The heart wants what the heart wants, and our hearts want books.

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Perhaps my favorite thing about writing this blog is knowing that your favorite book bloggers will have the chance to discuss their thoughts about the books they read together.  Talking about what we read helps me to consider angles I hadn’t before and opens my perspective, making the books even more enjoyable than they were on their own.  We want to share that experience with you, and invite you to join us for Virtual Book Club on Friday, August 26 at 7:30pm CST.  For those who sign up here, we’ll be discussing From Blood and Ash #1 by Jennifer Armentrout. Even if it’s not a title that you’d read on your own, consider dipping your toe into the genre or series, and seeing how talking about it with other readers improves the experience!  We’d love to talk about books with you!

One theme that is found in many of my favorite books is a thread of themes that wind together.  While I’m not ready to say The Widows of Malabar Hill by Sujata Massey is one of my favorites, it will be on the long list of contenders for 2022, and definitely has a thread of themes.  On the surface, this is a historical mystery about the first female lawyer in Bombay, so there’s three already – historical fiction, mystery, and a story of someone being the “First Only Different,” as Shonda Rhimes calls it.  There are actually two mysteries in the book though, the one of the widows, and the one of the mysterious stranger, who he is, and how he’s connected to Perveen.  As mysteries do, they are both revealed slowly through the progression of the story and flashbacks, which are thankfully very clearly labeled.  Readers also learn a bit about Zoroastrianism, the practice of purdah, and the general culture and development of Bombay in the 1920s.  

Darling readers, as much as a thread of themes is usually my favorite, the personal nostalgia is actually my favorite part of reading The Widows of Malabar Hill.  I got to travel to South India (hear, not Bombay) *cough* years ago on a summer study abroad, and there are many similarities.  I usually traveled by motorized rickshaw, but the bicycle and even man-powered versions were still present.  I’m familiar with the traditions of multigenerational households (which are still very much a practice in many parts of India), and the traditions of how women are expected to act after they come of age (yes, some of these are still practiced, although one piece in the text was new to me, but I won’t elaborate because spoilers).  The two pieces I enjoyed the most were the Yazdani Bakery, which Massey described with such detail I could almost smell the yummy goodness, and the practice of decorating the front doorway with a chalk design.  While I learned of these designs as kolams, and saw them done with rice flour in Tamil Nadu, Perveen, in the north, uses lime powder.  Her mother tells her that the material was previously thought to provide some disinfectant to feet of those entering the home, as well as to provide a welcome and a way to demonstrate the “accomplishments of the household’s women.”  In the south, my understanding is that the flour provided food for insects, and the design provided insight into the state of the household, as well as the aforementioned accomplishments of its women.  Like Perveen, I do have some tin stencils (although I’ve never used mine, but perhaps I should), but watching women design by hand is nothing short of magical, seeing how they take a fist full of flour, sometimes in different colors, and slowly, methodically distribute it to create magnificent designs to welcome guests and indicate to neighbors the state of their household.  

I’m not sure if The Widows of Malabar Hill qualifies as a cozy mystery, but it was quite cozy to me and I thoroughly enjoyed it, so I’m giving it 4 emphatic stars.  It’s well written, masterfully crafted, and thoroughly engaging.  I’m not likely to reread it, but I will likely continue with the series.  

What’s a book that took you to a fabulous, nostalgic place?

~Nikki 

Author Sujata Massey has been published in eighteen countries and has fifteen novels, two novellas, and many short stories under her name. Her fourteen novels are blessed to contain Agatha Award, Lefty Award, and Macavity Award winners, plus finalist places for the Edgar Award, Anthony Award, and Mary Higgins Clark Award. Massey’s particular settings are pre-independence India and modern Japan. She was born in England to parents of Indian and German descent, was raised in St. Paul, Minnesota, and calls Baltimore, Maryland home. She earned her Bachelor of Arts in Writing Seminars from Johns Hopkins University and wrote features for the Baltimore Sun before becoming a full-time novelist. Besides the Perveen Mistry Mystery Series, she also boasts the Rei Shimura Mystery Series, and stand-alone mystery novel The Sleeping Dictionary.

