Thanks to @aaknopf for a copy of Real Americans by Rachel Khong. I enjoyed this multigenerational family story. It begins with Lily, the daughter of Chinese immigrants, living in NYC, where she meets Matthew, whose family’s wealth comes from the pharmaceutical industry. Later, it jumps to Nick, Lily’s son, who lives in Washington with his single mom and suspects she’s hiding something. The final section gives us May’s perspective, Lily’s mother.

This book explores family dynamics and the tensions that arise between generations, especially around cultural differences. Lily, raised in the U.S., feels disconnected from her Chinese heritage, while May is reluctant to open up about her past. Nick, who is biracial but presents as white, grapples with his own identity. I thought the themes were explored with care and nuance, and the plot itself kept me engaged. I recommend this one!

Martyr! by Kaveh Akbar got a lot of buzz this year! I thought I was bound to like it since so many of my most trusted book friends had glowing reviews (including Obama). Unfortunately, it fell a little flat. I liked the writing at a sentence level. Akbar’s skill with language is undeniable and it’s clear he’s a poet. But the plot lacked tension, the story was scattered, and the ending felt too contrived to fully resonate. It’s told from different perspectives, and I didn’t care much for the imagined conversations between the different characters and people from history. Overall it failed to elicit any strong emotions from me.

I read The Many Lives of Mama Love by Lara Love Hardin for book club. This was a powerful memoir! The author shares her journey from being a wealthy, white suburban soccer mom to a jailed addict who lost custody of her youngest son. It’s a raw, compelling story about addiction, loss, and the fight to reclaim her life.

Hardin’s determination to get clean and meet the requirements to regain custody of her son is both heartbreaking and inspiring. What really stayed with me was how rare her story feels because she managed to get and stay clean with relative ease compared to so many others. While she did relapse after her initial release from jail, her unwavering mission to reunite with her son gave her the focus to detox again and maintain her sobriety.

It is not hard to imagine how much more difficult her journey would have been if she had not been a privileged white woman. Still, her story is pretty incredible - from soccer mom to jailed addict to literary powerhouse who gets to meet Oprah. This was a page turner too. I definitely recommend this one!

A huge thank you to @fsgbooks for sending me an ARC of Beautyland by Marie-Helene Bertino, which quickly became one of my favorite reads of the year. This book follows Adina, an alien, as she dutifully faxes her observations about life on Earth back to her home planet superiors, starting during her childhood.

This book was so tender! Adina is highly sensitive, and her observations on what it means to be human were so funny and wholesome. Her relationship with her single mom evolves beautifully over the years, and the way Adina narrates everything from teen jealousy and bullying, to crushes and friendship, love, and loss feels so achingly real.

This one made my cry at the end, and it wasn’t forced, it was perfect. I loved it so much. Highly recommend! Even if you aren’t really a sci-fi person, don’t let that hold you back. Yes, Adina is an alien, but at its core, this is a deeply human story.
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I read The Rachel Incident by Caroline O’Donoghue for book club. Rachel works at a bookshop in Ireland, where she meets her best friend, James, who is closeted. They become intertwined with her married professor and his wife and enmeshed in their lives, though not in the way Rachel hopes.

This book is full of mess and friendship. The story is told from Rachel’s point of view. She is a flawed character but not a bad person. She does unkind things, but she regrets when others are hurt, and she does grow over the course of the book.

I enjoyed this one. I think the sense of tension was a little up and down, so it didn’t fully capture me the entire time, but I did like the nostalgia, friendship, and plight of your early 20s. I don’t think it quite compares to the magic of Sally Rooney, but if you’re a Rooney fan, you might also enjoy this one.

Thanks to @aaknopf for my copy of Good Material by Dolly Alderton. I really enjoyed Ghosts so was very excited for a new novel from her! Unfortunately this one fell flat for me. I just did not like reading from Andy’s perspective. His character honestly came off as lacking any self awareness and very pathetic, not in a funny way, just in an annoying and boring way. I think his character was intended to be self-absorbed, but it just didn’t work for me and that is the perspective for the majority of the book. At the end there is a perspective change to his ex-girlfriend, which I found infinitely more tolerable. I’m down with unlikable characters usually, especially if they are interesting in some way, but this was not one of those cases. I do still really like Alderton and will definitely read whatever she writes next, but I view this as a failed experiment for me.

I started listening to Bottoms Up and the Devil Laughs: A Journey Through the Deep State by Kerry Howley on a whim, not knowing much about it. I learned quite a bit - about surveillance, whistleblowers, and the specific case of Reality Winner. The book wasn’t exactly what I expected - to be honest I’m still not sure what the “deep state” is, but I do know not to print out secret information to leak to the press from my company printer. I liked this one. If you want a quick read to learn more about surveillance and privacy with more focus on storytelling versus deep diving, it did keep my attention.

I really loved How to Say Babylon by Safiya Sinclair. Her memoir of growing up in a Rastafarian family in Jamaica was so powerful. She suffered abuse at the hands of her father, and she had to overcome many things stacked against her - family instability and poverty, lack of resources, being under the complete control of her father - and she managed to overcome and get where she is now. I found her story to be very inspiring and moving. I thought the prose was excellent. Her sentences are sharp and clear, and her writing flows so seemingly naturally, it makes sense that she is a poet too. I listened to the audiobook of this one and her narration made it exceptionally immersive. I highly recommend it!

I really love James McBride. I read Deacon King Kong a couple of years ago and really enjoyed it, so it was no surprise that I felt similarly about The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store. McBride’s books are filled with so much heart! There are a lot of characters and it isn’t always totally clear to me why they are part of the story, but he has a way of weaving everything together that always (okay, by always I mean for the now 2 books I’ve read of his lol) moves me so much. 

 

I will say, this one has a lot of characters. At some points I would forget who was related to who and eventually I just kind of let go of trying to keep everything perfectly straight. I probably should have taken notes or something. I also felt like it got off to a bit of a slow start with keeping my attention. The plot definitely feels secondary to the many characters so sometimes it was hard to keep up with the story. But, by the end of this book, I felt moved. I knew to trust where it was going. I have to be in a certain sort of mood to keep up with McBride’s writing, but I know there is always a great payoff at the end.

Thanks to @randomhouse for the gifted copy of Hello Beautiful by Ann Napolitano. I did not really enjoy this book. It’s kind of a reinspired Little Women, ish. Kind of. I just, was entirely bored. Did not care. It mostly tells their story through William, an extra tall kid turned basketball player with trauma because his baby sister died and his parents didn’t really love him after that. When he meets Julia at college and is swept up into her loving family of four sisters, he thinks that may fill the void in his heart. 

 

Spoilers ahead. Idk I just didn’t buy this one. Things like at the beginning of the book painting the mother as the tie that bound the family together, but then as soon as one of her daughters is about to have a baby unmarried she flees to Florida never to meet the baby? What?? And the dad being described as basically a useless lazy alcoholic before dying, but then as the book goes on the girls remember and love him so much more. Idk this entire book was not really believable in any type of way, there were too many contradictions between how characters were described vs how they were portrayed via their actions and choices. It felt gimmicky, it was sooo slow, I don’t think any sisters who were supposedly as close as they were said to be. Also I couldn’t even keep track of the younger sisters, they were such facades of characters, I kept mixing them up. Nobody besides William was really fully fleshed out or had much of a consistent personality. 

 

Suffice it to say I do not recommend this one 😬