I needed a quickie between books and this served well. I'm a fan of Rooney's and she does well in this short story that seems to excise anything that would tell you too much; your brain must make those connections. The last page is great, Rooney makes me smile.

This was the book I needed at the onset of quarantine. Perfect Tunes calmed my mind from the barrage of news and the anxiety of pandemic. I fell easily in rhythm with Laura, a young musician and songwriter from Ohio that heads to New York City in the early aughts. The story is a fun blend of nostalgia and music, but I was most enthralled by its insightful examination of creativity within the confines of being a woman and a mother.

The book spans over a decade, and starts with Laura as a naïve 22-year-old trying to avoid harassment at a hostessing job in order to pay her half of the rent for the Manhattan apartment she splits with her best friend Callie. They go to shows, bars, parties, and they meet musicians.

Laura meets Dylan, the lead singer-guitarist in a band called The Clips. Emily Gould’s writing is straightforward, resonant, and funny, too (Laura muses early on: “Dylan had the most beautiful dick in the world.”) Readers witness Laura’s journey into early onset adulthood after becoming pregnant, and the narrative makes dramatic jumps in time. We meet her daughter Marie as an infant, and watch her grow from toddler to teenager. The flash forwards and curveballs in Laura’s narrative kept the pages turning swiftly, and I found myself completely (and happily) transported.

The feeling of nostalgia was especially strong for me since I met my musician husband in an East Village dive bar in the aughts. He was in town recording an album with his band and I was temping anywhere I could to make my portion of the rent in a Bushwick loft that had no walls and going to any party listed on myopenbar.com. Maybe Laura and I would’ve been friends. Perfect Tunes reminded me so much of those first weeks navigating New York, and that flaming desire between two young people in the middle of a grimy city...

Rest of the review is at thebookslut.com <3

Lazlo Ratesic (what a name!) is a detective in the Speculative Service, a law enforcement agency in what is called the Golden State, which seems like a future version of California. In the Golden State, truth is king and lying is illegal. Everyone greets each other with facts (i.e., "two plus two is four and always will be,"), and everyone is surveilled via video and personal note-taking. Ratesic, a veteran officer who enforces the truth, has a natural power to suss out lies, and has the right to speculate or guess as to what happened in criminal cases, may have encountered a conspiracy, and the reader follows his path towards truths hidden and realized. This is definitely not a book I would've picked up if it wasn't in the Tournament of Books, but I'm so glad I did.

Like many books in the Tournament this year, it's a novel concerned with truth and perception. It's a damn good novel, and the audiobook narrator made me laugh and was the perfect gruff voice to the proceedings at hand. I think, even, that if it were not for VandenHeuval's specific voice, I may not have liked this book in print AS MUCH. He comes off as hard-boiled but as Ratesic discovers not only things that are deeply troubling, but wonderfully joyous (a fiction novel that is banned because fiction is LIES!), the narration really kept me going. The book’s themes play so well, though there was some convoluted points near the end where I said out loud in my car “wait, wait, wait, what?!” I will say, if I were to give superlatives at the end of the year, I think this would be the current contender for "best last line." I picked up the physical book in a store the other day and reread that last line again with pleasure, and maybe some wet eyes.

I might try more Winters in the future, who knows. But for speculative fiction, this book certainly won me over.

I immediately fell into the rhythm of reading GIRL, WOMAN, OTHER, a novel written in a prose style with little punctual adornment whether it be periods or quotation marks. The narrative never faltered without it; the lack of stopping made the stories glide by and helped the chosen endings that employed stops reverberate on the page. This novel illustrates a myriad of British Black women in their histories and their present day lives. Evaristo made me smile wryly through much of it, both for her character connections and her witty writing. There were moments of realization and sadness and despair, too, of course, amid a rich array of remarkably rendered women.

This book reminded me of a memoir I read late last year; the memoir written in part because there were not many texts from their particular point of view, non-fiction or otherwise. In GIRL, WOMAN, OTHER, a character laments about a novel chosen by her book club in which the women "don't even get a chance to speak in the book." Evaristo gives voice to those muted Black women in fiction and represents an array of women that are all so beautifully different and then culminates in a theme of togetherness. She accomplishes this, and, in the same vein of Carmen Maria Machado's IN THE DREAM HOUSE, provides more visibility to a depiction of lesbian relationships rarely seen. And while they are very different books, they are two great works filling in literary gaps. I'm so glad to witness it.

I love to be wowed. And that's what Larsen's PASSING did for me, from the onset. From the quiet first scene of the protagonist reading a letter from a long-ago friend. To the second chapter that flashes back, enticing with "This is what Irene Redfield remembered." To the introduction of her friend Clare Kendry on a sweltering Chicago day and their shared history and divergent present-day lives. To the central theme of the book, 'passing.' These Black women live in 1920s Chicago and New York, with the ability to pass as white, though one chooses to make it her lifestyle (marrying a white man who doesn't know she's Black) and the other deeply entrenched in Harlem society. Their complicated friendship ebbing and flowing through the book, Irene's anxious thoughts flooding her decisions, Clare's cool confidence wavering every now and then, and Larsen's subtext fueling a fire under all of it.

Each sentence a passion.

When I began, there were echoes of my reading of SULA last year—a book I picked up because it was said to be similar to Ferrante's Neopolitan novels. And all three manage that which I love about these books about women's friendships: the fissures that come about, the ones that leave and the ones that stay, the rebel and the stickler to the rules, what each does when faced with a society that would rather ignore or harm them (in Ferrante, though, its about economic standing, not race). These stories always fascinate me for what I learn and what I feel. PASSING also manages a Rorschach ending—asking the reader "what do you see? what do you think happened?" All I know is I loved all 147 pages.