So far in 2025, I’ve read 15 books:
Ratings legend:
| ★★★★★ | Completely enthralling, couldn’t put it down. and/or More than just entertaining (e.g., educational, enlightening). Would highly recommend. |
| ★★★★☆ | Really great book in all respects with perhaps some minor flaws. Would definitely recommend. |
| ★★★☆☆ | Average. An entertaining read but probably forgettable. Might or might not recommend. |
| ★★☆☆☆ | Finished, but did not like. Would not recommend. |
| ★☆☆☆☆ | Abandoned before finishing, usually because it was poorly written or just uninteresting to me. |
The books I’ve read so far in 2025—summary
Clicking on the title of a book will take you to its detailed entry further down on the page, which contains a description of the book and some thoughts I had about it.
| Number | Title | Author | Format | Pages | Duration | Rating | Genres |
| 15 | The Answer Is No | Fredrik Backman | Kindle | 68 | 02/19/25 – 02/19/25 (1 day) | ★★★★☆ | fiction, short stories, humor, novella |
| 14 | All the Lovers in the Night | Mieko Kawakami | Audiobook | 224 | 02/18/25 – 02/19/25 (2 days) | ★★★★☆ | fiction, Japan, Japanese literature, literary fiction, Asian literature, Romance |
| 13 | The 7½ Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle | Stuart Turton | Audiobook | 458 | 02/14/25 – 02/17/25 (4 days) | ★★☆☆☆ | fiction, mystery, thriller, fantasy, crime, time travel |
| 12 | Flags of Our Fathers | James D. Bradley | Kindle | 400 | 02/08/25 – 02/13/25 (6 days) | ★★☆☆☆ | nonfiction, military fiction, war, World War II, biography, military history |
| 11 | The Fall Risk | Abby Jimenez | Kindle | 82 | 02/07/25 – 02/07/25 (1 day) | ★★★★☆ | fiction, romance, short stories, novella |
| 10 | The Storyteller’s Secret | Sejal Badani | 390 | 02/02/25 – 02/06/25 (5 days) | ★★★★★ | historical fiction, India, romance, cultural | |
| 9 | Something in the Water | Catherine Steadman | Audiobook | 352 | 01/30/25 – 02/01/25 (3 days) | ★★★★★ | fiction, mystery thriller, suspense, crime |
| 8 | Yellowface | R.F. Kuang | Audiobook | 323 | 01/27/25 – 01/28/25 (2 days) | ★★☆☆☆ | fiction, thriller, mystery, books about books, books about writing, British |
| 7 | My Absolute Darling | Gabriel Tallent | Kindle | 432 | 01/23/25 – 01/26/25 (4 days) | ★★☆☆☆ | literary fiction, coming of age, thriller, domestic abuse, violence |
| 6 | The Uncommon Reader | Alan Bennett | 120 | 01/22/25 – 01/22/25 (1 day) | ★★★★☆ | fiction, British literature, Books about books, novella | |
| 5 | Magical Midlife in Glimmerspell | Addison Moore | 235 | 01/20/25 – 01/21/25 (2 days) | ★★☆☆☆ | paranormal women’s fiction, cozy mystery, gothic | |
| 4 | Some Trick (Abandoned) |
Helen DeWitt | 197 | 01/16/25 – 01/19/25 (4 days) | ★☆☆☆☆ | literary fiction, short stories | |
| 3 | All the World Beside (Abandoned) |
Gerrard Conley | 353 | 01/15/25 – 01/15/25 (1 day) | ★☆☆☆☆ | literary fiction, historical fiction, queer, LGBT, Romance | |
| 2 | All the Ugly and Wonderful Things | Bryn Greenwood | 421 | 01/10/25 – 01/13/25 (4 days) | ★★★★☆ | fiction, justice, domestic abuse, drugs, drama, crime, contemporary romance | |
| 1 | Arthur & George | Julian Barnes | 388 | 01/01/25 – 01/09/25 (9 days) | ★★★☆☆ | fiction, historical fiction, mystery, British literature, crime, justice |
The books I’ve read so far in 2025—details
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| 📕10-word summary: Man who doesn’t like people very much overdoses on them. 🖌6-word review: Smart satire. Overdone hyperbole at times. |
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| 💭Compelling quote: “Therefore, to avoid your neighbors, you have to make yourself uninteresting, but not too uninteresting, because that makes you interesting.” | |||||||||
| Description:* Lucas knows the perfect night entails just three things: video games, wine, and Pad Thai. Peanuts are a must! Other people? Not so much. Why complicate things when he’s happy alone? Then one day the apartment board, a vexing trio of authority, rings his doorbell. And Lucas’s solitude takes a startling hike. They demand to see his frying pan. Someone left one next to the recycling room overnight, and instead of removing the errant object, as Lucas suggests, they insist on finding the guilty party. But their plan backfires. Colossally.*From goodreads.com’s synopsis. | |||||||||
