sophia_sol | Entries tagged with book theme: history

I listened to this nonfiction book as an audiobook, which was a great way to spend time with the history of silk as I went about working on various fibre arts crafts myself! (no silk in my crafting stash, though. not in my budget!)

There was a lot to enjoy about the book - engaging writing, that covers many interesting stories from the history of silk. And it talks about much more than just the silk of the classic silkworm, too. People have gotten silk from other related types of moth cocoons, from certain shellfish (which use long silken strands to anchor themselves into sand), and from spiders, who create many different kinds of silk for different purposes. I particularly enjoyed learning about the many species of wild silk moths in India which have a long history of being harvested for their silks.

However, the further I listened in the book, the more striking it became that nearly all of the stories were told from a European perspective, about European priorities, even though most of the silks discussed are not European in origin. ( Read more... )

So as a whole I'm a lot less enthusiastic about this book now than I was when I was just starting it, which is really too bad. Read for the fun stories it does tell, but be aware going in that you are not actually getting the full world history of silk.

I wasn't quite sure what to expect from this book, going into it. It's a nonfiction book about underworlds, but what did that mean, exactly? What approach was the author going to take?

It turned out that the approach was: Macfarlane, over a number of years, went and visited 10 different places where the human world intersects with the world beneath our feet, and used that to talk about the human relationships with those places, and why we use them and what for, and what the experience is like, and the history of them. Each chapter was on a different place, and was a deep dive into that place in particular, and then the cumulative effect of these different places was built up together to say something bigger.

It's a remarkably beautiful book, caring far more about the artistic qualities of the prose than most non-fiction books I read. It's so evocative and thoughtful at the same time! In each chapter he's so careful about building the narrative landscapes for each chapter, in the details he does or doesn't choose to include. I was surprised to discover in one late chapter that the author must be a birder, because he kept on referring to so many different kinds of birds he saw there, specifically by species name, but it had never come up before because birds weren't thematically relevant details in previous chapters!

The chapters include things like salt mining, cave art, tunnels beneath Paris, melt-holes in glaciers, and more. All of it was fascinating and thought-provoking and carefully researched, too.

My one and only point of disjoint in reading the book was in his chapter on nuclear containment, because in my opinion he seems too optimistic about the likelihood of containment methods working for the span of time they'll be needed. Like. Ten thousand years is an astoundingly long time! I have concerns!

But other than that, this is truly an excellent book, and I recommend it highly.

This month I read two non-fiction books by Mark Kurlansky, Cod: A Biography of the Fish that Changed the World and Salt: A World History.

Both books are excellent at providing lots of historical details to give the reader a good sense of how vital each of these commodities was, and the scope of their effects on human cultures and industry. I particularly loved the book on cod, and it really made me want to try eating salt cod sometime to see what it's like!

I felt that the salt book was somewhat weaker, though. Sometimes the book was presenting information generally chronologically, sometimes it was focused on a particular location, sometimes it was following a particular product or trade over time or over space. It made it feel a bit jumbled and disorganized, going back and forward in time and hopping around the world. The cod book had a bit of that as well, but by the nature of the subject the issues were more limited so it wasn't as big a deal.

The salt book also had multiple particular details that got my back up.

One was the old chestnut about x species having not evolved for x number of millions of years, when talking about sturgeons. No, that's not how evolution works? like, yes sturgeons have maintained the same basic form for about 100 million years, because it's an extremely successful strategy for their context and continues to be so, but genetic changes will still happen in a population over so much time! probably if you took a modern sturgeon and a sturgeon from the cretaceous they would not even be able to interbreed!

The other was

palestine

that in a chapter about salt in Israel from ancient times to today, Palestinians weren't mentioned at all?! wtf, author!

Another historical romance novel by Courtney Milan, an author who's one of the few on my will-always-read list. And as usual I loved it! This is the second in her Wedgeford series, set in a village in England with a high percentage of Chinese residents in the 19th century.

