I didn't realize this was classic, beloved sci-fi going in, so whoopsie. I don't actually read tons of science fiction, but I'm trying to branch out more and the plot reminded me of Old Man's War by John Scalzi (I'm aware now this one came first) which I really loved, so I thought it would be another fascinating story based around unjust wars and aliens. It's also an allegory for Vietnam which I realized just before starting it, so that was another plus in this book's favor.

But, yeah. I didn't like it. I hate being so negative about books that are considered classics, especially when I'm still so under read in the genre, but it's not like I can make up other thoughts.

I didn't like the writing style. This is definitely something I struggle with in the sci-fi I've read. Anything that's too technical with science or military bores me. It reads so dry and bland and void of any personality. I'm here for the story and the characters, not how many gees they're going through space or what the specifics of their laser guns are. I'm more interested in what the fighting means in an emotional or philosophical sense than the military formations. Just not the book for me.

So much happened off screen as well. Because of time dilation, the main character skips through time a lot. Sometimes twenty years will pass, sometimes a hundred. He makes brief stops, but in general a few years have passed in his life and hundreds have gone by on Earth. So a lot of Earth's development, as well as the war's development, happens off the page and is explained to him by other soldiers. It felt like interesting things were happening in the background, but we so rarely got to experience them.

But then we get to the weird stuff. Every night, the men and women were assigned bunkmates with each other. Because apparently they never slept alone and there was never a choice. They were just randomly assigned a partner to sleep with. And have sex with. And this happened every single night. At first it didn't phase me because there's always weird societal stuff in science fiction. Generally, it's to make some kind of point or show how society was changed. But this was never discussed in any way. It just existed. The main character never even shared his thoughts on it. Like I don't know if this was some kind of self insert fantasy where Haldeman could get hella laid or if he just wanted an easy way to add gratuitous sex, but it was so pointless.

Then there was a whole gay subplot on Earth. It was very background and didn't have anything to do with the main story, but it was such a strange underlying thread. At some point, Earth was getting overpopulated so they decided to curb that by encouraging everyone to be gay. Because apparently, that was the only way to fight overpopulation. Birth control apparently didn't exist. It's just easier to make the whole world gay. And then everyone became gay eventually and heterosexuality was criminalized and seen as sociopathic behavior. I honestly can't tell if this was some kind of gay fear thing or if Haldeman was being progressive for the 70s. Like I'm not judging the book based on this the way I would a book with this subplot written today because it's fifty years old. It might have been incredibly progressive just to include some kind of acceptance of gay people. I genuinely don't know, but the whole suplot made me very uncomfortable and kind of culminated in the gay characters being given a choice to become straight at the end and taking it. I was very much not a fan.

The allegory for Vietnam could have been interesting in a different story (and has been, that's not an overly unique concept anymore but still very worth reading), but it was so obvious. At the end everything got wrapped up in the briefest of summaries with a neat little bow like Haldeman was teaching you a very deep lesson, but it was so obvious. I don't mind obvious if it's interesting, but this felt very bare bones. He gave us the minimum amount of thought and meaning, and then had it all happen off screen anyway.

I was so disappointed by this. I keep trying science fiction that sounds out of my comfort zone and loving it, but this hit all the wrong notes for me. I always wish to love classics, but sometimes it's just not for me.

This is a book that I struggle to review. I don't think it was bad, by any means. It captures a series of characters and unreliable narrators really well. You never know who to trust, but I still found it easy to follow the events of the story. It's a hard line to walk and was well done here.

But at the same time, this is one of the most forgettable books I've read in a long time. I struggled to keep myself from skimming it while reading and had to continuously go back over passages that I hadn't read thoroughly. I just wanted to get through it more than I cared about the actual story.

I'm writing this review five minutes after finishing the book because I worry in another ten or twenty I'd forget about it completely. I still worry I've waited too long because I can't think of anything to write here.

I wouldn't tell anyone to avoid this book, but I can't say I'd recommend it either. I wanted to really enjoy the story because I love missing persons cases that fall closer to literary fiction than thriller, but this one just didn't do much for me.

My biggest issue with this book was the storytelling. So much of the narrative is told through conversations. Cass mysteriously shows up on her mother's doorstep three years after going missing, and then the majority of the rest of the book is her interviews with FBI agents. Everything we hear about her trauma is through dialogue. It makes for a very boring story. I don't want to hear people talk about the things that happened, I want to see the events themselves. Even if it's told through flashbacks or memories. Anything is better than dialogue.

