Okay first I want to say I love Mercury and Shiner, so I came to this to complete Amy Jo Burns backlist. It is a very different type of book, putting aside that it is a memoir Burns uses a different writing style here that feels very detached and made it very hard for me to feel connected as a reader. 

Having worked in abuse prevention, I wonder if this was a coping strategy to write about the events of this memoir. But also from my professional perspective, I was bothered by the frequent use of "we," "us," "his girls," and so on. Burns wrote her memoir about sexual abuse, not a collective group memoir. I think again that may be a coping strategy, but I didn't feel comfortable about generalizing and applying her perspective and feelings to the other victims. 

Keep Your Friends Close is a good book for when you need an easy read but don't want a light, fluffy romcom. This is a domestic/female friendship story that I'd say straddles the middle of the cozy mystery to dark thriller continuum. Not to give too much away, but this is one to pick up if you like revenge, mommy friends who aren't as they seem, rich people behaving badly, and short chapters. 

The Five Wounds is a character driven drama about a Catholic family in New Mexico.  Amadeo Padilla is unemployed and has been giving the role of Jesus in the Good Friday procession- which he is taking very seriously. So seriously that I wondered if this book was a good fit for me, spoiler alert: I'm glad I stuck with it.

So as he's taken on this literal and metaphorical passion project, his fifteen year old daughter Angel shows up and she's pregnant. Only weeks away from her due date, Angel ran away from her mom's house and now Amadeo has to figure out a relationship with her and how to support her and the soon to be baby. 

As this book covers the baby's first year, we get the perspectives and experiences of several family members and it becomes clear how much love, struggle, and generational trauma they've got in spades. I've heard this book criticized as heavy, but I felt it was well balanced for the serious topics and content. I would have spent even longer with these characters, they felt so real and relatable. I loved how baby Connor brought them together and allowed them to forgive themselves and each other. 

If you like a deeply layered family drama, this is worth picking up. 

Shelterwood is the first novel I have read by Lisa Wingate. It is told in dual timelines, one in the early 1900s from the perspective of a young girl who forms a community for misfit and mistreated children, and the other set in 1990 is told by a female forestry ranger who has just come to a new post after three human skeletons have been found. 

While I thought this had some minor pacing issues, I loved the characters and felt pulled to them and wanted to stay in this story. Wingate did an excellent job of creating distinct character voices in the two timelines, so there is so danger of getting confused. I found myself much more invested in the past timeline yet I identified most with the female park ranger trying to balance work life and taking care of her children. 

The audiobook was very well done with two excellent narrators, so if that's something that appeals to you it's a good option with this novel. 

Madness: Race and Insanity in a Jim Crow Asylum is an excellently well researched and succinctly presented history of Crownsville Hospital in Maryland. Located in Anne Arundel County, Crownsville is a small town in a county that was rural for many years and is mostly known for the town of Annapolis. The asylum began as the designated mental hospital for Black people and it did integrate over time, but as this book explains the stigma of racial divides stayed with this hospital and greatly impacted the quality of care that patients received. 

If you were a fan of The Woman They Could Not Silence, you will almost certainly enjoy this book although it is more traditional nonfiction, not a narrative and person focused style. 

This book covers heavy topics in a respectful and eloquent way. My heart goes out to all of the families who lost loved ones at Crownsville and to the families who don't know. 

I really loved The Darlings by Hannah McKinnon. I expected interesting and flawed, relatable characters. The writing didn’t deliver on that and very boring and surface level. 

It's a Privilege Just to Be Here is a nuanced novel set at an elite prep school in Washington, D.C. Aki Hiyashi-Brown teaches at Wesley Friends School and she knows how fortunate she is to teach there and be able to send her teenage daughter Meg to school there as well. 

Aki became pregnant as a graduate student, which threw off her plans for a PhD and landed her at Wesley because of its subsidized childcare. Now years later, she has become accustomed to being one of the trophy teachers of color and the subtle racism of the institution. But when someone graffities "Make Wesley White Again.," Aki has to face all that means and what the actions of her school mean for people of color and herself. 

Compared to Celeste Ng and Kiley Reid, this is a stunning debut that proves Emma Sasaki can write with a powerful style that is also all her own. I was hooked from the first page to the last, loving this complex and astute take down of private school culture and generational differences in tackling systemic injustices. 

I cannot recommend this highly enough! 

Sunhead is a strong graphic novel with a distinct illustration style and realistic teenage interactions that highlights the upsides of hyper-fixation rather than the negatives that are almost always portrayed. 

Rotem is in high school and feeling like an outcast. Her primary interest is in vampire romance books, and she eagerly awaits book 2 being translated into Hebrew. Meanwhile, her friend group doesn't give a hill of beans. That all changes when Rotem meets Ayala- who actually reads Sunhead when Rotem loans it to her! 

This quick moving, realistic queer coming of age story made me smile and laugh and tugged at my heart, without spelling out every little thing or tying pretty bows at the end. I loved it and I hope you will too. 

 The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian by Sherman Alexie is a mix of so many things, many times all at once. This story follows Junior, an aspiring cartoonist, who lives on a reservation in Spokane, Washington. So much of his story is sad, surrounded by the systemic racism of the reservation system and poverty among his tribe. But it is also irreverently humorous and once you settle into that tone, it is easy to enjoy the humor alongside the sadness. 

A strong short story with characters that were fairly well fleshed out for the short length. At first this seemed like it was going nowhere, and then I had no idea where it would go. It is very much psychological.