Night and Silence—Seanan McGuire

Night and Silence

Y’all, it’s release date, which means I am cutting it just past the wire as I finish this one. I was stoked to be approved for an ARC of Night and Silence, this twelfth book in the series, because I love it and I love Toby Daye as a character and because I love Seanan McGuire (who lives in Seattle!)

BUT the only downside is that I had to re-read all of the other books, and there are 11 of them (not including novellas or other stories) so it took a minute.

All that to say, I finally finished this one today. And whew was it worth all of the lead up and the wait. So many secrets revealed, so many new adventures primed.

First, a quick recap of where we’ve come from. October “Toby” Daye is a changeling—that is, the child of a fae parent and a human parent. A long time ago, she made the changeling choice and opted for the fae side of her, only unfortunately her fae mom was not really interested in being a mother to her. Toby is also a private detective in the Bay Area. In her first adventure, Toby is unceremoniously turned into a fish while pursuing her liege’s kidnapped wife and kid. Even more unfortunately, she stays a fish for 14 years. Bummmer. And then throughout the next books, she goes on many more, mostly life-threatening adventures, gathering friends and family and unveiling secrets along the way. McGuire infuses quite a lot of Shakespeare into this series: all of the titles of the books are taken from Shakespeare quotes, many of the characters have Shakespeare-inspired names, Toby herself is a big fan, and as fae are immortal, some of them were contemporaries of old Willy Shakes himself, so it all comes full circle.

I played a fun game while re-reading where I renamed all of the books as if they were Harry Potter books. Night and Silence I renamed “Toby Daye and the Old Home Week.”

One thing that is great for new readers: while you can (and in my opinion, absolutely should) start from the beginning, McGuire does a fairly good job of recapping essential information as she goes through the new books in the series, so although you of course won’t get the whole action of the previous books, you can get the gist and not be completely lost.

In Night and Silence, Toby’s estranged, college-age human daughter Gillian has been kidnapped, Toby’s pretty sure by somebody from faerie (so nothing she can explain to her ex and his new wife when they are curious about where the daughter might have gone), and Toby has to track her down. This isn’t the first time that Gillian has been kidnapped because of Toby, but it is a bit more dangerous this time around, for a number of reasons. Toby’s made quite a few enemies over the years, so the list of people who might want to punish or blackmail her by taking her daughter is pretty extensive.

I can’t really get into too many more details without giving bits away, and the bits are too good to give away. Boy are them some doozy secrets revealed in this one. It feels like a whole new beginning for Toby and a refresh for the series (not that it needs it). I have to admit, when I saw the synopsis for the book, I thought to myself, “Again? She gets kidnapped again?” Especially since some of the characters that pop up as villains once again are folks that we thought were vanquished. Are we never going to be able to trust that someone is dealt with and/or dead, for real? But all of those thoughts went out the window as the story went on, with ever-increasing stakes and a satisfying resolution that left me wanting to read the thirteenth book in the series immediately. (Alas.)

One of my absolute favourite things about this series is the family that McGuire has built around Toby. I think many of us can relate to the idea of our biological families not always being what we need them to be, and of constructing a chosen family around ourselves to fill the gaps. That’s truly what Toby has around her now, and they all grok her on such a deep level that it often brings tears to my eyes. The unspectacular way that McGuire has introduced such a diverse range of characters and experiences among the gang is aspirational. And I will always want to be a little bit like Toby: selfless and reliable to a fault, enormously gooey with a hard shell, and endlessly sarcastic. (I think I got that last one pretty well down, actually.)

I highly recommend this series if you are at all interested in faerie/fairy stories, or magic, or just generally awesome fantasy with spectacular and intricate worldbuilding. And if you like this series, Seanan McGuire has written other books under her name, as well as pseudonyms for other genres. They’re all stellar.

Lord of Secrets—Erica Ridley

Lord of SecretsNora is a paid companion to her distant cousin Lady Roundtree, who has broken her leg. The only reason she took the position was to help support her younger brother and elderly grandparents in the country, where she usually lives. She’s not used to the way that things are done in society. She’s not great at reading and writing (she has dyslexia, though it’s never stated that way) and so she draws little caricatures of society gatherings for her family back home. Little does she know, her brother started selling them to a publication, albeit anonymously, and the society she has depicted in these caricatures is not thrilled to see their laundry aired. Heath, a member of that society, is also known as something of a fixer. He is hired to track down the identity of the caricaturist. But he didn’t expect to develop feelings for this new lower class girl and he definitely didn’t expect her to be the person behind the pen.