Naomi is a young woman who grew up in Wedgeford her whole life, and feels stifled and small but is determined to find ways to do the things she wants to do. Kai is the son of a habitual con man who had tricked Wedgeford's residents out of much of their money when Kai was a young child before disappearing, and now Kai is returning with his own agenda. Because of reasons, they pretend to be engaged to each other!

I loved both main characters so much, and their relationship with each other and with the other people in their lives. Both of them are deeply affected by being raised by the parents they had, and the environments they grew up in, but in very different ways from each other, and both have to learn how to how to update their perspectives on some aspects of it. And there are also many other people who have been important to them in various ways, whether they've been able to see it or not!

I also loved how much passion they both had for the things they do in their lives. I think this is one of the things I love about Milan's romances -- how much and how deeply her characters always care about the things that are of importance to them. they have passions and obsessions that they throw themselves wholeheartedly into. For Naomi it's taking an ambulance course (a multi-day first aid course, to learn how to deal with medical emergencies before the professionals are able to get there), and for Kai it's pottery.

I wanted more about the ambulance class than the book actually ended up giving me, which was disappointing, but I remember seeing Milan write somewhere online about how much of what would have been taught in a class like that in that era was bunk or an outright dangerous bad idea, so she didn't want to focus on that. Which is suuuuper fair!

But we get to hear lots of Kai's opinions about pottery and I loved every bit of it. You cannot get this guy to shut up about his pottery opinions once he gets going and he feels so strongly about it and it's GREAT. In the author's note Milan talks about how she ended up learning how to do pottery herself in the process of researching this book and you can tell how much Milan knows about the kinds of opinions a really good potter might have, including some more idiosyncratic ones. I'm endlessly charmed by it all.

But also it's a book about learning what it is to be seen by someone who sees you as who you truly are, and loved for it, and learning how to trust, both trusting others and trusting yourself, and that's beautiful too.

cut for some spoilers

Like the first Wedgeford book, this is another one that doesn't have the traditional romance novel beat of the climax where everything seems to be falling apart and the romantic leads break up or are separated or mistrust each other or accuse each other of something, and again you can see how the book COULD have gone that route and deliberately was written not to, and I like it so much. It's so much less stressful a read! There are still tough things they have to deal with in their relationship before getting to the happy ending, but it never feels manufactured, or like there's an idiot ball being passed around to make the plot work.

I do feel like the conclusion of the book was a bit rushed in the pacing which made it feel anticlimactic instead of satisfying. Always frustrating in a book that I otherwise love! But overall it was still a great read, which involved multiple squeaks of delight as I made my way through it.

Also I want to note that there's secondary character ace rep in this book which is very good :)

Note: I received a free ARC ebook in exchange for an honest review.

I started my reread of Heaven Official's Blessing in September and have been working my way steadily through it ever since. This time I posted my as-it-happened thoughts to mastodon as I went, because there's just SO much book in this book that there's no way I'd remember everything by the end! So now I'm copying all those thoughts over to here for posterity. Warning, this is like 22,000 words of thoughts. But this book is so GOOD it's worth every one of those words and so many more besides! I could talk about this book forever it feels like.

Anyway. On with the liveblog! (originally posted to: https://federatedfandom.net/@soph_sol/tagged/tgcfthoughts)

( Read more... )

THE END.

Over on mastodon I'm participating in a group readalong of TGCF, one chapter per week, and a few weeks ago we finished the first volume of the official translation so I might as well crosspost all my thoughts over to here as like, my book review? Yeah okay here we go! Putting it all below a cut to save your reading page

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Damn, another real banger from Aster Glenn Gray! She's just so good at historically-grounded character-rich retellings of stories from the folk tradition.

The Sleeping Soldier is an m/m Sleeping Beauty retelling. Russell, a Union soldier from the US civil war, falls asleep for a hundred years and wakes up in the 1960's to a different world. Caleb is a college student who meets the newly-woken Russell and takes it upon himself to be Russell's guide to the world he's ended up in.

I love how real the social mores of both the 1860's and the 1960's are in the narrative of this novel - both are clearly realized, and different from each other and from today. What does same-sex friendship look like? what does dating look like? what does it mean to have sex with someone else, what does it mean to have sex with a friend, what does it mean to be gay?

