Be Quiet!

Be Quiet! by Ryan T. Higgins
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

I gave this to my daughter for her 5th birthday because it makes me laugh out loud every single time I read it. Poor Rupert the Mouse just wants to create a wordless book, but his friends keep talking and ruining it! There are cameos by Higgins' character Bruce and one of the goslings (from his Mother Bruce series), which add to the fun. Plus, my daughter now knows the word "onomatopoeia"!

The illustrations really add to the story. I love Higgins' style of artwork--so much is conveyed by the expressions on the animals' faces and their body language.

View all my reviews

I'm Sad

I'm Sad by Michael Ian Black
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

This is a FANTASTIC book about sadness/grief. It's OK to feel sad, it won't last forever, and different things make different people/animals/potatoes feel better. There is some humor, too, although I don't quite want to "shelve" it as humor. But it did make my coworker laugh out loud, which is what brought the book to my attention in the first place!

The illustrations are outstanding--similar to Mo Willems in the way that a few lines and relatively simple drawings perfectly capture the thoughts, feelings, and emotions of these three friends.

My only quibble is that the wrong verb tense is used on one page, which is a pet peeve of mine. It should say, "If I WERE an astronaut, I would never be sad." Not "was." Copy editors should have caught this mistake. It's an "unreal conditional." Yes, I know I'm a big grammar nerd, but clarity and accuracy matters in language/communication!

View all my reviews

The Prime Minister's Secret Agent

The Prime Minister's Secret Agent by Susan Elia MacNeal
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Maggie is back in Britain, struggling with PTSD and depression, which she calls "The Black Dog." She retreats to Scotland to train aspiring spies, her only friend a stray cat who adopts her. When her supervisor forces her to attend the ballet to which she's been invited by her former flatmate, Sarah, Maggie finds herself in the middle of a murder mystery with ties to secret military experiments, and she discovers that sleuthing keeps The Black Dog at bay.

Meanwhile, at the Tower of London prison, Clara Hess, awaits her execution, insisting she'll only tell her secrets to Maggie, who refuses to go see her. She begins displaying multiple distinct personalities, but is she acting, or are they real?

On the other side of the world, the Japanese are preparing to attack Pearl Harbor. Despite ample clues and warnings, the U.S. fails to put the pieces together in time. However, the horrific attack brings enormous relief to the beleaguered British as the Americans finally join the war.

For reader's advisors: character doorway is primary, story and setting secondary. Some swearing. Characters are definitely flawed, but they grow and develop over the course of the book.

View all my reviews

The Lightning-Struck Heart

The Lightning-Struck Heart by T.J. Klune
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

An apprentice to the King's Wizard who gets kidnapped constantly, pines for the hunky Knight Commander, loves his parents, and has a hornless gay unicorn and a half-giant for best friends? Hilarious!! Absolutely crazy, and you just have to go with the flow. Or quest. Because, you know, rescuing the prince who's been kidnapped by a talking dragon and all that.

This is a long book (in print it's almost 400 pages, and the ebook version I read was over 600 pages), full of sass, snark, adventure, romance, heartbreak, sex puns, and magic. The characters are delightful--even the supposed villains cracked me up--and the dialogue had me convulsing with laughter.

Warning, though: you must have a VERY high tolerance for profanity and gay sex puns to enjoy this book. Seriously. So. Much. Swearing. And reference to sex--acts, organs, feelings. No actual sex scenes until the last few pages, though, unless you count the...er...interspecies encounter Sam unfortunately overhears a few chapters earlier. (He'll never get those images out of his brain! Gah!) As a straight woman, the actual sex scenes weren't my cup of tea, but they're more or less analogous to hetero sex scenes in some of the steamier romance novels I've read.

Almost all the characters were queer--mostly gay, one was asexual, and "Mama" was a drag queen. There were some token CIS characters, namely Sam's parents, the King, and the female members of the Ryan Foxheart fan club. I loved that being gay was completely ordinary and unremarkable. Even the Prince was gay, and that was no big deal because somehow gay men could have babies (although how was not explained).

The one thing that kept my rating from being 5 stars (and I know it's kind of nit-picky) was that the author & his copy editor REALLY need to learn the difference between "who" and "whom." Every single time "whom" should have been used...it wasn't. And there was at least one case where "I" was used in place of "me." The grammar mistakes yanked me out of the story and made me long for the ability to teach Mr. Klune & his editor about the difference between subjective & objective pronouns. It wouldn't have hurt for the book to have been a teensy bit shorter, although I feel like I should duck and cover for saying that.

This is the first in a series, and I look forward to reading the next installments!

