Tag: reading

TSM Book Club Book #9: Honey Girl by Morgan Rogers

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Started: February 17th
Finished: February 24th
TSM Rating: 4/5

Quarter-life crisis. Complete debilitating fear that every decision you’ve ever made was wrong. Trying to prove yourself in a world that doesn’t want to try and understand you. Also, finding a love so big and scary you need to run away from it.

Grace Porter is at a crossroads in her life. She’s finally finished school, getting her PhD. Now she has to get a job in her chosen field — astronomy —and everything goes terribly wrong. When she crashes and burns her first interview, everything that she’s suppressed over the last decade finally catches up to her. So much so that she’s does something so rash as to get married to a woman she just met, Yuki, on her graduation trip to Las Vegas.

The way Morgan Rogers writes about Grace — Porter as she called by everyone in her life — and Yuki’s connection is so lyrical and enchanting. It’s the best part of the book.

As Grace begins to confront her future, she also begins to open her eyes and see all the things she’s missed in her singular focus on the plan that she had laid out for herself, but also by her strict military man father, who everyone, including Grace, refers to as Colonel.

I couldn’t help but feel frustrated for Grace throughout the whole book, though. Her parents failed her in so many ways. There’s one character in the book — Miss Debbie — who works for Grace’s father and who feels like she can speak to Grace in any way she wants to. I think that’s the part that made me the angriest. It’s not clear if Colonel knows how Miss Debbie treats Grace and condones it or if he’s ignorant to it and Grace doesn’t tell him because she is so afraid of disappointing him.

On some level, everyone in the book is on their own mental health journey. The story is about the thing we do to please everyone else and confronting what that can do to us. It’s about friendship and the family that you chose. It’s about learning to be there for those who love you and being there for yourself. It’s about putting yourself first, but also supporting the people who choose to support you.

TSM Book Club Book #8: Purple Hibiscus by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

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Started: February 10th
Finished: February 17th
TSM Rating: 4/5

This story was so consistently heartbreaking that I wasn’t sure how I would feel by the end.

For 307 pages, we live in the head of 15-year-old Kambili, a girl from a devoutly Catholic, Nigerian family. While a pillar of the community, her father is incredibly emotionally and physically abusive toward Kambili, her brother Jaja, and her mother. He’s abusive to the point where they are all afraid to express any emotion. At one point on the book Kambili said she doesn’t ever remember laughing and wouldn’t know what her laugh sounds like.

Through all the repression and fear, Kambili still desperately wants and strives for her father’s approval. Even after she and Jaja spend time with her father’s sister and her children, and they see what the world could be like beyond their religious oppression, Kambili still holds on to the belief that she is nothing without her father’s approval.

Over the course of the story, we see both Kambili and Jaja transform in their own ways to grow beyond their father. The way Achidie describes the physical changes in Kambili and Jaja as their personalities evolve is like watching flowers bloom.

It was an overall beautiful story of moving beyond what you know in order to find who you are. Changing your surroundings to change your mind set and breaking ties to move you forward, while strengthening others to find strength in yourself. A story of the things you hold on to in order to survive even in the most hopeless circumstances.

TSM Book Club Book #7: Fake It Til You Bake It by Jamie Wesley

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Started: February 6th
Finished: February 9th
TSM Rating: 5/5

This book was so much fun. I loved the banter between the main characters — Jada and Donovan — and I also loved that they were honest with each other from the very beginning. I know that it’s a popular romance trope, but I hate it when characters hide things from each other that will inevitably blow up in their face when the truth is revealed. And this is coming from an AVID watcher of Hallmark Christmas movies! So much chaos that can be avoided with a single conversation!

Jada and Donovan are polar opposites, but their personalities complement each. In my last review, I mentioned that I didn’t like doubting whether a couple would last — a Happy-For-Now vs. a Happy-Ever-After — this one, like Seven Days in June, felt like a HEA.

I also love the setup for her next book!

TSM Book Club Book #6: Seven Days in June by Tia Williams

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Started: February 1st
Finished: February 6th
TSM Rating: 4/5

Dark. Melancholy. Isolated. Bright. Funny. Hopeful.