I knew reading The Widows of Malabar Hill with Nikki would be an adventure in nostalgia for her. I also knew that I was going to be learning a lot about the lives of women in pre-independence India. I didn’t realize that my favorite part of the book was going to be how the women of different religious backgrounds interacted with each other, in private and in public. Perveen Mistry is an Oxford University educated Parsi woman who works as a solicitor at her father’s law firm in 1921, a time when women weren’t allowed to sit for the bar examination to be able to argue cases in court. The Parsi people is an ethnoreligious group in India who follow the religion of Zoroastrianism and fled Arab Muslim conquered Persia (present day Iran) in the 7th century CE. The Mistry family were originally builders, architects, and real estate developers in Bombay, but Perveen’s father became an attorney to help Mistry Construction navigate legal waters. Perveen is able to serve her father’s firm in the matters of family and contract law. She needed to be familiar with the religious laws, especially those of marriage, divorce, and inheritance, for Parsis, Hindus, Muslims, as well as the British colonizers. I am amazed at Parveen’s multilingual abilities, though I know it is still very common in India today. The way she expresses respect and understanding for women of different religions and economic standing, especially her clients, the three Muslim widows of a polygynist textile mill owner, kept me in awe and anxious anticipation for anytime when she would inadvertently make a faux pas. I’m not a fan of vicarious anxiety, and I blame it on my Enneagram 1-ness.

The themes on themes on themes that Nikki mentions above is obviously a love of mine as well and I can’t wait to read the next books in the series, The Satapur Moonstone and The Bombay Prince to see how they are expanded upon. Honestly, I am surprised that I haven’t remained a reader of mystery novels since my love of Nancy Drew was so deep as a child. I’m giving The Widows of Malabar Hill a four star review since I know I won’t re-read it, but will definitely look forward to experiencing 1920s India through the rest of Massey’s series in the future.

What low-key surprises you that you like a genre when you read it as an adult, but upon reflection you knew you were obsessed as a child?

~Ashley

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Do you ever resist reading a book because everyone is talking about it, or wonder if it’s really that good?  Sometimes we do.  Today’s titles live up to the hype, for us, and hopefully, so will From Blood and Ash #1 by Jennifer Armentrout.  If you’d like to find out, join us in reading and then sign on to the next Virtual Book Club discussion on Friday, August 26 at 7:30pm CST.  Whether it does or doesn’t live up to the hype, the conversation should be entertaining, and we’d love for you to sign up here to weigh in on this title!

As of this writing, I have a bit of a struggle with whoever titles Emily Henry’s books, but there is hope.  If I’m reading Beach Read, I want an ocean beach, not a lake, because those vibes are very different.  And when I read People We Meet on Vacation, knowing it’s a romance, I want the romance to be between… people who meet on vacation.  And, while writing this, I just learned the international title is You and Me on Vacation which is PERFECT!  UGH.  Thankfully, Book Lovers includes not two, but three main characters who love books!  All that aside, I really enjoyed all the above titles, especially the latter two.  People We Meet on Vacation is a friends to lovers romance novel that is witty, real, vulnerable, snarky, and deep.  Henry even seems to have just the right amount of “hold my beer” energy (my words, not hers) when she’s putting these characters through the ringer.  (I’m not spoiling the issue that pulls them apart and necessitates the grand gesture because it’s their vacation that’s my favorite train wreck as so many things go wrong.)  Amidst that, these two were best friends and then didn’t talk for two years, for some reason that is ever. so. slowly revealed, then reconnect to have a trip full of memories, both new and old, and it’s really fun to tag along for on their current, over the top travels.  

The structure is probably my favorite part of People We Meet on Vacation which feels geeky and I don’t care.  We start out in the “present day” Poppy is struggling to be herself, because she doesn’t know what makes her happy, except for traveling with Alex, and she hasn’t talked to him in two years.  They end up texting and then going on a trip, like they used to, Poppy hopes, to reconnect and rekindle their friendship.  While we’re experiencing this with Poppy, every other chapter or so, we travel back in time, first to ten years ago when Poppy and Alex first meet, gradually learning about their friendship, lives, and travels over the last twelve years, until we get to the last time they saw each other, near the end of this book, and learned what happened right before those two silent years.  I have been on record stating I’ve struggled with this sort of structure before (*cough* All the Light We Cannot See), but I think the difference is it’s really clearly labeled here.  We have “this summer” and “twelve years ago” style headings for each chapter and I’m so here for it because the reader clearly knows where they are in Poppy and Alex’s progression throughout. 

