It’s been a while since I’ve written book reviews, but I’ve been reading more again, so I hope you’ll enjoy these mini book reviews of some of my recent reads. It covers both adult and YA novels, across genres from romance to mystery and suspense, and is just a taste of what I’ve read recently.

Get a Life, Chloe Brown

Take a Hint, Dani Brown

by Talia Hibbert

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What is there to say about these books that hasn’t already been said? They definitely lived up to the hype. I particularly liked Take a Hint, Dani Brown. Rather than experiencing second book syndrome, I think Dani Brown really improves upon Get a Life, Chloe Brown, or perhaps the plot and characters just worked better in Dani Brown. My main critique of Chloe Brown is that the conflict was not well executed. I didn’t like how it really only blew up about 80% into the book…just strange timing.

The pace in Dani Brown was just so much better, the editing much tighter and slightly better executed. Which is not to say that Chloe Brown wasn’t great – because it was! I love these romances and sped through them so quickly. The characters and their struggles are all complex and real and relatable (even when they’re not). Each sister has such a different personality, but I enjoy getting to see more of their dynamic and through different lenses. I’m looking forward to Act Your Age, Evie Brown.

Get a Life, Chloe Brown – Black main character, Disability rep (fibromyalgia, chronic pain)
Take a Hint, Dani Brown – Black main character, Disability rep (anxiety), LGBTQ+ rep (bisexual main character), Muslim Pakistani British love interest

Miss Meteor

By Anna-Marie McLemore and Tehlor Kay Mejia

I wasn’t entirely sure what to expect when I started the book. McLemore is one of my favorite YA authors, but this seemed pretty different from their usual work and I’ve never read any of Mejia’s work. But wow, this book blew me away. There’s just a dash of McLemore’s magical realism, but the book centers way more on the characters and their relationship to one another and with themselves. Chicky and Lita are dealing with their own issues and also with the fragments of their friendship. The love interests are well-written and well-rounded too. Miss Meteor explores finding yourself, becoming comfortable in your own skin and accepting who you are, standing up for yourself and what you believe in, queerness and queer identity, friendship, and more. I highly recommend this one!

LGBTQ+ rep (trans man love interest, pansexual main character), Fat rep, Mexican American main characters

Minor Feelings: An Asian American Reckoning

By Cathy Park Hong

Poet and essayist Cathy Park Hong blends memoir, cultural criticism, and history to expose the truth of racialized consciousness in America. Binding these essays together is Hong’s theory of “minor feelings.” As the daughter of Korean immigrants, Cathy Park Hong grew up steeped in shame, suspicion, and melancholy. She would later understand that these “minor feelings” occur when American optimism contradicts your own reality—when you believe the lies you’re told about your own racial identity.

Hong uses her own story as a portal into a deeper examination of racial consciousness in America today. This book traces her relationship to the English language, to shame and depression, to poetry and artmaking, and to family and female friendship in a search to both uncover and speak the truth.

So many people, especially Asian Americans, have been raving about this book, saying how much it means to them and how well Hong articulated their Asian American experience. I would definitely say that although what Hong talks about could be applicable to Asian Americans across the board and she doesn’t necessarily exclude any group, the book reads very much like an East Asian American “reckoning.” Hong also could have better articulated and explored what she means by “minor feelings,” and although I enjoyed the essays, for the most part, I didn’t find that there was anything that new or revelatory.

The book goes a little bit beyond the typical narratives, but if you have some understanding of Asian American Studies or critical race theory or have knowledge of left-of-progressive/liberal politics, there isn’t that much new (though the infusion of Hong’s personal experiences and stories are valuable and interesting). She also of course approaches the topic through the lens of a writer, which is interesting. That said, the last essay in the book really hit me and made an impact – enough to bump up my rating of the book. I would still recommend the book, but I think there are more interesting texts out there.