| Thoughts: Until this book of his, I’ve had a love-hate relationship with this author. I read A Man Called Ove in 2017 and with so many metaphors and similes (several of them in one paragraph at times), the writing became distracting enough for me to abandon the book. Then in 2023, our Mostly Social Book Club read Anxious People, and I absolutely loved it! I’m happy to say I really enjoyed — albeit just short of loving — this book. I thought that at times, although it sounds redundant, the hyperbole was over-the-top — to approach being just plain silly. I’m also turned off when (professional) reviewers describe a book, like many did about this one, as “hilarious” or “laugh-out-loud funny,” because humor is so personal and subjective. With all that said, it was a short, fun read, and I’d definitely recommend it. I chose this book as my November 2024 First Reads offering, which provides free early access to an editor’s pick from Amazon Prime. | |||||||||
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| 📕10-word summary: A glimpse into a mid-thirties freelance copy editor’s inner life. 🖌6-word review: Sometimes great, sometimes excruciating protagonist’s dialogue. |
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| 💭Compelling quote: “As long as you’re living on this planet, you have to be serious about something, but it’s better to be serious about a limited number of things.” | |||||||||
| 🎓Some new-to-me words: plumeria, mugicha | |||||||||
| Description:* Fuyuko Irie is a freelance copy editor in her mid-thirties. Working and living alone in a city where it is not easy to form new relationships, she has little regular contact with anyone other than her editor, Hijiri, a woman of the same age but with a very different disposition. When Fuyuko stops one day on a Tokyo street and notices her reflection in a storefront window, what she sees is a drab, awkward, and spiritless woman who has lacked the strength to change her life and decides to do something about it. As the long overdue change occurs, however, painful episodes from Fuyuko’s past surface and her behavior slips further and further beyond the pale.*From goodreads.com’s synopsis. | |||||||||
| Thoughts: I saw this book in my BookBub email, and it sounded interesting, perhaps because the protagonist was a copy editor. I went back-and-forth between not liking and liking this book, and ended up on the “like” side, as per my 4-star rating. Several times, I had to tell myself that I was frustrated with the main character because she was an introvert when she sometimes either took forever to answer somebody’s questions, or just didn’t them answer at all. I found all three of the main people she interacted with during the story — Hijiri, Mitsutsuka, and Noriko — quite interesting. I also liked how this book did not have a Hollywood ending. | |||||||||
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| 📕10-word summary: Man stuck in time loop until he solves a murder. 🖌6-word review: Interesting premise. Complicated execution. Tedious reading. |
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| 💭Favorite quote: “Thankfully, the leaves and twigs are so demoralized by the earlier rain they don’t have the heart to cry out beneath my feet.” | |||||||||
| 🎓Some new-to-me words: brazier | |||||||||
| Description:* Evelyn Hardcastle will be murdered at 11:00 p.m. There are eight days, and eight witnesses for you to inhabit. We will only let you escape once you tell us the name of the killer. Understood? Then let’s begin… Evelyn Hardcastle will die. Every day until Aiden Bishop can identify her killer and break the cycle. But every time the day begins again, Aiden wakes up in the body of a different guest. And some of his hosts are more helpful than others…*From goodreads.com’s synopsis. | |||||||||
| Thoughts: If, like me, the title of this book reminds you of The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo, disabuse yourself right now of any notion of a connection between the two books. There isn’t any. It took me a while to get the rhythm of how the storyline in this book was going to work, and the dealbreaker for me was the one chapter that was solely exposition of the time- and body-traveling rules. I mean, if you have to stop the story with a chapter explaining how a device — which you’re purportedly employing to enhance your narrative — is going to work, maybe that’s a little too heavy-handed writing. It suspended my effort to suspend my disbelief with the sort of reading equivalent of breaking the fourth wall in theater.