In sum - what are the expected patterns of the shapes of different kinds of relationships, and how do these assumptions work when you're from two different cultures separated by the gulf of a hundred years?

And god, the way it kept coming up over and over all the different ways in which it was no longer acceptable for men to express affection and closeness to one another, physical or emotional, platonic or otherwise! PAINFUL, and so true, and something that hasn't actually changed from the 1960's to today. The days of romantic friendship are gone.

Russell gives it his all to throw himself into finding ways to be happy and comfortable and to fit in in this new life of his, and Caleb is so, so earnest and caring and brave and scared. It's scary to be gay in the 1960's! It can literally mean your death!

I really appreciated that although the main focus was on the Russell/Caleb relationship, and the various other communities and relationships they're a part of and which are meaningful to them as well, we also got to see a bit about romantic friendship between girls in the past as well, via Caleb's historical research project. And I loved how much he loved the girls in the letters he was studying!

I also appreciated that it came up more than once what a stark difference there was in songbird populations between 1865 and 1965, because yeah, the enormous decline would be noticeable.

Anyway the book was amazing and I nearly cried at the end and I definitely stayed up way too late last night reading it but regret nothing.

When I watched The Untamed (hereafter CQL) in 2021, my immediate thought upon finishing was that I HAD to read the book (hereafter MDZS) that it was based on. Now, more than two years later, I have finally done that.

And it's so good you guys!

And also, really very different from CQL.

I knew that already, because on top of the way that inevitably at least some things get changed in any adaptation process, I understand that the complex system of chinese censorship has standards for a wide variety of different things not being allowed to be shown on tv. And several of those things are integral to the version of the story in MDZS.

Being now familiar with the versions of the story told in both tv and book, I think the difference that's the biggest is the moral universe being presented by the themes of each story. CQL is the story of a person who always tries his best to do what's right, and is treated poorly by society because of it, but eventually is able to triumph. MDZS is the story of a person who makes some huge mistakes and then has to (gets to?) learn how to live with them.

Both are wonderful stories worth telling! And they have a lot in common. But they are not, in the end, the same story. Going forward I will definitely be paying more attention to which version is being tagged as the fandom when I open fic!

I do feel like I'm not quite up to writing a coherent review of the book right now though. I read the first two-thirds or so back in April, and then accidentally took a multi-month break from reading it, and then read through the remainder over the course of the last few weeks. So the beginning portions of the book are fuzzy in my head and easy to confuse with everything else I have read about CQL/MDZS and the fanfic of both, and it's hard to hold the shape of the entire narrative in my head.

But I do have a few more notes! Most of which are varyingly spoilery for either or both of CQL & MDZS

( Read more... )

idk I feel like I'm spending most of this review talking about MDZS only as relates to CQL which feels a bit unfair to MDZS as the originator, like I'm not respecting it as its own thing! But it's hard for me to talk about it in any other way after having spent the last two years so much in the fandom. If I'd come to MDZS before I ever knew anything about CQL this would be reading very differently!

At some point I do want to do a closer reading of MDZS to appreciate it better for what it specifically is doing, like the way I'm currently doing a TGCF close read on mastodon. There's so much fruitful stuff to pay attention to in any work by MXTX.

Anyway please rec me fic that is particularly good at being based in MDZS canon! I want to spend more time exploring it!

Aster Glenn Gray did it again! Wrote a really good queer historical romance that is thoroughly grounded in its historical setting with characters I love!

Honeytrap is that classic set up of a Soviet agent and an American agent during the cold war have to work together because of reasons and then fall in love, and it's one which I am primed to love because of my time spent in The Man From U.N.C.L.E. tv show fandom back in my younger days. The Soviet agent in Honeytrap even has a patronymic of Ilyich, which I immediately took to be a homage to MUNCLE's Ilya Kuryakin, and then felt extremely vindicated when MUNCLE was the first thing mentioned in the author's note at the back of the book.

However! This book is doing much more nuanced things than MUNCLE did, or indeed that MUNCLE fanfic did as far as I can recall.