Reader, please do note, these are not your light beach read.  All these books include characters who are dimensional and deep, and have complex issues to overcome, and that’s all before the romance comes into play.  You may just get dragged into your feelings with them and end up crying, which isn’t a bad thing at all, but did leave me needing something very different before moving into book two of this double feature, and delighted to have a historical mystery to read afterwords.  

For the second act, Book Lovers, we may be about to have a bit of a squabble.  Ashley finished before I started (see aforementioned required pause in between) and said I could write about the first book but she wanted to write about the second.  I told her she could write about the second, but that didn’t mean I wasn’t going to…and it still doesn’t because here I go.  I loved the deep dive into what a book agent does (and how they get paid) versus what an editor does.  I love the city slickers who spend a month in a tiny country town outside Asheville living their best Hallmarkish-movie-life (and would actually LOVE to do the same).  I love the snark and the dimensional personalities of the main and supporting characters, including Sunshine Falls itself.  I love the pseudo enemies to lovers romance, and y’all, how I love Nina’s relationship with her sister.  Here’s the sort of spoiler, this isn’t just about a romance, it’s also about Nina’s relationship with her younger sister and how that has developed throughout their lives.  We get their family history in flashbacks so that we understand the background that’s gotten these two fabulous women to the “present” day.  Henry writes single POV stories, and that allows her to gorgeously craft a fantastic romance but also a stunning story of sisters.  I want to say more, but y’all, if you want a Hallmarkish movie on the page with amped up real life, snark, and spice (yes, a couple of open door scenes), I think Book Lovers would be a great fit (however, if you want to read all three of Henry’s latest books, I’d read in publication order because each feels better than the last, and they’re all so fun)!  

I have now read Henry’s last three releases (the only three included on her book listing page in each of the books mentioned so far), and the YA novel A Million Junes and I’m giving Emily Henry a season pass.  That’s right, I’m here for whatever she’s writing.  My beloved Kendra Adachi also gave Henry a season pass in this episode with her delightful sister Hannah, wherein she said that she liked People We Meet on Vacation and LOVED Book Lovers.  I agree, and I’m giving them 4 and 5 stars, respectively.  If you still are on the fence and need a dose of Henry herself, with some support from Anne Bogel, please listen to them on this Modern Mrs. Darcy episode, which was so fun! 

~Nikki

Sometimes I don’t know what my job is here on the blog because Nikki goes in and takes so much of my fun research stuff and throws it in her part of the blog post… But, I’m not complaining, I’m just still in an emotional upheaval because of Book Lovers. Before I can get into those details, however, we do need to discuss Ms. Emily Henry. She’s the author of three bestselling romance novels: Beach Read, People We Meet on Vacation, and Book Lovers. She is also the author of four young adult books: The Love That Split the World, A Million Junes, When the Sky Fell on Splendor, and Hello Girls with Brittany Cavallaro. That’s seven books published since her debut in 2016, which was only four years after her graduation from Hope College in Holland, Michigan. (Maybe we know why she chose a Michigan town as the setting for Beach Read?) She lives and writes in Cincinnati and the part of Kentucky south of the Ohio River. 

Now, a few things about People We Meet on Vacation. The book is of course written from Poppy’s point of view, and when we meet her she is a successful magazine travel writer living in New York City with a great apartment, the perfect job, and a best friend who is a social media influencer. Poppy and Rachel discuss Poppy’s struggles at work and in life, which Rachel calls “Millennial ennui” because Poppy has accomplished all the goals that she set for herself. A big part of Poppy curating the current trip with Alex is because those were the times in her life where she felt the most joy. During one of the flashback chapters we learn an important private joke between Alex and her, which is the phrase “this speaks to me.” Poppy is trying to experience and create moments in her life which ‘speak to her’ or, in that Marie Kondo way, finding the things which bring her joy. And that’s what makes her situation so relatable to me, she’s just trying to find her joy.