Tedious, annoying, distracting: 1) I found it tedious that there were 8 “hosts” (i.e., other characters’ bodies) that the protagonist inhabited during the story, but then there were a couple of bodies he “visited” more than once. End it already. 2) Overuse of the word “conspiratorial” (or its derivative) in writing is annoying to me, and there were three instances of it in this book. Nobody whispers and conspires that much. 3) This is the second audiobook by a British author that I’ve listened to recently in which I found distracting the pronunciation of these words as “enna-thing,” “enna-one,” and “evra-thing.” Is that how all Brits say those words? I don’t think so. |
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| 📕10-word summary: Raising of the Flag on Iwo Jima photograph’s shocking history. 🖌6-word review: Scholar-like accounting. Incredibly written. Horrific details. |
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| 💭Compelling quote: “John’s other nightly habit, though, was something he refused to talk about at all. When Betty would ask him about it in the morning, he would simply turn away. He’d be sleeping, his eyes closed, was the way my mother remembered it. But he’d be whimpering. His body would shake, and tears would stream out of his eyes, down his face.” | |||||||||
| 🎓Some new-to-me words: chockablock, sintering, billet, supplanted, jingoistic, pillboxes, mettle, tyro, bivouacked, bibulous, paeans | |||||||||
| Description:* In this unforgettable chronicle of perhaps the most famous moment in American military history, James Bradley has captured the glory, the triumph, the heartbreak, and the legacy of the six men who raised the flag at Iwo Jima. Here is the true story behind the immortal photograph that has come to symbolize the courage and indomitable will of America.*From goodreads.com’s synopsis. | |||||||||
Thoughts: To be clear, the writing in this book is excellent. My 2-star rating is because I didn’t enjoy it, and I would not recommend it to others, which is a result of my extreme pacifism and the excruciating details about the horrific acts of war written about in this book. Full disclosure: The only reason I didn’t abandon this book was because it was a Mostly Social Book Club book. I skipped chapters 7 (D-Day), 8 (D-Day Plus One), 9 (D-Day Plus Two), 10 (D-Day Plus Three), and I skipped over many other paragraphs, passages, and sometimes pages of prolonged descriptions of murder, torture, and dismemberment. While reading this, I thought a lot about my father, and his 2 combat tours in Vietnam, during one of which he received a Purple Heart for wounds received during Operation Purple Martin. I also thought about his unwillingness to talk about his time in Vietnam like a lot of the guys in this book with regards to the battle on Iwo Jima. Also, like a lot of these guys, my dad suffered from long-term effects of his war experience — he was a terrible sleeper, couldn’t eat rice because it reminded him of maggots in the food in the field, and had severe PTSD reactions to fireworks being set off.