Those are all the things I felt while reading this book. Tia Williams really gets to the heart of what life can truly feel like when you have no one to rely on but yourself. She also shone a big shiny light on what it feels like to find the one person that truly gets you. How whole that can make you feel when you have and how hollow you can be when you lose it.

Shane and Eva are two very flawed characters. They aren’t shiny and bright like most romance/women’s fiction novel characters can be. And their dark is depths of hell kind of dark, but they are endearing because of their ability to endure. Their unbridled love and passion for each other are the kinds of things that teenage love affairs are made of. The seven days they spend together are all angsty, gritty, horny stuff that makes up the best teen romances.

The levelheaded maturity they show in the end really gets me. Sometimes I read these books that are all about the HEA, but I finish them thinking, These relationships would NEVER actually work in real life. At least not without A LOT of couples therapy. This one, though, I think could go the distance. And I liked that. I liked the feeling I got finishing this book at 3:30 in the morning — when both my toddlers wake up and fall back to sleep, but I’m now WIDE awake, I read. It felt like, These crazy kids might actually go the distance.

I liked that feeling. I want more of that feeling in my books. I’ll pick up a few more Tia Williams books, chasing this high.

TSM Book Club Book #5: Love in the Time of Serial Killers

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Started: January 26th
Finished: February 1st
TSM Rating: 3.5/5

I meant to finish this yesterday, but caught up with kid stuff.

Either way, I liked this one. Beyond the love story between Phoebe and Sam, it was about the scars our parents leave us with.

Our protagonist, Phoebe is a few months removed from the death of her estranged father when she moves back to her childhood home to prepare it for sale. As Meredith Grey would say, she’s dark and twisty. Which is juxtaposed with her little-hearted, ray-of-sunshine brother, Conner.

Sam, her dad’s next door neighbor, is the opposite of her in every way, which is part of his appeal. Unfortunately, Phoebe is so lost in the negative impact of her relationship — or lack thereof — with her dad, that she risks losing something great with this genuinely good dude.

This book made me think of the complicated relationship I had with my own father before he passed away. Thompson even has a line about grieving the potential of a relationship that captured a lot of how I felt in the months and even years after my dad was gone: “I hadn’t realized what a different kind of grief that was —the loss of all the potential moments that would never be, not the past moments that already were.”

Every day with my boys, I try to give them good moments and memories so they aren’t carrying these massive scars from the past into their future. At least not from me, because we all go through our own shit that helps shape us into the people we are as adults.

This book was, to me, just as much about wading through the shit as it was about falling in love in spite of the shit.

Also, her obsession with true crime is weird but so on point!

Just Call Me Stuck-in-a-Rut Mama!

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Originally, this post started as me venting about how stuck in a loop I’ve been feeling. How much some days I want to let the kids take control. Nothing will shake you out of a routine like a winter in New England.

C came into our room around 1 AM — not really that abnormal — and couldn’t/wouldn’t go back to sleep — also not that abnormal — until I gave him some melatonin. While he got back to sleep, I was fully awake, playing Solitaire on my phone when A’s alarm went off at 4:30.

As I lay there lamenting my lack of sleep, A came rushing back to our bedroom, letting me know it had snowed overnight — it was raining when we went to bed — and he wasn’t going to have time to shovel our “only annoying that it’s big when it snows” driveway, so I’d have to do it to clear it for the school bus! Yay.😑

Somewhere in the middle of clearing the left entrance — we have a U-shaped driveway — the call came in that school was cancelled for the day. Why? I’m not really sure. They’d already cleared the street, and there was only about two inches in the driveway.

So my loop was interrupted by the weather and school cancellations. While the one day interruption was “pleasant,” it won’t fix the stuck way I’ve been feeling as of late.

My loop currently looks something like this: wake up. Work out. Get C dressed. Make C breakfast. Make and pack lunch and snack for C. Find something for J to eat because he doesn’t like eggs. Shower. Brush C’s teeth. Get him on the school bus. Spend the day entertaining J/cleaning/attempting to work on side projects. Rinse, lather, repeat.