I understand why it was chosen for this story, but I think that choice was incredibly detrimental to the book.

Apart from that, it was pretty fine. Just another thriller that to be perfectly honest, I won't be thinking about again. The characters were fine. You can basically guess the ending from the first chapter. But it was still compelling enough that I wanted all the answers. Glad I read it for the answers, but I don't think this is one you'd be missing if you gave it a pass.

This was a really compelling story of a woman whose son goes missing. The cops basically have no leads and there's nothing to suggest what may have happened. Which puts Susan in a terrible position of having so many questions and fears, and no information. It was masterfully done.

The character of Susan is the focal point of the book. Who she is, what she's going through. She is the driving force more than any mystery of a missing persons case. She's so fully developed that you can't help but feel for her.

And even beyond just her, the whole world is so well built. You see her neighbors in detail. Her friends. Her estranged husband. Their extended families. Everything is so fully developed it's like an entire world Gutcheon has crafted. I love when a contemporary novel spends so much time on the world building that you get a clear picture of their lives. Nothing felt too limited in scope and everything had depth.

The only downside for me was the ending. I think for a book like this, any type of closure is going to feel at least a little underwhelming. It's just kind of the nature of missing persons cases. The mystery is the appeal, and then the answers can never live up to the hype. But it was still a great book.

I'd highly recommend this if you like a slow character study of a woman losing her son. It's brilliantly written and makes me want to pick up a lot more from Gutcheon.

Do you ever read a book that you dislike so much you don't even want to put forth the effort into explaining why you dislike it? That was this book for me. I've put off writing this book for days because I already read the damn thing. Now I have to think about it?

For a book about racism, this white author really likes to keep everything neat and tidy with clear cut bad guys and a lot of well meaning white people. It seemed very poorly done to me. But other people with more experience than I have written much more in depth reviews (easily found if you're scanning through the reviews here), so I'll leave it at that. I do want to share a quote I saw that so perfectly captured my feelings:

"It provides the same frustration one feels at Thanksgiving, when your self-described open-minded aunt won’t shut up about the beautiful gay couple she waves to at the gym."

The characters were flat. Pretty sure she dumped having well rounded characters in favor of jamming themes down your throat constantly. Like explicitly lecturing the reader in the narration of the story. It happened frequently. Regardless of whether I agree with those thoughts or not, it's not the way you write a good story. If you want to preach, write a sermon.

I didn't like the first person plural perspective in this. It's very similar to the style of Eugenides's The Virgin Suicides, but without the beautiful writing. It didn't work for me here. It felt so jarring. At times we lose that perspective and it goes into third person and you get the inner thoughts of Xavier or Juniper or whoever, and then halfway through a paragraph it'd switch right back to the "we" of the neighborhood. It felt awkward every time.

It was also just really pretentious. This probably goes with the jamming her themes down your throat every chance she got, but god this was pretentious. I'm normally not one to complain about pretension because I like books with flowery writing and heavy themes and writers who act smarter than they are. Like nine times out of ten, that's my preferred book. But this was painful.

I don't recommend. If you love it, more power to you. But this whole experience felt like suffering to me and describing my thoughts here is just prolonging it.

(I got this as an ARC; here's my honest thoughts)

This book is so bleak and so slow, which is to say of course I loved it. Give me just the dreariest story in existence and take 450 pages to describe a trial that took place in three days and I'm gonna be happy. So I wouldn't necessarily recommend this book to everyone, but it was one hundred percent the book for me.

This book is a portrait of all the characters involved in the trial. The narrative is taking place over the three day murder trial, but it spends most of the book going back in time to the 40s and World War II, and especially the Japanese concentration camps in America. You see how the whole past built us up to this moment and this murder trial. And you also see the full lives of all these characters. Their parents, their childhoods, everything that's led to their present. It's so beautifully done.

There were a few weird moments in this book that I struggled with. Just for example, the first (and most notable) was when the coroner was examining the body of a man and spent a whole paragraph describing his penis and comparing it to his own. Like weird? So weird. There were a few moments like that when the characters spent a rather large amount of time on something that was so strange and unnecessary.

