reneedecoskey's reviews
318 reviews

This was an impulse buy last weekend for a last-gasp-of-summer read, and it solidly served its purpose. It’s a fairly predictable rom-com about two writers, Gus and January, who were enemies in their college writing program, always in a silent war of who was the better writer. Years later, they’re reunited when January spends the summer at her father’s beach house on Lake Michigan — a place she only learned existed after he died and she learned about it from his former mistress. So she goes there to heal and work on her next book, and she discovers Gus living next door, also working on his book. The rest is history. The book is very funny sometimes, and very sad at other times as she processes her father’s hidden past and comes to terms with his sudden death. The part of the book that I was most drawn to was actually each of their writing processes, which wasn’t necessarily the point, I suppose. 3-3.5/5 stars for me, but I’m not typically a rom-com reader. Bookstagram just raved about this. You may love it.

The books of Megan Abbott's that I’ve read are dark and twisty, and this one was no different. It’s a story about the very dark side of ballet and how a somewhat incestuous family of highly unusual circumstances navigates it. The first ~100 pages are a little slower as it sets up the plot, and then when it picked up, I couldn’t put it down. It is dark, weird, twisty, twisted, and a little creepy. Similar to how the movie Black Swan gave me the creeps about Swan Lake, this one did the same thing with The Nutcracker. I was hoping to develop an unnatural fear of Tchaikovsky, though, so it’s cool 😜

I'm not a huge fan of historical fiction but I love a book about books. This one just didn't do much for me. First of all, it felt like someone explaining WWII to 12 year olds. I kept wondering if it wouldn't have been better as a YA novel. It wasn't written in a way that made me feel any kind of emotional connection to any of the characters, so when they abruptly died, I didn't care. It was 325 pages but probably could have been 100. Just a lot of filler to get to the end where we know the main character survives the war in spite of Germany's daily blitzes and dropping bombs on London. She also owns a bookshop, and her soldier comes home from war. All wrapped up pretty neatly. 

The Startup Wife is about a Bangladeshi-American woman, Asha, who forms a startup with her husband Cyrus and his best friend Julian. It's an app that provides personalized rituals, and it takes the world by storm. Asha codes everything. She built the company. But when it takes off, it's Cyrus (the unlikely CEO) who gets all the credit for it, naturally. It's very funny at times, but also underscores how women have to work twice as hard to be taken half as seriously in anything and everything. If you have any interest in or knowledge of startup culture and the tech industry (in the book, they work in an incubator that's only preparing tech for the apocalypse, which I thought was funny), you will enjoy this.

One thing I'll say is that I didn't expect this to end with the dawn of the pandemic and I really didn't expect that to have such an effect on me as it did.

Brad Meltzer writes fantastic kids books about people who have made a difference in history, and also has a couple of books for grown-ups. The title is a little hokey, but the book itself was super interesting. It’s a true story about a plot against Lincoln’s life that was to take place in Baltimore in 1861 as he made his way to DC for his first inauguration. It’s told in narrative form so it’s not dry the way a lot of historical books can be. 4/5 stars.

Running alongside this plot is also the story of the nation’s first private detective agency (who foiled the attempt, and from which we get the expression “private eye”) and the first female spy (who played an integral part in getting Lincoln to safety).

The context, of course, is the political upheaval over slavery, as well as rampant and open white supremacy, thus causing a number of southern states to secede to preserve those views and that lifestyle in the south. I spent a lot of time thinking about the parallels between society then and society now with its approach to race relations and other political differences between the north and south even still (coughpandemiccough). I’m not a historian. I don’t have profound, informed things to say. But I don’t know if I felt better knowing that we’ve gotten through this kind of in-fighting before, or even more concerned about another civil war. 

4/5 stars for me. While it wasn’t a literary masterpiece, it was a fun read and I couldn’t put it down. It’s especially great for this time of year and back-to-school as it focuses on Teddy Crutcher, an English teacher at the prestigious Belmont Academy who has just won Teacher of the Year. He’s the kind of teacher who will be totally petty just to teach his students a lesson. He doesn’t want to be bothered with annoying colleagues, helicopter parents, or students who do anything but live fully up to their potential.

There was something about this that kept reminding me in different ways of Crime and Punishment, but Teddy experiences his own emotions in different ways than Raskolnikov. Both books share this idea of an obligation to do terrible things “for the greater good.” This is obviously not classic Russian literature, but that’s not necessarily a bad thing. I don’t believe this author got paid by the word 😄

The Other Black Girl by Zakiya Dalila Harris was engrossing. The very last line actually gave me goosebumps.

It’s a story about Nella, the only black employee at Wagner — a top publishing house. She’s been working hard for 2 years, hoping for a promotion and to begin to get her own books to edit. When another black woman, Hazel, is hired, Nella is excited at first. But then Hazel starts a meteoric rise that leaves Nella feeling like she’s being overlooked and even more underappreciated. Then she starts getting anonymous notes that say “Leave Wagner Now.” Is it someone who wants her out, or someone trying to warn her about something?

As the story starts to unwind, a darker history is revealed. It’s always been the plan. It’s been the plan years before Nella even met Hazel. Before Nella was even hired at Wagner. It goes the whole way back to 1983 and a black editor named Kendra Rae Phillips (missing since Dec. 1983), who just so happened to be Nella’s inspiration for wanting to work there.

The book includes mystery, dark humor, and some magical realism. There were a few small details/character arcs that I didn’t feel were really wrapped up as much as left hanging, but not major characters. This is why I'd give it a 4.5 instead of a 5. I really enjoyed the book.

I love a plus-size main character. I don’t understand why they always have to be plus-size fashion bloggers. Centrally speaking, the book is about Daphne Berg, who reunites with an old friend who’d humiliated her years ago. That friend, Drue, asks her to be in her ritzy wedding. A plus-size fashion designer offers to give Daphne clothes to wear in exchange for social media posts (so there’s an influencer piece). But then something terrible happens, and Daphne suddenly turns into a detective. And I think it all happens in one day? 🤷🏻‍♀️

The first half was a 4-star. The second half was a 2.5. Not my favorite from this Philly-based author. There were a lot of editing errors. Not like typos, but like, in one paragraph she describes the desk being under a window. Two paragraphs later she says it’s under a world map. Or when Drue tells Daphne that her parents are getting divorced and she just found out a few days ago, a few hours later Daphne says she doesn’t know when Drue found out and it might have been that night. Just little inconsistencies like that that bugged me. There’s also a character in hiding who suddenly isn’t anymore and it’s never explained why. And the end made very little sense to me. It was a stretch.

Not an awful read. I enjoyed it. I just didn’t love it. But it was a good book to read when my brain needed a break.

I listened to this one while driving back and forth across PA, which was a trip because the book takes place on a drive across PA (although mostly in the Poconos). If you like psychological thrillers, read this. It was so good and so much fun. By the last third of it, I was so tense and I was yelling “WHAT IS REAL?!?” at the narrator in between audible gasps.

I’m a sucker for boarding school books, and this one takes place over the course of the school year at the all-girls fictional school Atwater. It’s told from the perspectives of various students, benchmarked by important school events. It’s a tumultuous year from the start. When freshmen arrive for orientation, yard signs all over town show the school’s famed clock tower and announce that “a rapist works here.”

Throughout the book, we learn more about the event that prompted those signs, as well as the activism that follows. Except no one knows who is responsible for all the mysterious activism.

All Girls dives into the girls boarding school culture, as well as questions of safety in the Me Too era.