It starts out in 1959 with Gennady and Daniel going on a road trip through America together in search of leads on the case they've been assigned to work together, and it all feels very familiar and classic, but then....it keeps going. The book goes up to the 1990's! And over that time it really explores the political and social realities of the times and places in question.

Click to expand for spoilers for the rest of the book

It's not actually a story about the Soviet agent making a home in the US like this kind of story often is, at least in English-language stories; both characters have understandable attachments to their homelands, understandable concerns and frustrations with the evils large and small that their countries perpetrate, ways in which they have been hurt by their country, etc. The reason why the road trip becomes such an idyllic part of their past isn't because it's about Experiencing The USA, but because they get to learn to know each other; and though the road trip must eventually end, their relationship isn't over.

The book is realistic about what it means to be queer in the changing eras as well. Both Gennady and Daniel are bisexual but have very different relationships with their bisexuality, and the other queer men who have come in and out of their lives have different journeys with their identities too.

I loved the moment where Daniel meets with a boy he'd kissed when he was young, who has grown up into a man who sponsors a group for gay students on campus in the 70's - and Daniel is horrified, because he's so worried about what he sees as the lifelong danger this man is encouraging these kids to subject themselves to, admitting to their gayness permanently on paper in the yearbook. But that man and his students are making their choices for very good reasons as well!

And over time both Gennady and Daniel have other relationships too, relationships that are deep and meaningful to them, and which fail for reasons entirely unconnected with each other. I love that we get enough of a sense of Alla that I truly care about her happiness too, even though we only get to know about her after her and Gennady's relationship is on the rocks; and I love seeing Elizabeth and Daniel's happy polyamorous lifestyle which eventually has to end because it turns out one of Daniel's relationship needs is to be someone's primary partner, though that's not exactly how he phrases it, and in the end Elizabeth can't quite give that to him.

The Daniel/Gennady relationship isn't the only possible love for either of them, isn't the only possible happy ending, and yet they do love each other and do end up getting a chance at a happy ending, and I just adore that.

Goddd so much of the book is about like, moment after moment of glorious stolen happiness between them with the sure knowledge that it will have to end. I finished the book with this sense of like. idk. Wistful yearning, and total satisfaction at the same time. It wasn't what i expected, at all! And it's so good.

I mad the fatal mistake of not writing down my initial impressions immediately upon finishing the book, so this review must rely on my inconsistent memory. Can I remember the things that struck me that are worth talking about?! Tune in to the rest of this post to find out.

To Shape a Dragon's Breath is a wonderful alternate-earth historical fantasy novel, with a main character from a culture based on post-colonial Indigenous people in North America. In this context of trying to maintain their way of life despite the devastations of disease and colonial rule, Anequs is a teen who finds a dragon egg and bonds with the new-hatched dragon. By the rules of the colonial government, all dragoneers must attend an academy to learn how to safely control their dragon's powers, so Anequs must leave her home and immerse herself in a culture and a schooling system that were not designed for her.

The author does a wonderful job of showing the many different ways indigenous people respond to the impossible situation they're put in, post-colonization, with no good answers; and the many different big and small manifestations of racism that they face, by people both well-meaning and malicious. Anequs finds both friends and allies, but even within these people she is often having to deal with their own internalized racism.

And I loved the worldbuilding! Although different language and symbols are used, because latin is not the language of science and education in this world, it is clear that the power of a dragon's breath is to break down anything into its constituent elements and rebuild them according to the direction of their person or people. So Anequs in learning vitskraft is basically learning chemistry, and the symbology that can be used to safely direct the power of a dragon's breath to create only the things you want.

And it's fun, too, to see a version of the world where a viking style culture is the one that is dominant in the colonial era instead of british culture, and the ways in which it does and doesn't change things.

(I do think that if one were to carefully draw out all cultural ramifications there would be even more differences between that world and our own history -- eg the clothing would NOT be our world's 19th century western fashion! -- but I do understand that that might be too big a project to undertake, to make every single thing make sense within the internal logic while still making it recognizably 19th century to the reader.)