Little Fires Everywhere

By Celeste Ng

In Shaker Heights, a placid, progressive suburb of Cleveland, everything is planned–from the layout of the winding roads, to the colors of the houses, to the successful lives its residents will go on to lead. And no one embodies this spirit more than Elena Richardson, whose guiding principle is playing by the rules.

Enter Mia Warren–an enigmatic artist and single mother–who arrives in this idyllic bubble with her teenaged daughter Pearl, and rents a house from the Richardsons. Soon Mia and Pearl become more than tenants: all four Richardson children are drawn to the mother-daughter pair. But Mia carries with her a mysterious past and a disregard for the status quo that threatens to upend this carefully ordered community.

When old family friends of the Richardsons attempt to adopt a Chinese-American baby, a custody battle erupts that dramatically divides the town–and puts Mia and Elena on opposing sides. Suspicious of Mia and her motives, Elena is determined to uncover the secrets in Mia’s past. But her obsession will come at unexpected and devastating costs.

It’s hard to articulate exactly what I thought about Little Fires Everywhere because I admittedly watched the Hulu mini-series first. The two are both similar and also quite different, likely owing to their respective mediums. Honestly, I should have read the book first because it’s hard not to read the TV show version of the characters into the book.

The characters feel quite removed from the reader, and although I think this adds different layers to the book and the message, I probably would not have been as interested or invested in their story if I hadn’t watched the show first. Elena is the character I feel most differently about when comparing the two. That said, there are some plot points that I enjoyed more in their original form. Ng is more subtle and the plot is less explosive (compared to the show), but the subtly makes sense and gives a different flavor and atmosphere to the book. I’d highly recommend checking out both, but definitely read the book first.

Everything I Thought I Knew

By Shannon Takaoka

Seventeen-year-old Chloe had a plan: work hard, get good grades, and attend a top-tier college. But after she collapses during cross-country practice and is told that she needs a new heart, all her careful preparations are laid to waste.

Eight months after her transplant, everything is different. Stuck in summer school with the underachievers, all she wants to do now is grab her surfboard and hit the waves—which is strange, because she wasn’t interested in surfing before her transplant. (It doesn’t hurt that her instructor, Kai, is seriously good-looking.)

And that’s not all that’s strange. There’s also the vivid recurring nightmare about crashing a motorcycle in a tunnel and memories of people and places she doesn’t recognize.

Is there something wrong with her head now, too, or is there another explanation for what she’s experiencing?

As she searches for answers, and as her attraction to Kai intensifies, what she learns will lead her to question everything she thought she knew—about life, death, love, identity, and the true nature of reality.

The premise of the book is interesting, and the cover is gorgeous. I probably would have enjoyed the book more when I was younger and maybe read less YA fiction. The characters and plot were interesting and relatable. I know some readers found the main character too impulsive or didn’t understand the reasoning for her actions; I didn’t find that to be the case. Although I wasn’t very invested in them, the characters were compelling enough. Overall, the plot was fairly predictable. Some may be surprised by the twist, but I thought it was mostly pretty obvious. Though that ending??

Disability rep (main character has a heart transplant), Asian American love interest

Now That I’ve Found You

By Kristina Forest

Following in the footsteps of her überfamous grandma, eighteen-year-old Evie Jones is poised to be Hollywood’s next big star. That is until a close friend’s betrayal leads to her being blacklisted . . .

Fortunately, Evie knows just the thing to save her floundering career: a public appearance with America’s most beloved actress—her grandma Gigi, aka the Evelyn Conaway. The only problem? Gigi is a recluse who’s been out of the limelight for almost twenty years. Days before Evie plans to present her grandma with an honorary award in front of Hollywood’s elite, Gigi does the unthinkable: she disappears.

With time running out and her comeback on the line, Evie reluctantly enlists the help of the last person to see Gigi before she vanished: Milo Williams, a cute musician Evie isn’t sure she can trust. As Evie and Milo conduct a wild manhunt across New York City, romance and adventure abound while Evie makes some surprising discoveries about her grandma—and herself.