Whew. I really got on a tear of requesting romance books from NetGalley. Honestly, I was just looking for some escapism, and historical fiction romance usually is great at that. Not as much this time around.

This is number 5 in the Rogues to Riches series. I hadn’t read any of the others in the series, and the completionist in me is bummed by that, but the recoveringcompletionist in me is quite pleased with this indication of progress.

Overall, this book was meh for me. Not bad, not great, just kind of meh. Which, honestly, equates to a bit unforgettable in the long run.

I appreciated that Nora wasn’t a Mary Sue-style perfect heroine, though it did seem like the only thing keeping her from being that was this kind of shoehorned dyslexia. Now, I’m all for more characters in literature that have disabilities, but the fact that she had so much self-hatred about it (realistic for the time period but disappointing considering other “not realistic for the time period” moments) was not my favourite.

Although it was somewhat anachronistic or less prominent in history than it might seem from this novel, I loved how much Heath’s sisters took Fleetwood Mac’s advice to heart, and went their own ways. I know at least one of them is the subject of another book in the series, and I enjoyed the snippets that we got with his sisters so much that I’m actually interested in reading that book, even though this one was just whelming.

Alright, let’s get into the things I found less than stellar. Insta love x100000000. Of all the tropes, this is among my three least favourite. They met once at a dance, he was nice to her, and immediately she’s in love with him. As I noted on my Kindle, “Extreme, instant infatuation is a good start to every relationship.”

I noticed a theme that is prevalent in historical romance which has always bothered me but which I haven’t been able to hit on until this book. So often, the heroine is someone who shirks the expectations of society and does things differently, and that’s why the hero falls in love with her. BECAUSE she’s different. Which is basically just the old-timey version of “you’re not like other girls.” The heroes especially usually deride the other girls, the ones who are hunting for husbands. Like, what do you expect of them? They’ve been told their entire lives—by society, by their friends, by their families—that the entirety of their worth is wrapped up in who they are able to “catch” as a husband. You’re really going to be an asshole about a girl who does what she’s been told is the most important thing to do every day of her life? Ugh.

Honestly, the biggest obstacle to loving this book for me was that it seemed like nothing happened. The pacing was so terrible, and as a result, the passage of time was quite confusing. It almost felt like this had initially been planned as a novella and then had to be stretched into a novel-length piece. Not even character development was happening during that time, which might have been the only reason I would excuse such slow pacing. I got to 62% in, and made the note that it felt like nothing had happened. At 72% in, FINALLY a single kiss! Not another kiss until 90 PERCENT INTO THE BOOK. What even am I doing here?

As I mentioned, I would be interested in reading the final book in the series, Lord of Vice, which is about Heath’s sister Bryony and a gaming hell owner Max. They were both introduced in this book, and immediately, as soon as Max was introduced, I made a note that I was CERTAIN he was going to get with one of Heath’s sisters. And he does. I’m into it. I am a bit of a sucker for a rogue gaming hell owner story. There are surprisingly a lot of them.

Scholastic Warehouse Sale Haul!

Does this look familiar?

Scholastic Book Fair

If you are as nostalgic about the good old days of the Scholastic Book Fair, I’m about to blow your mind. Did you know that Scholastic warehouses have semi-annual sales, with huge discounts on books? We have a local warehouse in Auburn, and I first became aware of the warehouse sale about 10 years ago. Since then, whenever possible, I go to the warehouse sales and gather some books, sometimes for local schools, but most often for myself. You can even sign up to volunteer, and for every hour that you volunteer, you get a certain FURTHER savings on the already-discounted books. Find out more about warehouse sales and see if there’s one near you here.

Here’s a little video scan of my local warehouse. It’s overwhelming in the best way possible.

This year, they did the first ever BOGO sale. Honestly, I think it’s not as good a deal as the previous 50% off most items, so if they continue with the BOGO sale, I might be going less often. But since I’m in the midst of a period of stress/comfort/sadness binge-buying, it was right up my alley. Plus, I was able to pick up a good group of books.

Here are the books that I was able to pick up this time:

CAWSE Haul 1

Children’s Books

It Takes a Village by Hillary Rodham Clinton and She Persisted by Chelsea Clinton – I’ve had both of these on my list for a while, and have almost bought them several times, but I got them discounted now so I’m glad I waited!