I struggled with that, for sure, but also I did kind of enjoy the detail in the story. There's so much detail in everything that's going on that doesn't feel like it contributes to the story, but the whole world is so well described that it forms an entire picture. Like you're able to see everything in this book, and feel everything that the world is offering, because of all the unnecessary details.

If I'm being honest, I found the trial scenes a little boring. Usually I enjoy trials in books, and all the dialogue and questioning witnesses, and the law in general, but I just wasn't invested in it here. The real story felt like it was happening outside of the trial, so I kept feeling like I was waiting for the trial to be over.

It also felt like the ending was overlong. I think around the 350 page mark (100 pages left), I started feeling ready for the book to wrap up. I think that was also around the time we stopped going so far back in time and focused solely on the death of Carl Heine and the trial. But then it simultaneously felt like the very final ending of the book (the last few pages) wrapped things up a little too quickly.

The setting of the snowstorm was fantastic. Throughout the book it's happening in the background, and it adds so much to the trial and the story. It was the perfect choice. It gave the trial this sense of utter reality in the present, like you can feel it happening, which I don't think would have been as strong without the storm.

All in all, I thought this was great. It's not a favorite, but I'm so glad I finally got to this and could see myself rereading it in a few years. It's masterfully crafted and so beautiful. If you like slow and dreary books, I highly recommend this.

Another lovely addition to this series, and another by Barry Denenberg. As I collect and read more of these books, I'm realizing how many he wrote.

I loved the character of Mary. She's smart and funny and worth following as she struggles through life in America. The emotion really does hit you. Sad things happen, and I love how much you feel the sadness.

I struggled with the abruptness of this book. It felt very short in terms of the events that happened. Like there wasn't enough time to write the story Denenberg had in mind, so he'd throw things in very quickly and end plotlines without much development. I've felt this way in some of his other books as well. Middle grade can be short without feeling so cut off.

I also didn't feel like we got to see much of Mary's situation. I loved the characters, but as far as historical elements, I didn't feel like we really saw much of what was going on at the time. I wanted a lot more of that.

But I'd recommend this. It's a solid book and worth reading if you like the Dear America series. And it holds up well enough reading (possibly rereading) as an adult.

I struggled a lot with this book. I wanted to love it, but there was something holding me back.

For starters, there's a lack of context of most of the events happening in the story. That's my fault, for my ignorance of Morocco and the politics there, but it did make it harder for me to follow when there was limited information on the politics surrounding their imprisonment and the coup. She talks briefly of things like "the Ben Barka affair" (it's believed her father murdered the leader of a political movement opposing the king) and her friends' fear/dislike of her father, but there wasn't enough information for me to actually understand what was happening.

She talked about several attempted coups as well. I looked up one of them for more information, just because I really couldn't follow the politics or intent behind the coup and wanted to understand more (both for the book itself and just generally trying to broaden my knowledge- interesting subject). But some of the basic information contradicted what was in the book. The book stated that hundreds of guests were massacred at the attempted coup of 1971, but online sources state the number at 92. The discrepancy made it difficult for me to trust some of what Oufkir was saying. If that was an exaggeration, what else was she exaggerating?

Something else I had difficulty with was her mocking her sister's weight. At one point during their imprisonment, her younger sister gains some weight and Oufkir talks about rationing her food and forcing her to do an exercise plan (in Oufkir's words, to stop her letting herself go). At the same time, she discusses how limited food they had and how they're all starving. Even if I ignore the horror of her limiting her little sister's food, how is she gaining weight if they're never given enough food to eat? Why the need to ration her if their food supplies are already next to nothing? Oufkir talked about eating weeds and chewing a single dried chickpea.

There were also a few beliefs Oufkir held that were difficult to get past. She lived in the palace for much of her youth and frequently commented on the slaves held there, but didn't seem to have any problem with the practice, even in hindsight. She said that the slaves had the choice to leave, but few ever did. Later in the book she discusses how her family is freed in Morocco, but still can't work or leave the country and their friends are investigated so even though technically they're free, their lives are still very controlled by the state. She draws no parallels.

I did think it was very interesting to see how the family grew and changed overtime. I wish there was more of that, but it seems to stop very suddenly once they're free. She references various things (my younger brother Abdellatif was unable to cope on his own because of how we always did everything for him, my sister Maria was able to escape to France and set us all free), but the book stops before we get to these events. In the end, a couple of things are summarized in list form, but that's about it. It felt like so much was left out.