Anyway I found it a thoroughly enjoyable book with a satisfying ending, but also it's clear from the book that there's more coming in the series and I only wish I could read the rest IMMEDIATELY. But that is not how linear time and recently-published books work!

We Ride Upon Sticks is a historical fantasy/magic realism novel set in the long-ago era of 1989, and it fully embraces what it means to be set in the 80's in the eastern United States. (is it weird to be reading historical fiction set in the decade of my birth? it sure is! but also I adore how firmly it embodies the 80's.)

The Danvers High School field hockey team has a long history of losing their games by embarrassingly large amounts, but this year is different. This year the 11 players have a PLAN, have made a magically binding pact, and are ready to do what it takes to win for a change.

The book is told from the pov of the team. Yes, the whole team, it's written in first-person plural. You would think this would be weird? But it super isn't, it feels remarkably natural to read!

None of the team members are the main character; the whole team is, equally. Over the course of the narrative, you spend time examining the realities of what it means to be each of them, what's going on in their families and relationships, what their inner lives are like, and so forth. You would think that this is too many characters to focus on, but again, it super isn't! I really felt like I knew all eleven of them.

One of the things I loved about this book is its prose; it's distinctive and confident and fun. And I love the way reveals are constructed, circling around the information so that you see what the result is and then come back around to see what actually happened – you get these kind of reveals both within the space of a paragraph, or a chapter, or a whole arc, and I love the way it carries you forward. And the author has a real knack for similes too, and the story is full of the kind of extremely specific and weird details that make something come alive. I saw in the author's bio that she's also a published poet and that doesn't surprise me!

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But overall I thoroughly enjoyed the read, and it was definitely doing a bunch of really cool things!

Awww, a perfectly lovely retelling of Gawain and the Green Knight set in WWII, that does all the things one wants in such a retelling. A beautiful little gem of a novella. Gawain is lovely and charming, the Bertilaks compelling, the secondary characters richly drawn as well, and the story is fully present in its setting. I loved it!

I always find it so funny when the cover copy on a book tells of a very different story than the one that's actually between the covers. "Clara seizes the chance, no questions asked" hahaha no Clara asks a lot of questions!

Anyway this is a book set in 1920's Washington DC in the Black community, with a main character who can see and talk to spirits, and takes on a mission on behalf of one of them in order to free herself from an agreement. Clara pulls together a team of other people who also have magical gifts, plus her friend Zelda who's not magical but used to work in a circus and isn't about to let Clara do anything dangerous without her.

I really enjoyed the depth of the setting of this book; the author clearly did her research, and it shows in the best ways. People and places and relevant issues of the time and the specific place are all integrated into the narrative, bringing it to life. Issues of classism and colourism within the Black community is a major theme in the book, and it emphasises the importance of solidarity against the bigger problems they all face.

I also loved Zelda and the way her friendship with Clara was portrayed. This is one of the important relationships in the book and I love that! Also another important relationship is between Clara and her dead grandma. Grandma ghosts best ghosts.

The aspect of the book that worked least well for me was three other members of Clara's team. They're three men named Jesse Lee, Aristotle, and Israel. And I kept getting them confused! They each have different backstories and abilities but I didn't feel like I got enough of a sense of their different personalities to be able to hold each one firm in my head as a different person. I kept having to think hard to remember which one was Clara's love interest, which one had which ability, and so on, which was fairly disorienting.

But overall it was a solidly enjoyable and interesting book. And I really appreciated one aspect of the ending, which is:

( cut for a mild spoiler for the ending )

A novella about the Matter of Britain, featuring Percival the Grail Knight as a young woman. Griffith's prose is beautiful, and she's doing some interesting things with this interpretation, and I found the beginning of the book compelling, but ultimately....idk, I finished the book feeling oddly dissatisfied. I'm not sure what I wanted done differently, I'm not sure what wasn't working for me.

( some spoilers for the ending, as I try to talk through what didn't work for me )

Dangit I wanted to like this book!!

After having seen multiple enthusiastic reviews for this children's book from 50 years ago (thank you

melannen and

cahn), I had to get my hands on it myself, and it was well worth it! Such a good book.

