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: the winners

I didn’t know the Beartown story was continuing until I saw this book on my sister-in-law’s coffee table and promptly stole it. She’s lucky she’d already finished it…

I loved Beartown. Still one of my favorite books of all time. My review here. I did not love its sequel Us Against You (because it undoes much of Beartown’s positive message by excusing an abuse of power through its promotion of a relationship between a teacher and a student).

I wasn’t sure what to expect with the third book, especially since it’s MASSIVE in length compared to the first two. What am I getting myself into? I wondered.

The Winners introduces so many new characters, but it brings back your old friends. It’s like a homecoming reunion.

Spoilers for Beartown and Us Against You below, but no spoilers for this book.

The best part of Backman is the way you deeply know a character after just a few sentences. This man is the master of the short glimpse. The three-page intro to Hannah and John (and the way he flips your perceptions on their head) is probably the best example of his genius in this series. He somehow captures someone’s essence so quickly.

It’s interesting how some books will tell you all about a character’s hair color, height, eye color (and breast size if it’s a male author writing a female character) but leave out their actual personality. Backman is the opposite. You’ll know their deepest fears, their greatest strength, their desperation, and the depth of their moods even if you don’t remember what they look like. He actually does you a favor but not giving all the characters names - some people stay as “the editor-in-chief” or “the colleague” all the way through the book so you don’t have to keep as many small-town-inhabitants straight in your mind.

His commentary on marriage is so deep:

The hard part of a marriage isn't that I have to live seeing all your faults, but that you have to live with me seeing them.

I think, just due to its length, there were a few parts I skimmed. There are some bits that get preachy, where I think the author is probably trying to undo what some readers may have perceived as his overly rose-colored-glasses view of what happens when you report an assault. (Beartown has a huge up-hill battle but ultimately most people believe the victim. It seems the author is trying to say with this book that he understands that is not always the case.) There’s also a more explicit description of an assault than I remember from Beartown, which I did not wish to dwell on.

The Winners was worth the time investment, and more. You’re looking for heroes, and you find them. You’re looking for villains, too, but you mostly find deep sadness, guilt, confusion, insanity, a history of abuse, and a lot of conflicting feelings of judgment that make you think. Makes you worry. Makes you want to talk to your kids more about difficult topics.

The ending of this trilogy is so satisfying. Backman gives you glimpses into the future of every character so you know how their stories end — even minor characters get the full-future treatment so you can really imagine the generations to come. It’s magic. There’s 300 books, at least, in this novel — a Backman paragraph is better than a novel from a lot of other authors.

This book has the best final two lines, I think, of any novel I can recall reading. I want to tell you but I promised no spoilers.

Grr. I want to tell you though. It’s just so good.

Go read the book.

The last two sentences are bliss.

book review: strange the dreamer

Strange the Dreamer gives us a lowly librarian who dreams of more, then gets more than he bargained for.

As opposed to the other book featuring a blue-skinned female lead that I read and did not love, this one I enjoyed. It was fast paced and surprising a few times, and I really enjoyed the portrayal of dreams which are, no surprise based on the title, a very relevant part of the book. Also, this story alone didn’t feel entirely incomplete even though it starts a two-part series.

(Content warning: there is a fair bit of sexual violence which is not explicit but a very weighty overarching theme of the abuses of power that are the central conflict in this story.)

This is a fantasy world with gods (well, slain gods, thanks to the godslayer, the saddest guy you’ve ever met) and — oops, there’s someone in there — their half-human children that live in a massively immoveable behemoth hovering over the city of Weep. It’s an interesting setup as the reader moves between the settings and understands the terror each feels for the other. There’s a huge element of prejudice to be overcome, and a large skills gap of magic to be overcome and explained.

Memorably, a totally maniacally crazy girl that is generally pretty freaky. Also a spoiled brat man-child and some metal animal giants.

The names in this duology irritated me a lot at first — oh, really, the weird guy’s name is Strange, mmhmm — but they kind of grow on you. The town where all the terrible and sad things have happened is called Weep, and you just sort of get immersed with that as part of the world.

book review: hidden figures

Yes, I know I’m years behind on reading this, but there’s only so many hours in the day — and there are a LOT of pages out there. Hidden Figures was absolute perfection. What an uplifting and exciting true sweeping account of black women in the sciences. Wow.

People told me this book was about Katherine Goble Johnson and the other black female mathematicians who helped win the Space Race. They’re not wrong, but they’re also not really right. It’s so very much more than that.

This nonfiction piece read like fiction. It was just so exciting. Dozens of characters can be a little difficult to keep track of, but you quickly realize who the main names are and the rest can become a beautiful buzz of “everything else that was also happening.”

I, being the Trekkie I am, knew all about Dr. King’s contribution to the final frontier, but the way that Shetterly basically uses it as the final story to ice the cake… [air kiss] sheer perfection.

Side note, I watched the movie right after. Mistake. I knew it, and I did it anyway. I hate to be the person who says the book was better (even though it always is), but in this case, the book was so so so much infinitely better. And it wasn’t even a bad movie. The book was just that good.

book review: the midnight library

This book was a slightly depressing series of “would you rather” choices. You discover, along with Nora as she travels the many possibilities of her life, that there’s not always a right and a wrong decision to be made.

This story reminded me of the movies Sliding Doors or The Butterfly Effect, in that the reader (viewer) keeps having ideas of what will lead to the HEA, but it’s still not right.

The concept was executed in a bit of a confusing way for me, kind of a bureaucratic after-life as you see in The Good Place or Loki. Lots of confusing rules and some waiting around in lines.

I enjoyed seeing a single character in so many roles. They all seemed to make sense based on the setup, so I enjoyed that the author didn’t just throw the character into random settings.

The ending was more mundane than I expected. I think if I had read this before I absolutely loved Dark Matter by Blake Crouch, I may have enjoyed this more. But this felt like a much sleepier and far less romantic version of that.

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.