Micro-Review: We Live Here Now

This has been the year of horror reads for me. Mostly, it has been very rewarding.

I just finished We Live Here Now by Sarah Pinborough, picked up on a whim, and really found it very satisfying. It’s also proof of how important an author’s voice is to my reading enjoyment.

We Live Here Now involves a super familiar premise: a couple—married or otherwise—full of issues and secrets moves into a house that is less a “fresh start” and more a fresh new hell. I routinely have tossed books like this against the (metaphorical) wall. (I rarely throw books, especially if they’re on my kindle!) I saw War of the Roses at an impressionable age and what it impressed upon me is how much I disliked watching a couple tear each other apart. How little tolerance I have for truly mean-spirited people. It’s especially irritating to me in a modern setting where it becomes increasingly difficult (plausibility wise) to keep a couple together. In the age of “setting healthy boundaries”, it’s hard to imagine couples staying together when they have come to actively dislike each other.

So, I started this book expecting that I would DNF it. But! I loved it.

And that is all due to Pinborough’s voice. She glides through this story. Just when the characters do something appalling, she’s there to remind you, it’s not just them—it’s the house encouraging this behavior—and the characters spend as much time regretting their behavior as they do committing the acts. It makes it so easy to just keep moving through the story.

Minor spoilers follow:

It’s told in three POVs. Emily’s, Freddie’s, and weirdly enough, a crow. The crow’s POV was unusual, but not off-putting. Another major point in Pinborough’s favor, because I often dislike animal POVs.

It’s got all the usual spooky accoutrements you want in a haunted house story—creaking doors, scratching noises, ominous messages, a country vicar, a few eerie rumors, windows that open and close, a terrible stench, a room that feels dangerously unwelcoming. And honestly, the usual plus the couple plus her strong writing would be enough, but then she adds the twist (which I will not discuss other than to say I very much enjoyed this element) which changes the whole feel of the story. It’s not just a haunted house story. It’s something weirder and better and just sold me on the whole thing. It went from a novel I enjoyed to a novel I want to make sure other people read. 

I think though, if it hadn’t been Pinborough writing it, I might have DNFed before the twist, and I would have missed out.

It seems like every holiday gets pushed on us earlier and earlier and you know, in the case of Halloween, I’m not mad about it. Spooky Season used to be Oct 1, but now apparently it’s Sep 1 and hey, I’ve started it off well with We Live Here Now.

My life by book numbers

It’s weird, but I tend to use my reading habits as a barometer of the state of me. Everything going great? I am reading no more than two books.

Stressed out of my gourd? Insomnia? I go through kindle unlimited books like potato chips–devouring entire series in a matter of days (Lots of time to read if you cut out sleep, I’m just saying.)

ADHD out of whack? Add another book to the pile. The breakfast book stays at the table. The lunch book stays on the e-reader. I add one book that was too tempting not to start, but then gets carted from room to room, temporarily lost over and over again.

No books? Send me to the doctor. Or more practically and a bit cheaper, send me to the bookstore. I’ll reset. It’ll be fine.

Writing up a storm and using my creative brain non-stop? I’ll be rereading all my favorite comfort reads. Ilona Andrews, Martha Wells, Agatha Christie. If I’m utterly wiped out? Dick Francis or Diana Wynne Jones.

If my life is chaos? Well, I can tell by so many obvious things, but the one that usually makes me sit up and say, okay, time to get things back under control is the number of books I am currently reading. I tend to read two books at a time. One is the breakfast table book; one is the lunchtime e-reader book.

Right now? I am reading a breakfast book (Cascade Failure, LM Sagas, very enjoyable); a lunchtime libby book (A Study in Drowning, Ava Reid; fraught but good); a dinnertime book (same table, different book, The Book That Wouldn’t Burn, Mark Lawrence–great characters so far); a bedtime book (How to Become the Dark Lord and Die Trying, Django Wexler–more violent than I was expecting somehow); an ‘oops, I left the bedtime book in another room so I’d better start a different book rather than walk down the stairs‘ book–(if you have an entourage of pets, you know why – Cinderwich, Cherie Priest, enjoyable if spare); the ‘I keep waking up in the middle of the night and the kindle is in bed with me*’ book (Hell for Hire, Rachel Aaron, popcorn book!), or the ‘ugh, I woke up in the middle of the night and the kindle is out of battery so I will use my phone kindle app‘ book (An Inheritance of Ashes, Leah Bobet; good but fraught), plus the two books that I have (kind of) forgotten that I am reading (Hide, Tracy Clark and The Monstrous Misses Mai, Van Hoang).

