Willis Wu is a background actor on Black & White (a police procedural with a Black cop and a white cop) and strives to be more than just Generic Asian Man. Someday, maybe he’ll reach the top and become Kung Fu Guy, but first he must work his way up from Generic Asian Man #3, then #2, and finally #1. In between, he dies on screen, cannot act for six weeks, and provides the reader with some backstory about his parents and their struggles with fitting into their roles.
But this novel is more than that. It’s an unflinching gaze into what it must be like to be Asian in America; shoved to the sidelines and kept below a glass ceiling.
The story is told in screenplay format, which helps immerse the reader in the perpetual filming of the show while also demonstrating how the entire lives of the characters are defined by their roles on the show. This is both suffocating and illuminating.
This novel is clever, intriguing, and at its core, heartfelt.
There is a Netflix show of the same name based on the novel running at the time I’m writing this. While the show is entertaining on its own, the book has depth and a social message that I didn’t see in the show.
Grace is a woman in her seventies who is stuck in a rut. Once upon a time she was a wife and mother but lost both her husband and son, now she fills her days with the same routine, slowly fading into the background of life.
When she receives a letter informing her that she’d been left a property in Ibiza, Spain, she decides she might as well check it out. While she hadn’t seen the owner of the property, Christina, in decades, nor had she been close to Christina, the mystery of why this college friend would leave her a house was enough to disrupt her usual pattern of her day.
Grace has no idea that her entire world will be upended in the best possible way, nor that the simple act of diving could infuse her with life.
The author weaves a tale of supernatural abilities, kindness, grief, loneliness, and joy against a lively and vivid backdrop of Ibiza. The novel is told as a letter to a student, who reached out in a time of need, and is glorious in its complexity. Grace is a delightful character, one who softens as the pages go on, and who opens up to life’s experiences despite being attached to her grief.
The novel was one I’d love to relive, to experience again for the first time. Its tone is soft, its characters vivid, and the message of respect delightful.
Ada Lamarr is running out of air. She sent a distress signal and knows there’s a huge vessel nearby but they took their sweet time answering. When they finally arrive, she’s barely alive and has to launch herself out of the giant hole in her ship, across empty space, and into her rescuer’s ship. She barely makes it.
Once there, she needs to explain why she was looting a ship that had crash landed on the nearby planet. Lamarr knows what’s on that ship and knows that her rescuer’s ship had no reason to be in the area except to also retrieve something from the downed ship.
What follows is a heist novella, where the author skilfully leaves clues that build to a massive cliffhanger ending.
While this was very well written – Lamarr’s character is vibrant and consistent – it’s frustrating to read a novella that ends so abruptly. The story is complete, yes, but also leaves room for sequels, sort of like Marvel movies and their after-credit scenes that give a taste of a future movie.
Still, the novella immediately gives the stakes and a sense of character and never slows down. It was entertaining enough for me to seek other work by the author.
Note: there’s a page of binary code near the end. I translated it: “This data has been compromised. This d1t1 has bee6 compromised. This data haromised. This data haromised.ised.ised.ised”
Kenzie and Gennaro are hired by a woman to watch her adult son. A photo of him was taken and he told her he’s being stalked by someone. While Kenzie and Gennaro can’t find any evidence of foul play, someone starts targeting the people Kenzie loves and some dark secrets about his family come to light.
This is the second novel in the Kenzie and Gennaro series and it’s better than the first one. The author develops the characters well in this novel. Gennaro’s husband Phil is shown trying to be a better person by quitting drinking and the childhood friendship of Phil and Kenzie feels robust and nostalgic. The relationship between Kenzie and Gennaro deepens as well, almost to the point of restarting a sexual ember.
Honestly, I would prefer not to have the will-they-won’t-they between the male and female lead characters. I find this tiresome and worn out. Having said that, this novel was written in 1996, so it’s kind of expected.
