When Jane finds out that her sixteen-year-old niece Kayla has disappeared, at first Jane's all, why should I care?
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But then Jane hears that Kayla is a coldhearted, distant person - just like Jane herself - and sees a picture of Kayla with the empty look of a sociopath in her eyes. And suddenly Jane is interested.
So Jane takes time away from her boyfriend Luke (who's stressing Jane out with his talk of moving in together) and from her law firm (where she's been busily bringing about the downfall of a particularly obnoxious young partner) and travels to her childhood town to see if she can find a missing young girl who might just need what Jane has to offer.
3.66 stars, mostly because the middle part got really slow-paced, when Jane's visiting her completely dysfunctional family and wandering around town looking for clues, and possibly a little action. She gets this rather odd fascination with wind turbines that eventually leads her to some insights into her relationship with Luke and her own psyche. That subplot took too long for too little payoff.
But the story picked up nicely in the final third, with a memorable ending. And Jane comes up with gems like this:
What he doesn’t know is that his testicles don’t imbue him with immortality, and I could easily get out a gun while he’s fumbling with the button of his pants. I could kill him and leave his body in the dirt where no one would spot it from the highway. Like he’s a woman. Like he’s one of a million dead women.
Why did he have a drink with her if he didn’t want it? Why did he let her into his truck? Why did he go off with her if he wanted to say no? What did he expect to happen? You really have to be smarter if you don’t want to get murdered by strange women.
Thanks to NetGalley and the publisher for the ARC!
Content notes: F-bombs and some sexual content (not quite what you might think, but ...)....more
A bitter, ongoing quarrel with her mother about her career plans to be a chef led Natalie Tan tOn sale now! Review first posted on :
A bitter, ongoing quarrel with her mother about her career plans to be a chef led Natalie Tan to leave her San Francisco home in anger. Seven years of stubborn silence and globe-wandering later, Natalie is called home by a neighbor at her mother’s passing. She still deeply desires to be a chef and to have her own authentic Chinese restaurant, like her grandmother Qiao had done many years earlier, and now she’ll have the chance: Natalie has inherited her laolao’s (maternal grandmother’s) long-abandoned restaurant below their apartment. It’s still operable, though dusty and dirty, but their Chinatown neighborhood is fraying, with family-owned businesses dying and a steep rise in real estate prices causing Chinese families to move away.
A psychically-gifted neighbor returns Qiao’s old, handmade recipe book to Natalie, along with a prediction: if Natalie cooks three recipes from the book to help three of her neighbors, as her laolao did many years ago, and is able to save these neighbors, her restaurant will be the jewel of Chinatown and the neighborhood will be revitalized. Natalie is initially dubious and reluctant � she feels like her neighbors had let her down when she was struggling to deal with her mother’s agoraphobia years ago � but she soon enters into the spirit of the endeavor, and magical things begin to happen when her neighbors eat her food.
As I watched, fractures ran along the surface of their skin, reminding me of shattered porcelain. The cracks deepened as they ate. Once they were finished, tiny streams of glittering gold filled the cracks: mending, repairing what was broken, and transforming it into something far more beautiful. It was similar to a piece of kintsukuroi I’d picked up in Tokyo, repaired pottery that had been mended with gold.
As Natalie begins cooking in Qiao’s restaurant, the scent of fried dumplings even leads a handsome young man to her restaurant and her life. But neither love nor her quest to help the neighborhood is as easy as Natalie had expected.
Natalie Tan’s Book of Luck and Fortune is a charming, sweet tale with a dash of magical realism. I expected something like The Joy Luck Club or a Chinese-American version of Like Water for Chocolate. What I got was more like a literary version of a Hallmark TV romance movie. It’s so lightweight as to approach being fluffy, though the immersion in Chinese culture and food serves to give it some heft and make the story more memorable. Several Chinese recipes are included in the novel, and they and the luscious descriptions of Natalie’s cooking made my mouth water. The romance subplot wasn’t particularly well-developed or romantically satisfying; I got far more enjoyment out of reading about the “plump prawns� and “tender steamed rice noodles and crunchy golden fritters.�
Debut author Roselle Lim incorporates a few serious issues into her tale, including mental illness and the loss of ethnic urban neighborhoods. Her writing is sometimes clunky; phrases like “gathering fog brewed at the base of the gate the way steam rises from a perfect bowl of noodle soup� and “hoping the fog would thicken like salted duck congee to conceal my arrival� struck me as unintentionally humorous.
Natalie Tan’s Book of Luck and Fortune is a warmhearted tale with an authentic Chinese voice, if not as deep and literary as one might hope. Don’t expect too much from this book and you may enjoy it.
Thanks to the publisher and NetGalley for the ARC!...more
A Pakistani retelling of Pride and Prejudice? And by an author born in Pakistan? I was all, sign me up!
So ... 3.66 stars. It's not perfect, and oftenA Pakistani retelling of Pride and Prejudice? And by an author born in Pakistan? I was all, sign me up!
