rainbowbrarian's Reviews (1.85k)

 Friends, I LOVED THIS.  My wife told me to read it back in 2021 and I shoulda listened!  Because it’s delightful.  Overachiever, Grace Porter, has been driving herself with an unrelenting focus for the past 11 years to get her PhD in astronomy.  As a black queer woman in STEM, she’s having to work twice as hard as any of her white colleagues to try to prove herself the best.  She can’t settle for anything less (thanks to a seriously tough relationship with military dad).  

When she spends a single weekend in Vegas with her friends and wakes up to find herself married to Yuki, a rose cheeked girl she can only hazily remember, she finds herself floundering and lost for the first time since she can remember.  With nothing left of her new wife aside from a hastily written note, a key, a photo, and a wedding ring, she finds herself clinging to the beautiful memory of the happiness she felt with this dream girl.  But what happens when you try to merge fantasy with reality?  Can The Plan survive these detours?

Favorite Parts - The Friends - OMG, folks, the friends of both of Yuki and Grace are EVERYTHING.  I love how well embodied they are, they are wonderful and diverse and funny, and I want more of them.  I also love that Yuki has a radio show about cryptids and other lonely creatures.  The therapy - seriously, many of the characters struggle with serious, real mental health challenges, and these are not done lightly.  A big plot point involves Grace finally reaching out to a therapist and I found that journey very realistic and was awesome about normalizing the process and not sugar coating it.

Read This If You - need a queer Asian manic pixie dream girl, have ever struggled with feeling like you don’t know what you’re doing with your life, have ever wanted a wacky posse of feral queer friends. 

 The author of this memoir is a queer brown Indian immigrant who grew up in Appalachia.  I had honestly never seen a book from an author like her.  I knew I needed to read it.  And it was a fascinating and surprisingly relatable read.  

Neema moved to West Virginia when she was quite young and she describes her experience being one of very few brown and non-Christian families in a very white and very Christian neighborhood.  But despite these differences she talks about a rich network of neighbors who became in many ways very like an extended family.  Her memories of having snacks at a neighbors house and another neighbor helping her learn to play basketball and encouraging her were really great to read.  However, mixed in with these positive formative experiences are stories about how her fellow students spit on her, told her that her food smelled bad, and called her all manner of racial slurs and epithets.  

I found common ground in her stories about seeing hateful facebook posts from people she thought of as family.  How to react when a loved one posts pro-Trump things that support hateful rhetoric about people who are just like you?  What do you do with those feelings and that reality?  Neema tries to be understanding, considering the struggles that the posters have gone through that lead them to these thoughts.  I don’t think either of us have a perfect answer as to how to respond. 

Read This If You, like me, have never read a book from an author like this.  It was informative and really resonated with me.  

Kept falling asleep, trying to listen on planes.  Will resume another time.