Dear Girl, by Amy Krouse Rosenthal and Paris Rosenthal – First of all, that comma at the end of the title is actually part of it, which I kind of love. I actually knew nothing about this book, but saw it was by Amy Krouse Rosenthal who I first became aware of when she was dying and wrote an essay to the woman who would love her husband after she died. (“You May Want to Marry My Husband.”) Which is devastating, but it was beautiful. I’m pretty sure this book is going to make me cry.

The Library Book by Tom Chapin – Again, know nothing about this one except that it features a young girl of color on the cover (hooray!) and is about libraries and books. I love all of the above. I bought two copies so if I loved it and wanted to gift it sometime in the future, I’d already have a spare.

This Little Trailblazer: A Girl Power Primer by Joan Holub – I like this one a lot and often send it to friends as a baby gift. I bought ten copies, ready to be gifted.

If I Had a Gryphon by Vikki VanSickle – Another one I didn’t know anything about, but the cover drew me in. Bought two.

STICKERS! I got some sets of Finding Nemo 2 stickers and some puffy animal stickers. Because who doesn’t love stickers?!

CAWSE Haul 2

YA Books, Graphic Novels, and Miscellaneous

So children’s books, YA books, and graphic novels are kind of the only types of books that I buy. Okay, that’s not really true. They tend to not have a lot of grown up book options at the warehouse, and most of the ones they DO have are cookbooks, which I will never use.

I was excited to find several books that I’ve been hearing about and wanted to buy there, including Miles Morales: Spider-Man by Jason Reynolds; Aru Shah and the End of Time by Roshani Chokshi, which has been blowing up on book Twitter; Solo by Kwame Alexander; and Carve the Mark by Veronica Roth, author of the Divergent series.

I was also glad to grab a hardcover copy of Winter since I have most of the rest of the Lunar Chronicles in hardcover. (Acquired from previous warehouse sales, naturally.)

The others are equally as exciting: Volume 1 of the Bob’s Burgers comic; Nimona, a graphic novel by Noelle Stevenson, who works on Lumberjanes which is one of my favourite comic series; Labyrinth Lost by Zoraida Córdova, the first in a new series called Brooklyn Brujas); and two Disney-ish books, one is a “Twisted Tale,” A Whole New World (an Aladdin book) by Liz Braswell and the other is a villain book Poor Unfortunate Soul: A Tale of the Sea Witch (obvs about Ursula).

Plus a cool water bottle and a diamond-topped pen!

Six Weeks With a Lord—Eve Pendle

Six Weeks with a LordOh boy was this one ever not for me.

Warning: shouty capitals ahead.

Content warning for sexual coercion and mention of rape.

The general plot is this: Everett is an impoverished lord who needs money to pay off his brother’s debt and helping to stabilize his herd after a disease has ravaged it. Grace is the daughter of a shopkeeper who is left penniless after her father dies, and who refuses to marry the man her father chose for her, but she needs somebody to marry her so that she can get her inheritance and win custody of her younger brother. They’re both essentially looking for a business arrangement, Grace agrees to split her inheritance half and half for such a situation, but when Everett’s biggest requirement out of the deal is that Grace go through the motions of pretending to be in love with him for at least six weeks, for the sake of the morale of his people, what results is so much more. Spoiler alert? But it is a romance book, so you could have extrapolated.

Continue reading “Six Weeks With a Lord—Eve Pendle” →

More or Less a Countess—Anna Bradley

More or Less a Countess

“Violet didn’t mind the dark. She’d spent many evenings alone in her grandmother’s library, cradling dusty books in her hands and pondering the pattern of invisible fingerprints on those old, crackling pages.”

SAME, Violet.

Violet Somerset is an opinionated, odd girl who just wants to love books and also write one about true crime locations in Regency London. So, basically, a legend. Nick Dare is a lord who needs to marry and soon, according to his grandmother. When he mixes up Violet for her younger sister Hyacinth after returning to the London scene following an absence, Violet doesn’t correct him; she lets him continue to think that she’s Hyacinth, of the amazing pianoforte skills, so that he will escort her on outings to various crime locations which would be unseemly for her to visit on her own. Though both initially sees the other as a match of expediency, they gradually grow closer until they eventually…consummate their relationship. It’s only AFTER this point that Lord Dare learns that Violet is not, in fact, Hyacinth, but begrudgingly marries her anyway because, hey, he’s been inside her, and that was the done thing in those days. And then, despite the fact that they’ve started their marriage out on a lie, all things work out and there’s a happily ever after.