But I didn't hate this. It was interesting story of a very privileged and spoiled young girl with such a limited upbringing who went through a very traumatic experience. It was worth reading, but I didn't come away from it feeling like I fully trusted her narrative.

I don't usually go for super fluffy contemporaries, but I was craving something happy after my last book made me sad, so I picked this up. It's been on my shelf for years, and if I'm being perfectly honest, I thought it was middle grade. It looks like a middle grade type cover and the story sounded a little young, so I just assumed (wrongly). I'm a little more down for very cutesy books when the characters are younger and I probably wouldn't have picked this up had I realized they were all like 16ish.

Which is to say, this isn't my type of book so I can hardly review it well. It was fine, I guess, if you like that kind of thing. It read like an mid 2000s YA, but was published in 2012. It's first person present tense, which I don't frequently love.

By the end, I will admit I was a bit invested in the relationship. It's real obvious where it's going, but it doesn't matter when it works. It was just really sweet and happymaking, which is why I picked it up.

One thing that bugged me were the characters' jobs. For whatever reason, every adult in this book is either a small business owner or an artist. Piper talks about her single mother being a little tight on money, but somehow she affords to send three kids to an exclusive private school. Piper herself works as a bookkeeper for a candy shop, despite being only 16, which stretched the realm of believability for me. All of her friends also "work" for the candy shop, but I'm pretty sure no one got paid except maybe Piper. Although to be honest, I'm not entirely sure Piper got paid either. I just assumed she did, but she never talked about specific hours or getting a paycheck. She just kind of went over whenever she felt like it. And the owner of the candy shop wasn't a family friend because she talked about how her mother had barely met him, so I'm not entirely sure why they were all working there. It was confusing.

But if you like very fluffy, happy YA, you'd probably like this fine. It wasn't amazing, but apart from my nitpicking over everyone's jobs, there wasn't anything really wrong with it either.

I had a lot of trouble with this book. The first thing I struggled with was the description. The description makes it sound like it's about growing up gay in the deep south in the 60s (Clark was born in '53). And like, yes technically she is growing up gay in the 60s, but the book isn't really about that. It's about her dysfunctional, abusive parents, full stop. And she happens to be gay. Everyone she talks about in the book is actually surprisingly supportive of her (or she glosses over most of the issues because the book isn't about that).

A lot of this book is also about racism. She makes liberal use of the n word. Like, so much. Perhaps this was more noticeable listening to the audiobook, but it felt constant. I was actually listening to it with another person present at one point and they requested I turn it off for that reason. I understand that she's from Mississippi in the 50s and she was using the language she heard to illustrate the racism, but it felt excessive. It didn't add anything to the story, especially with the frequency. Like maybe it would have worked better if it had only been a few times and maybe it was worse because I was listening to the audiobook, but all I heard for half this book was a white woman repeatedly saying the n word.

It also felt like she did a lot of things in her youth that caused harm to the black people in her life and while she acknowledged that, it didn't feel like she acknowledged it enough. At one point the KKK was collecting money (in Mississippi, in the late 60s, potentially very early 70s) and she bullies her black nanny's daughter into going with her to confront them. She acknowledges she shouldn't have done that and it was dangerous for the girl, but I don't think she really gave that situation the gravity it deserved. Like she could have been lynched. Literally. I'm genuinely surprised nothing bad did happen to her. I don't feel like Clark truly acknowledged the gravity of that situation. That was the worst example, but there were others too. Like making her nanny go to a whites only diner immediately after segregation was outlawed.

I also feel like her narration of the audiobook was a little overwrought at times. There was a level of shouting or saying things in a tearful, desperate way that just felt over the top. I wasn't the biggest fan. I know she was trying to convey emotion, but it sounded very soap opera-y.

But I think it was fine overall. It was interesting to learn what it was like for her growing up so wealthy in Mississippi, especially with two toxic parents who basically ruined her childhood. It was also sad. I teared up a few times, which I always enjoy in a book. But I dunno, I'm not sure how much I'd recommend this unless you're specifically want to read about toxic parents.


Note: I listened to the audiobook and my reading comprehension is always much lower on audiobooks, so my thoughts are less complete and detailed than usual.