Beautyland by Marie-Helene Bertino

Wednesday, Apr. 9, 2025--San Antonio

Beautyland by Marie-Helene Bertino is quite unique.   It was named a top book of 2024 by Time and others and is the story of an alien brought to life as a human female child birthed by a poor American woman in Philadelphia.  (The book tells how it occurred.)  The child is a bit of a misfit (as any alien would be), but that works well for her to fulfill her purpose here.  As a child, she is visited in the evenings by beings from her planet who explain her existence and her purpose.  Not until she is an adolescent is she "activated" for fulfilling that purpose which is to report on what life is like on Earth, since there are problems on her home planet that will cause everyone to die if they cannot find a solution such as a new place to live.  The book consists of her life story--living in poverty and what that entails, being a bit different from everyone else (definitely not a part of the in-crowd), being very intelligent and earning scholarships for the best Catholic middle school and high school in the city, missing out on a scholarship for college because another student who cheated got it, being close friends with a girl in her classes and her family through most of her life, making the decision to be bold and move to New York City to live where her best friend and one of brother both moved, etc.  But more important than that life story are her communications back to her home planet.  The author of the book has done a great job of imagining what it would be like for a stranger to earth observing life here.  Each communication is an explanation of how things are, but written in a very innocent, childlike way.  It's those communications that make the book so special and keep the reader interested.  There are sad times, happy times, frustrating times, etc., that assure the reader that she is really living life as an earthling while observing it.  I enjoyed taking the journey with her and gave the book 4 stars out of 5.

The Hypocrite by Jo Hamya

Wednesday, Apr. 2, 2025--San Antonio

The Hypocrite by Jo Hamya was recommended as a top book of 2024 by several sources.  I read it, and it was an interesting concept for a novel, but it was quite confusing at times, since the book was describing 3 different periods of time--a 3-month period a father and daughter spent in Sicily as he wrote a novel and she was invited there to assist him, and two simultaneous events occurring 10 years later--the mother and daughter having lunch together and discussing their lives while the father (divorced from the wife since the daughter was a young child) watches a matinee of a play the daughter has written which seems to be a criticism of what happened that summer.  By the end of the book, I did not care for any of the characters.  They are all very self-centered.  The father has always had sloppy, inconsiderate habits which bother those around him and which he seems to think are okay ways for him to be.  The mother divorced him for those reasons and seems to have tried to punish him by limiting his time with the daughter while collecting as much child support as possible (since he is a very successful author).  The daughter is the worst of all of them, however.  She is a 30 year old who feels that she has been slighted constantly by everyone in her life.  She is always ready to tell anyone else (even strangers on the street) how they are offending her by what they are saying or how they are acting.  In my opinion, it's time for all of them to go their separate ways and to never have anything to do with each other ever again; otherwise, there will never be any peace in their lives.  But I expect, the same problems will arise with anyone else who becomes involved personally with any one of the three.  I was so glad to see the book come to an end.  I gave it 3 1/2 stars out of 5 not because I didn't like the characters but because it was such a complicated construction of a novel that I found myself having to figure out too often what was happening and where and when. 

The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo by Taylor Jenkins Reid

Thursday, Mar. 27, 2025--San Antonio

The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo by Taylor Jenkins Reid was published 7 years ago.  I decided to read it because I read a short blurb on a news website about anticipated upcoming films and series later this year.  I've always found the original books to be better than the films or series made of them.  Books just have so much more detail than can be included on film.  It's the story of a sexy Cuban refugee living in Hell's Kitchen in New York making her escape and rising to become a very wealthy Oscar-winning film star and co-producer who marries 7 different men and eventually lives a reclusive life.  It makes me think of Elizabeth Taylor (multiple husbands), Greta Garbo (reclusive), and Raquel Welch (sexy and a name hiding her Latin heritage) among others.  It's also the story of an actress strongly protecting her reputation at great personal cost.  The entire book takes place within a two-week period when she is meeting with an author she has chosen to write her official biography with legal agreements that it cannot be published until she dies.  She wants the REAL story of her life (versus the one the public knows from paparazzi publications) to be told.  The book has sold over 5 million copies since it was published, and it definitely kept me interested and picking it up to continue reading as often as I could.  I rated the book 4 1/2 stars out of 5.