I loved Kristina’s debut novel I Wanna Be Where You Are, and you never know how second books are going to go. But wow, I loved this one. Of course, the ballet book (IWBWYA) will always have a place in my heart, but she really stepped it up in Now That I’ve Found You. Sure, the actual “mystery” wasn’t that mysterious – I knew where Gigi was almost right away – but I loved following the characters every step of the way. I also loved seeing Evie and Milo finally realize their feelings for one another.

Overall, it’s a fun book, and just like I love a good ballet book, I also love a good music book (music is not the center of the story, but Milo is a musician and in a band). And of course I love that it’s set in New York City – I miss the city so much!! Forest’s writing and the book’s editing is so much tighter in this one, and the book is all the better for it. I highly recommend the book for a quick, cute read. I can’t wait to read her next book and to see what she’s able to do with a longer timeline in her story.

The Vanishing Half

By Brit Bennett

The Vignes twin sisters will always be identical. But after growing up together in a small, southern black community and running away at age sixteen, it’s not just the shape of their daily lives that is different as adults, it’s everything: their families, their communities, their racial identities. Many years later, one sister lives with her black daughter in the same southern town she once tried to escape. The other secretly passes for white, and her white husband knows nothing of her past. Still, even separated by so many miles and just as many lies, the fates of the twins remain intertwined. What will happen to the next generation, when their own daughters’ storylines intersect?

Weaving together multiple strands and generations of this family, from the Deep South to California, from the 1950s to the 1990s, Brit Bennett produces a story that is at once a riveting, emotional family story and a brilliant exploration of the American history of passing. Looking well beyond issues of race, The Vanishing Half considers the lasting influence of the past as it shapes a person’s decisions, desires, and expectations, and explores some of the multiple reasons and realms in which people sometimes feel pulled to live as something other than their origins.

I don’t know if it’s fair for me to compare The Vanishing Half to Such a Fun Age, but I can see people grouping the two together, and I have to say I enjoyed this one so much more. I wasn’t in the mood to dig too deeply into the book, but it’s easy to see that the book is complex and richly layered. Brit Bennett writes some fantastic and hard hitting lines. I love a good generational novel, and this one delivered. There’s so much to unpack, and I will certainly continue to find new things within the pages upon a future re-read. The book starts off a bit slow but later picks up. Both sisters’ lives are interesting, and it’s fascinating to see how they diverge and what they both sacrifice as a result of their decisions and lives.

However, the actual execution of the generational novel was not what I expected. I thought the two sisters’ stories (and that of their daughters) would be more interwoven than it was. Although seeing the story through the daughters’ lenses was interesting and I understand why it wasn’t more interwoven because of the situations of the characters, it read more like two separate stories. I would have liked to see more of Desiree’s side of the story once Jude grew up; I know her day to day might have been roughly the same, but it would have been more interesting to see, for example, her thoughts about her daughter’s life and to see what her life ended up being like.

Overall, I enjoyed this one immensely, and it definitely lives up to the hype.

Who Is Vera Kelly?

By Rosalie Knecht

New York City, 1962. Vera Kelly is struggling to make rent and blend into the underground gay scene in Greenwich Village. She’s working night shifts at a radio station when her quick wits, sharp tongue, and technical skills get her noticed by a recruiter for the CIA.

Next thing she knows she’s in Argentina, tasked with wiretapping a congressman and infiltrating a group of student activists in Buenos Aires. As Vera becomes more and more enmeshed with the young radicals, the fragile local government begins to split at the seams. When a betrayal leaves her stranded in the wake of a coup, Vera learns war makes for strange and unexpected bedfellows, and she’s forced to take extreme measures to save herself.