It's historical fantasy set during the time when Mary Tudor was queen of England, which is not an era I see getting a lot of attention from fantasy novels, and it's well grounded in its particular time in history. The book is about a young woman, Kate, who is exiled to a place that has a lot of dismissed-as-superstition rumours about unsettling connection to magic and Faerie.

And this too is great, the writing is wonderfully evocative, and the fairies of the book are appropriately Other while still managing to be sympathetic in some ways. ( I guess this is spoilers? )

Anyway. Excellent book, love this for me, highly recommended to others for whom this kind of thing is your thing as well. Oh and it's a Newbery award winner too!

This is a nonfiction biography of a woman who was an amateur scientist in pretty much the end of the era when you could have a successful career publishing academic articles without formal credentials, and only the beginning of the era when women could have a successful career in academia. She was born to Swedish nobility, her first husband died in the Russian revolution, she was a nurse to the famous Dionne Quintuplets, and she spent decades living in a tiny cabin in the woods in northern ontario taking intensive observations of birds.

A fascinating woman! But obviously I read this book because BIRDS. And it does mostly focus on her life after she falls headfirst into what became her true life's work of studying and understanding birds. I loved reading about her passion, her efforts, her extensive correspondence with bird experts across north america, her growing and deep familiarity with all the birds of her area, her dedication to keeping careful records of everything she saw and heard. Some of the things she studied continue to be relevant to ornithologists today!

But one through-line in the book was Louise's knowledge of the declining numbers of songbirds over the years, even from the very earliest days of her birding efforts in the 1930's. She knew, too, that the declining numbers were due to human activity, and she mourned their loss. Near the end of the book, the reader is provided with some numbers of just how great the decline in songbirds has been from when Louise began her records to now in the 2020's and it is honestly heartbreaking. Even just within Louise's life, she talks about the obvious and stark change in the experience of the morning bird chorus. It brings me near tears to think of how things used to be! Between habitat loss in both breeding grounds and wintering grounds, the effects of herbicides and insecticides, disappearing food due to the collapsing insect population, and more, songbird presence is a shadow of what it once was.

The other important thing I learned from the book is that the things I want to know about birds ARE out there, I just need to acquire bird books that are focused on specific species or specific families, instead of field guides, if I want to know everything about a bird's life and behaviour. NOTED. My bird library WILL be growing.

Sequel to last year's A Marvellous Light, a book I enjoyed but felt rather like it wasn't focusing on the story I wanted it to focus on. This one.... unfortunately continues the trend, though in a slightly different way.

Maud and Violet are two young women on a trans-atlantic ship voyage, who get caught up in a mystery surrounding a murder and a missing magical object. Together, they work to solve the mystery, accomplish their various goals, and navigate their growing relationship with each other.

There are many things to like about this, and honestly it is executed very well. There's good stuff between Maud and Violet, and the amount of trust and vulnerability they're a) interested in sharing with each other or b) capable of; and there's a fun cast of secondary characters in the restricted environment of a ship at sea. Some of the food descriptions really stuck with me, and I don't usually notice food in books! And we get to find out more about the Forsythia Club, the group of old lady magicians who had fascinated me so much in the last book.

But the story being told here is really a lot more hijinks-heavy a story than I usually prefer, featuring two main characters who are both hijinks-generators in their own ways, so I just wasn't really into the vibe for the first, like.... at least half the book.

And then I was teased with an AMAZING idea that then didn't go anywhere near what I was hoping and expecting for such an idea!

( cut for spoilers )

At any rate, highly recommended for anyone more into hijinks than me. I really did like the characters and their relationship!

And the next book is going to feature my favourite secondary character from this book, apparently: Ross, the class-conscious pornography-smuggling reporter. I'll be interested to see where that goes! And I hope there'll be more of Mrs Vaughn in the next book.

Look, there's another queer Great Gatsby novel, obviously I had to give it a try! This one's premise is: what if Nick and Gatsby were trans men and also explicitly textually into each other, plus Nick and Daisy are Latinx. And like, yeah, sure, I'm in!

