AHEM! So I've FINALLY gotten around to writing my reading roundup post for the months of September, October, November, December, January, and February. At the end of every month since September, I planned to write up my usual mini reviews, but things kept sliding away in a brain fog of pain, lassitude, and inability to focus. I have not written Morning Pages or in my Live Journal, both things I truly enjoy, or rather, enjoyed in the past. Neither have I kept up with my handwritten letter correspondence with dear friends, which I am really sad about. I'm sure they've been really worried. All I have been capable of is casual comments on social media every once in a while and endless scrolling of who-knows-what. I have barely been able to focus on reading.
Since October, chronic pain has had me whipped. Physical Therapy including massage three times a week is holding me together, body and soul. No answers from the doctors yet. I have further scans and tests and appointments scheduled as everyone hunts for an answer. In the meantime, I am spending quality time in bed, or on the couch on a better day, when I absolutely cannot force myself to be out and about and cheerful. Health is my only focus for this new year.
Now, it is the end of the second month of the new year, and I am finally mustering up the energy to get this post out. As a result, the post is rather on the longer side with reviews of fiction and romance.
The Shadow of a Queen by Heather B. Moore
Category: Historical Fiction
Comments: Moore truly knows how to set the stage on which her tale of historical fiction, based on true people and events, unfolds. Her deep research and skillful storytelling immerse you into the Victorian era and life in Queen Victoria's household. The story is mainly about Princess Louise, the sixth of Victoria's nine children, and it is as much about Louise as it is about Victoria and their private family life. [My Review]
Small Things Like These by Claire Keegan
Category: Literary Fiction
Comments: This small book was shortlisted for the 2022 Booker Prize and won the Orwell Prize for Political Fiction. I was pleased that the Booker Committee recognized the value of small books with modest stories among the doorstoppers and grand epics as worthy of the Prize. I was awed by Keegan's writing chops, and how smoothly and almost unknowably, she constructs a complex story, moving seamlessly from observant details to deep ideas. Set in Ireland in the 1980s, this is a story of a town controlled completely by the Catholic Church, and how the village folks are determined to walk on the right side of religion, despite horrific things happening under their noses. Amongst these, lives a man who was born to an unwed teenage mother who was taken in by one of the town's wealthiest of people and given a good education and start to life. The protagonist never forgot how lucky he and his mother had been, and chooses to do the right thing in spite of his wife's and townspeople's disapproval. Such emotional writing even though the protagonist is outwardly quite stoic.
Foster by Claire Keegan
Category: Literary Fiction
Comments: My fascination with the above book led me to immediately buy this Ireland-set book from Book Depository, since the US version was going to be released later on. And I was amply rewarded for my impatience. It is likewise a small, initimate book, in which a monumental change happens in the life of a child, while on the surface, the child moves through each day filled with seemingly banal things. The inciting incidence is that an unwanted girl in a poor family with many children, a pregnant mother, and a wasteral of a father, is shunted off to the mother's sister's house for a few months. That is when she realized what it means to be brought up by a caring family. Beautiful writing!
A Dream Life by Claire Messud
Category: Literary Fiction
Comments: Another small book of towering reputation from a fabulous writer, who the New Yorker calls one of our "greatest contemporary writers." In the 1970s, a middle class NYC family of modest means moves to Sydney because the man is ostensibly given a promotion, but in reality, is being sidelined by his company. His wife was vehemently opposed to the move, but their family of four has no choice. The story of their glittering socialite life then unfolds to the woman's utter disbelievement. She tries hard to fit in, to be one of them, but knows that the high class society only tolerates her. This gem of a book is her story and her choices in her new life in Sydney.
