March! Goodbye, March! This March I read eleven books, another slight decline (currently declining at the rate of -2 books per month) which I am going to tell myself is mitigated by the fact(s) that: a) one of the books I read was 600 pages of TINY print, and b) I am applying for jobs, which does take some of the mental energy I usually reserve for reading. We will all know whether or not I have a new job when my current fellowship ends in June, because I will report having read either 5 books (based on current rate of decline) or, like, 45 if I'm unemployed and have nothing else to do with my time. Stay tuned!
I began March with the very familiar comforts of Jane Austen's Northanger Abbey, of which there isn't really much to say except that if you haven't read it, you should, and if you think you don't like Austen, this might be the one that convinces you--short and sweetly funny. I don't ever really plan out the reading trajectory of my months--I don't usually read thematically, except occasionally when one book reminds me that I'd like to try another--and so it was just coincidental that March started with a classic, beloved romance and then I kept bumping up against other examples of the genre. [Skip to the end now for book reviews if you truly don't care about my wandering meditations on Romance.] Especially because, Austen and her contemporaries aside, it's not a genre I particularly ever read. But I picked up Helen Hoang's The Kiss Quotient this month after seeing it on a bunch of bookstore staff pick shelves and getting curious. I also read, in one bookstore-floor-sitting whim, the graphic novel Bloom, which is a YA m/m romance.
Both of these are critically-acclaimed books, and in both cases I could see why: they were well-written (or well-told), had interesting and thoughtful representation of different identities and experiences, and were sweet (and, in The Kiss Quotient's not-Young Adult case, also convincingly hot). And yet: I really didn't love either of them that much, and I think it's because in both cases, there wasn't enough meaty plot there to support the weight of the love story. It's hard for a story whose end you already know--it's a romance, they end up together--to carry the weight of a whole book. In comparison, take another book I read this month, Victoria Lee's The Fever King, a YA sci-fic dystopia with a focal m/m romance. I liked The Fever King a lot, and its romance worked really well for me even though I knew it was coming, and that was because the rest of the story was detailed and gripping, full of twists and high stakes that made me care about the characters outside of their central relationship. It's fun to watch interesting people fall in love against an explosively exciting, or even just intricately detailed, backdrop; it's harder for me to watch it in unsparing close-up, with nothing else going on.
So is a book like The Fever King a romance? According to my own unsanctioned genre-defining, no, it's sci-fi. Or even romantic sci-fi. Or even YA dystopian sci-fi romance. But the qualifiers are what make it interesting for me.
In fact, it can be hard to find a book that doesn't at least include a romantic plotline somewhere within in: books we think of as Serious Novels, like Dana Czapnik's The Falconer (which I did not love, more on that below!) include forays into sex and romance as a critical aspect of their main character's coming of age. Angie Thomas's wonderful books are so good in part because they capture the complications of teenagerhood perfectly, and in On The Come Up that means including, as a small side plot, the relatable thrill of the first time you make out with someone on a couch. Romantic relationships are driving distractions or catalysts even in books no one would ever classify as romances, like Johannes Lichtmann's thoughtful, well-executed Such Good Workor Esi Edugyan's Half Blood Blues, which was rich and devastating and wonderful.
The flip side of that, of course, is that a ton of books shoehorn a romance plotline in out of some kind of weird sense of obligation or inevitability. Ann Leckie's fantasy novel The Raven Towerhad plot and character issues throughout, almost like she wasn't interested in actually writing it once she came up with the (new and interesting) central concept, and the half-hearted inclusion of a bland, weak love story was the perfect example of that. Wilkie Collins's plotty, gothic No Namedoes the same thing--two romance plotlines, one of which moves the plot forward, the other of which [spoiler alert] comes out of nowhere at the end as though to say, "see? This is a Happy Ending." [Here's the thing, though--I loved Wilkie's obligatory romance. I wanted that Happy Ending. Who can explain the human heart???] [/end spoilers]
Duh, you are probably saying, romance is a Universal Human Experience, and thus we find it in all books because novels are trying to capture the universal human experience!! Which, sure! But it is interesting to consider where it works and where it doesn't, where it gives you that swoopy-stomach feeling and where it makes you grimace, and why it is in my case that I don't care so much about characters falling in love when the story hasn't given me the right setting or stakes to make me care about them, first, as people in a world.
Reviews below! A lot of 3-star books this month, with a few standouts.
29. Northanger Abbey, Jane Austen [*****]
This is one of my favorite Austen novels, maybe because it's her most purely fun book--a gentle satire that takes on Regency-era cheap thrillers in a way that's still impressively resonant today, but that also has a lovely, genuine romance at its heart. Catherine Moreland is Austen's least impressive heroine, but Austen is very much in on that joke with us from the first page, and her compassion for Catherine turns her from silly archetype into someone relatable in her young over-enthusiams and fumbling, graceless naivete. An all-time comfort book for me.
30. Such Good Work, Johannes Lichtmann [*****]
Unexpected book of the month award goes to this strangely good, possibly Important (?!) story about an American writer and recovering drug addict who moves to Sweden and starts working with refugees there. I really expected to hate this book based on literally that description; instead, I found myself at first impressed by how it kept getting things right at the exact moment I thought it was about to get them wrong, and then drawn in by the precise and spare and beautiful writing, the gently-probing questions the narrative asked about humanity and goodness in a bleak world, and the sort of befuddled compassion with which the author/narrator (this book reads VERY biographically) viewed himself. I strongly recommend this book, if only because I'd like to see if anyone else feels anything remotely similar about it.