View all my reviews

Sacred Rest: Recover your life, renew your energy, restore your sanity

Sacred Rest: Recover Your Life, Renew Your Energy, Restore Your Sanity by Saundra Dalton-Smith
My rating: 1 of 5 stars

I really wanted to like this book. I requested my library purchase it so I could read it. But...it is WAY too preachy, repetitive, and lacking in useful content. I enjoyed the brief scientific parts. I enjoyed some of the parts where she talked about her own struggles and those of her patients. However, I needed there to be much more science and much much less evangelism. I'm fully on board with the idea that rest is sacred, necessary, and as God intended. Stop quoting Bible verses at me, though, especially when they are taken out of context and irrelevant. I wanted to read the book to get tips/ideas for how to manage my life so that I feel more rested, present, joyful, and calm. In the end, I realized that reading the book was annoying me so much I was skimming it while rolling my eyes and muttering impolite responses, so when my checkout expired, I didn't bother to renew and finish the last few chapters. She wasn't saying anything new. In fact, the book might not have been too bad had an editor removed all the redundancies, nearly every Bible verse, and every attempt to convert the reader to her particular brand of evangelical Christianity.

View all my reviews

Grown-Up Marriage: What we know, wish we had known, and still need to know about being married

Grown Up Marriage: What We Know, Wish We Had Known, and Still Need to Know about Being Married by Judith Viorst
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

Someone gave this to me for a bridal shower gift, I think, but it sat on my to-read shelves for the past 8 years until I picked it up almost at random last month. I'm actually pretty glad I didn't read it prior to getting married or even in the first few years of my marriage, as I found the tone of much of it quite dismal and depressing and focused on unhappy people.

On the bright side, I appreciate my own marriage and husband even more now that I've finished the book! Perhaps it's a generational thing, since Viorst is substantially older than I am, or maybe her intended audience is the generation younger than I, who might be getting married before they've figured out who they are and what they want? Really, though, there aren't a whole lot of earth-shattering revelations. Much of the book boils down to:
1) Choose your life partner very carefully (I personally recommend eHarmony!)
2) Communicate honestly, kindly, and frequently
3) Treat each other with respect
4) Don't cheat on your spouse and expect anyone to feel good about it
5) Really, just don't cheat on your spouse
6) Maintain your sex life (with your own spouse--see #5)
7) Have fun together because those memories will help sustain you through the rough patches
8) Everything will change all the time as you move through the stages of life, so expect continual adjustments and plan to do the hard work of making them in concert with your spouse.

I don't want to give the impression that I hated the book--it wasn't awful, it just wasn't as helpful as I'd hoped. Clearly there are plenty of other reviewers for whom it clicked. Maybe they recognized themselves in some of the couples or situations, maybe they had some "Aha!" moments while reading one or more sections, or maybe they just read it at exactly the right moment in their lives. That's great! I will donate my copy to the Friends of the Library for a book sale so perhaps it'll make its way to someone who'll get that kind of benefit from it.

View all my reviews

Vox

Vox by Christina Dalcher
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

In this near-future dystopia, a right-wing, ultra-conservative preacher leads the "Pure" movement which controls the country to the point where women, girls, and even female babies are forced to wear counters on their wrists which limit them to 100 words per day and administer increasingly painful shocks for each word over that 100. Reading and writing are forbidden. Jobs, passports, and bank accounts, etc., are for men and boys only. Anyone who doesn't adhere to the "Pure" standards--such as adulterers, all LGBTQIA people, and those who protest the restrictions--are sent to "work camps" to do hard manual labor in utter silence. And worse.

Dr. Jean McClellan has been chafing for a year at the restrictions, ripped away from her work as a top neuroscientist days before from curing Wernicke's aphasia--an illness which strips language from its victims, making words jumbled and meaningless. Then the president's brother is stricken with the illness, and suddenly the Reverend Carl and an assortment of suited men in black SUVs show up at her door with an offer she ultimately cannot refuse: return to work long enough to finish the anti-aphasia serum. Touring her new tightly monitored lab with teammates Lorenzo and Lin confirms that all is not above-board, wreaking havoc with her plan to buy time (and unlimited words) for herself and her daughter by not revealing how close they already are to a cure. Question is, is it really a cure that those in power want?

Jean used to be apolitical, never imagining a fringe movement could gain such power. Now she's fighting for the lives of everyone she loves as part of an underground resistance network. Her tension, frustration, despair, rage, and fear are palpable. I could almost hear relentless, urgent music playing in the background as I read. It was particularly haunting to alternate reading this novel with listening to the third Maggie Hope mystery, set primarily in WWII Berlin. In the era of a Trump White House, this cautionary tale should inspire you to exercise your right to vote, speak up, and join protest movements...while you still can.

Do not read this at bedtime because you'll either try to sleep and fail, or keep reading through the night until you finish the book.

For readers' advisors: story doorway is primary, character and setting are secondary. There is quite a bit of profanity, some sex, and some violence.  There is a lot to discuss, so it's a good choice for book clubs.  Also suggest to fans of The Handmaid's Tale or Future Home of the Living God.

Many thanks to Bookbrowse.com and the publisher for the ARC I received in exchange for my honest review! I don't usually read dystopia, but this was excellent.

View all my reviews