Why aren't there more summer camp counselor novels?!? Camp Gray Wolf caters to teens with visual and audio impairments--deaf and blind kids, that is. Protagonist Lilah hasn't been to camp in years, but getting tired of what a struggle it is to not-quite get by in her mainstreamed life, she impulsively decides to apply to be a junior counselor, and even convinces her parents to send her younger brother, Max to go as a camper. 

At camp, Lilah starts out just as frustrated trying to keep up with other counselors' fluent ASL, but she really wants to learn. She gets lots of support from fellow counselor Isaac, from whom she'd like a little more. 

This is a <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sliding_Doors">Sliding Doors</a>-like YA story, where  Natalya's summer is depicted in alternating chapters as if she'd made both sides of a tough decision. Does she spend her rising-senior summer in NYC, as always, with her dad or try to connect with her mother in LA? In NY, the bisexual protagonist meets her crush, a girl she comes to know as Ellie, and in CA, her love interest is fellow intern, Adam. 

I feel like bisexual romances often pit the lovers against each other by gender, but Adler goes around this trope by taking the competition out if it. She's just showing how Natalya's life plays out in two scenarios. 

I normally really enjoy Dahlia Adler's writing, but liked this one less, perhaps because I listened Mara Wilson narrate the audiobook, rather than read it with my eyeballs. Wilson sounds surprisingly like the narrators of the two other novels I've listened to (<a href="https://app.thestorygraph.com/books/c9e961cf-73e2-45ba-96c5-58a9e2197a91">Tumble</a> and <a href="https://app.thestorygraph.com/books/df958962-87c4-4f2f-bb25-ec3b311a4830">Four Aunties and a Wedding</a>. 

I'd never read a James Patterson book before. He is a <a href="https://encrypted-tbn0.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcQBKdHv_OVffL1HK09rTqj1JmIeQdTH1H_SyLBNU0bcbFFMt-EM5BMunko_D3xsxm93JeY&usqp=CAU">joke in library circles</a>, so my choice was more about Dolly Parton than JP. Sorry to report that the book was absorbing and sweet. I assume the former was JP and the latter was DP? 

The protagonist, AnnieLee Keyes, is a singer-songwriter absolutely bursting with talent, beauty, and star quality, but maybe the combination of fierceness and vulnerability that makes her so charismatic comes from her past, which she doesn't talk about, except to lie. 

Her love interest, Ethan, is a talented guitarist and her mentor a Dolly Parton stand-in named Ruthanna. They both have sadness in their pasts, too. Still, everyone puts aside their own traumas to support AnnieLee. Though I believe Patterson is known for writing thrillers, this is much more of a romance, with sprays of violence and one cross-country car chase. 

This is a sweet, not-very eventful book about a lesbian nun in her late 30s getting a fresh look at herself, her sisters, and the community she serves. 

This is a cute, fun, paranormal romance that thinks it's cuter and funnier than it is. The protagonist, Iris Scanlon, is a "daywalker," that is someone who takes care of vampires' needs while they're sleeping or otherwise hiding from the evil day star. At 29, Iris has been responsible for her younger sister Gigi (17, I think) since they're parents died five (?) years ago, so she's got to make a decent living and keep her nose clean. 

The world building is solid, and the storytelling is compelling enough that I'll probably read the next one.

Eighth year grad student Ingrid Yang is having a tough time finishing her dissertation on enjambment in the poems of a legendary Chinese-American former faculty member at her Massachusetts university. She doesn't actually care about Xiao-Wen Chou and is only writing about him because she was pressured to do so by her advisor, the chair of the East Asian studies department. Ingrid is the only child of immigrants and is engaged to a white man who calls her "dear" all the time and fusses over her health. 

She and her best friend Eunice (Yoon) met when they were assigned office mates, two of the few East Asians in the East Asian studies department. Or maybe Yoon is in another department? I forget, but it is Ingrid who is being groomed to become the department's next tenure-track Chou scholar and upping the department's racial and ethnic diversity by becoming its only Asian member. (n.b., I'm not sure that's how faculty hiring goes. Typically institutions are discouraged from hiring their own Ph.D.s) Ingrid is a non-maker of waves and a pleaser, so she's going along with the plan...until she finds a snarky note in a box in the Chou archives. 

As an archives-adjacent special collections librarian, I wasn't crazy about the description of the archive. First of all, a standalone archive of one poet seems improbable, and the stereotypical shade on its main desk-sitter, Margaret is irritating. 

Is Margaret's whole job staffing the reading room? Do any archivists work at the facility? Or maybe the collection is finished because Chou is dead? It's annoying. 

The story of Ingrid's awakening also seems improbable. She's incredibly ignorant of race and racism at the beginning, but I do like the story of her relationship with her parents. 

It took me a bit to get into the book and its gratuitous air travel concept and gratuitous sound effects, but ultimately, as a Parker Posey age peer and Party Girl generation librarian, I was in it to finish it. Like many celebrity memoirs, Airplane reads like it was written for the money. Apparently Posey didn't make much when she was the indy darling of the 1990s, but I think it's more that the celebrity lifestyle is hard to maintain. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

There are names dropped and bad behavior revealed. 

I wish it had been more linear. 

I couldn't bring myself to care what happened to Evelyn

I just wrote in a review that maybe it's too soon for Covid-19 novels, but this one was okay in a way that the previous book I reviewed wasn't. Protagonist Joan is an ICU doctor, but despite the book taking place from fall 2019-spring 2020, and Joan's work being core to her existence, the virus isn't exactly the novel's core.

Anyway, Joan is 36 years old and lives in a rental apartment in a doorman building in Morningside Heights. Her parents went back to China when Joan began her undergrad at Harvard, and her older brother Fang lives in a Greenwich, CT mansion with his wife and three kids. Though not identified as such in the book, Joan appears to be on the Autism spectrum or at the least has atypical relationships with her coworkers, neighbors, and family. When her father dies unexpectedly, Joan flies to China for the funeral, and returns in time for work on Monday. She is rewarded by her boss for being so dedicated and is psychologized for it by her brother and sister-in-law. She lies to her neighbors when she's on forced bereavement and has no ability to establish boundaries with her floor mate, Mark.

This is a novel-about-nothing, despite its dramatic events. I'm not describing it well, but I will say that Joan Is Okay is an apt title. Joan is okay, and is living her best life, even if it may not seem so to others.