Overall, this novel is a giant step forward from the first book in the series. The author does a better job of setting the scene here, keeps the reader engaged by giving reminders of how the clues stacked up, and rounds the characters out well. I’m looking forward to reading the third in the series.
Four women; a biologist (the narrator), a psychologist, an anthropologist, and a surveyor, are sent into Area X as the twelfth expedition team. Their purpose is to map the area and make observations, all while trying not to be affected by the area itself. The biologist volunteered because her husband was part of the eleventh expedition.
The narrator gets infected very early on by inhaling spores and tries to cover it up. While she continues the investigation she learns that the psychologist is hypnotizing the three of them, that there had been more than eleven expedition teams before them, and that there’s some kind of life form deep underground.
While this novel was good, it felt incomplete. It’s the first in a trilogy, which might explain why the story is left dangling. The biologist is the only survivor of the expedition and she chooses not to return to the border, but instead to follow in her husband’s footsteps.
I found the dangling storyline frustrating. I wanted to know what the alien was, why it was there, when did it arrive, is it actually an alien, how drastically the biologist changes, and how those changes affected her. Maybe those answers are in the next few books.
In the story, the biologist encounters a massive pile of journals but doesn’t inform the reader of what she’s read, which is a pet peeve of mine. I wanted to know what was in those journals, how far back did they go, how many different people wrote in them, and why they were in a huge pile. I understand that this narrator is unreliable, but still, this was frustrating.
Overall the novel was good, it was an interesting peek into a mysterious zone, but irritatingly incomplete.
Jolene is an anxious person who hates her job and doesn’t make any attempt at being sociable with her coworkers. To deal with her hatred, she types nasty messages at the bottom of emails and changes the font to white. Except one day she forgets to change the font colour, is caught, and formally reprimanded. The reprimand includes restrictions on her computer, but the administrator makes a mistake and accidentally gives her admin access to all texts and emails. Now Jolene knows more about her coworkers, including how they feel about her.
The characters in the novel are rich, well developed, and believable. That kept me going throughout, especially when I felt like Jolene’s anxiety was laid a bit thick. The author did an excellent job revealing the source of Jolene’s anxiety and hatred, as well as slowly doling out bits of the other character’s backstories.
I wasn’t quite expecting the romance angle of the novel – Jolene has an instant attraction to the new HR guy Cliff – but it worked well.
Overall, the author’s narrative style made this an easy, interesting read, rich with sensory description and emotion.
This is a novel about a disintegrating marriage. Jane, an aspiring writer, meets John, a filmmaker and they hit it off immediately. There are some red flags, but that’s expected. Nobody is perfect, after all. But as the novel progresses it becomes clear that John is not what he seemed while dating. Nevertheless, Jane marries him and they have a child.
Jane takes over all of the domestic duties, putting her career on the back burner while John reaches for success. He starts companies and is fired from them. They move five times in seven years for his work, each move becoming more and more difficult for Jane.
While she sees that John isn’t helpful and is in fact a grown-up child that expects his wife to look after him, she doesn’t leave him. She speaks of leaving him later, after the child is older, but doesn’t take any steps to do so. Instead John is the one to leave, having began a relationship with someone else.
I found this frustrating. While I could identify with her quandary – it’s easier to stay than it is to leave – I think I would have preferred reading about how she left and the fallout of that decision instead of feeling like Jane was just tugged along through life.
Not naming the child in the novel is an odd choice. This made the child seem like a tangential part of the narrative, not an active participant, which keeps the character at a distance from the reader.
Overall the novel was a good read, but one I’m likely to forget over time, not remember.
Charles is a robot valet, created to serve the upper crust of society. When he murders his Master, he’s mystified as to why, having found no motivation for his actions in his records. Since Master is dead, Charles reports to Diagnostics to try to suss out the problem. There, he finds and strange robot called The Wonk and embarks on a journey of self-discovery in a world where humanity has fallen away and rendered valets obsolete.
The novel is wonderfully written and the reader is firmly anchored in Charles’ point of view throughout. Charles’ logic and reasoning make sense, and the author helpfully gives the reader a step-by-step analysis of most of his decisions.