This is TOO MANY BOOKS. Plus I have two more library books eyeing me distrustfully. They want my full attention and don’t they understand that I just want to pick them up and love their first chapters or two? (Ghost Station, SA Barnes and How to Solve Your Own Murder, Kristen Perrin)…. I fully expect to start them before the end of the day in the name of ‘trying to figure out which one I should read next..’.

Anyway, this means that my solution to a life in CHAOS weirdly starts with… finishing a book. Sure, I’ll get the bills paid at some point, the laundry done before Monday, the house cleaning caught up on, the dogs groomed, etc., but for sheer sense of accomplishment? Getting the currently reading books down to two is the goal.

It gets to the point where I find myself wishing that I had picked worse, less enjoyable books, because then I could just declare them DNF (which totally counts as finishing a book somehow).

It’s okay. That’s what weekends are for, right? To catch up on reading short stories!!! (I know, I’m cuckoo for cocoa puffs, but I am so easily led into reading things and Alex Brown from Reactormag just listed their must read May stories)

That said, here are three book recommendations that I did finish this past week.

Alice Bell’s Grave Expectations. Fun, cozy sort of murder mystery with a ghost and an amateur detective whose life makes mine look neat, tidy, and organized. Claire and her ghostly best friend Sophie are hired to do a seance for an upper class family that is full of delightfully awful people. They uncover a past murder. Claire is kind of a disaster area as a person and I appreciate chaos in a protagonist. I really hope this is the start of a series. The characters are all engaging, and I’d like to hear more about them.

Killing Me by Michelle Gagnon. I picked this book up because well, kind of a long story. A few years ago, I was taking French and decided I would enjoy French lessons more if I could reward myself by reading in French and I found a novel that sounded really good and I thought this was the same author. It is not. I can’t recall the title (or apparently the author of the book I did want to read which is a pity because it still sounds intriguing in my memory) but this book sounded interesting in its own right.

If Grave Expectations is a cozy, Killing Me is a strange in-between step between a cozy and a genuine thriller. The tone is not always quite successful, and there are a few moments that misfired, but overall, I really enjoyed this. Even with chaos brain, I sat down and read this pretty much straight through. It’s about Amber (not her real name) young woman who is nearly killed by a serial killer, then rescued (accidentally) by a woman who is looking for a specific serial killer and is rather put out that she has stumbled on the wrong one. Since Amber has a past of her own to hide, she dodges the police and ends up in Vegas where she reunites with the hunter and a motley cast. The heroine is full of snark, which mostly works. It’s very readable.

The Brides of High Hill – Nghi Vo. I’ve read some of her other novellas in this series, but this is definitely one of my favorites. It’s a Bluebeard tale that gets upended in a sudden, yet delightfully vicious way. I loved it so much! Nghi Vo has become one of my favorite writers for interesting and beautifully written stories. I adored her clever take on The Great Gatsby: The Chosen and the Beautiful, and I also really loved Siren Queen.

*Yes, the kindle lives in the bed, why, where is it supposed to live? Somewhere out of reach?? Don’t be silly.

April reads

Apparently April is the month where I catch up on horror. It’s such a weird genre for me. I am fascinated by horror but also easily annoyed by it. I dislike people being cruel to each other for no reason. I dislike people suffering for no reason. And I really dislike nihilistic downer endings. It’s one of the things that turned me off of Supernatural—Sam and Dean had made everywhere hostile to them, so much so that even death wouldn’t be a rest (Yes, I know the series resolved well. I just gave up for a long time around season 10.)

But I also love people struggling against forces that they don’t understand. I love people trying to survive long odds—not undamaged, but coming out alive. I love man vs. monsters. I also really love the style. A lot of horror writing is extremely visceral (no pun intended) and powerful. It’s a genre of senses. The creeping cold around your ankles, that scratching of claws against your window, the scent of something subtly wrong, and on and on and on. Love that. It’s probably the most sense-driven genre.

So this month I read:

What Feasts at Night – T. Kingfisher

In this novella, a soldier decides to take a sojourn at their cabin in the woods, mostly to facilitate their batman’s affair with a mycologist. Of course, nothing is ever that easy. Easton arrives to find the caretaker dead and something lurking in the woods. I really adored What Moves the Dead, the first novella in this (hopefully long-running) Sworn Soldier series. I adored it, even though it used the Fall of the House of Usher as its springboard. I have contradictory opinions about books based on other fiction—suffice it to say that I approach all books of that ilk with suspicion.