Though this is the second book in the Somerset Sisters series, it worked just fine as a standalone. (Note to self: stop requesting books without finding out whether they’re part of a series first.) I’m assuming the first book is about Violet’s sister Iris, who we encounter as well as her new husband, in More or Less a Countess. I didn’t love the twee flower names for the Somerset sisters, but we can’t always get what we want, I suppose.

I did EXTREMELY relate to Violet. A girl who loves true crime, libraries, and cemeteries? Yeah, that’s a romance novel heroine I can get behind, for sure. Also, the very first thing that happens is that she gets stuck in the library when Nick comes in and tups a married woman. Who hasn’t been caught in an awkward situation, and then gets stuck when things have passed the point of no return? We’ve all been there.

The central conflict, that Violet has lied about her name, was SO contrived to me. If this were real life, sure, lying about your name might be a signifier of an underlying tendency to deceive. Or it might just be that it got past the tipping point and it became too awkward to correct him. Granted, I think the bigger problem for Nick is probably that she then decided to use him, but still. Not the best of even terrible fake conflicts that I’ve encountered in romance novels.

Even the secondary conflict, when Nick discovers a sketch that Violet made of him entitled, “The Selfish Rake” from the time that she watched him fuck the married woman in the library, was kind of ridiculous. He gets upset that she’s entitled the piece that way, but, dude, you were. You were undoubtedly and assuredly a selfish rake. It did make a little more sense that he actually overreacted to that because of the specter of his dead older brother, the golden child, and his own feelings of inadequacy that he won’t ever measure up. Still, not an appropriate reason to be a dick to your new wife, even in Regency England.

There were some really great tropes in this one too. One that I’ve been noticing more and more recently is the precocious but naive young woman who understands the act of lovemaking intellectually but asks questions of the experienced man on practicality, which, of course, gets him immediately and irreversibly hard. To be fair, the sexy times were pretty compelling, so it was worth reading for them alone.

There was some fairly funny dialogue, most especially from Gibbs, Lord Dare’s valet. The writing was a little repetitive in places, especially when addressing Violet’s past, and even more so when talking about Lord Derrick.

Overall, a pretty solid three, three and a half stars from me. I didn’t love it, but I liked it enough to read more by Anna Bradley, and I don’t think I’ve read any of her stuff before.

The book has a scheduled release date of August 7. Find out more here.

Thanks to NetGalley and Kensington Books for this ARC in exchange for an honest review.

I Went to France! And All You Got Was This Freaking Blog Post

This year I celebrated my 30th birthday. The Dirty Thirty, as it is sometimes called. As a treat to myself, I decided to go on a big three week trip to France. As a further treat to myself, I decided to go alone.

I got to do some really amazing book-related things while I was there, so I just wanted to take a few minutes to debrief AND talk about some of the books I read while I was there. A few of them were France-related, and some of them were just for fun while I was stuck inside during a storm in Paradise. (We’ll get there…)

So, if I really tried (and not even tried that hard…) I could relate everything I did in France back to something book-ish, but for the sake of sanity, I’m going to stick with things that I can fairly explicitly say are book-ish.

One of the first places I went, on my…second full day in Paris, was the Père Lachaise Cemetery. I’ve always loved cemeteries. Part of it is that I’m super morbid. But I think the bigger part of it is the sense of wonderment and overwhelm that I feel standing in a place literally full of history, thinking about the lives of the bodies buried there, thinking about what their world looked like, thinking about the people who surrounded them and the things that they cared about. And realizing that most likely, all of those things are gone now. And so will we all be. It’s honestly kind of comforting to me.

Père Lachaise was a straight shot north from my Airbnb, and teeming (too much, adjective-wise, for a cemetery?) with a wealth of people whom society—and I guess me, since I decided to go there—have deemed important. Among those important people are some pretty significant literary figures. I’ve included photos below of the gravestones of Moliere, Marcel Proust, Balzac, Oscar Wilde (!) and Abelard and Heloise. Abelard and Heloise are a bit further back, more obscure figures, but I learned about them during one of my medieval history courses in university. One of history’s most passionate, devastating, beautiful love affairs. Look it up. (Gertrude Stein is also buried at Père Lachaise, but for the life of me – haha – I could not find her, despite making two large circles around the EXTREMELY sizable cemetery.)

Later that same day, I walked from my Airbnb the 15 minutes over to the Victor Hugo house. Once I found out how close it was to me, I knew I had to go, even though it hadn’t really been part of my original plans. Hugo lived there from 1832 to 1848, and wrote many of his books there, including a large chunk of Les Misérables. He lived here before he lived in exile after Napoleon III’s coup d’état.