 With all that said, this story is a fascinating look at marketing and PR and its — in retrospect — absolute disastrous treatment of the most recognizable image of World War II, Raising the Flag on Iwo Jima by Joe Rosenthal. And finally, the Afterword of this book made me gasp. |
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| 📕10-word summary: Neighbors bond over the shared stairs to their apartments disappearing. 🖌6-word review: Fun characters. A short, playful story. |
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| 💭A favorite quote: “Sometimes the start of something good begins during something bad,” he said. “We don’t get to pick when these things happen.” | |||||||||
| 🎓Some new-to-me words: Dalit, ghatiya, salwar kameezes, mangalasutra, puja, lassi | |||||||||
| Description:* It’s Valentine’s Day weekend, and Charlotte and Seth are not looking for romance. Armed with emotional-support bear spray, Charlotte is in self-imposed isolation and on guard from men. Having a stalker can do that to a person’s nerves. Just across the hall and giving off woodsy vibes is Seth, a recently divorced arborist. As in today recently. Heights, he’s fine with. Trust? Not so much. But when disaster traps them one flight up and no way down, an outrageously precarious predicament forces a tree-loving guy and a rattled girl next door to embrace their captivity.*From goodreads.com’s synopsis. | |||||||||
| Thoughts: I chose this book as my February 2025 First Reads offering, which provides free early access to an editor’s pick from Amazon Prime. I liked the premise of the story, and it was a short little book to slip in after reading 4 lengthier ones and before starting the next serious, nonfiction, book club book, Flags of Our Fathers. | |||||||||
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| 📕10-word summary: Deep personal loss leads to self-healing and uncovering family tragedy. 🖌6-word review: “A rich, thoughtfully woven generational tale.” |
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| 💭A favorite quote: “Her stories were her only passport to places she had never been. Without them, she would be forever trapped in this village.” | |||||||||
| 🎓Some new-to-me words: Dalit, ghatiya, salwar kameezes, mangalasutra, puja, lassi | |||||||||
| Description:* Nothing prepares Jaya, a New York journalist, for the heartbreak of her third miscarriage and the slow unraveling of her marriage in its wake. Desperate to assuage her deep anguish, she decides to go to India to uncover answers to her family’s past. Intoxicated by the sights, smells, and sounds she experiences, Jaya becomes an eager student of the culture. But it is Ravi—her grandmother’s former servant and trusted confidant—who reveals the resilience, struggles, secret love, and tragic fall of Jaya’s pioneering grandmother during the British occupation.*From goodreads.com’s synopsis. | |||||||||
| Thoughts: I read about this book on BookBub and found it in the library, with no waiting list for it. I love, love, loved this book. It’s the kind of book that while reading, I’m thinking, “How do writer’s come up with this stuff? It may very well end up being the best book I read in 2025, and it’s only January. And it might very well become my next Mostly Social Book Club book recommendation. | |||||||||
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| 📕10-word summary: Greed begets greed as newlyweds descend into a beyond-dangerous situation. 🖌6-word review: Riveting. Chilling. Fast-moving, who’s-doing-it mystery thriller. |
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| 💭A favorite quote: “But that’s life, isn’t it? Sometimes you’re the dog; sometimes you’re the lamppost.” | |||||||||
| 🎓Some new-to-me words: The nuanced difference between flotsam and jetsam, especially in the context of maritime law. | |||||||||
| Description:* Erin is a documentary filmmaker on the brink of a professional breakthrough, Mark a handsome investment banker with big plans. Passionately in love, they embark on a dream honeymoon to the tropical island of Bora Bora, where they enjoy the sun, the sand, and each other. Then, while scuba diving in the crystal blue sea, they find something in the water. Suddenly the newlyweds must make a dangerous decision to speak out or to protect their secret.*From goodreads.com’s synopsis. | |||||||||
| Thoughts: My friend Nicole recommended this book 2 years ago, and I finally got around to reading it. And it’s become my first 5-star book in 2025! Yay! It’s a fast-moving story and Erin is the kind of protagonist that you’re yelling at, “Don’t do it! You know you shouldn’t do it!” all the while knowing she is going to do it, and since she is, you can’t wait to see what happens so you can say, “I knew it!” and “I told you so!” It’s a complex, but very-well-weaved set of plot lines with a very nice twist at the end. I listened to the audiobook of this novel, which was read by the author, Catherine Steadman. It’s the first book I’ve read of hers, and I’d definitely consider another. | |||||||||
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| 📕10-word summary: White author steals and publishes dead Asian author’s next book. 🖌6-word review: A most improbable plot. Marginally interesting. |