What Feasts at Night was not quite as good as the first novella but was still an excellent read and a keeper. Kingfisher is really wonderful with setting and characterization. I always feel like I am immersed in her world, and I would love to hang out with her characters. I’m adding this series to my shelf with Sarah Monette’s Grave Key.

What Grows in the Dark – Jaq Evans

This is a tricky book. It has a heroine who is not particularly likeable, being repressed, and a con artist of sorts. She claims to be a psychic so that she and Ian, a college friend (who doesn’t really know her that well) can travel around making a little bit of money making youtube videos. She gets called back to her small town by her dead sister’s girlfriend who says something is taking other kids. The way it took her sister. Usually, I dislike characters who aren’t forthcoming with their friends and allow situations to go from bad to worse, but here, it works. This book never really gets terrifying, but it is definitely slow burn creepy.

A Cosmology of Monsters – Shaun Hamill

Strange, strange book. I loved it. It’s a literary sort of horror, about a family over decades, primarily the youngest son. And of course, it’s about the monsters that are haunting them. I really liked the monsters and their relationship to humans.

Where He Can’t Find You – Darcy Coates

A YA horror novel.

This one might be my favorite read of the month, not just of the horror books I read. I adored this book from page 1 to the end. It’s got a fairly standard premise: there’s a killer in a small town, and if you’re not careful, it’ll get you! But what really made this stand out is that everyone knows what’s up from page 1. The Stitcher is the town bogeyman; the teens think they know who he is, and the police agree, but! There’s no evidence. There’s none of that slow “we must convince people we’re right!” They start off believing two things at once: that the creepy man who smiles is the Stitcher, and that the Stitcher’s kills come on a crest of inexplicable events—technology failing, animals being born deformed, etc. I’m not a huge Darcy Coates fan; her books are hit or miss for me, but this one is a definite hit.

The Grip of It – Jac Jemc

This piece is as hard to follow in some ways as a fever dream, and that’s really what this book is like. Nightmarish. But you’re in it, and you’re accepting it, and then you wake up. The premise is a straight-forward as these stories go: a married couple with some problems buy a haunted house. Things get worse. This is definitely a book where the style is what sells it. If you want your hauntings wrapped up with a bow, though, this is not the book for you.

I also watched The Dead Boy Detectives, which I mostly liked.

All of these books were good reads.

Three Things and Another One

It’s cold and I’m rewriting a novel. I have no thoughts to spare. Arguably, at this point I have no thoughts at all.

That said, here is one thing in general that I have loved this last month–MYSTERY– and three things in particular.

Nina Simon’s Mother Daughter Murder Night. A fairly low stakes mystery–I wouldn’t really call it a cozy, though I have seen others do so–that shines because of the characterization. I loved that the mother and daughter have a fraught history between them, but that the author doesn’t take the easy route out and tar one of them as “villain” and the other as “wronged”. They’re both stubborn women who know how to fight, and the third member of the trio–the grand-daughter–is just like them both. One of the dangers with amateur sleuths is that often it feels too forced or contrived that they would be able to solve the case, especially when there are police involved. Here, the women are placed in good position to find out what they need to know to beat the police to the solution. The mystery holds up all the way through and was just a pleasure to read.

Death & Other Details on hulu. There was little to no chance that I wouldn’t watch this given the glut of advertising, Mandy Patinkin’s role, and my fondness for mystery. But I really loved the first three episodes: the writing is exactly to my taste, the clues are doled out well, the time jumps are interesting, and I feel like the mystery is going to play out properly–surprises, but surprises that we will have been set up for. That’s the big thing in mysteries, right? That we have faith in the writer. That they’re going to tell their story well, laying out the clues in the right way, and not randomly ambushing us with bullshit twists for the sake of twists. I am grateful to Knives Out and Rian Johnson for proving that mysteries can be well-plotted and profitable again (and probably to a lesser extent Kenneth Branagh’s Hercule Poirot outings, which were not faithful to Christie’s books but were still intriguing.). More mysteries please! With the classic form of the amateur detective–the well-respected private investigator. As a side note of no importance, I do love the name Imogene. I hope to see more from the writing crew of Heidi Cole McAdams and Mike Weiss.

In the same vein, I have just this moment started A Murder at the End of the World, and so far, it has the same quality as the above: writing that feels confident, an actor who is compelling, and an amateur sleuth I immediately want to root for. If it turns out to be bad, don’t tell me! I’ll just be disappointed.