In Tongues by Thomas Grattan

Sunday, Mar. 23, 2025--San Antonio

In Tongues by Thomas Grattan is a good story but has a central character I didn't like.  Gordon reminds me of too many young men (especially young gay men) who wander through life making bad decisions no matter what good opportunities come along.  One of his biggest problems is not having any sense of responsibility.  Money, when it comes, is to be blown irresponsibly.  Friends are persons to take advantage of when needed without feeling bad about it.  It's like he feels he deserves every opportunity that comes along while not needing to feel grateful or to avoid taking advantage of those who have provided it.  He fails over and over again in keeping friends, keeping jobs, in simply living life.  By the end of the novel, he seems to have finally figured some things out and made some good decisions, but his love life is still unsettled and may never become so.  I considered quitting reading the book during the first quarter of it, because I found no pleasure in reading about such a person.  But the story eventually becomes more interesting because of the persons around him--the lesbian friends he makes, the older gay art dealer and his fickle younger life partner who take him under his wing, his ultra-conservative religious father and his second wife, etc.  The book was named one of the top gay novels of 2024 and the author won a literary prize for it.  I can see why.  Sometimes, however, there are good novels that are just not enjoyable to read for a specific reason.  My final rating for the book is 4 stars out of 5 with the lost point being for the beginning when there no motivation was developed to make me want to continue reading about the life of this young man.

All Fours by Miranda July

Thursday, Mar. 29, 2025--San Antonio

All Fours by Miranda July was named a Top 10 book by Time and a finalist for the National Book Award.  I actually waited weeks with this book on hold before getting it on my Kindle through the Libby App (my local library paying for it, thank goodness, rather than me).   It's the story of an obnoxious woman making bad decisions.  Supposedly funny, I didn't laugh once during the 15% of it that I read.  I just couldn't stick with it any longer.  From the reviews, I can see that it is women who love the book, and apparently it's women frustrated with their lives.  There was just nothing about it that appealed to me.  It joins a small group of books with prominent award nominations that I swear must have been achieved by "sleeping" with the judges!!  I decided to quit the book and give it 1 star out of 5. 

How to End a Love Story by Yulin Kuang

 Tuesday, Mar. 18, 2025--San Antonio

How to End a Love Story by Yulin Kuang was named a best book of 2024 by TIME.  The plot is a great one--two people who were not friends in high school and are pushed further apart by a tragedy just months before graduation, go their separate ways for years with both becoming writers, and then find themselves on the same writing team for adapting the novel of one of the two into a screenplay for a mini-series.  I found the story and the characters to be exciting.  I thought, "I am reading such a good novel."  Then throughout the 3rd quarter of the novel I started noticing things:  Is this a romance novel?  There are pages of detailed descriptions of the steps of a sexual encounter.  And it repeats and repeats with every sexual encounter.  It was far more detail than was needed for a novel and became a distraction from the good story I was reading.  And there were repetitions of terms--"the tattoo of my heart" (meaning the beat), "gripped my heart" and other expressions written too many times compared to what is expected in a serious novel (versus other creative ways to say the same things when a feeling is repeated).  Fortunately, the book turned back into a really good novel during the final quarter.  By that time, however, I had realized that I could not rate it higher than 3 1/2 stars out of 5.  If only the author had stuck with the real story rather than wandering off to spend so much time describing multiple sexual encounters in almost the same words, I could have raised that rating!