I also find myself having the same conversation with the boys every day — “Stop fighting!”, “Pick up your toys!”, “Go to the potty!” It’s a miracle I still know other words in the English language.

There are some days when I’m so sick of the routine that I want to just let the boys go wild(er than usual) and let the chips fall where they may.

Of course, I can’t do that. I’ve been working on potty training J this week and have to make sure he doesn’t pee behind the couch…again. The boys also have a tendency to get into wrestling matches, usually at C’s instigation, and I have to make sure they don’t kill each other. So what’s a burnt out, stuck-in-a-rut mama to do?

Keep calm, take a breath, and soldier on. Also, hide in the pantry and eat snack pack Pringles…and pour a glass of wine while making dinner.

But seriously, I think I need to find something to balance out the everyday mundanity. Committing to my #65in365 goal is helping to keep me a little bit sane. I get most of my reading done when J insists that I can’t work, and I must watch Cocomelon/Little Angels/Blippi/Spidey and his Amazing Friends with him. Outside of that, though, what’s a stuck-in-a-rut mama to do?

I know that these things I’m complaining about are all part of motherhood, but isn’t that all the more reason to find a way to achieve the “just treading water” feeling of only communicating with toddlers all day? What’s your thing to help combat stay-at-home mom burnout?

TSM Book Club Book #4: Artemis by Andy Weir

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Started: January 19th
Finished: January 26th
TSM Rating: 3/5

I read The Martian a few years ago and loved it. I picked up Artemis shortly afterwards and added it to my ever waxing and waning TBR pile. Finally, it made it to the top. I wanted to love this the way I loved The Martian, but I didn’t.

Here’s what I did like:

1. The old west type world Weir created on the moon.

2. The Apollo space program rabbit hole it sent me down. I did not know that we landed on the moon successfully SIX times. All we ever talk about is Apollo 11 (the first successful landing) and Apollo 13 (the epic failure; still haven’t seen that movie). It would be nice to know more about the other missions (Apollo 12, 14, 15, 16, and 17).

3. Science. I’m not a true STEMist, but I find science-y things very fascinating.

Here’s what I didn’t like:

None of the characters were likable or even redeemable. Even Rudy, the morally sound police officer, bends the rules. They all do bad things for good reasons, but even those good reasons get muddled by their own selfish desires. Jazz, the main character, in the end when she has the opportunity to become honest, continues to find ways to skirt the system.

I understand that morality and good deeds aren’t always black and white. The world (and space, apparently) is very grey. This was too much grey for me.

TSM Book Club Book #2: Highly Suspicious and Unfairly Cute By Talia Hibbert

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Started: January 7th | Finished: January 14th
TSM Rating: 4/5

Remember high school? Remember crushing on someone so hard your stomach felt like it was going to drop out? This book has all of those sweet, tingly, first love feels and more. I first fell in love with Talia Hibbert when I read Get a Life, Chloe Brown (totally out of order for that book series😳). She writes such strong, complex female characters, and you can’t help but love them, flaws and all. She handles each of her characters’ issues with such grace and humor it makes any of her readers who see themselves — or perhaps their children — in the characters feel seen and understood.

Celine and Bradley’s love story is so genuine and so mature for two kids who are trying to navigate one of the most pivotal years in a young person’s life. I loved how Hibbert infused the story with so much raw teenage angst that you couldn’t help but relate and hope they found their way to each other the way most of us often don’t.

TSM Book Club Book #1: Well Met by Jen DeLuca

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Started: January 2nd | Finished: January 7th
TSM Rating: 3.5/5

I’ll be honest this one was a real slow burner. I wasn’t sure if I would like it until I was about halfway through. Once it picked up, though, I was hooked. It was nerdy in some of the best ways — who doesn’t like a good Renaissance fair and a little Shakespeare banter. Our couple takes some time to have good, flirty interactions, but when they do, they are oh-so-good!

Come for the romance. Stay for the Renaissance factoids. The other three books in the series will definitely be on my list this year.