A fourth thing, tangentially related: Mystery, yes; amateur sleuth, no. In this instance, The Puppet Show by MW Craven was a really interesting police procedural of the type I like: the protagonist is not without his (significant) flaws, but never to the point where you wonder, how on earth is he even capable of detecting? It is also, despite its very dark subject matter, not unrelentingly grim. I enjoyed it and because for once my library has let me down, bought the second book online.

Quick Book Rec

I don’t remember when I first heard about Calamity by Constance Fay, but it must have struck me favorably because when the book showed up as available on kindle unlimited, I snatched it up.

It is really a very good space opera romance. There are a lot of terrible ones out there, but this one had good characters, a continuously changing plot, and a romance that I enjoyed. The heroine and her love interest were suspicious of each other, but not to the point of stupidity or of self-sabotage or of pace-killing. The world-building was interesting enough that I want to know more about the ruling families, but also the other groups mentioned–the strange cults, the “little” people trying to make a life in the shadows of the families. Fay created a lot of types of sf technology, then used it in smart, entertaining ways.

Basically, I devoured this. It is full of the good tropes; the kind that you see coming and you smile in anticipation. Calamity got five stars for fun.

An equivalent would be the Kinsmen series by Ilona Andrews so if you liked that series, you will probably enjoy this. I know I did.

Recent reads

There are few things better than hitting a hot reading streak, where each book is a delight to read. It’s so rare!

But here are three books I really enjoyed.

This Body’s Not Big Enough for Both of Us by Edgar Cantero. Ridiculously funny spoof of Noir PI style stories, where it’s less about the crime committed and more about the personality of the PI. Cantero can be hit or miss for people, but I loved this book and bugged my friends by reading excerpts to them, giggling maniacally the whole time.

The Book Eaters by Sunyi Dean. Lots of hype around this book but all of it is actually deserved. It’s got a neat world-building premise of a different type of “human” that lives on the edges of society with their own rules. This book works so well because of its spare style. The protagonist is a desperate mother with her back against the proverbial wall, trying to create a better life for her son. It could be very grim and depressing but because it’s so streamlined (though not to the point of feeling sketchy), it just flows and flows and takes you along for the ride. I will look for other books by this author.

And then there’s Emily Wilde’s Encyclopedia of Fairies by Heather Fawcett. I adored this book. I am a sucker for an academic character dealing with fantasy creatures. I am also a sucker for fish-out-of-water stories where a city lady has to deal with rural life; and a sucker for a romantic relationship where it is evident to everyone but the heroine for a time. I loved the characters here, but I also really loved the fairy elements. I will definitely be picking up the sequel in January!

And it looks like there will be more awesome reading to come: I have Martha Wells’ System Collapse, Alix Harrow’s Ten Thousand Doors to January, and the final Robert Jackson Bennett book in the Founders Trilogy, plus Samit Basu’s The Jinn-Bot of Shantiport. And oh! Can’t possibly forget a new Olivia Atwater! The Witchwood Knot looks delightful. I will have to get my hands on it soon.

What’s that saying? So many books, so little time?

Recent Reads

Around this time of year, I start looking for spooky reads. This is always a little weird for me, because I’m both fascinated by horror novels and easily put off by them. Plus they sit outside my usual ranking system, because for me, a book has to be re-readable to get a four star or above–and I rarely want to reread horror novels. I’m just happy to survive them. So their ratings tend to be one of three. DNF–not for me! 3 stars–a good read that I will never revisit. Or the rare 5 stars, where I will never reread it myself, but I will tell everyone I know who likes horror that they have to read this book.

But I keep trying, even as I DNF the majority of them. I have such a narrow range of “horror that I enjoy” instead of “horror that annoys me” or “horror that horrifies me”. For the long weekend, I dove into two and they were both successes.

Malice House by Megan Shepherd has the kind of premise I just love. A character inheriting an isolated artist’s estate–along with its Terrible Secrets (TM). This book upped the ante by involving monsters. Plus it brought in the always evocative idea of art (writing or illustration) birthing its own reality. That said, this was a reasonably pleasant read, but not much more. There was a sudden jump to “The Marburys are cursed!” that sort of came out of nowhere for me. The ending was very full of all the monsters, when the rest of the book was only sort of looking at them sidelong. Plus Haven Marbury, the heroine, takes a midpoint action that feels also out of the blue. Overall, I liked the book, but it felt like Shepherd was putting in as many elements as she could to make sure her book felt distinct from others, and it just ended up a little rushed and muddled. The core tension between Haven Marbury and the local “Ink Drinkers” book club was wonderful, and went to great, creepy places. I also really loved Haven and Kylie’s friendship. An enjoyable read. It is apparently book one in a series, and I’ll probably read the next.