Above is a writing desk that was “commissioned” by Victor’s wife, Adele. She asked her husband, George Sand, Alexandre Dumas and Alfonse de Lamartine to contribute their inkwells, pens, and a signed letter to go with the desk as part of an auction to raise money for their adopted town of Guernsey. However, nobody else at auction could afford it, so Victor ended up buying it himself at auction.

A few days later, on my roundabout way back to my Airbnb from the Louvre, I walked across the Pont des Arts to la Bibliothèque Mazarine, the oldest public library in the country. You’re not really supposed to take pictures inside…oops. They have books that are centuries old just casually lined up along the walls. As one does.

Bibliotheque Exterior

From there, I actually just continued walking along the Seine until I reached Notre Dame. Mostly made famous by the Victor Hugo novel The Hunchback of Notre Dame. I’m obsessed with it now. Also, it was awesome to go and see it so soon before we opened our production of the show based on the novel at my place of work. (The 5th Avenue Theatre in Downtown Seattle. The Hunchback of Notre Dame plays through June 24, 2018.)

On my last day in Paris, I left my schedule entirely open, but I did know that I had to visit Shakespeare & Company, one of the most well-known bookstores in Paris. It is truly astonishing, most especially the story of how the bookstore was started and thinking about all of the giants of writing who have ever visited the place: Ginsburg, James Joyce, James Baldwin, Anais Nin, to name just a few. (Read more about the history of Shakespeare and Company here, if you’re interested.) And while the history is amazing, most of the books they have for sale are English language books, and we have English language bookstores at home, not to mention my luggage was COMPLETELY full at this point, so I didn’t actually buy any books. I did grab a tote bag because I guess I collect them (based purely on how many of them I have accumulated kind of accidentally). It might be the first time I’ve ever walked into a bookstore and not purchased any books. I felt impressed with my restraint.

Shakespeare & Co

After leaving Paris, I didn’t really do too many “literary” things, as it was meant to be the more relaxing, chill half of my vacation. But I DID finish quite a few books, since I hadn’t been able to get much reading done during the first half of my vacation because I was so busy. Here’s a little wrap up of the books I read, most of which have absolutely nothing to do with France.

The Black Count

The Black Count by Tom Reiss

I started reading this at the beginning of my trip, having downloaded the ebook from my local library (shout out to KCLS!) in preparation. I finally finished it having arrived on Corsica. Little did I know that by the end of my trip, I would be able to see, from the coast of Corsica, the island of Montecristo in the Tuscan Archipelago.

I have always loved Alexandre Dumas (II, for the purposes of the book). The Three Musketeers I think is one of the first classics I ever read of my own volition because of the Disney movie version (with Chris O’Donnell and Oliver Platt and Keifer Sutherland and Tim Curry, which I was absolutely obsessed with as a kid) AND I feel like I’m hearing more from people that they had no idea that Alexandre Dumas was Black. So when I found out that not only did this biography about the author’s dad exist, but it also addressed how he rose through the ranks of the army even though he was Black in 19th century France, and how Dumas’ father was the inspiration for the character of Edmond Dantes and his , I was hooked. Reiss won a Pulitzer for this biography, and it’s no wonder. Fascinating and thorough, I honestly think I’m probably going to come back to this one in a couple of years and reexamine it when I’m not on vacation. Also, I am now inspired to read and re-read everything that Dumas ever wrote, knowing what I now know about his dad and Dumas’ (II) early life.

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Revolution

Revolution by Jennifer Donnelly

This was the only other France-related book that I read. It was pretty cute. Teenager Andi’s younger brother died in a tragic accident that she blames herself for. It tore her family apart, leaving her mentally fragile mother unable to cope and her already-absent father leaving the family and getting another chick pregnant. When her father has to go to France for a part-work, part-pleasure trip doing some very important DNA testing for a friend to determine whether remains found belong to a prince lost to history, Andi is dragged along for the ride. She’s not pumped about it, as she’s not super jazzed about her dad at the moment, but she goes along for the sake of researching a paper she’s writing. When she discovers a secret notebook in an old guitar case, she goes on a journey with Alexandrine, a young woman alive during the French Revolution who was a caretaker for the lost prince. Nothing to write home about re: writing structure, prose, etc. but it was definitely a fun adventure.