So ... 3.66 stars. It's not perfect, and often it follows the original P&P plot a little too closely, especially with the characters' names and some famous lines and scenes from P&P that were a little too spot-on. Alysba (Alys) Binat as Elizabeth Bennet and Valentine Darsee are okay, but I draw the line at Jeorgeulla Wickaam and the "Looclus" (Lucas) clan. Humeria (Hammy) and Sumeria (Sammy) Bingla for the Bingley sisters was pretty funny, though. Mr. Collins is Farhat Kaleen, an older widower with three children; Charlotte Lucas is Sherry Looclus. The character makeovers of those last two were awesome, by the way.
I liked it best where it veered from P&P in some interesting ways; Sherry's point of view and subplot, for example, was really fascinating to me (view spoiler)[and ultimately happier than Charlotte's; I love that Sherry is happy with her tradeoffs and more affluent lifestyle, and is even enthusiastic about sex with Kaleen, and mothering his children (hide spoiler)]. The Elizabeth Bennet character, Alys, is strident in her feminism, enough so that the ultimate romantic wrap-up seems a little out of character. The traditional P&P plot is modernized in several ways, including her character (age 30, and fighting against some of the traditions of her country relating to marriage and the role of women), as well as a gay character and sympathetic discussion of abortion(view spoiler)[ (the Wickham character got the Georgiana character pregnant a year or so before the events in this novel) (hide spoiler)].
I really enjoyed the immersion into modern-day Pakistani life. The moral quandaries transfer pretty well into current Pakistani culture, including the obsession with marrying well and the near-disaster that Lydia ("Lady") causes her family. The food sounded like it was to die for. And fairly frequently the novel was quite insightful into human relationships, in ways that aren't entirely owed to Jane Austen.
I wanted to tell him about my kind and generous Jena, my fearless Alys, my artist Qitty, who holds her head up no matter what anyone says to her, and my Mari, who just wants everyone to go to heaven. Even my silly, selfish Lady, who doesn't know what is good for her and just wants to have a good time all the time. But I didn't tell him about any one of my daughters. He doesn't deserve to know a single thing about my precious girls.
Awww!
The writing is sometimes a bit clunky, especially when the author is making a social point. But it was still an interesting story, as long as you don't mind that it toes the P&P line pretty closely.
I received a free copy of this ebook from the publisher through NetGalley for review. Thank you!
Content notes: a few F-bombs (4, to be exact). Some innuendos, but no other sexual content....more
Just published in June 2018, Tell Me Lies is an in-depth examination of a young woman's toxic relationship with the wrong person, a guy she meets her Just published in June 2018, Tell Me Lies is an in-depth examination of a young woman's toxic relationship with the wrong person, a guy she meets her first year in college and stays more or less entangled with over the next several years. If you've ever dealt with a sociopathic lover who's hard to give up, or known someone in that situation, or would just find it fascinating to see the same situations from the points of view of both the vulnerable partner and the user who has no mercy or conscience ... I'd recommend this book.
Lucy Albright has no idea what she's in for when she lets Stephen DeMarco into her life when she's a freshman in college. He's attractive but not all that, but he knows how to appeal to women. In fact, he makes a study of it, deliberately creating a persona that his target young lady will like ... and lying ruthlessly and without conscience. Mostly so he can juggle several different sexual relationships at the same time. Sex and money are his only real cares - well, along with alcohol and drugs. And both Stephen and Lucy have secrets they're hiding.
The chapters alternate between Lucy's and Stephen's points of view. Stephen's chapters were chilling but effective. The author never tries to hide the ball or surprise you about what's going on in his head.
Stuff like that used to happen throughout my childhood and into my teenage years—events or moments when I’d lack the specific emotional response expected of me. Time and time again, the empathetic reactions that seemed to be required never came... I learned about appropriate responses; I began simulating them when appropriate. And somewhere in that haze of it I came to the realization that I was different. I didn’t want to hurt people, but I could, and when I did, there was something cathartic and liberating about it, especially because any collateral damage was almost always rectifiable. I know about guilt, and it doesn’t apply to me—I don’t carry the burden of it. It actually works to my advantage, most of the time.
Tell Me Lies kind of accidentally got put on my NetGalley approvals (I was asking the publicist for two other books and this one just got approved along with them) so I took a look at it, even though this really isn't my type of book. It's hard R-rated, with lots of college parties, drinking, drugs and sex. F-bombs litter the pages like confetti. I ended up skimming most of it, and it was rather slow-paced, but it was compelling in a hard-to-look-away kind of way.
Some readers will love this book; others will hate it. Know yourself.
I received a free copy of this book from the publicist through NetGalley for review. Thanks!...more
$2.99 Kindle sale, Nov. 17, 2017. This Pulitzer Prize winning novel, a collection of interrelated short stories, has been on my TBR list for a long wh$2.99 Kindle sale, Nov. 17, 2017. This Pulitzer Prize winning novel, a collection of interrelated short stories, has been on my TBR list for a long while. But the GR reviews are all over the map, from 1 star (boring, depressing) to 5 enthusiastic stars. And those are from friends and reviewers that I trust.
Tadiana ✩Night Owl�
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