Burn the Negative by Josh Winning. Another familiar sort of premise that always attracts me: A cursed film, a child actor who’s made a new life for herself yet gets dragged back to the traumatic events of her past when the cursed film gets a remake. I liked this one a lot. It’s also sort of familiar, but it also has an interesting take on the “final girl”. A few twists that hold up well with the characterization and the information that has come before–which is not always the case! This one I recommend.

I’ll take suggestions for other horror reads. I like horror-adventure really. I don’t like horror where absolutely everyone dies miserably. I don’t like weirdly contrived stories. I like ghost stories. I love mad science. I love discovery stories. In movie terms, I like Crimson Peak, The Others, or The Relic. I don’t like Saw, Human Centipede, Hostel, or Seven.

Horror novels that have really worked for me? Gemma Files’ Experimental Film. Robert Jackson Bennett’s America Elsewhere. Kate Alice Marshall’s Rules for Vanishing. Stephen Graham Jones’ My Heart Is a Chainsaw. T. Kingfisher’s What Moves the Dead. Elizabeth Hand’s Wylding Hall.

The Concept of Book Clubs

I have always loved the concept of book clubs because reading the same book? With other people? So that you have people you can gab at about the book? Wonderful. But I haven’t really had that in decades.

Much of it is me. I am a picky reader in that I don’t mind reading other people’s book suggestions but I want to read them on my own time as the mood strikes–which is not really conducive to a book club. Also, it is very aggravating to force yourself to read a book when you aren’t in the mood for that particular story and then get to book club to find out you are the only one who actually read it. This is a form of exquisite torture. Especially if you disliked the book and want to vent about it.

As a quick note, I did NOT dislike When Things Get Dark.

The point being, is that I bought When Things Get Dark and quasi-strong armed a friend of mine into getting it too and oh, it has been a delight to discuss the stories as he goes.

I bought this book because one of the stories in it: “Sooner or Later, Your Wife Will Drive Home” by Genevieve Valentine was covered by Ruthanna Emrys & Anne M Pillsworth in their delightful tor.com column Reading the Weird.

It seemed like such an interesting story, so when the collection it was in went on sale, I bought it. Some misfires, some excellent stories, some just not-for-me pieces, but again, the fun of it has not only been in reading the short stories, but in discussing them.

Writing is often like working in a void. Lots of crickets. It’s not the kind of art form that you can just wave at somebody and they can take in at a glance. It requires attention and time, and we’re all short on that. So writing isn’t particularly social at the core. (This is why we love our writing groups and conventions and our coffee shop “offices”–to remind us we are not in this alone.) But reading is also not particularly social. TV, movies, music–you can watch or listen to the same thing at the same time. You can even group watch movies over the internet!

So… social elements and reading? Gotta be book clubs. Or, you know, just bugging a friend until they read the same book you are at roughly the same moment in time.

And to encourage others? This really is a solid collection. The standouts for me are:

Elizabeth Hand’s “For Sale by Owner” — I was thrilled to hear she got permission to write a book set in Shirley Jackson’s Hill House.

Laird Barron’s “Tiptoe” which is just delightfully creepy.

Gemma Files’ “Pear of Anguish” because no one does feral, fucked up people like Files.

The Genevieve Valentine story, which was everything I expected and wanted it to be.

I also really enjoyed Stephen Graham Jones’ “Refinery Road” though didn’t think it very Shirley Jackson inspired.

And I keep going back to Carmen Maria Machado’s “A Hundred Miles and a Mile” and getting new things from it, even though I don’t think I’ve quite gotten IT yet. This one strikes me as potentially the most Shirley Jackson inspired.

All in all, a solid collection, which is pretty much what you would expect from a collection edited by Ellen Datlow.

Romance novels

In the spirit of Valentine’s Day, have a non-exhaustive list of romances that I have read recently and really enjoyed. It always surprises me that I can come up with titles, because if you asked me if I read romances, my response would be: only rarely.

Yet, when I stop to think about it, that’s just not true. It’s simply that the romances I read are masked in some way—either they have a large fantasy element and I think of them as SF/F, or they’re in a format that slips by labeling.

So, recent reads that I recommend.