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| 💭A favorite quote: “Social media is such a tiny, insular space. Once you close your screen, no one gives a fuck.” | |||||||||
| 🎓Some new-to-me words: consanguinity | |||||||||
| Description:* White lies. Dark humor. Deadly consequence. Bestselling sensation Juniper Song is not who she says she is, she didn’t write the book she claims she wrote, and she is most certainly not Asian American.*From goodreads.com’s synopsis. | |||||||||
| Thoughts: This story started off okay, but as soon as you find out what June Hayward intends to do with Athena Liu’s manuscript, it’s blatantly obvious that it’ll never work. As hard as I tried (at least at first) to have some empathy for June, I liked her less and less as she became more and more delusional about what and why she was doing what she was doing. By the end, I only finished it because I was so close to the end, not because I cared about June’s character any more. Would not recommend—especially if you’re a writer. | |||||||||
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| 📕10-word summary: The complex chaos of a 14-year-old girl’s domestic abuse experience. 🖌6-word review: Too violent. Too graphic. Too infuriating. |
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| 💭A favorite quote: “The truth of you, if it is there at all, exists beyond an unbridgeable and irreducible epistemological gap.” | |||||||||
| 🎓Some new-to-me words: verdigris, cassoulet, erinys, salal, stob, cultivar, gyre, rictus, cauls, numinous, adumbrations | |||||||||
| Description:* At 14, Turtle Alveston knows the use of every gun on her wall. She knows how to snare a rabbit, sharpen a blade and splint a bone. She knows that her daddy loves her more than anything else in this world and he’ll do whatever it takes to keep her with him. But she doesn’t know why she feels so different from the other girls at school; why the line between love and pain can be so hard to see. Or why making a friend may be the bravest and most terrifying thing she has ever done. Sometimes the people you’re supposed to trust are the ones who do most harm. And what you’ve been taught to fear is the very thing that will save you…*From goodreads.com’s synopsis. | |||||||||
| Thoughts: First of all, Goodreads includes “Young Adult” as a genre for this book. I can’t imagine any situation, context, or universe in which this book could garner such a designation. There are a lot of triggers in this book, the biggest one being incestuous rape. And, as if that’s not horrendous (and adult) enough, the graphic detail in which the physicality of the act is described is off-the-charts unnecessary. There is also a lot of talk, description, and use of guns in this book, another topic that I abhor. The ratings of this book are a complete dichotomy between love and hate. I gave it a 2 rating: “Finished, but did not like. Would not recommend.” In an attempt to temper my extreme bias against reading about emotional, physical, or domestic abuse (and guns!), I will admit that this book is well written, which is to say I think it earns the “literary” part of the “literary fiction” designation. | |||||||||
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| 📕10-word summary: The Queen, an opsimath reader, becomes passionately obsessed and challenging. 🖌6-word review: Enjoyable fictional account—well-written book-about-books novella. |
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| 💭A favorite quote: Prime Minister’s advisor: “Your employer has been giving my employer a hard time.” Kevin, the Queen’s advisor: “Yes?” PM’s advisor: “Yes. Lending him books to read. That’s out of order.” Kevin: “Her Majesty likes reading.” PM’s advisor: “I like having my dick sucked. I don’t make the Prime Minister do it. Any thoughts, Kevin?” Kevin: “I will speak to Her Majesty.” PM’s advisor: “You do that, Kev. And tell her to knock it off.” |
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| 🎓Some new-to-me words: duff, glabrous, careered, equerry, flummeries, boulle, accretion, chivvied, opsimath, peregrinations, tetchy | |||||||||
| Description:* Led by her yapping corgis to the Westminster traveling library outside Buckingham Palace, the Queen finds herself taking out a novel by Ivy Compton-Burnett. Duff read though it is, the following week her choice proves more enjoyable and awakens in Her Majesty a passion for reading so great that her public duties begin to suffer. And so, as she devours work by everyone from Hardy to Brookner to Proust to Beckett, her equerries conspire to bring the Queen’s literary odyssey to a close.*From goodreads.com’s synopsis. | |||||||||