Roses, in the Mouth of a Lion by Bushra Rehman
Category: Literary Fiction
Comments: Razia Mirza is a Pakistani American growing up in 1980s Corona, a conservative, immigrant Muslim community in Queens surrounding the first Sunni mosque built in New York. Rehman’s masterful prose, peppered with Urdu phrases, evokes rich emotional and social nuances regarding a particularly sensitive divide between generations in a community of immigrants trying to hold on to their culture even as they make new lives for themselves in a new country. This was a brilliant book in how she constructed the story, the twist to Razia's story in the end, and above all, in what minute detail she brought twi. This is a YA story, but Rehman has written Razia's adult story in the book, titled Corona. [My Review]
Independence by Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni
Category: Literary Fiction
Comments: Divakaruni’s latest brilliant novel coincides with the seventy-fifth anniversary of the independence of India from British rule and its partition into India, Pakistan, and East Pakistan (now Bangladesh). With great attention to detail regarding the political and religious upheaval this caused and its impact on ordinary citizens, Divakaruni tells a highly nuanced tale of a Hindu Bengali family living in the village of Ranipur near Calcutta (Kolkata). Divakaruni is superb in this book. She had always been a great storyteller, but in this highly emotional tale about a cause that is so dear to her, her writing really shines. [My Review]
Do You Take This Man by Denise Williams
Category: Contemporary Romance
Comments: In this book, Williams has crafted a fun enemies-to-lovers tale set in Asheville, North Carolina, featuring a no-nonsense divorce attorney who moonlights as a wedding officiant and a wedding planner who used to be a pro-football events manager. I really enjoy Williams' writing, especially, her characterization. This one quite up to the high benchmark she set in her earlier book.
Never Rescue a Rogue by Virginia Heath
Category: Historical Romance
Comments: Heath is carving a name for herself in historical rom-coms. I enjoyed her first book. This one is a frenemies-to-lovers story of an illegitimate duke and a clandestine journalist. Claiming to be a copyeditor at a newspaper, she is actually the anonymous Sentinel who sniffs out the illegal shenanigans of powerful people and brings them to justice through the power of her words. Gentle and kind, Giles Sinclair is the new duke of Harpenden, a hated title he associates with his late father, who always hated him. [My Review]
A Cosmic Kind of Love by Samantha Young
Category: Contemporary Romance
Comments: In Young’s (Fight or Flight, 2018) sweep-you-off-your-feet, tender-hearted romance, pink-haired Hallie Goodman loves her job organizing high-profile events all over New York. Her people-pleasing, conflict-avoiding ways have her constantly appeasing her selfish parents during their acrimonious divorce, while her ex’s scathing words still rankle. After a stint on the International Space Station, astronaut Captain Christopher Ortiz is back in New York. ince birth, his estranged, domineering father has kept him from his Mexican heritage, which he now wants to explore. This was an unusual story with characterization and plot. I recommend it.
The Rewind by Allison Winn Scotch
Category: Contemporary Romance
Comments: This was such an unusual book. I had never read anything like it before. It is a second-chance rom-com set on a snowbound New England college campus at the turn of the millennium and told mainly through the internal monologues of the protagonists; actual dialogue is sparse. College sweethearts Frankie Harriman and Ezra Jones broke up before graduation and put the breadth of the country between them. Ten years later, they’re back on campus to celebrate the wedding of mutual friends. On the surface it is straightforward story, but it is the two protagonists' backstories and vulnerabilities where this book shines. [My Review]
Georgie, All Along by Kate Clayborn
Category: Contemporary Romance
Comments: I could wax lyrical for eons about Clayborn's Love Lettering. I found her next, Love At Sight, quite interesting, and this third one as well. Clayborn is a very good writer with great character work, but I kept feeling like her latter two books were crowdsourced or she was consulting people she had not consulted in her first book. I know most people loved all three of these books, but for me, the first one was so good, that my expectations were set high, and the other two didn't quite match that level of excellence. This is a story where two misfit protagonists grow up in a small town. She leaves for the glamor of Hollywood for work, and he scrapes together a successful business through the kindness and care of a benefactor. Now, she is back, and these two completely opposite strangers work on their past difficulties to forge a strong future together.