Freya Marske’s A Restless Truth. F/F

Romantic and funny, plus with a locked-room murder mystery of sorts, in that the heroine’s companion is murdered on a ship and there’s nowhere for the murderer to escape to. Maud and Voilet are great characters, well-drawn, and believably suited to each other. This is book 2 in The Last Binding Trilogy, and it’s even better than the first, A Marvellous Light.

A J Lancaster’s A Rake of His Own. M/M

This is book 5 of the Stariel series, and although it features a separate couple than the previous four books do, I would hesitate to call it stand-alone. There’s just too much water under the bridge and too much world-building. That’s okay. While I loved this book, I loved the previous books too. This whole series is very satisfying. Watching the faerie prince and uptight Marius Valstar, the botanical scholar interact is a delight. Also there’s a murder. (I like fantasy murder mysteries!) The whole series is one of my comfort reads.

Lana Harper’s Payback’s a Witch, and Back in a Spell. F/F & M/F respectively.

These are books 1 & 3 of the Thistle Grove Witch series. (See what I mean about fantasy? But no murders here.) These are pretty much stand alone; the set up is not particularly complex. The fun of these is in the characters! With witchy powers as well.

And, of course, the Olivia Atwater Regency Faerie Tale Series. Half a Soul, Ten Thousand Stitches, and Longshadow. Half a Soul is one of those books that I recommend any chance I get and would have to have it pried from my hands before I would give it up. I’ve reread it at least twice. Just excellent; her take on faeries makes them very strange and odd, and I love it.

So when it comes to contemporary romance, this is where I really usually double down and think, no I don’t read romance. Again, I’m wrong. Some of my favorite novellas of the past year are contemporary romance. They’re just on Archive of Our Own.

Copperbadge is a fandom stalwart for a reason. He’s prolific and good! But last year, he’s been giving his readers the super entertaining Shivadhverse, which as far as I can tell, began with the hallmark inspired prompt of what happens if a chef meets a prince and they fall in love, and that chef is inspired by Guy Fieri. Delightful things happen. Eddie Rambler and Crown Prince Gregory are adorable and sensible, and I loved them immensely. Apparently their author did too, because we’ve gotten a series of excellent spin-off novellas involving other characters in the world. The series starts with Fête for a King.

Two delightful things

Pretty much what it says on the tin: two pieces of entertainment that made me happy.

First, Ms Marvel. I started watching this with an increasing sense of irritation, because I kept thinking “I’ve seen this before. OMG, who did they borrow this from?” before I <headslap> realized, duh, they borrowed it FROM THE GRAPHIC NOVEL by G. Willow Wilson, which I had read. Then I went back and really enjoyed it. I loved the young actress’s enthusiasm for the character. Marvel usually does really well with casting and this show wasn’t an exception. I loved her friend Nakia, trying to make herself heard in the mosque. I even mostly liked Bruno, minus his moping crush on Kamala. But that’s me. I hate that trope. It’s like why can’t they honestly be friends, instead of one oblivious and one pining. Urgh.

There were lots of plot moments, especially toward the end, where I was left scratching my head, going, wait… How/what/why/Huh? but really, it didn’t matter much. This was a show about Kamala finding her place in her family, in the world, and in history. And those elements were all perfect. I really enjoyed it. So far, out of the marvel series on D+, my favorites are WandaVision, Hawkeye, and Ms. Marvel.

Ms. Marvel is pretty formulaic–following the typical disney AND marvel arc–but you know, that didn’t mean it wasn’t really fun to watch.

The second piece of entertainment that I absolutely adored was Emily Henry’s Book Lovers which is a contemporary romance. I can really only talk about it in superlative fragments. The dialogue! The characterization! The humor! The good nature of it all! It’s all the things I love about romance novels, with none of the things I hate about them. There are no forced misunderstandings. There are no moments where the characters lash out and hurt each other for no good reason.

It’s really a clever book, self-aware of all the romance tropes, highlighting them, and inverting them. Sometimes subtly–her sister is NOT her source of support and the one she goes to for advice; sometimes overtly–Nora, the heroine tells the reader straight off that if life were a hallmark movie, she is the obstacle to true love, not the person who deserves it. Readers who like Jennifer Crusie should adore this. And it is so funny! I had the hardest time not reading sections aloud to my roommate. Considering it was her book that I had stolen from her To-Be-Read pile, it seemed like the least I could do. But oh, it was hard. I kept putting it down after chapters and laughing to myself, stretching out the reading.

Just… delightful! Both of these are really recommended.