actual story and tell us the true facts. Since this wasn’t based on anyone’s actual life, all the personal story twists just struck me as inauthentic — of course the doctor is an abusive psycho, of course the preacher is an abusive psycho, too, of course the new husband (who is also the preacher’s brother) is ALSO an abusive psycho, of course the librarian is DEFINITELY a verbally abusive psycho…

Not my favorite. Obviously I’m in the minority because this book has won like a hundred awards. So you’ll probably like it and I’m wrong. :)

book review: piranesi

Piranesi was such an odd book. That’s not necessarily a bad thing, as I am all here for weird books… But it was so different than most things I’ve read. I keep starting sentences about this book and not having ways to finish them.

Things I liked:

• A lot of references to Narnia

• Beautiful setting

• Intrigue

• Untrustworthy narrator - think Call me Ishmael

Things I didn’t like:

• Took too long to get started

Things I’m not sure how I felt about them:

• Everything else

Haha.

Seriously, though, I’m not sure if I liked the inconclusive ending. I’m not sure if I liked the style. I’m not sure if I liked the incoherence of the fact delivery. I’m not sure if I liked the sudden appearance of new characters. I’m not sure! And I think that leads me to believe this was something like eating foodie food.

I don’t need to have that again—I’ll just have cheese on my pizza— but I am glad I ate the butternut squash this time.

Piransei for me was the kind of book you chew slowly, and look off a little to the right and then slowly say, “It’s… interesting.”

Very memorable descriptions of flooding water. Beautifully composed, visual scene.