Book Lovers, however, had me texting Nikki when I was at about 70% because I was literally crying. Did I have something else I needed to be doing instead of finishing reading that book? Yes I did. Did I give any shits? No I did not. I just kept reading and crying and reading and crying until I hit the 100% mark. I can’t even tell you the specific reason why I was crying because that would spoil so much of the later part of the book, but it wasn’t about the romantic relationship in this novel, it was about the sisterly one. I definitely texted my own younger sister, told her I loved her, and that a book made me boo hoo cry tears. She was amazed because I am not a weeper. But, I cry every time I watch Lilo and Stitch when Nani finds out that Lilo has been taken into a spaceship by aliens and she will probably never see her little sister again, so, perhaps this isn’t as big a stretch for me as my sister thinks it is…

My favorite part of the entire book is that the premise of Nina’s character is that she is the big-city career woman whose boyfriend experiences the small-town love story. 

“The kind where a cynical hotshot from New York or Los Angeles gets shipped off to Smalltown, USA- to, like, run a family-owned Christmas tree farm out of business to make room for a soulless corporation. But while said City Person is in town, things don’t go to plan. Because, of course, the Christmas tree farm–or bakery, or whatever the hero’s been sent to destroy – is owned and operated by someone ridiculously attractive and suitably available for wooing. Back in the city, the lead has a romantic partner. Someone ruthless who encourages him to do what he’s set out to do and ruin some lives in exchange for that big promotion. […]You can tell she’s evil because her hair is an unnatural blonde […] and also, she hates Christmas decorations. As the hero spends more time with the charming baker/seamstress/tree farm…person, things change for him. He learns the true meaning of life! He returns home, transformed by the love of a good woman. There he asks his ice-queen girlfriend to take a walk with him. […] And then he realizes: he can’t go back to his old life. He doesn’t want to! He ends his cold, unsatisfying relationship and proposes to his new sweetheart.” 

How would it feel to be repeatedly told by the men you’re dating that the life you love, the life you’ve worked so hard to achieve is not the life he wants to have any longer? That he wants something and someone fundamentally different from who and what you are. These are the romantic struggles that Nina is facing when her sister whisks her away to Sunshine Falls, NC, AKA Smalltown, USA, for a month of attempting to create Nina’s own Hallmark Happy Ending. Nina, like Poppy, and like January in Beach Read, is a woman struggling to find her joy. Yes, these are all romance novels, and so YES each of these women find their Happily Ever After, but I think the biggest part is that they come to realize something fundamental about life, and that only they can make themselves truly happy and having a partner is the icing on the cake. 

And so, darling readers, just like for Nikki, Emily Henry has become a season pass author. Five Stars for Book Lovers, and Four Stars for People We Meet on Vacation, with last year’s June Virtual Book Club pick of Beach Read also pulling in a Four Star Review, that’s solid proof that Henry is an author I’ll come back to again and again. Plus, if she can get me to cry real tears, she’s got to be good at what she does.

As a super fun bonus, check out this bonus content on her website…look who you can run into while stranded in an airport, if you’ve read Beach Read. 😉

~Ashley

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The following post includes affiliate links. More details here.  As you’re doing your Amazon shopping, we’d be ever so grateful if you’d use our affiliate link to do so as it helps pay the bills around here!

There’s no time like summer to get me excited about diving into a fantasy novel, bonus points if it’s a literal beach read because it’s like a vacation while already on vacation!  If you enjoy fantasy (or perhaps if you want to give it a try), join us for the next Virtual Book Club discussion on Friday, August 26 at 7:30pm CST.  For August, we’re reading From Blood and Ash #1 by Jennifer Armentrout and then we’ll travel to that world discuss it together.  If this sounds like fun, sign up here to get the link to join in! 

It doesn’t happen often that I struggle with how to describe a book or what I really think about it, but Our Country Friends by Gary Shteyngart made it happen.  I am not sure how this got on my holds list, but it did, and I’m still sort of on the fence, but I think I’ve learned some things, so I’m calling it good enough.  The book premise is really interesting – eight friends spend the first six months of the pandemic (yes THE pandemic, as it opens in the spring of 2020) together at a country house.  As writers do, this includes an interesting, complex group of characters, all with their own backstory, some of which is combined, because three of our group go way back to high school (just like your favorite book bloggers).  Even just two years after that very strange summer of 2020, it felt like an interesting read with a lot of potential, and it is.  Here’s the part of the marketing copy that perhaps should have given me (or maybe us) more pause – it “reads like a great Russian novel, or Chekhov on the Hudson.” If that sounds too serious for your preferred summer reading, well, it could be.  Near the end of my reading, I looked up the author online to learn more about him (sorry not sorry, perhaps Ashley will get to more), and he was described as an absurdist author, which is something else that could have helped me.  