Magic Rises, Magic Breaks, Magic Shifts by Ilona Andrews

Ilona Andrews is the pen name for a husband-and-wife writing team. These are books 5, 6, and 7 in the Kate Daniels series, which I started reading as part of the now-defunct Vaginal Fantasy book club. Not much to say about them other than they’re about a badass heroine with sarcasm for days who will literally lay down her life for the people she cares about, including were-lion Curran, her beau. The books take place in a post-apocalyptic world that cycles through magic phases and tech phases, never knowing when it’ll be one or the other. Though there are some annoying tropes (how could there not be?), for the most part, this is a pretty solid series with one of my favourite leading ladies. I fell a bit behind in the past few years as Ilona Andrews continued churning out books, so it seemed like an apt opportunity to catch up as I was stormed in.

Sidney Chambers and the Shadow of Death

Sidney Chambers and the Shadow of Death by James Runcie

I started watching the TV series when I first got to France as a thing to do to wind down after long days, and lost many hours of sleep that I probably needed zooming through them. I’m a sucker for mysteries, I’m a sucker for period pieces, I’m a sucker for period mysteries, and I’m a sucker for an attractive gent who is conflicted about his place in the world. If you don’t know the series, Sidney Chambers is a vicar in a post-World War II Grantchester (near Cambridge) who accidentally falls into detective work. He also is in love with Amanda, one of his sister’s friends, though they have sort of mutually decided that them being together would never work because he’s a poor vicar and she comes from a well-to-do family. The books are semi-episodic already, containing about 5-7 self-contained mysteries in each. I usually am adamant about reading books before consuming the TV/movies attached to them, but it was actually interesting to me to have watched the series first and then think about why they might have decided not to include certain facets of the book in the series. Each season of the show covers the content of one of the books (though things get a little off the rails in about book/series 3.) The books are quick paced and light, compared to some of the other shit I sometimes read.

Want

Want by Cindy Pon

Last but not least. Somebody book-ish I follow on Twitter recommended this book when it was on sale on Amazon. I think $1.99 for an ebook? Anyway, I knew literally nothing about it, but it’s quite hard to go wrong with a price of $1.99 and a recommendation from somebody I have chosen to follow on Twitter. Set in some distant future in Taipei, the wealthy have access to suits that keep their air healthy and the poor are left to breathe the super-polluted, disease-ridden air. Jason Zhou and his friends want to take down the company that builds the suits, hoping that if they do, maybe the government will actually invest in making things better for all citizens. Jason kidnaps a random girl and ransoms her. With the ransom money, he and his friends build an elaborate cover life for him, and he goes undercover with the wealthy folks, getting close to the daughter of the dude who owns the suit company. Shenanigans, intrigue, destruction, death ensue. I really quite enjoyed this one. It was pretty fast paced, I appreciated that it was sent in an Asian country but didn’t fetishize the culture in a way that some books set in Asian cultures do, and though I did get a bit shouty sometimes, the romance was just fine and full of actual conflict (as opposed to fabricated for the sake of drama).

The Wedding Date—Zara Stoneley

The Wedding Date

Well, it was a valiant effort, and I made it to 62% before I threw my Kindle across the room and finally accepted defeat.

Samantha Jenkins is asked to be the maid of honor for her best friend’s wedding. Only problem is, her best friend is getting married to her ex-boyfriend’s brother. Which means, of course, that he will also be there. With his new girlfriend. And Sam has already told her best friend Jess that she’s dating someone new. But she’s not. What to do, what to do? Oh, I know, hire a perfect stranger to pose as your boyfriend! What could possibly go wrong? Enter Jake, an utter and total and complete and absolute stranger. I’m assuming they end up together, even though they made the whole “don’t fall in love with me” pact, but I couldn’t actually tell you because I couldn’t finish this book.

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First off, there are SO MANY BOOKS called The Wedding Date, including one that was just released three months ago (which, to be perfectly honest, is the one I thought I was requesting because I’ve heard good things about it. That’ll teach me to be more thorough before requesting).