So This Is Christmas by Jenny Holiday
Category: Contemporary Romance
Comments: Holiday follows her popular Christmas books—A Princess for Christmas and Duke, Actually—set in the tiny, fictitious German-speaking alpine country of Eldovia with this story of the cupid behind those tales. This is a gentle romance between a strait-laced, traditional European man and a gregarious, ever-changing New Yorker. He is the royal equerry whereas she has been brought in to fix the problem of the main export company of Eldovia bleeding money. Clash? Of course, they do.
Where We End & Begin by Jane Igharo
Category: Contemporary Romance
Comments: I have loved all of Igharo's books. She is a talented writer and incorporates her Nigerian culture to go effect in setting stories in North America and Nigeria. Her stories are always complex and involve intricate emotional pitfalls for her two protagonists. They can, at times, flirt with the line between romance and women's fiction. This is romance and is a second-chance story between a Yoruba Nigerian boy/man and an Igbo girl/woman. They were sure they were destined to be together. And yet, when the girl goes off to America for college, he breaks off the relationship, staying back in Nigeria. Twelve years later, when she returns, life has completely changed for both of them, and yet, that old magical pull is still there. A memorable book. [My Review]
Lady Ludmilla's Accidental Letter by Sofi Laporte
Category: Historical Romance
Comments: This self-published author was one of my surprise finds in 2022. These days, I rarely take a chance on unknown self-pubbed authors, but the premise seemed too irresistible, and I am so glad I went with my gut feeling. Written in a trad Regency style with farcical and serious elements intermingled with laugh-out-loud moments, this was a wonderful book, and I shall be reading more of this author's work, in particular, Lucy and the Duke of Secrets. A lonely spinster deals with the circumestances of her dreary existence by a letter correspondence with someone who has become a dear friend with whom she has fallen in love, sight unseen. (Here is a fabulous case made for handwritten letters.) She decides to meet him and goes to London. And to her horror, she discovers that he is an inverterate rake.
The Candid Life of Meena Dave by Namrata Patel
Category: Fiction
Comments: This author was a surprise find of 2022 as well, thanks to a discussion about South Asian writers that I was following on Twitter. I am looking forward to her next book Scent of a Garden coming out in June. I'm not fond of the term "women's fiction," but this is about the heroine self-discovery and features some romantic elements towards the end. I would label this simply as "mainstream fiction." This was a debut book, but reads like a novel by an assured writer. She is a photo-journalist of repute, leading a roving, rootless life around the world. But her life is turned upside down when she inherits an apartment in Boston. And there begins her interactions with the quirky (to the nth degree) residents of the large Victorian house split into ownership apartments. They surround her with affection and are up in her business 24x7. At first, she balks at this encroachment into her privacy and is anxious about this house anchoring her down. But gradually, she changes and starts to build tentative roots.
Part of Your World by Abby Jimenez
Category: Contemporary Romance
Comments: This is one of the best books I read in 2022. I have enjoyed every single one of Jimenez' books. Her characters are so emotionally mature that they are able to calibrate themselves and empathize with others with a great degree of nuance. I can hardly wait to read her next April book. In this book, Jimenez has her characters truly grapple with small town versus big city living. Most of such type of books, gloss over the difficulties and has the city person move happily into the small town. But this book has them both contemplating life in the other person's milieu. She is an ER doctor in a big city, belonging to a wealthy family of high profile surgeons who have been involved in the same hospital for generations. Her father is disappointed that she only wants to be an ER doctor and not a surgeon and/or the board chairman. He is a talented carpenter and artist in wood who lives in a modest life in a small town, not far away from the big city. He is also ten years younger, which he is fine with but she isn't. Can she bring him into her world? Can she move into his world? Such a fabulous story. Highly recommended!
