April Reading Recap
Hello, fellow book lovers! Heavy memoir month with only one I’d strongly recommend. The moral of the story is that not everyone should write memoirs, and I need to stop being suckered into reading them. There were a few standouts from this month that I couldn’t recommend more to you (Poor Deer, Rainbow Black, and While You Were Out). I hope you find something that tickles your fancy. Until next month, happy reading!
Poor Deer by Claire Oshetsky
Quick Synopsis: Margaret’s earliest memory is the day her friend died. This day shaped the rest of her young life. To cope with her traumatic reality, she creates an alternative reality in her mind to live in, with only happy endings. However hard she tries to live in this fairytale-like state, her conscience still haunts her as a magical manifestation taking shape as Poor Deer that makes her face that day of her friend’s tragic death.
Strong Points: I love a book in which you can dissect the many subtle layers without the author force-feeding them to the reader. The characters are kept at arm’s length, yet they are well developed and complex. The narrator is struggling to cope with her past while also protecting herself from the truth by fabricating alternate endings for the situations she’s in, leading to an unreliable narrator. If you can let go and go with the flow, you’ll enjoy this one. This book is not rooted in reality, but for me, it worked. Its heavy themes of grief, trauma, and the weight of guilt are told in a really beautiful way.
Weak Points: It was hard to get a sense of when the book took place. At points, it felt fairytale-like and didn’t take place in our time, but then a TV would be mentioned. But that’s me nitpicking; it was a solid book.
Writing Style: 4.5/5
Characters: 5/5
Plot: 4.5/5
Flow/Pacing: 4/5
Overall Rating: 4.5/5
Highly Recommend
For fans of: Beautyland by Marie-Helene Bertin, James by Percival Everett, and Piglet by Lottie Hazell
Rainbow Black by Maggie Thrash
Quick Synopsis: : Lacey lives with her hippie parents, who run a daycare center for the local kids in their rural town. Life was good for Lacey and her family until the Satanic Panic hit. Lacey’s parents are thrown in jail after being accused of practicing Satanic rituals and abusing the children at their daycare, breaking apart her family and turning her world upside down.
Strong Points: The characters were all very well developed and flushed out. You understood each of their motives, and you fell in love with this dysfunctional family and even the secondary characters. It’s a gripping story that explores a very real part of our country’s unsettling history of prosecuting those who are different. I couldn’t put it down.
Maggie Thrash published a graphic novel memoir (such a cool concept) before this one. I'm definitely going to be adding that to my TBR.
Weak Points: Dylan, Lacey’s childhood friend, has a complete personality change in the second half of the book. It felt like a completely different character, which I wasn’t the biggest fan of. Again, that’s just me nitpicking because this one was fantastic.
Writing Style: 4.5/5
Characters: 4/5
Plot: 5/5
Flow/Pacing: 5/5
Overall Rating: 4.5/5
Highly Recommend
For fans of: Diavola by Jennifer Marie Thorne, Rouge by Mona Awad, and Like Happiness by Ursula Villarreal-Moura
My Side of the River by Elizabeth Camarillo Gutierrez
Quick Synopsis: After her parents’ visas expire, they are forced back to Mexico, and Elisabeth is left to navigate life in the US alone at the young age of 15.
Strong Points: The author is one strong cookie. Having to spend your teenage years alone must have been so challenging at times. I find her strength admirable.
Weak Points: My biggest issue with this book was the lack of emotion and depth. It felt very unauthentic and had an undertone of bitchiness. After getting into Penn, she didn’t want to go because she “couldn’t bear the thought of getting into a private Ivy League university and having it be confused with a public state school.” She had this elitist attitude of someone who grew up on The Upper East Side and was chauffeured to private school every day. While yes, she went through tremendously tough times that I can’t even fathom, I got the sense that she thinks she’s better than everyone else having gone through what she has gone through. She can’t quite turn off that competitive edge and protective emotional layer, making her come off as cold. After landing an internship that she worked so hard to get, she can’t help but say, “I tried to find a work outfit that would make my coworkers jealous.” Gutierrez reminded me of those annoying, over-achieving straight-edge kids in school who constantly bragged about not doing drugs and loved the heavy course work loads, making it into their personalities. Listen, I get it. She felt she was given an opportunity to stay in America and wanted to work hard to achieve and make something of herself, so she strictly focused on that to quiet the anxieties of being alone in the country. It just felt as if writing this book was just another thing she could check off her list of things she wanted to achieve in her life. While all the power to you, it lacked the soul and emotion I was hoping to get from a tragic subject matter like this. I was left wondering what the author wanted us to take away from her book. She could have used this opportunity to shed light on the policies that could help other children in her shoes, but instead she decided to write 272 pages on all of her accomplishments. Booo. Save yourself the time and just go to the author’s LinkedIn profile, and you’ll get just as much out of it as I did with this book.
Long story long, not everyone needs to write memoirs.
