July 2022 books

Rivals by Katharine McGee
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

This one gets a very warm meh. Not enough stuff happened and the whole thing seemed contrived to end on a ridiculous cliffhanger. I still had a good time reading it, though! The Daphne/Nina plot was my favorite.

View all my reviews

The Golem and the Jinni by Helene Wecker
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

I am not sure this book had any business being as good as it was?? Kind of a weird blurb and very strange story but it completely drew me in. It reminded me a lot of The Bear and the Nightingale but instead of medieval Russia, it was the immigrant neighborhoods of 1899 New York City. Just incredibly rich and satisfying.

There was one tiny mistake: a character from Europe comes through Ellis Island and the officials there change his name to be more palatable in English. This is a common misconception but research has shown that it simply didn't happen that way (if a name was changed, it was usually by the families themselves when they did paperwork later on to become citizens). I know it's silly to point this out in a book with literal Jinni (genies) but it's kind of a pet mini-cause so I thought I'd mention it.

But! There is a tiny, kind of cool non-mistake that made me smile: there's an official document in the book that references "Beirut, Syria" which is correct! Lebanon wasn't independent during the time of the book so Beirut was technically in Syria.

View all my reviews

Part of Your World by Abby Jimenez
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This might be my favorite Abby Jimenez book!

View all my reviews

Queen of Scots: The True Life of Mary Stuart by John Guy
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

On the one hand, this book fulfilled its purpose of brushing me up on all things MQOS before my trip to Edinburgh. But on the other hand, Mary Queen of Scots and the Murder of Lord Darnley is just so much better. I am admittedly a huge fan of Alison Weir but I think even an unbiased reader could see that where Guy (in this book) describes, Weir (in that book) interprets. This was most obvious in the chapters about 1565-1568ish: a marriage, a murder, a birth, a murder, a kidnapping and maybe-rape, another marriage, and imprisonment/escape/imprisonment. There is a lot going on there and Guy does present multiple points of view about those events.

But he seems to lack both imagination and empathy when it comes to Mary. He accepts only the most banal and paperwork-y motivations for her actions and relies almost TOO heavily on the extant written sources (if such a thing is possible). Take, for example, Mary's kidnapping and maybe-rape at the hands of Bothwell. Guy argues that she wasn't assaulted at Dunbar because: 1. she didn't scream (!!!!!); 2. her servants were there and she didn't ask for help; 3. Bothwell was gone for a couple of days and she didn't escape; etc. This may all be factually true based on the written sources we have and I still don't think any of that indicates whether or not she was raped!

Anyway, it's not that I'm invested in that exact plot point but it's just illustrative of the wider treatment of Mary's incredibly complex inner life in this book. Weir does a better job of teasing out what her deal was, or at least what it extremely plausibly MIGHT have been. So go read that book instead.

View all my reviews

The Diamond Eye by Kate Quinn
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

3.5 stars, rounding up. I am SO persnickety about my historical fiction these days! I really enjoyed reading this book but it did drag on and the extensive research that the author did was on FULL display in a way that I don't think it should have been. There's a scene where a character's mother walks into her apartment in 1940s Moscow and says something like "16 square meters all to yourself, what luxury" and...nobody talks like that. But the author did her research and knew the apartment in question was 16 square meters and dad gummit, she was going to mention it or else! And I respect that! It just took me out of the narrative. See also: what movies/operas were playing on which dates, how many hours of instruction were in a sniper course (given annoyingly without any context of timeline), which famous people were at which parties, etc. I think there's a way to give a strong sense of time and place without characters turning into Wikipedia editors and this book didn't always succeed in that area.

I do think it's me, not this book, though. I'm realizing that when a book is about a specific real person from history, I prefer non-fiction. I loved The Spy and the Traitor and Irina's Children, but had similar complaints as above with The Invisible Woman: A WWII Novel.

View all my reviews

Sea of Tranquility by Emily St. John Mandel
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I liked this book more than its companion/prequel The Glass Hotel but not as much as Station Eleven. Reading it felt like eating cotton candy but in an exotic flavor, not just regular...pink.

View all my reviews