Ugh, I wanted to love this book. I went into it knowing the main character is a CIA spy, but I was under the impression that it would not be problematic. Not so. I’m sorry; maybe if you don’t really know the context, you could put this behind you. But as someone who cares quite a bit about that time in not on Argentina but across Latin America, I can’t recommend the book. As a spy novel, it wasn’t even particularly interesting, and she’s just a fine character. The plot isn’t the fast-paced storyline you might expect, which doesn’t make it bad, but it doesn’t help it.

I know Argentinians still care about the Malvinas/Falkland Islands, but I hated everything about how the author portrayed the conflict. Additionally, I can vaguely see the author’s intent in writing about the student revolutionaries, but she did not do it well. You can pull some interesting threads from the book – like how government officials slowly let the coup happen and why people were fed up and how the role of every-day people – and I know this takes place at the beginning of it all so “they didn’t know” what was yet to occur, but the USian author treated everything with so little care.

It makes me sick. There isn’t enough nuance. The author and publishers clearly didn’t put in enough thought into the subject matter. Were there no sensitivity readers? An estimated 30,000 people were “disappeared” by the military regime. The CIA played a big role in the coups across Latin America at the time (look up Operation Condor, just as a start). It’s wrong to write a book about a CIA operative in Argentina in the 1960s and treat it this way. Don’t bother with this one. Please go read some works written by Argentines instead.

Asylum

By Madeleine Roux

For sixteen-year-old Dan Crawford, New Hampshire College Prep is more than a summer program—it’s a lifeline. An outcast at his high school, Dan is excited to finally make some friends in his last summer before college. But when he arrives at the program, Dan learns that his dorm for the summer used to be a sanatorium, more commonly known as an asylum. And not just any asylum—a last resort for the criminally insane.

As Dan and his new friends, Abby and Jordan, explore the hidden recesses of their creepy summer home, they soon discover it’s no coincidence that the three of them ended up here. Because the asylum holds the key to a terrifying past. And there are some secrets that refuse to stay buried.

This book is pretty old and not lastingly popular, so I didn’t have any expectations going in. I was looking for some suspense/spooky vibes, and I’ve owned this book for years. Also, a haunted asylum-turned-dorm called Brookline? There are a lot of similarities with my college dorms, so I thought it’d be fun to read. The book is fine? Just fine. It was mostly predictable, and it wasn’t that impressive. It wasn’t very spooky or suspenseful either, and the characters were either pretty boring/uninteresting or badly stereotyped. And was the girl (whose name I can’t even recall anymore) a bit of a Mary Sue?… I don’t have much else to say about this book, and I won’t invest time in reading the rest of the series.

Ten

By Gretchen McNeil

It was supposed to be the weekend of their lives—an exclusive house party on Henry Island. Best friends Meg and Minnie are looking forward to two days of boys, booze, and fun-filled luxury. But what starts out as fun turns twisted after the discovery of a DVD with a sinister message: Vengeance is mine. And things only get worse from there.

With a storm raging outside, the teens are cut off from the outside world . . . so when a mysterious killer begins picking them off one by one, there’s no escape. As the deaths become more violent and the teens turn on one another, can Meg find the killer before more people die? Or is the killer closer to her than she could ever imagine?

I read Ten immediately after finishing Asylum, and I’m so glad I did. Although the book wasn’t stellar or five stars, it was a much better read. The mystery was fairly compelling, the cast of characters diverse and interesting enough (lots of different personalities). The genre isn’t my typical, but this was pretty good. It’s a quick and entertaining read. Mysterious but not overly so. The atmosphere is mostly great. The romance is not super compelling, but it’s fine.

Honestly, I tend to read the ending of books shortly after I start it (especially for mysteries…I love a good spoiler), so I’m not sure if I would have otherwise predicted the ending/who the killer was on my own, but I can see it surprising most readers. I just think that the last few remaining characters were the ones I least suspected, and the author needed to better establish the possible motivation for different characters killing the others in order to be even more of a thrill and mystery.