| Thoughts: This was an enjoyable, easy-to-read book that was a welcome change from my 3 previous 2025 books. I thought it was amusing how the Queen referred to herself as “one,” as opposed to the royal “we.” For example, responding to “Your Majesty has started reading,” she says, “No, Sir Claude. One had always read. Only these days one is reading more.” I was also amused when every once in a while, she said something that sounded a lot like Violet Crawley, Dowager Countess of Grantham in Downton Abbey. For example the Queen writes, “‘One recipe for happiness is to have no sense of entitlement.” To this she added a star and noted at the bottom of the page: ‘This is not a lesson I have ever been in a position to learn,'” which reminded me of the Downton Dowager’s infamous response to, “‘There are many hours in the day. And of course I’ll have the weekend,’ he says. Lady Grantham says, without a hint of sarcasm, ‘What is a weekend?'” And finally, although a fictional work and no names are stated, the inferred Queen is Queen Elizabeth II, the Prime Minister is presumably Tony Blair, and the Duke would naturally be Prince Philip. | |||||||||
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| 📕10-word summary: Midlife crisis leads woman to town rife with the paranormal. 🖌6-word review: The cozy mystery genre gone awry. |
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| 💭A favorite quote: “I shoot Harold a look. It took us 3 years to have Harper and not a single baby soul followed suit. I was at war with my ovaries, my uterus, doing everything humanly possible to give Harper a sibling and here Charlene jumps into bed with my husband and makes it a reality.” |
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| 🎓Some new-to-me words: transmundane, telesensual | |||||||||
| Description:* An impending divorce. A hot homicide detective. And spontaneous time travel. Midlife in Glimmerspell is proving to be magical. “If I thought the first half of my life was a bumpy ride, I’d better buckle up because I’m about to go over the hill and off the rails.”*From goodreads.com’s synopsis. | |||||||||
| Thoughts: So far in 2025, I’m on a roll—but it’s not a good one—of books that just aren’t working for me. Fortunately, I got this book as a free 4-book series download, and needless to say (but I’m going to anyway), I won’t be reading the other 3 books in the series. It was not at all what I expected, which was your typical cozy mystery. I would estimate that 25% of it was spent on the murder, while 75% of it focused on the female protagonist drooling after a dreamy male detective, time traveling, vampires, werewolves, and fae. Time traveling does intrigue me, and I’ve read some books of that genre, such as: Remember Me Tomorrow, Oona Out of Order, The Midnight Library, Mrs. Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children, The Time Traveler’s Wife, In Five Years, and A Wrinkle in Time, but I don’t like the gothic genre at all. | |||||||||
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| 📕10-word summary: Thirteen short stories; didn’t understand 2 of the first 5. 🖌6-word review: Not my cup of tea. Abandoned. |
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| Description:* [DeWitt’s] jumping-off points might be statistics, romance, the art world’s piranha tank, games of chance and games of skill, the travails of publishing, or success. “Look,” a character begins to explain, laying out some gambit reasonably enough, even if facing a world of boomeranging counterfactuals, situations spinning out to their utmost logical extremes, and Rube Goldberg-like moving parts, where things prove “more complicated than they had first appeared” and “at 3 a.m. the circumstances seem to attenuate.” In various ways, each tale carries DeWitt’s signature poker-face lament regarding the near-impossibility of the life of the mind when one is made to pay to have the time for it, in a world so sadly “taken up with all sorts of paraphernalia superfluous, not to say impedimental, to ratiocination.” *From goodreads.com’s synopsis. | |||||||||
| Thoughts: Read the description. ‘Nuff said. | |||||||||
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| 📕10-word summary: Two men negotiate dangerous, secret love in Puritan New England. 🖌6-word review: So lyrical it obfuscates plot. Abandoned. |
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| Description:* Cana, a utopian vision of 18th-century Puritan New England. To the outside world, Reverend Nathaniel Whitfield and his family stand as godly pillars of their small-town community, drawing Christians from across the New World into their fold. One such Christian, physician Arthur Lyman, discovers in the minister’s words a love so captivating it transcends language. As the bond between these two men grows increasingly passionate, their families must contend with a tangled web of secrets, lies, and judgments that threaten to destroy them in this world and the next. And when the religious ecstasies of the Great Awakening begin to take hold, igniting a new era of zealotry, Nathaniel and Arthur search for a path out of an impossible situation, imagining a future for themselves that has no name. Their wives and children must do the same, looking beyond the known world for a new kind of wilderness, both physical and spiritual.*From goodreads.com’s synopsis. | |||||||||
| Thoughts: “Lyrical writing is used to create a piece that feels more deeply evocative than usual, thanks to its song-like, poetic property. In a way, it’s prose that sounds more like a poem.” I’m not a fan of it. I have survived some lyrical writing: In 2020, I read What Belongs to You, and although containing lyrical writing and having a 40-page paragraph, I not only finished it but gave it 4 stars. In 2022, I read On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous, for whose 6-word review, I wrote, “Chapter 9 is so lyrically beautiful,” and I gave it 5 stars. However, when the writing is so lyrical that I can’t follow the plot, that’s a deal-breaker—as was the case with this book. | |||||||||