Long Island by Colm Toibin

Friday, Mar. 14, 2025--San Antonio

Long Island by Colm Toibin was named a best book of 2024 by many top publications.  It is a follow-up to his novel Brooklyn.   Toibin is a good writer.  His style is easy to read and clear and precise.  In this book, the character Eilis has returned to Ireland for the first time in 20 years (from the setting of the first book) to visit her mother supposedly to celebrate the mother's 80th birthday, but really to get away from a problem that has popped up in Brooklyn where her life has been somewhat suffocating from living on a cul de sac that has four houses filled with Italian in-laws.  She is at a point where she must make some major decisions about her life that will affect others--her husband, her children, and her family and friends still living in the small Irish village where she grew up. The book is so well written, that each step of the way the reader can foresee problems that don't have good solutions and the book ends with the reader left in this quandary.  What decisions did every one make?  If this was decided, this would be a problem.  If another decision was made, there would be this a different problem.  All the characters have their faults, so there are reasons for the reader to want the story to go in different ways.  I really enjoyed the book and rated it 4 1/2 stars out of 5.

Whale Fall by Elizabeth O'Connor

Wednesday, Mar. 12, 2025--San Antonio

Whale Fall by Elizabeth O'Connor is set on a small island 5 miles off the coast of Wales where fewer than 40 people live and half of the homes are abandoned due to the hard life on the island and the desire of young persons to leave for the mainland.  One young girl is a star pupil who knows not only Welsh, but also speaks and writes English.  The timing is the 1930's with rumors of war coming, but the news is always delayed by a couple of weeks or more before arriving on the island.  Two researchers from Oxford arrive on the island to study the people and their culture--their music, their stories, their life daily lives, etc.  They hire the young girl to be their assistant for interacting with the locals and for writing what is said and translating it into English for the book the researchers will publish.  The book gives a great picture of what the harsh life is like on the islands.  It also shows that the "researchers" are misinterpreting what they are seeing and hearing and will be presenting a story that is not really true to the life there but to how the researchers have romanticized it to themselves.  (Reading the book brought back memories of the criticisms that Margaret Mead and other anthropologists from that time period eventually received for their work in remote civilizations being misrepresentations.)  The researchers eventually disappoint not only the young girl but also the reader in an emotional ways.  But that was apparently a typical problem for anthropologists of that period in time.  It took a while to really get interested at the beginning of the book, but I soon found myself really enjoying the "real story" of life on the island.  I gave it 4 stars out of 5.

Skater Boy by Anthony Nerada

Saturday, Mar. 8, 2025--San Antonio 

Skater Boy by Anthony Nerada is, I believe, the first book that I have ever read within 24 hours.  But after about 7 books in a row that didn't excite me much (even though some were well written), it was such a joy to be reading a book that kept me wanting to stay with it page-after-page that I even changed my daily routine to keep going until the end.  It was identified as one of the top novels for young adults from last year (although it likely will be banned from many school libraries because of its subject matter).  It's a coming-of-age novel about the lives of various misfits in their senior year of high school--the tough guys who are considered delinquents, the school nerds, those becoming aware of sexuality issues, etc.  The central character is one of the tough guys in a group of three who call themselves The Triads.  He has been rebelling because of events in his earlier life.  His father was an alcoholic and an abuser until he and his mother finally decided to try to escape.   But a tragic event occurred and they have been afraid of being found by the father for 9 years.  They live a lower-class life in a small apartment above a business.  He works at a local pizza place owned by the father of one of his friends in the Triads to help his mother with the expenses.  He cuts classes, gets into trouble often, and is in danger of failing and having to repeat his senior year.   He is also discovering that he is apparently gay and is afraid to come out to his friends or his mother.  But he has seen and met a ballet dancer who is the best friend of the daughter of his mother's boyfriend's boss when the "family" (mother, son, mother's boyfriend, and boyfriend's daughter) make their annual trip to the local theater during the Christmas season to see a performance of The Nutcracker.  That sets the stage for the coming-of-age events within the lives of multiple people during the final semester of their senior year.  Bad behaviors are analyzed and changed,  enemies come to understand they have more in common than they realized, and adolescents begin to mature and to make amends for the past.  I gave the book 4 1/2 stars out of 5.