Second, this was just terribly full of stereotypes and tropes, I couldn’t take it. It was clearly meant to be a romantic comedy in book form, but it fell completely flat for me. Girl who thinks she’s fat (though also thinks that losing 8 pounds before the wedding is just about right, so not at all fat); has been dumped by a shitty guy but then can’t fathom going to her best friend’s wedding alone because in this day and age she can’t be honest WITH HER BEST FRIEND and has lied to her and said that she’s dating someone new; ex-boyfriend already has a new girlfriend who is “hugely pregnant” and of course the most harping, shrewish woman in existence; has a gay hairdresser who is the most flamboyant gay of all time—seriously, she actually describes several of his actions as “flamboyantly”—and that is literally the only LGBTQ+ representation (I’m not saying there aren’t gay men like that because there absolutely are, but it was SUCH a stereotype); hires a guy who seems immediately enamored with her, who can’t BELIEVE she doesn’t already have a boyfriend, even though she has not one redeeming quality that I can find. He, of course, keeps insisting that she’s Not Like Other Girls—you know, that old gem of a trope.

Beyond all of that, the writing was just so not my style. Honestly, there were some incredibly off-color, if not downright inappropriate and disgusting points, but I couldn’t tell if they were just culturally acceptable phrases in England and it was just a cultural difference…The character is supposed to be in her mid-twenties (I think) and yet can’t even THINK the term “fuck buddy” IN HER HEAD, and has to censor herself. She calls sex “rumpy-pumpy” and explains that her boyfriend was “poking her when he was still with me,” referring to her ex-boyfriend’s new girlfriend. Poking her. I can’t.

This is followed shortly thereafter by one of the most vomit-inducing phrases, for so many reasons: “He’s been sowing his seed like he was planning on feeding the third-world.” (Emphasis mine, obviously.)

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I’m sorry, I just threw up in my mouth a little bit.

And there were huge plot holes as a result of poor development/worldbuilding. (Is it even considered worldbuilding if it’s ostensibly set in present day England?) For some reason, her best friend’s wedding’s festivities are scheduled to take place across a week of time. And then, though there’s no back story of this, we find out that Sam and her best friend Jess have been friends since they were little, which is why (conveniently for the attempt at farce that this author is going for) Sam’s parents are ALSO invited to the week-long wedding.

The dude that Sam hires, Jake, is an actor. His sister was in the hair salon at the same time as Sam and heard her woes, and offered up her brother, claiming that he always needed money. Yet, when Sam and Jake start discussing a fee structure for the “favor” that he’s going to be doing for her (pretending to be her boyfriend), he insists that the money doesn’t really matter because his uncle set up a fund for him specifically to support the lifestyle of an actor who might not always get work. So why did your sister seem to think you were desperate for money…?

AND CAN I TELL YOU THAT THIS GIRL GETS A BANK LOAN IN ORDER TO HIRE THIS GENTLEMAN?! I don’t know how they do things on the British Isles, but here that would be considered fraud. Like, legally speaking. I don’t care how desperately single you are, I do not believe you would be desperate enough to commit fraud.

There may be people who would enjoy this one, but it’s really just not for me.

You know what you could do instead of reading this rage-inducing book? Watch The Wedding Date with Debra Messing and Dermot Mulroney. Similar premise, infinitely better. And much less creepy winking.

Thanks (I think?) to NetGalley and the publisher for an advance copy in exchange for an honest review.

Book…Ish: A Debrief of Samantha Irby with Lindy West

Last night I attended a Town Hall Seattle event, part of their Arts and Culture series. It was perhaps one of the best pairings I’ve seen—Samantha Irby in conversation with Lindy West.

(Let me take the opportunity to briefly expound on how much I love Town Hall Seattle, because I absolutely do. Their events are incredibly varied and culturally relevant/intelligent, and tickets for their events are only $5, so they are super accessible. And, if you have a little bit of extra money, you can become a member. It’s only $45 for an individual annual membership. At that level, you don’t get free tickets, but you do get early/exclusive access, and you get special VIP seating at events.)

Anyway, back to the thing. The event was for Samantha Irby’s book tour, celebrating the re-release of her first collection of essays, Meaty.

I actually read We Are Never Meeting in Real Life before Meaty, and it resonated with me so much that I promptly bought several copies, just to have on hand in case I ever need last minute gifts—plus a copy that I took with me to give to my best friend when I went to visit her in New York in January. So as soon as I found out they were re-releasing her first book—and especially having learned recently how important pre-orders really are to authors and publishers—I immediately pre-ordered it.

