What I Read Last Week

I don't really want to think much about the past week. It was fun, but there was lots of driving, reading, and trying to figure out how best to show love to my family while simultaneously wanting to just be left alone for two hours to play fetch with the dog.

 Another Brooklyn by Jacqueline Woodson - I read another book by Woodson, The House You Pass on the Way, for the Book Riot Challenge, and I felt like I could really like Woodson, but these books are just too short for me to really love them. The writing is great and I like that LGB teenagers have something to read with them in mind as an audience, but just as things get going, the book ends.  I don't know. Good, but disappointing in the end.

Artemis by Andy Weir - Weir's follow-up novel to The Martian, which I loved so much I can hardly stand to talk about it, is not nearly as successful, I think. The fact that there was no waiting at the library for the book probably told me all I needed to know, but there you have it. The book is the story of a woman, Jazz Bashara, who lives in the only city on the moon and makes her living as a smuggler as she tries to redeem her mistakes from the past.  Antics ensue. Why Weir decided to take on a female protagonist is absolutely beyond me.  The character is definitely written from a male perspective (a twelve year old male perspective, even) with references to porn and sex everywhere. 

The science and techno-babble in The Martian was interesting, if sometimes over my head, but it was always super clear what the point was.  There's so much talk of welding here that I would just about have done anything to get away from it, especially since it was never clear why I was supposed to care about Jazz's ability to weld or why this was an important element of the overarching plot. 

So skip this one and reread The Martian.

The Lying Game by Ruth Ware -  Goodreads is harsh on this book, giving it a 3.54 star rating as I type this).  I didn't think this was great literature or anything like that, but it was sort of a fun ramble through the British seaside.  The setting and tone were amazing and I instantly had a knot in my stomach from the very first paragraph. It was dark and forbidding and I was all about that on a cold, snowy evening in December.

Yes, I found the main narrator to be super annoying (I get it - you're a mom and the best mom and the mommiest mom who ever breastfed her baby in every public place because you're a super mom mom mom), but you know what? That didn't seem unreal to me.  I KNOW women just like that woman.  I do sometimes get upset by the rise in anti-hero protagonists that are over-saturating popular culture at this time, but this isn't an anti-heroine. She's such a self-centered new mother with a dark past and that's not something that doesn't exist.

So I recommend this book. Don't be scared off by the Goodreads reviews.