Liars by Sarah Manguso

Friday, Mar. 7, 2025--San Antonio

Liars by Sarah Manguso is a book that took me some time to become invested in it.  It begins with tales of how horrible a marriage is.  The central character is the wife who is being mentally abused by her husband--a man who does nothing to help around the house or with their child, who is a frustrated because of being unsuccessful both as an artist and as a failed (3 times) tech entrepreneur, who is envious of his wife's successful writing career, who constantly manipulates her to feel like she is a failure (in all possible ways), and who regularly implies to friends that she is crazy by emphasizing that she received psychological treatment years before they were married and exaggerating the story as if she had been confined to a mental hospital.  At the same time, the woman keeps downplaying/overlooking/excusing the severity of the abuse while it continues to happen regularly.  I wanted to yell at her.  By the last third of the book, I realized that I had needed to go through all the first 2/3 to understand the situation better and to observe the slow evolution that was occurring in their relationship. I didn't want to put the book down during that last third of it.  I gave the book 4 stars out of 5.

Poor Dear by Claire Oshetsky

Monday, Mar. 3, 2025--San Antonio

Poor Dear by Claire Oshetsky has lots of good reviews.  I read it because of one on NPR.  But it was slow reading for me, especially in the beginning.  I spent the whole time I was reading the book trying to figure out exactly what was happening.  Margaret seems to be autistic with indications of high intelligence.  She teaches herself to read by looking at the books as someone reads to her.  She creates her own form of script to write the stories that appear in her mind.   She has a vocabulary that is far above what is expected of a child her age.  But at age 4, a tragedy occurs.  Her best friend is a bit of a wild child--always seeking adventure in dangerous ways.  While playing a game in an unused shed, the friend suggests a game and hides in an old ice chest that locks automatically when she closes the lid.  Margaret can hear her friend panicking and trying to get out of the chest, but Margaret cannot figure out how to operate the latch to free her.  She spends her whole life feeling guilt from that day with the entire town believing that the death of her friend was her fault.  Margaret's conscience seems to take the form of an imaginary animal called Poor Dear which is almost always around needling her about what happened and what she needs to do to atone for the death of her friend.  As the story progresses, there are good and bad experiences in Margaret's life, but the mental illness she is developing keeps interfering.  It's an open-ended book where the reader must decide what Margaret eventually does.  I gave the book 3 1/2 stars out of 5.

Most Ardently by Gabe Cole Novoa

Thursday, Feb. 20, 2025--San Antonio

Most Ardently by Gabe Cole Novoa was listed as a top book of 2024 by NPR and others.  It is a part of the "Remix" series where classic novels are reinterpreted by authors from marginalized backgrounds.  In this case, the original novel was Pride and Prejudice, and the character Elizabeth is written to be frustrated because "he" (who associates himself with the chosen name of Oliver) has always felt that he is a boy and hates being in dresses, does not ever want to get married, and, thanks to his older sister and two friends who know how he feels, is able to sneak out into society dressing and passing as a man.  (I assume the author is a transgender man and used his experience to reinterpret the character.)  Furthermore, the "awkward with women" character Darcy is reinterpreted as being attracted only to boys.  The story essentially follows the story of book that is being reinterpreted.  The aggressive mother is worried that her 5 daughters must find suitable men to marry because the family home/estate will be inherited by a distance male cousin as the closest male heir.  The father is still rather meek yet understanding (and in this version is coming to realize that his second daughter is more like a son than a daughter even though he does not completely understand the situation yet).  The character Wickham is still conniving to solve his money woes by marrying in a way that will solve those problems.  Etc.  It's an interesting concept.  To make the story work, the author has to overlook the general circumstances of the time for LGBTQ persons, but there is an addendum where he explains that there is historical evidence to support what he has written--evidence of the "male" member of a married couple being discovered as having female genitals upon death, for instance--and pointing out that there were no birth certificates at the time of the novel's setting so that a person could live as the opposite sex with no official records indicating that that he/she wasn't.  It is an easy read and is well written.  I gave the book 4 stars out of 5.  I probably will not read any others in this remix series, however.

