madeline's reviews
776 reviews

This is a really solid debut - it manages to balance a lot of things (romance! medicine! being an immigrant!) really well without leaning too far into any one, particularly the parts of being a medical student that might come off as tedious or gross.

This book took a bit to grab me, and I admit to not being sold on the love interest. But it was, in the end, a very compelling read, and felt super realistic. I'm looking forward to seeing what else this author writes!

Thank you Harper Voyager and NetGalley for the ARC!

CWs:

familial pressure and unsupportive parents, absent father, non-narrative character experiences the death of a parent, medical gore is present but not overpowering.

Jeez, what a disappointment. As a librarian, I feel like this should have been right up my alley. The mystery is interesting, but it's let down by a variety of factors and a deep commitment to explaining details that are totally useless.

The heroine is a Mary Sue who looks down on people who have books in their home and never read them. The hero is a former mercenary who's called The Butcher of Benin by someone who is admittedly a bad guy but still. This is where I should have stopped listening.

The final straw for me was when they're kissing on his porch that overlooks the Detroit River and a guy on a boat honks at them. Both characters wish they were armed at the moment (they both carry guns, which I am Not Into) so they could harm him for spying on them. Like, no, it's not cool to be a voyeur, but wanting to shoot someone for it? In this economy? No thanks.

Joy is in love with her best friend Malcolm. Malcolm is maybe in love with Summer. Summer’s best friend is Fox. Fox can’t stand Joy. So their weekend getaway should be perfect.

I really, really struggled with this book. There are some things that were just not going to work for me: I think that third person present is A Choice and not the right one for this book, there are some details I’m still fuzzy on (where exactly do Joy and Malcolm work, and what kind of app is she modeling on?), and I definitely think this book would have benefitted from multiple POVs.

But it’s personal, too. I’m also on the record as finding books where characters seem determined to sabotage themselves as very tough reads for me. Maybe some of it is seeing myself in them, a lot of it is loving basically every character I read and wanting only the best and softest for them. Joy and Malcolm’s relationship has certainly drifted into toxicity, and they’re both struggling with the ramifications of that, and her desire to maybe sabotage his romance with Summer was rough for me. I think that this book came at a time for me personally, too, that made this situation really untenable for me. 

Many people will see themselves in this book, and I wish I could, but not right now. Thank you Berkley and NetGalley for the ARC.

i'm trying to wrap up some books that have sat around half-finished for lengths of time i don't care to admit to, and it was very easy to remember why i put this one down.

ada lives in an alternate (but not too strange to us today) past where women are valued only for their ability to reproduce - if they can't or don't have babies, they're deemed witches and run out of town or worse. ada hasn't gotten pregnant in a year of marriage, and is sent to a convent so her husband can remarry and try again. in an effort to further the education her midwife mother gave her, she escapes and takes up with a band of outlaws to try and get to the woman who's written the most influential medical text ada's read.

this book has an interesting premise that ultimately reeks of white feminism. instead of questioning why women's value is tied to their ability to have babies in the first place, ada simply sets out to prove that not all women can have children, and sometimes the fact that they haven't gotten pregnant isn't their fault. the outlaws she falls in with are a group of queer women and gender non-conforming people of various races whom ada repeatedly puts into intense danger with her ignorance, and their repeated traumas only serve to educate ada and push her story forward.

none of the things that happen to The Kid's band - horrors that ada witnesses or past agonies that they reveal to her - ever cause ada to question the cis gender normativity of the world she lives in, understanding, of course, that she likely wouldn't have had the vocabulary for this. a novel that promised a feminist rethinking of the old west does nothing of the sort.

Will Chen is a senior art history student at Harvard, working in the campus gallery when a theft occurs - a team takes several pieces of Chinese art, and Will, seizing the opportunity, a small jade piece. Days later, he's contacted with an opportunity that would result in the kind of repatriation he'd only been able to dream of: assemble a team to steal back five specific pieces of Chinese art looted two centuries ago, and walk away millions richer. Now Will and his team have a chance to right their pasts and their futures, to return what colonialism stole from their ancestors and create a better life for themselves. But if they're caught, the ramifications are bigger than anything they can imagine.

It's a little dangerous to be as excited about a book as I was about this one, because the let down if they're not as great as you're expecting them to be feels so bad. But the payoff of a highly-anticipated book being even better than you could have imagined is so, so good. The second I read this book's premise, I was hooked, as a lover of art history and someone who works in a cultural heritage field. The conceit alone is great, but Li's prose is incredible and searing and made this read so much more than I could have imagined. The way each character conceptualizes their relationship with China and America, their parents, their heritage - it's nuanced and emotional and wildly good.