 

And THEN, I heard about this great event. Though obviously the event was on the surface designed to promote Meaty, it really was mostly a conversation between Samantha and Lindy. You know how sometimes there are writers you love, and their work makes you laugh out loud and cry and hate the people they hate and love the people they love, and then you go to see them talk or do a Q and A and it just doesn’t have the same feels (WHICH IS TOTALLY FINE because they’re authors and not necessarily public speakers)? Such was not the case here. Both Samantha and Lindy were exactly as hilarious and opinionated and glorious as I hoped. They commiserated over Hollywood projects in the making (or stalled), they discussed sometimes missing regular “day jobs” and getting to bitch about work to coworkers (honestly one of my favourite parts of my job), and Samantha told a new story about worm penis dude (you’ll have to read her book to know THAT story) for an audience member who was looking for another funny pet story to tell her friends.

Samantha has also been clear that she doesn’t have concrete goals; she basically takes opportunities as they come to her. (Which I love and also is generally how I live my life, because I realized that when I was too stuck in my “goals,” I wasn’t open to possibilities.) But she did amend that by saying that she does have one goal. And that is to use her position to help those who might not have the opportunity otherwise. Which reminds me of that great gif that people often share on International Women’s Day (and never any other time).

giphy2

One of the things that struck me most about the night, however, was their response to a question from an audience member: If they weren’t writing what they write (namely, essays and stories mostly about their lives and identities), what other genre or type of writing would they like to do? And though Samantha and Lindy had different responses, the reasons behind their responses seemed to be the same: I would be writing something that makes me respected as a writer. Samantha said that she still gets people when, say, she writes a piece for The New York Times, that are like, “Wow, how did you get to do that?” They don’t really see her as a writer, because she “just” writes about her life.

Lindy went further to examine why this might be. She said that when she started writing on the internet, it was during a time when women’s blogging was really becoming a thing. And the disrespect of that type of writing even back then was staggering. People who wrote for recognizable or established publications, especially men, would be incredibly condescending. “Isn’t that woman cute, trying to write? How adorable. Oh, she pointed out a major point of privilege in this piece I put together? Thanks for the feedback, you itty bitty woman.” There seems to be this belief that because women were talking about their lives and experiences, that it was somehow less valid than the Very Important Work that the men were doing.

It’s so demoralizingly disappointing to hear, that these two women whom I and many others consider icons and role models—for their work, for the raw sharing of their experiences, for the validation of our own work and experiences—feel like they would sometimes rather be writing poetry, or literary fiction, or “anything that people would respect.” And it’s not disappointing because they feel that way, because that feeling is completely understandable. It’s disappointing that this stupid fucking trash society doesn’t give them the respect they deserve because of the subjects they write about.

And all of this conversation automatically made me think of romance novels, and how women who write romance novels are so looked down on—and so is the genre itself—even though it’s a $1 billion industry and makes up OVER A THIRD OF THE U.S. FICTION MARKET.

Which led me further down the path to this mini-ephiphany: the reason that stories that feature or center women, or are FOR women (especially women whose identity as a woman intersects with other marginalized communities) is because we’ve spent our entire history as a society believing those stories had no value. That women’s entertainment, much like women’s labor and women’s pain and women’s opinions (ad infinitum) is inherently less valuable. And correlated to that, we’ve spent our entire history as a society telling men and boys that their stories are the important ones. Usually I believe that somebody else’s success does not equal my failure, but it seems to be until pretty much this moment in history, the men in charge believed that the success of women would have been their failure.

And then because there are few (or no) examples of successful women’s (or Black or POC or LGBTQ+) media, that’s used as evidence that there shouldn’t be because obviously nobody is interested. It’s part of the reason why somebody can look at a fucking gorgeous poster for A Wrinkle in Time—a story about a young girl—and ask whether or not the marketers want boys to be interested in the movie because there’s a girl featured on the poster and it’s got pastel colors. God forbid boys experience stories that don’t center them. It’s part of the reason why (white) writers are trying to find reasons to tear down or diminish the success of Black Panther. God forbid whiteness not be centered for one moment in time.

Maybe if the (mostly) cisgender straight white men had let us share the podium before now, we wouldn’t be pulling them off of it entirely. Sorry not sorry, you gotta go. You’re not good at sharing, so we’re taking your toys away and kicking you out of the sandbox. (That’s some mixed metaphoring, but I don’t care.)

So, to Samantha Irby and Lindy West, if they ever happen to see this: please keep writing whatever the fuck you want. The people who don’t respect you now will be replaced by those who do. By the people to whom your writing means something, and is important, and validating.

We’re on the way up. Thanks for helping to ready the path for us.

Edited to add: Town Hall does a podcast that often features upcoming or recent event folks, so if you wanted to listen to one featuring Samantha Irby and Lindy West, you could find that here.