Our Evenings by Alan Hollinghurst

Thursday, Feb. 13, 2025--San Antonio

Our Evenings by Alan Hollinghurst is on the "best list" of multiple publications for 2025.  I found the first half of it to be fantastic.  It was well written, gripping, and seemed very authentic for the experiences and thoughts of a young minority scholarship student attending an elite school.  I was ready to recommend it to everybody.  But the 3rd quarter of the book became a bland telling of event after event with gaps of time between them.  Maybe this was on purpose because one learns that the protagonist wrote much of the novel, then his husband wrote the rest from journal entries.  The final quarter of the book was a bit better, but the excitement for reading it never returned to that I enjoyed with the first half.  If the whole book was like the first half, I would have given it 5 stars.  However, my overall opinion now is that it should be rated 3 1/2 stars out of 5.

Woo Woo by Ella Baxter

Monday, Jan. 20, 2025--San Antonio

I did not find Woo Woo by Ella Baxter to be an enjoyable novel to read.  It took me 2 weeks to get through about 225 pages!  Some aspects of it were interesting to consider.  Some were very confusing.  The central character is a performance artist.  She creates life-size puppet characters using silicone, fur, bones, fabric, etc., which she wears for live performances, for taking photographs, etc.  She also specializes in nude performances which are presented live in person or online and from which photographs are made to sell in the gallery that represents her art.  She has followers who wait for her next broadcast and comment online as the performance is occurring.  She suffers greatly from anxiety as scheduled shows at galleries approach.  The book covers a few weeks before her biggest gallery opening so far.  The stress and worry of this approaching event is depicted.  She "sees and communicates" with a fellow artist who is deceased.  She procrastinates as the gallery owner asks her to write the blurb to be put into the program describing her works to be exhibited.  There is a stalker outside the house--standing in the garden, passing notes under the door, etc.  But is he real or imaginary?  She expects more attention from her unbelievably tolerant husband, a chef working long hours in his highly rated restaurant, than he can possibly provide.  She worries constantly that the show will not be a success.  She enters periods of excessively wild online performances creating havoc and messes.  She needs constant assurance from others that she is a good artist.  And when the owner of the gallery that represents her gives her the big show she needs and wants, she wants to make the decisions about how to present the show rather than leaving them to the owner.  I am sure there are artists like this woman.  How people in her life put up with her for very long, I don't understand.  I would be running away from any kind of relationship with her.  She is too needy, too self-centered, too anxious, etc.  I gave the book 3 stars out of 5 because I am sure it is a fairly well written description of what some artists are like.

There Is a Rio Grande in Heaven by Ruben Reyes, Jr.

Sunday, Jan. 5, 2025--San Antonio

There Is a Rio Grande in Heaven by Ruben Reyes, Jr., is a collection of short stories.  The stories are related to the experiences of Central American immigrants who came to the United States.  Some are science fiction set in the future (involving Central American immigrants).  Some have a gay male Central American immigrant as the protagonist.  The final story is written in a style of giving the reader options of what he wants to happen from one stage of the story to the next and provides the opportunity for going back and making different decisions at different points.  (This choice technique worked particularly well when reading on a Kindle.)  The stories were interesting, but I did not find myself dwelling on them after they were read.  In fact, as I progressed through the book, I had difficulty remembering stories I had already finished.  I can recommend the book for being interesting, but not for being great.  I gave the book 3 1/2 stars out of 5.