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| 📕10-word summary: Young girl negotiates her family’s abusive, criminal, and dysfunctional lifestyle. 🖌6-word review: Gloom, despair, agony abundant. Unconventionally triumphant. |
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| 💭A favorite quote: “I mostly liked high school. I liked learning things. How numbers work together to explain the stars. How molecules made the world. All the ugly and wonderful things people had done in the last two thousand years.” | |||||||||
| 🎓Some new-to-me words: lassitude, keening | |||||||||
| Description:* As the daughter of a drug dealer, Wavy knows not to trust people, not even her own parents. It’s safer to keep her mouth shut and stay out of sight. Struggling to raise her little brother, Donal, eight-year-old Wavy is the only responsible adult around. Obsessed with the constellations, she finds peace in the starry night sky above the fields behind her house, until one night her star gazing causes an accident. After witnessing his motorcycle wreck, she forms an unusual friendship with one of her father’s thugs, Kellen, a tattooed ex-con with a heart of gold. By the time Wavy is a teenager, her relationship with Kellen is the only tender thing in a brutal world of addicts and debauchery. When tragedy rips Wavy’s family apart, a well-meaning aunt steps in, and what is beautiful to Wavy looks ugly under the scrutiny of the outside world. Kellen may not be innocent, but he is the fixed point in Wavy and Donal’s chaotic universe. Instead of playing it safe, Wavy has to learn to fight for Kellen, for her brother, and for herself.*From goodreads.com’s synopsis. | |||||||||
| Thoughts: This is the third book in 2025 for our Mostly Social Book Club. There are several trigger-warning-worthy topics covered in this book—primarily for domestic abuse and rape; although, one reviewer purports: “trigger warning basically for everything.” Goodreads lists “young adult” as one of the genres of this book, which is mind-boggling to me. I spent a lot of time while reading it in a mental debate about the definition of pedophilia, while “seeking first to understand, then to be understood.” (And, yes, I know Stephen Covey was a homophobe.) I look forward to our book club discussion about this book when we get to it. | |||||||||
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| 📕10-word summary: Two distinctive men’s lives intersect in a most unlikely way. 🖌6-word review: Slow until the connection is made. |
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| 💭A favorite quote: “Flowers. Each year, without fail, on the 15th of March, Jean receives a single snowdrop with a note from her beloved Arthur. A white flower once a year for Jean, and white lies all the year round for his wife.” | |||||||||
| 🎓Some new-to-me words: succoured, cynosure, glaucous, locum-tenens, amanuensis, packstaff, oleaginous, paterfamilias, purlieus, tantalus, coir, drayman, carapace, interregnum, fettle, jocosities, febrile, mendacious, mephitic, fulminate, pusillanimous, palaver | |||||||||
| Description:* As boys, George, the son of a Midlands vicar, and Arthur, living in shabby genteel Edinburgh, find themselves in a vast and complex world at the heart of the British Empire. Years later—one struggling with his identity in a world hostile to his ancestry, the other creating the world’s most famous detective while in love with a woman who is not his wife—their fates become inextricably connected.*From goodreads.com’s synopsis. | |||||||||
| Thoughts: I received this book a couple of years ago from my friend Susan Katz. Thanks, Susan! I found the first half of it slow moving, during the telling of the story of each of the main characters, Arthur & George (duh). I put this book down a lot, which is why it took me 9 days to read it. In addition to (the first half) not being riveting, it’s a pretty dense book comprising (as you can see by my list) a lot of words I had to look up while reading—it sure would have been easier reading it on a Kindle. Learning about Arthur and George in alternating story snippets, we find out who Arthur (really) is a good way into his story—and since I hadn’t read anything about the book beforehand, it was a nice surprise that kicked up my interest in the book a little bit. I considered abandoning this book a couple of times, but in the end, I was glad I stuck with it. With that said, I wouldn’t recommend it without a couple of caveats, which is why I gave it 3 stars (Average. An entertaining read but probably forgettable. Might or might not recommend) instead of 4 (Really great book in all respects with perhaps some minor flaws. Would definitely recommend). I see that this book was made into a 3-part 2015 PBS Masterpiece TV mini series, but I don’t plan to watch it. | |||||||||
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