Writing Style: 2/5
Plot: 3/5
Flow/Pacing: 2/5
Overall Rating: 2/5
Not Recommend
For fans of: Educated by Tara Westover, Wandering Stars by Tommy Orange, and The Things We Didn’t Know by Elba Iris Perez
Private Equity: A Memoir by Carrie Sun
Quick Synopsis: A woman’s memoir about her time as the assistant to one of the most prestigious hedge fund billionaire founders
Strong Points: After doing some digging and stalking Sun’s LinkedIn page, I discovered the billionaire hedge fund founder was Chase Coleman, founder of Tiger Global Management (his wife was featured in the HBO documentary “Born Rich” alongside Ivanka Trump). Her time at the hedge fund was demanding, exhausting, and yet so fun to read about. They worked hard, but they also played hard. Seeing how the 1% live, flying to exotic islands to surf big waves that morning, eating $50 meals for lunch, and ordering $1,000 cakes to then leave untouched and thrown away was the best part of this book.
Weak Points: The author repeatedly talks about how uninterested in money she is and how it’s not a driving force for her like it is for other people. Yet she continuously talks about how expensive the clothes she is wearing are and the cost of the lavish gifts she’s receiving down to the dollar amount, how much everyone is making, and how she books herself expensive spa retreats to unwind. For someone who doesn’t need money, this money sure is affording her an expensive lifestyle. She doesn’t care about money because she’s never HAD to care about money. After graduating from MIT, she had no student loans because her parents paid for everything. As the reader, you never get the sense of what motivates the author (if we are to believe it isn’t money), which leaves you with this shell of a person. And hey, maybe she’s still trying to figure it out. If that’s the case, maybe wait awhile to write a memoir then, huh?
Writing Style: 3/5
Plot: 5/5
Flow/Pacing: 2/5
Overall Rating: 3/5
Eh, Recommend
For fans of: Burn Book by Kara Swisher, The Trading Game by Gary Stevenson, and Extremely Hardcore by Zoe Schiffer
Chamber Divers: The Untold Story of D-Day Scientists Who Changed Special Operations Forever by Rachel Lance
Quick Synopsis: Using newly declassified information, this book explores the scientists and their research with submersibles and how it impacted WWII.
Strong Points: The author did a wonderful job of storytelling, making each experiment and war recap into an exhilarating tale, engrossing the reader right from the start. Each of the scientists’ personal lives was well researched, so you felt like you knew the characters on a personal level, which resulted in a deeper connection with them and the story. For a 500-page nonfiction book about war and experiments, it read as a light and easy read. I especially liked the pressure chamber experiments. Since they didn’t have any technology and were under time constraints, they used themselves as test dummies to figure out what gas mixture would work while deep underwater. What these people put themselves through in the name of science was remarkable.
Weak Points: I’m not the biggest fan of military history; even though they were well-written, she did go on a little too long and in great detail about the D-Day invasion. For the first five pages, I was into it, but then it started to lose my attention.
Writing Style: 4/5
Characters: 4/5
Plot: 3.5/5
Flow/Pacing: 4/5
Overall Rating: 4/5
Recommend
For Fans of: All the Beauty in the World by Patrick Bringley, To the End of the Earth by John C. McManus, and What the Dead Know by Barbara Butcher
Thank you, NetGalley, and Penguin Group Dutton for providing me with a free, electronic ARC in exchange for an honest review.
Greta & Valdin by Rebecca K. Reilly
Quick Synopsis: Sister and brother, Greta and Valdin, live together in a flat in Auckland. Valdin is recovering from the heartbreak of his boyfriend's move to Buenos Aires. Greta is working on her master’s thesis and trying to keep her head above water with her meager academic salary. Together, they try to navigate adulthood the best they can.
Strong Points: It was set in New Zealand, which was fun. I haven’t read many books set in New Zealand. The slang was great.
Weak Points: This book is getting so much buzz, and I’m for sure in the minority with this review when I say I didn’t care for it. This could definitely be a me problem, since I don’t tend to read books like this and am not the target audience, but I found this book ridiculous at times. It’s going for light, funny, and ridiculous, but I couldn’t get down with the goof. Between the 45 different characters with similar names, the complex family/friend relationship webs, and how everyone was hooking up with each other (toeing the line of incest at times), it just fell flat. The characters were ALL charming and witty, always having funny comebacks and perfect comedic timing. It felt as if the author only knew how to write one type of character, which resulted in the characters being carbon copies of each other. It became quite repetitive and obnoxious after a while. Again, it might be a me problem, so take this review as you wish.
Writing Style: 4/5
Characters: 2/5
Plot: 2.5/5
Flow/Pacing: 3/5
Overall Rating: 3/5
Not Recommend
For fans of: Piglet by Lottie Hazell, Memory Piece by Lisa Ko, and Green Dot by Madeleine Gray
While You Were Out: An Intimate Family Portrait of Mental Illness by Meg Kissinger
Quick Synopsis: After seeing most of her family members suffer from mental illness and not get the help they need, Kissinger explores the system that failed them and what it was like growing up in this fragile family.