My problem was that my focus was on a different aspect of the story. When Charles leaves the manor and begins to walk to Diagnostics, he observes the world around him, a world that’s crumbling. Other manors appear to have fallen into disrepair and Charles doesn’t encounter another human for quite some time. I wanted to know what befell the world, what caused this ruin?
That question is answered at the end but to get there I had to drag through a lot of material that was only somewhat interesting.
The book is divided into five parts with titles that eluded me. I looked them up and understood that each part was an homage to an author, specifically: Part I KR15-T: Agatha Christie Part II K4fk-R: Franz Kafka Part III 4w-L: George Orwell Part IV 80rh-5: Jorge Luis Borges Part V D4nt-A: Dante Alighieri I haven’t read some of those authors and didn’t recognize the homage, but it’s a cool Easter egg for other readers. I did see the Wizard of Oz reference at the end, though.
So while some parts of this novel flew right over my head, the work itself was an interesting commentary on how our society could lead us into ruin.
May, recently unemployed, chooses to undergo a procedure to subtly alter her face so it wouldn’t be recognizable by AI. The compensation she receives is enough for her to purchase a three night stay in the Botanical Garden, the only greenery in the city, for her family. But while luxuriating in the glory of a forested area, her children go missing.
I tore through this novel and read it in two sittings.
Technology is presented beautifully, as both helpful and harmful. Children have bunnies attached to their wrists that monitor their heartbeats and location while also providing them with access to the internet. People have woombs, large egg-shaped structures where they can sit inside and be surrounded by whatever images suit them. Hums are robots, designed to be helpful to humans. Ads are constant and invasive.
Near the beginning, May takes the bunnies off her children’s wrists as a way of forcing them to exist in the real world and experiencing all that Botanical Gardens has to offer. She demands that she and her husband Jem leave their phones behind as well. But without this tech, they have to use a paper map to navigate the area and are out of touch with the world.
This becomes a problem when Jem and May fall asleep while the kids run up and down a waterfall area. With no bunnies, her children cannot be located easily by a helpful hum. Instead, the hum must access public feeds to locate the children. In doing so, the hum records May’s reaction to everything, which becomes a viral video.
Child Services gets involved, with a hum sent to observe the family. May panics, of course, that her children will be taken from her.
It’s easy to identify with May and her choice to remove the kids’ bunnies, many parents don’t want their children immersed in the internet all the time, but also the fallout and misunderstanding of peoples’ reactions to the viral video. In it, May is presented as anti-bunny, which she’s not, and parents everywhere condemn her.
The ending confused me, though. The hum tells May that the investigation concluded and her children would stay with her. Then the hum tells her to go to her woom to see the portrait it made for her, a portrait that absolved her of the investigation. Inside her woom, she saw herself undergoing the procedure to change her face, which, it turned out, was to train AI on distinguishing the differences not become unrecognizable as advertised. But how did this portrait absolve her?
Despite that, I enjoyed the book and its look into a dystopian, near-future world where capitalism has run rampant.
A hard seltzer company sponsors Pride with devastating results.
Wendy is at the first of many potential parties to kick off Pride when violence breaks out. To make matters worse, her ex is at the party with a new girlfriend.
This book was okay. Not spectacular, not horrible. It was a lighthearted romp through a zombie apocalypse with an LGBTQ+ found family. I predicted how the zombies were created early on, which I felt was obvious and a bit frustrating that the main character didn’t figure it out just as fast.
The characters were a bit stereotypical, which was disappointing.
There’s fairly graphic sex in the novel. Wendy has sex with two characters, both times she reaches the point of orgasm without actually having one. I don’t know if the author was trying to frustrate readers or what, but it was annoying. I’m also not a fan of having a sex scene right next to a gory, violent scene. It seems wrong to ignite passion in a reader only to present them with violence.
Overall the book was all right. It was a quick read, entertaining enough, but not stellar.
Should Be Writing 