Unfortunately, though I think the book is successful at what it's doing, it turned out to not work for me personally on several different levels. It's a good, readable, thoughtful, queer book with coherent themes and sympathetic yet imperfect characters doing their best, which should be my jam. And just about every criticism I'm able to come up with, there are reasonable reasons the choices were made, and I can understand and sometimes even appreciate those choices! And yet as a whole I was left dissatisfied.

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So like. As I said. My issues with this book are me problems, and I can imagine a different reader experiencing this as a five-star book, where for me it's solidly 3 stars and not a bit more.

So I'm nil out of 2 so far on queer Gatsby retellings that work for me. But if/when I hear about another one, though, I will return, ever-hopeful that maybe the next one will be the one that works for me!

I got this book from

skygiants' review, and like, reading through this book I could ABSOLUTELY see how it is obviously the poison for Becca, Becca's poison, but also: I read the first two pages and was immediately confident I would like this book too. And I was right!

It is a historical fantasy novel with three main characters. The first two are an angel and a demon who live together in a Jewish shtetl in Poland as chevrusas, or study partners in their study of the Talmud, but who for a variety of reasons end up immigrating to the US. The third, Rose, is an extremely lesbian Jewish teen girl who immigrates to the US as well, for opportunities and for adventure and for getting away from her best friend Dinah who had the temerity to marry a man. Then they all get involved with labour activism! And also dealing with ghosts and dybbuks and gentile demons and oppressive immigration policies and more.

The three main characters are all so different from each other and I adore all three of them so so so much! Never ever a moment of disappointment on switching viewpoints, just excitement to spend time with that character again. Also: the narrative itself is a character with an "I" which I love too. Actually I would have loved if this was an even more prominent feature too! Love me a book where the narrative isn't trying to disappear into the background but has its own opinions separate from that of the characters it's writing about.

Plus the book as a whole is suffused both with very Jewish and very queer vibes and I love this about it. I am not Jewish myself so cannot speak in detail to that aspect of it, though I always love to read books that go all in on depicting very specific experiences like this! And the queerness....ohhhh it was beautiful. This book not just a book with queer characters; the whole narrative is queer in its soul, and I love that for it. And for me, reading it!!! It's just like, this is a book that understands me.

( minor spoilers I think )

At any rate, thank you Becca for the rec because this was a GREAT read.

EDIT dangit this is a harpercollins book and the strike is still ongoing, I forgot to check before posting this review! I'm not going to take it down at this point but I'm gonna be more vigilant for checking going forward so I don't post any more. Find out more about the HarperCollins union strike here.

Hmmmm this is a case where I see and respect what the book/the author is doing, but didn't actually vibe with it myself, unfortunately.

Wild Rain is a Western romance novel featuring a Black m/f leading couple. Westerns are really not my thing to start with, though I do appreciate that at least the narrative acknowledges Indigenous people and their rights in ways the genre usually hasn't. And as a romance novel, this is one that features high romantic/sexual attraction in the leading couple, with Instant Attraction being a major feature, which is also not my jam as romances go. I do appreciate that Spring and Garrett don't act on their attraction until they know at least something of each other's good qualities, but still. And then they are all in with each other after just a couple weeks of knowing each other!!! I do not get the allos.

And......I don't love Jenkins' writing tbh. The prose is workmanlike bordering on awkward. And although "show don't tell" as advice is an oversimplification, this book could really use a little less telling. It's show AND tell, constantly. I don't remember noticing this in the previous Jenkins books I read, so maybe I'm just not in the right headspace to read past it right now? idk.

The book does have many wonderful features! Including: the portrayal of Black people in history, how seriously it takes sexual assault, the acceptance that not every woman wants children and not every happy ending has a marriage, the friendship between Spring and her sister-in-law, the acknowledgement of the ways a traumatic childhood can affect a person for life, and the way the lead couple were able to trust each other and lean on each other both physically and emotionally.

But although the good things kept me reading, the things that didn't work for me were strong enough that I didn't actually particularly enjoy the book. Which is too bad! I think this would be an excellent read for people who are not me.