Strong Points: You know when you open a book and are instantly soothed by the author’s writing? That’s how it felt to read this book, from the first page to the last. Which is a feat considering the heavy subject matter. It’s a beautiful story of what it means to be there for each other as a family and meet people where they are in life, while also raising awareness for how the government has failed to provide mental health resources, especially to those who are in dire need of them. Kissinger shares what it was like to grow up with eight siblings, several of whom suffered from bipolar disorder, depression, and anxiety. She was raised by a mother who was hospitalized several times for depression and anxiety and a manic father who was prone to violence. She tells this part in such a caring and sensitive way, making sure not to exploit her family. She used her platform as a journalist to reach other families suffering from mental illnesses, squashing the stigma around suicide (especially amongst the Catholic community) in the ‘90s. This book delves pretty heavily into suicide, suicide attempts, and drug overdoses. It’s definitely not a light read, but if this is a topic that interests you, I would highly recommend it.
Weak Points: Nothing that I can really think of.
Writing Style: 5/5
Plot: 5/5
Flow/Pacing: 4.5/5
Overall Rating: 4.5/5
Highly Recommend
For fans of: Hidden Valley Road by Robert Kolker, Grief Is for People by Sloan Crosley, and Dopesick by Beth Macy
Sociopath by Patric Gagne
Quick Synopsis: A memoir of a sociopath, from her childhood to her adulthood.
Strong Points: Gagne saw nothing wrong with breaking into her neighbor’s house after realizing they weren’t home to fetch a cup of sugar that her mom sent her to ask for. Her mind simply works differently than others'. This made for an interesting story about her childhood and how she felt like she had to walk on thin ice, unsure why her actions were wrong when they really weren’t hurting others. As she grew up and became less innocent, of course her behavior became creepy and bizarre, leading to an interesting story.
Weak Points: This book is all the rage right now. Gagne has been all over the place with her “honest” pieces in the NYT and on every podcast that will have her. You have to give it to her; she has an impressive publicist. Okay, maybe I’m being too harsh, but I suspect we have another James Frey situation on our hands (author of A Million Little Pieces, a “memoir” that turned out to be semi-fictional after he was caught fabricating events)! Here is why I’m suspicious:
#1: 85% of the writing was dialogue that read as fiction. There certainly can be dialogue in memoirs, but there is no way that every conversation is recorded with 100% accuracy unless she has Highly Superior Autobiographical Memory. Which I highly doubt since the author even stated in the first few pages that she’s a liar. So, an untrustworthy narrator isn’t a great start for a memoir.
#2: In the last ½ of the book, the author goes to graduate school to get her PhD in psychology so she can better help her fellow sociopaths. Her schooling and research are both heavily mentioned. Now here’s where the problem pops up. Since she drones on about what great research she is doing and how important it is, why isn’t this groundbreaking dissertation found anywhere or referenced in other research? So, there is a lot of talk about her brilliant work, but nothing to back it up.
In the few statistics that she did throw out in the book, there weren’t any citations to back them up. I would have liked her to dig deeper and maybe hear more research about how one becomes a sociopath. Are they born this way? How much of their upbringing plays a role? Is it genetic? Etc. Instead, we read 100 pages about her adventures of flirting with a “really well-known guitarist” from a “really well-known band” that just loves her!
She’s also not a therapist anymore, so she's not really doing much of helping others with this syndrome, like she claims throughout the whole book, and instead just writes using the shock factor of admitting to being a sociopath. Lastly, was she ever a practicing psychologist? I can’t find anything online about where she practiced or for how long.
Okay, rant over. If this bad review intrigues you enough to read the book, or if you find this mysterious dissertation, let me know.
Writing Style: 1/5
Plot: 1/5
Flow/Pacing: 2/5
Overall Rating: 1.5/5
Not Recommend
For fans of: The Age of Magical Overthinking by Amanda Montell, Did I Ever Tell You by Genevieve Kingston, and Knife by Salman Rushdie
Superfoods, Silkworms, and Spandex: Science and Pseudoscience in Everyday Life by Joe Schwarcz
Quick Synopsis: A collection of short essays on the science behind everyday objects.
Strong Points: For the most part, the essays were pretty interesting, and I walked away having learned something. Like the stingers on bees, they contain the same chemical that is responsible for giving bananas their signature smell. And bats are the primary pollinators of agave. No bats = no tequila
The author is the director of McGill University’s Office for Science and Society and has published several books in this format. It’s clear he’s very knowledgeable on the subject of chemistry, yet he did a nice job of being playful with these essays.
Weak Points: A few essays were a little lackluster. While I enjoyed this book, it felt a little coffee table-booky—not one you would necessarily need to read cover to cover. Entertaining, but nothing to write home about.
Writing Style: 4/5
Plot: 3/5
Flow/Pacing: 3/5
Overall Rating: 3/5
Recommend
For fans of: Edison’s Ghosts by Katie Spalding, His Majesty’s Airship by S.C. Gwynne, and Wheat Belly by William Davis
Thank you, NetGalley, and ECW Press for providing me with a free, electronic ARC in exchange for an honest review.
“Get busy living, or get busy dying.” - Different Seasons by Stephen King