Love, Theoretically by Ali Hazelwood
Category: Contemporary Romance
Comments: I started the year off with a bang with a book that is going to be one of the best of 2023 for me. Hazelwood's writing just clicks with me with her alternately quirky and serious characters, the tenderness and trust and understanding between them, and their unfailing support for each other. I know, last summer, when I read her entire backlist back-to-back, while I loved each book individually, I felt that the characterization was a bit repetitive, but I had also suspected that time and distance would make the next book exciting to read. And it turned out to be true. I enjoyed this book thoroughly. This book is a clash between a theoretical physicist adjunct professor and an experimental physicist tenured professor, set in Cambridge (Boston). He disapproves of theoretical physicists and has recommended another experimentalist for the dream job she is gunning for at MIT. Since her paycheck as an adjunct in non-existent, she supplements her income by offering her services as a fake girlfriend. This book contains more science than her previous books; that actually was a draw for me. Untangling their vulnerabilities and deep-seated views of self is where Hazelwood shines. Highly recommended!
Attribution by Lisa Moore
Category: Mystery
Comments: This is a very interesting art history-mystery novel. The author is an expert art collector and former fine art gallery owner. The art history discussion and how the provenance (or attribution) of a piece of art is established is fascinating. The book cover art is by Spanish Baroque artist Diego Rodríguez de Silva y Velázquez of the early 17th century. This is a contemporary book with an art history mystery at its base, which is fascinating. Overall, I wished the writing could've been better—debut book published by a vanity press that needed substantive editing—but it had good bones. I look forward to reading her next book.
Speechless by Lindsey Lanza
Category: Contemporary Romance
Comments: Selfishness sounds the death knell for a character because they are in it for themselves. When it is the heroine, the reader is expected to empathize with her despite her selfishness, and I cannot. This book started off brilliantly enough. She is a writer who found herself suddenly divorced. She has always felt left behind by the people in her life, and the resulting insecurity and low self-esteem coupled with crippling endometriosis, is sucking the joy out of her life. She survives her chronic illness through the love of her service dog and the glorious music of one composer. When her best friend from college asks her to move to LA to live with her, she jumps at the chance. And guess who is her seatmate? None other than the composer, who is extremely gorgeous and is afflicted with crippling social anxiety. They are so wonderful to and for each other in the first sections of the book. It all sounds good so far, but then it goes pear shaped. He pours all his love into her and gives her anything that she might possibly need, materially and emotionally. And she blows hot and cold constantly and takes and takes. The worst is after they make love, and it is amazing, she simply runs out of his house and disappears for two days. Yes, she has some emotional stuff to work on, but why doesn't she talk to him?? Instead, she goes to her friend's house and drowns her sorrows in drink and binge-watching for two days without a thought for him even though she knows his feelings are very much engaged. In the meantime, he has been frantic with worry wondering if she had an accident, where she was, etc. When she swans back, she is nowhere near as contrite as she should've been. This is unforgivable.
Rich in Your Love by Pippa Grant
Category: Contemporary Romance
Comments: The premise of this story is a common one in contemporary romance. To wit: Highly accomplished big city girl comes to small town and meets local man doing small town things and decides to throw in her lot with his. How that comes about is where the story is. This plot has been done remarkably well this year by a few authors already—that is why this book had to stand out, but, in fact, it stays mired in its trappings. It is trying to be chick-lot/rom-com, but the levity required for that (with its matching gravitas) is entirely missing. What comes across instead are ill-thought-out plot details that are summarily put down by the author and don’t make logical sense. Of course, romance is chockful of bonkers plots but those plots are coherent within the context of their stories. They make sense. This one doesn’t because the pieces don’t cohere into a whole. The biggest example of this is the heroine, who is the main POV character. The author tells you again and again how amazing she is, but the person on the page is an immature person whose left hand doesn’t quite know what her right hand is doing.
Courtiers: The Hidden Power Behind the Crown by Valentine Low
Category: Nonfiction
Comments: I was intrigued by the title and curious about the behind-the-scenes tea. There was that, of course, and detailed explanations of how things work. It was interesting, but it was also boring and repetitive. I also felt manipulated at times, like I was supposed to buy in to his agenda that I found more about out when I read about him the web. However, it is a book royalists will enjoy—in small doses.
[Some of these books are eARCs from NetGalley and the others are either borrowed from the public library or I've bought them.]