31. The Falconer, Dana Czapnik [**]
Sometimes I dock a star for disappointed expectations, which I think is what happened here: nothing could possibly have sounded more appealing to me than a coming of age story about a basketball playing prodigy of a girl in 1990s New York City, and then I read this, and oof. It's not that the book failed to be any of those things, it's that the writing just absolutely did not work for me. Pages and pages of philosophical meditations coming from either the world's worst-written or the world's most unbearably pretentious 17 year old; take your pick, but either way, I did not like it. There were moments of real resonance here--the basketball scenes are fantastic, and the clumsy, painful romance is very teenaged and very real--but they are pearls in seaweed!
32. The Kiss Quotient, Helen Hoang [***]
This was a fun book that I enjoyed reading, but the romance at the heart of it--ostensibly the whole point of the book--never really grabbed me. My stomach never swooped, not so much because I always knew what was coming for the characters as because I never quite got to know them as individual beings. I also had one major complaint: no it isn't hot when the guy tries or wants to beat up a rival out of jealousy!! Sorry not sorry :(
33. The Peacock Feast, Lisa Gornick [***]
I didn't even include this book in my belabored romance breakdown up at the top of this email because I barely remember anything concrete about it. I think it was pleasant; I certainly have no complaints. I do remember thinking this would be historical fiction or a period novel or something and it very much isn't. I think it's about generational trauma and memory, or something, and long-lost family and the Secrets We Keep. Which is fine! A fine book.
34. On The Come Up, Angie Thomas [****]
As with her previous (and uber-popular) novel The Hate U Give, here Angie Thomas does a sort of astounding job of helping the reader see and understand injustice through distinctly teenaged eyes. The complications of growing up--of figuring out who you are in your family and with your friends, at school and at home and in the world, of jealousy and love and stumbling communication--intertwine with the creeping tendrils of political awareness, poverty, racism and persecution, so that everything becomes tangled together, pain and anger and growing up. In On The Come Up, Thomas's protagonist Bri is often hard to like, her decisions frustrating and her relationships more fraught than in Thomas's previous novel; as a result, this book is less instantly relatable, less cathartic. But I think the very challenge of coming to love Bri is as much the point of the book as any particular aspect of the plot, a push that Thomas is giving her new and fawning readership, and one most of us probably need. This story is real, too.
(Also, a book with rap as a central plot component needed to include stellar fictional lyrics and Thomas truly delivered--it's one of the most impressive aspects of the book, honestly.)
35. No Name, Wilkie Collins [*****]
Here is the 600 page book of tiny print I read in March, and yes: it was worth it. In fact, it was a joy--to love a book so much, to be so enveloped in its cozy world of gothic thrills and delicious villains and large-hearted, strong-headed women and know that you still have pages and pages to go! As with The Woman in White, another Collins novel (and one of my favorite books ever), I was intrigued and impressed here with the way that Collins probes at--even if he doesn't fully take on--issues of gender, morality, and the laws that govern both in Victorian England. And even if my twenty-first century self wants to take issue with some of the book's ultimate Lessons, the rest of me just doesn't care. Smart and funny, cozy and thrilling, suspenseful and heart-wrenching, all at once, and for so long--hard to ask much more of a book, in the end. Again: just a pure joy.
36. Half Blood Blues, Esi Edugyan [*****]
One of those interesting juxtapositions: to go from a book that gets five stars for pure joy to a book that gets five stars for what felt like pure pain. This book was unrelenting: filled with all varieties of pain, from jealousy to physical hurt to Nazi persecution to pounding hangovers to hunger to rejection to betrayal to the constant, imagined mournful soundtrack of a broken jazz band playing something called the titular Half Blood Blues. But, not to get too poetic here, I think that was the point--the sweet painful way a brass instrument calls out a low note, the painful histories of blues and jazz and blues and jazz musicians, the way that art and pain are so often and famously layered together. This book is all of that; it packs a nearly-literal punch. I felt bruised when it ended.
37. The Raven Tower, Ann Leckie [**]
Two stars here solely--grudgingly!!--for the interesting, original concept and worldbuilding. Leckie is good at this: she's best known for her Imperial Radch sci-fi trilogy, which is even more interesting and complicated than this story but suffers from some of the exact same issues. I think Leckie has a tendency to get bored with her own characters, or at least to make them boring--here, again, she writes a main character who is a pillar of perfect morality, an avatar for good in the world, and thus entirely uninteresting. Flat characters and rote plotting are saved by a deeply interesting concept, but only somewhat. Also, this book really should have been a short story, especially when you see how large the font is and how huge the margins are in an already-scanty 250ish page book! (Three stars for my imagined short story version.)
38. Bloom, Kevin Panetta and Savanna Ganucheau [***]
This graphic novel (another rarely-read genre for me) was lovely and soft and sweet and not that much else. I liked the main character's dynamics with his often-difficult friends and family much more than with his all-too-perfect love interest; the romance subsequently ended up feeling like the least interesting part of the story. Illustrations were beautiful, though, and it was a quick and gentle read.
39. The Fever King, Victoria Lee [****]
Odd to like a book and know that you probably only like it because it keys in a very specific code to your book-reading heart. I cannot really "recommend" this book, but I can say that there is a chance you might also like it if you like all of the following: The Hunger Games, Law and Order SVU, that one thriller about Ebola, Tamora Pierce's Emelan series, the bad Dan Brown book about hackers, DSA-esque political platforms around open borders, and--very, very critically and specifically, because The Fever King is a thinly-veiled dystopian ripoff of it, which honestly was the clincher for me--the m/m historical fantasy romance series "Captive Prince," which began as an online serial novel in roughly 2009 and which I read one painful chapter at a time on LIVEJOURNAL until it was self-published and then actually published as a full trilogy a few years ago. (Speaking of romances that make you care about the world and characters first, boom! There we go.)