Even books that aren’t favorites can help us learn more about ourselves as readers.  It’s really just all data to get to an improved chance of picking up the right book at the right time.  Perhaps great Russian novels have their time and place (which isn’t summer for me), but absurdist just isn’t my thing, and now I have a word to help me describe that.  I also really need characters to root for, otherwise a book feels like a slog.  There was one character I was rooting for in Our Country Friends – the child, and as much as I wanted good things for her, it wasn’t enough.  These adults are a mess.  Some of them are trying, others are not (that we can see), and I just cannot with all of it.  I did finish the book because I wanted to know how the story ended, mostly for the child, but I also wanted to see how this train wreck finally happened and what occurred after.  I did, and the “wreck” happened, differently than I anticipated, and it made me like some of the characters even less than I already did.  

If you’re looking for an interesting character study that doesn’t feel dissimilar to reality TV (but like the better old school kind a la MTV), then this might be a book for you.  If you want something heartwarming, think again before picking up Our Country Friends because that’s not the vibe here.  I’m giving this book two and a half stars, and rounding up to three.  The plot is interesting, the writing is great, but the characters are just meh.  I considered rounding down, but I genuinely think the author accomplished what he set out to do and executed it well, it’s just not my thing.  

What’s a book that isn’t for you, but helped you figure out how to better select books that are for you?

~Nikki

Gary Shteyngart is the author of six books. His 2014 memoir Little Failure was a National Book Critics Circle Award Finalist. The Russian Debutante’s Handbook was his debut novel, published in 2003, and the winner of the Stephen Crane Award for First Fiction and the National Jewish Book Award for Fiction. His award winning debut novel was followed by four more: 2006’s Absurdistan, 2010’s best selling Super Sad True Love Story, and 2018’s best selling Lake Success, and the focus of our review today, 2021’s Our Country Friends. His website says nothing additional than “his books appear on best-of lists around the world and have been published in 30 countries.”  I had to traverse to wikipedia to find out that Shteyngart lives in New York, has taught writing at Hunter College, and currently teaches writing at Columbia University. The most important note for our purposes here is that in the “Personal Life” section of wikipedia it states thus: “Shteyngart is married to Esther Won, who is of Korean descent. They have a son, born October 2013. Shteyngart now lives in the Gramercy neighborhood of Manhattan. He spends six months out of the year at a house in northern Dutchess County, in the Hudson River Valley where he does nearly all of his writing.” 

The vibe I am getting is that Shteyngart used his own personal life before and during the pandemic, then embellished it to these absurd and ridiculous reaches of human tolerance of other humans’ actions to create the plot for Our Country Friends. The setting is the country house of a Russian-born Jewish immigrant writer who grew up and was educated in New York… this sounds awfully autobiographical. Even a New York Times review of the novel states: “This [omniscient] narration also allows the novel to adopt a tone of wry self-reflexivity, as in this slap at the very idea of writing a pandemic novel: ‘Stranded social novelists up and down the river … beseeching their higher power to help me make something out of all this stillness.’” If a New York Times reviewer can find a quote about writers living in the country and creating novels during the pandemic, then we can infer that this is exactly what Shteyngart was doing. I know all works of fiction pull something from real life, but this is a little on the nose for me. Honestly, my entire problem was that this was not a summer beach read, even though the majority of the novel takes place during the spring and summer of 2020. It was heavy in the way these adults had no real redeeming qualities and acted so foolishly towards each other and the way the world functions. I do think that these characters are the outcome of privilege run amok with no temperance by those who are less monied than they are. I’m not a fan when the book is a modern story set in modern times. The absurdist actions of the characters and the narrator are just nails in the coffin for me.

I am giving Our Country Friends two stars and I am not sad about it. I STRUGGLED through the entire book. Did the book meet the expectations and goals of the author? Yes. But, the book didn’t meet my expectations and if it weren’t for the narrator’s teaser that the country cottage colony wouldn’t have the same owner by the same time the next year I wouldn’t have stuck around to figure out what these strange people kept getting up to. I’m always interested in how real estate passes from one person to another. Additionally, Nikki reminded me that A Confederacy of Dunces by John Kennedy Toole is also an absurdist novel, and I DNF’ed that sucker back in college and have never looked back.

~Ashley

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