My kids have been away at camp this week, and surprisingly, I did not really do that much reading. Reading is easy to do while they’re around so I used my time doing hot yoga, going to movies, and watching a lot of tv. They’ve been with me 24/7 this summer so I really didn’t miss them but I’m also very excited to see them tomorrow.
I don’t know why Fruit of the Drunken Tree never really clicked for me. Totally sounds like something I would love and, I mean, the writing isn’t bad or anything. I still can’t put my finger on what went wrong with this book. I liked the sections from Petrona’s point of view, but the vast majority of the book was from Chula’s and that just didn’t work for me. I don’t know, a lot of people love this one, so maybe don’t listen to me just this once.
Speaking of stuff that didn’t quite land, Neverworld Wake was a pretty frustrating read. This was a cool concept: five young people get in an accident, then find out they’re all dead, but one can survive if they can come to a unanimous vote. No spoilers, as this is set up very early on. I like it, I’m totally up for this kind of genre bending. But this concept got extremely muddled; there were a lot of rules to this Neverworld Wake, then the rules were changing and were different for different people and there were a lot of dramatic revelations. It also got bogged down with them trying to find out what happened to their friend who’d died the year before; one of the dramatic revelations was that someone was angry at his parents because they covered up a shitty thing he did. Boohoo. It did have a killer ending that almost made up for the mess in the middle but overall it didn’t really work. I always feel like I want to like her books more than I do, but I’m sure I’ll keep reading them. Side note, I met her when she was on the book tour for her first one and she was incredibly nice and got very excited for me because I was pregnant and I’ll always appreciate that about her.
Since I seem to be in a slump, I decided to try Educated. This is one that a lot of people are loving right now, but I hadn’t really been drawn to it since in general I don’t like memoirs. This kind of had a Glass Castle vibe, which is one of very few memoirs that I actually enjoyed. This was fine, but I feel like I appreciated it more than I actually enjoyed it. There’s not really much I can hold against it, because mostly what I didn’t like about it was that it’s a memoir. She certainly has an interesting story to tell, and it’s amazing how accomplished she is considering what she came from, but it felt a little disorganized and choppy and about 100 pages too long. This is probably a case of it’s not you it’s me though.
Holy slump! I have a lot of books out from the library but nothing is really calling out to me, so clearly this is just me. I decided to start A Place For Us based mostly on the fact that it has the highest Goodreads rating of all the stuff I have checked out right now. I like it so far; it feels like something you can really get lost in and may be just what I need to get out of this slump. Fingers crossed!