I think some people will struggle with the way that the team fumbles through their heists, escaping without what seems like a ton of research and often by the skin of their teeth. But to me, it seemed so perfect - don't you remember what it feels like to be 21 and just a little invincible, just a little smarter than anyone else in the room, just a little desperate to prove to everyone that you're someone, even if you're not quite sure who that someone is? Of course this crew would make it work until they can't, and even then they find a way.

This is an absolutely fantastic debut novel, and one that should be on the TBR of anyone working in cultural heritage. I won't be able to stop thinking about this one for a few days. Thank you Penguin and NetGalley for the ARC!

my review for under one roof is basically totally applicable here, with the substitutions that they are both engineers instead of a scientist and a lawyer.

I cannot overstate how disappointed I was by this book. Initially, it was a three star read: the writing style and I were not getting along, and I prefer a little more tension in my boss/employee romance. The vibe here was very much more friends-to-lovers than boss & employee.

It lost another star about halfway through the book, for plotlines that came out of nowhere and some math that just wasn't mathing. The attention to detail didn't seem like it was there to me.

And then, finally, we're down to one star at 10% left in the book, which seems pretty late to have something that egregious come up, but even if it had been a 5 star read till then we'd still be here. Ray

is sent to prison for conspiracy to commit fraud, because he made some terrible decisions that absolutely didn't have to be made. He's not thrilled about it, but accepts that it's his debt to pay to society. Elvin describes Ray's six-month prison sentence "more like an extended stay in a country club," with a tennis court on site, and tells us that Ray was "delight[ed]" that the two of them got several conjugal visits, because "he wanted the 'full experience,' he claimed, even though his living arrangements were more like a college dorm room than a real prison."

I'm an American and reading this from an American perspective, and this book is set in Canada. But it's clear that Ray's privilege as a wealthy person from an even wealthier family went a long way in quickly bailing him out and then getting him a fairly lenient sentence. It's disturbing to me to see the prison sentence being presented as a small obstacle to be waved through in the epilogue, instead of a life-changing event that Ray got the absolute best version of in a system that disproportionately jails Indigenous and Black Canadians.

Unfortunately, I cannot in good conscience recommend this book. Thank you Carina and NetGalley for the ARC.

CWs:

childhood financial insecurity, sick parent, temporarily sick sibling, absentee parents, drug transport, incarceration

This is my second Ann Aguirre book, and I had a lot of issues with it that I don't remember having with my first by her (notably not the first book in this series, which wasn't my best move). Overall, the book is kind of bogged down in unnecessary details and instances of virtue signaling, which get old pretty fast - pieces that I'm sure Aguirre meant as an effort towards diversity and inclusion that just aren't worked in well and feel heavy-handed.  

But I'm also really irritated that this book is marketed as having bisexual representation when the only reference made to Clem's bisexuality is that she thinks about a time when she almost asked out another woman in her coven. I absolutely don't have an issue with bisexual people ending up in straight (or straight-passing, perhaps, since Gavin says somewhere that he's always been kind of a vibes person when it comes to attraction) relationships. It was just really disappointing to have this introduced by the blurb as something that seemed like it would be explicit, and the word "bisexual" doesn't even appear in the book. 

I'll probably read the other books in the series, but I'm glad that I read this one before I recommended any of them to anyone on the premise of them being good and clear queer rep. 

Thank you Sourcebooks and NetGalley for the ARC!

CW:

the hero has taken away witches' powers in the past and atones for this, manipulative parents and grandparents, parental abandonment, divorced parents behaving badly.

Fifteen year old Maddie Sykes has just been left at her great aunt's house for the summer, missing her mother but relishing the chance to grow her sewing skills with the woman who inspired her dressmaking in the first place. Aunt Etta is the premier seamstress in the tobacco town of Bright Leaf, North Carolina, making all the dresses for the wives of the wealthy executives. When Aunt Etta falls ill, Maddie has to take over all the sewing for an upcoming gala - but her work reveals more than just hems that need to be fixed. The people of Bright Leaf are getting sick, and the tobacco company might know more about why than they're willing to admit.

Honestly, I stuck with this book because it was an interesting premise in a time period we don't see a lot of. Maddie's voice is very naive and really doesn't sound like a fifteen year old. The writing is... almost moralistic, I would say? There's clearly Good Guys and Bad Guys (the categorizations of whom I totally agree with), but they're so obvious that the reader doesn't really need to be told who is who. We're still definitely informed, though, and there's a lot of weirdly positioned info dumps where Maddie says someone "goes on to explain" something and similar structures that could have definitely been dialogue.

I think a lot of historical fiction readers will like this book, particularly if they enjoyed something like Radium Girls or The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks and want something similar but fiction. I'd try this author again, but I have a feeling her writing style is just not going to be my thing.

Thank you William Morrow and NetGalley for the ARC!

CW:

narrative character lost a parent in WWII, narrative character has been abandoned by her mother, miscarriage and infertility, sexism, homophobia, medical coverup