Tag: mental health

TSM Book Club Book #27: Will They Or Won’t They by Ava Wilder

Posted in July Reads, TSM Book ClubTagged , , , , , , , , , , Leave a comment

Started: July 1st
Finished: July 6th
TSM Rating: 5/5

This was one of my most anticipated books of the year and I wasn’t disappointed.

I’m going to be honest, I loved Shane instantly, but it took awhile for Lilah to grow on me. She was such a frustrating character to root for. And this is coming from someone who can get lost in her own mind and feelings from time to time.

These two had such an epic meet cute at the beginning. Eyes meeting across a room, instant “this-one-is-going-to-be-different” attraction.

She realized belatedly that she’d gone too long staring at him without saying anything. He was still watching her, the corner of his mouth quirking up in amusement. Dimple, she thought stupidly, involuntarily.

WTOWT, pg. 10

Then a slow burn get together that goes down in flames. Which for most relationships is just the end, but the rebuilding of that fire from the cinder was epic. Ava Wilder really makes you work for their reconnection. She makes them work for it.

It would have been so easy for her to have these two characters fall right back into bed with angry, hateful sex right at the beginning, but that’s not what this couple is about. That first meeting was epic and life altering. It’s not something you want to mess up twice.

While Lilah is tough and emotionally reserved, Shane is softer and kinder, and emotionally available. He’s not perfect by any stretch of the imagination, his reaction to Lilah abruptly dumping him was immature at best. Most of his actions come from a place of hurt and fear.

What Ava Wilder does best with this and her first novel, How to Fake it in Hollywood, is building the anticipation and allowing her character space to grow and work on their flaws.

She suddenly understood, with a nauseating surge or regret, what a precious thing she’d been so careless with all those years ago, too blinded by distrust and self-loathing to see it standing right in front of her, if only been brave enough to reach for it.

WTOWT, pg. 182

I enjoyed this book so much. It was totally worth the wait.

TSM Book Club Book #21: Recipe for Persuasion by Sonali Dev

Posted in May Reads, TSM Book ClubTagged , , , , , , , , , , , Leave a comment

Started: May 22nd
Finished: May 31st
TSM Rating: 4.5/5

It is only by pure coincidence that the last two books I picked up to the end of May featured protagonists struggling with mental health issues with varying degrees of severity. Both deal with heavy topics of suicide, depression, loss, drug abuse, and parental abandonment.

First up is Recipe for Persuasion, whose lead, Ashna Raje, spends her whole life doing what she can to make her father happy much to her own detriment. She also spends most of her life angry with her mother for abandoning her time after time.

On the brink of losing her restaurant, typically reserved Ashna, through some coaxing by her best friend and cousin, ends up a chef competing on a celebrity cooking show in order to win the money to save it. The show’s premise is to pair a professional chef with a celebrity, and much to her surprise, Ashna is paired with her high school sweetheart turned professional soccer player Rico Silva. For his part, Rico has his own struggles as he never really got over Ashna and the abrupt ending to their relationship. When we meet him, he has reached the point where he has to confront his past in order to move forward.

On top of all this, Ashna’s whirly-gig of a mother, Shobi has chosen this moment in Ashna’s life to come back and try to fix things with her. Ashna has spent her life building walls to protect herself from her mother bouncing in and out of her life. To protect herself from her parents’ fighting. Even when her father commits suicide, she builds walls around herself to keep herself protected from disappointment and disappointing.

Throughout the book, we see her struggle to maintain control over her life and struggle as she tries to be a stronger version of herself. She needs to be that version of herself as she confronts the past with Shobi and Rico.

Recipe… epitomizes the phrase, “Sometimes you have to go back to move forward.”

I loved it for how it examined mother-daughter relationships and even what it means to be a mother. Shobi’s struggle to find work-life balance and to reconcile her own feelings about being a mother and wife and what she was forced to give up to reclaim her independence.

This was the problem with motherhood, the part Shobhan didn’t understand — why did it have to be an all-or-nothing game? Weren’t mothers human?

Recipe for Persuasion, pg. 269-270

I also loved the depth of love Ashna and Rico have for each other, even after twelve years apart. Love, real love, can stand the test of time and distance. The word Dev uses over and over to describe how Ashna and Rico feel about each other is essential. I loved how perfectly and succinctly it sums up what they are to each other.

Sometimes when people leave you, you get so caught up in trying to convince yourself that you can cut them out of your life that you think you’ve actually figured it out. You keep moving. You ignore the feeling of being chased, even as you can’t stop running and running to get away. But then you realize that you haven’t moved on at all. Those who are essential to you have always been an absence. Even when you refused to acknowledge it, their void was always there.

Rico, Recipe for Persuasion, page 344

This was such a good read. Even with some of the darker themes, there was a lot of hope and love infused into the story. It should be noted that this is the second book in a series. I didn’t realize it until I started this one, but the stories are stand-alone. I’ve already added Pride, Prejudice, and Other Flavors (the books are Sonali Dev’s reimagining of Jane Austen classics).

TSM Book Club Book #14: Z: A Novel of Zelda Fitzgerald by Therese Anne Fowler

Posted in March Reads, TSM Book ClubTagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , Leave a comment

Started: March 21st
Finished: April 5th
TSM Rating: -/5

So this took a while.😅

I full intended to finish this book before the end of March, but it took a while for me to really get into…like over one hundred pages. After finishing it, I’m left with mixed feelings. On one hand, it was well written. On the other it was repetitive.

I was left feeling that, though they ran in very cerebral circles, rubbing elbows with some of the greatest writers and artists of the 20th century, their life lack a lot of substance, although they both seemed to be striving for meaning and value.

This is a fictionalized version of the Fitzgerald marriage as seen through Zelda Fitzgerald’s eyes. Through her view, you see a woman who longs for independence, a little self-worth, and also to be seen as someone of worth by her husband and the world. Through her view, F. Scott Fitzgerald is an emotional, abusive, narcissistic, possibly homosexual, alcoholic who spends beyond his means and can’t get out of his own way.

In reading the acknowledgements at the end, Fowler said that in researching for the book biographers for both were either Team Zelda or Team Scott in the matter of who ruined whom. While reading, I did stop to peruse both their Wiki pages (I know, not always the most reliable source), but it was clear that whomever wrote Scott’s page was Team Scott.

Again, this book is a work of fiction but if I had to choose, I would say neither and both. I think they may both have needed up the way they did anyway. Early in the book, Zelda’s father observes Scott’s excessive drinking and tries to warn his daughter. A warning she doesn’t heed and it comes back to hahbtbher as Scott’s drinking is a point of contention in their marriage. Drinking was always going to be a hindrance for him whether he was married to Zelda or someone else.

As for Zelda, clearly their is a history of mental illness in her family, as he brother also had severe issues with his mental capacity. She continually runs up against the brick wall that is her husband. Who’s to say that a different husband wouldn’t have done the same?

On the flip side, Scott used Zelda as his muse for many of his stories. He took her letters, her life, their life together and turned it into fiction to win himself literary acclaim. For Zelda, she traveled the world and was able to explore her creativity. She learned from literal masters of their craft she likely never would’ve been exposed to had it not been for her marriage to Scott.

I don’t know if it’s our place to take sides in their marriage. Clearly all that mattered to the two of them is that they loved each other enough once not to completely abandon each other, no matter how many slights and hurtful words they said to each other. It seems they hung onto each other because of the deep love they had for each other once. It’s not our place to judge.

Because of that, I don’t have a rating for this book. If you’re interested in a fictional take on the adult life and times of Zelda Fitzgerald, give it a read.