LIES AND WEDDINGS – Kevin Kwan

Kevin Kwan’s novels scratch a certain itch.  They are decadent, delicious, and outrageous – perfect novels to gorge yourself on.  And Lies and Weddings (Doubleday 2024) is my absolute favorite of his works.  While some of it may seem like a regurgitation of the Crazy Rich Asians trilogy as far as certain plot points and characteristics, but that’s certainly an unfair dismissal of this novel.

Take Bridgerton but set it in present time and add some filthy rich Asians to the mix, and you’ll come close to this guilty pleasure.  (Rufus and Eden are pretty much Colin and Penelope!) Rufus Leung Gresham is the future Earl of Greshamsbury, and it’s fallen on his shoulders to save his family’s fortunes, name, and estate.  Only he doesn’t know he’s been tasked with such an endeavor because the family’s financial ruin still thrives on a house of cards held up by some generous loans from a “friend” of the family’s doctor, Thomas Tong.  Rufus’s mother, however, works tirelessly behind the scenes to secure a rich bitch of a wife for her son, as well as securing good matches for her two daughters.  Once confused with being the nanny instead of the Mistress of the House, she is consumed with appearances and money.  Having the family go to ruin will never do.  But her children don’t exactly play by the rules she’s set for them – especially Rufus.  Instead of falling into a marriage agreement with a rich heiress or the Chinese venture capitalist billionaire his aunt has selected, he finds himself falling in love with the literal girl next door – Eden Tong. Despite being the daughter of the family doctor and the current Earl of Greshamsbury’s best friend, Eden is not someone Rufus’s mother would ever approve of to marry.  It was fine when they were children and played together, but it is not fine any longer.

When the house of cards starts to collapse and a hot mic reveals secrets to a rabid crowd of gossipers, the Greshamsbury family and the Tongs have to face secrets that have long been buried, lies that writhe and damage, and the high stakes of a high society that would love to see them cut down. From London to Hawaii to LA to Marrakech, this is one jet setting novel of opulence, deceit, family obligations and expectations,  and love.

Lies and Weddings is delightful and fun, and it never pretends to be something more than what it is – the perfect palate cleanser.

Read this book.

THE ADVENTURES OF AMINA AL-SIRAFI – Shannon Chakraborty

“For when Amina chose to leave her home and return to life at sea, she became more than a pirate. More than a witch. She became a legend.”

A female pirate retired to a life of single-motherhood and relative domesticity takes to the sea for one more daring adventure?  Sign me up.  From the moment I first heard about Shannon Chakraborty’s The Adventures of Amina Al-Sirafi (Harper Voyager 2023), it was on my radar.   I finally picked it up off my stack, and it was 100% not a letdown. This is the type of fantasy that I prefer – heavy on character development, light on the romance, with smart and sharp writing.

Amina has essentially retired from her life of notoriety.  As there are many folks who would love to see her dead, she keeps a pretty low profile.  She lives with her daughter and her mother off the beaten path.  When an extremely wealthy woman shows up at her door, it soon becomes clear that her profile wasn’t as low as she’d hoped; Salima is the mother of one of Amina’s former crew mates – a man who met a horrific fate on her ship.  She has sought out Amina because her son’s daughter, Dunya, has been kidnapped.  Whether because of loyalty/guilt for her former crew mate, the offered reward, the threats against her own daughter or a combination of all three, Amina takes the job.  And like any good nakhudha, she needs her ship and her crew.  What follows is Amina getting the band back together and reclaiming her ship, the Marawati.

Have I mentioned that Amina was/is married to a demon who may or may not be dead and who may or may not be connected to the kidnapping?  Oh… and the kidnapping may not actually be a kidnapping so much as a young girl running away from a life she doesn’t desire – in this case, however, it’s like jumping from a frying pan into the fire.  Amina needs to save Dunya, save herself, keep her crew alive, and manage that demon that she entered a marriage contract with – high stakes as the villain here is a pretty powerful Franc who has tapped into some horrible blood magic, and Dunya is leading him to more magical artifacts to fed his blood lust for power.

I enjoyed the framework of the storytelling being that of a scribe writing down the tale from Amina’s mouth. I liked the interjections between the two of them, even more so by the end.  I want more of Tinbu, Dalila, Majed, and Amina’s adventures.  And yes, I do want more of Raksh – for better or worse.

The Adventures of Amina Al-Sirafi is refreshingly unique, and I can’t wait for the Marawati’s crew’s next adventure.

Read this book.

PERISH – Latoya Watkins

I’ve been dragging my feet over this review, and I contemplated not even posting.  But I remembered I posted about How the One-Armed Sister Sweeps her House, and that novel left me, as a reader, with the same sort of feeling as Latoya Watkins’s Perish (Tiny Reparations Books 2022). I’m actually going to recycle part of that review for this one.

I rarely post trigger/content warnings, and I try to avoid reviews with them – that’s my reading preference.  You may prefer them.  And that’s perfectly acceptable.  That said, Perish is one TW/CW after the other: incest, rape, rape of the mentally challenged, child molestation, domestic violence, brutal assaults, animal abuse, murder, suicide, addiction, abortion, torture, etc.  This list really could go on and on.  Some things are mentioned in passing, others as flashes of memory, and some in great detail.  There are multiple instances of rape and abuse, particularly between children and older male family members. This was the rare read that I nearly DNF’d; I didn’t, but I do wish I’d never started it.  It was simply too much, too hard, too hopeless.  (And the dog dies in this one.)

This story of generational trauma and a family legacy of abuse is heavy on the continued assaults and pain and not so much on breaking the horrid cycles. There is an intense struggle between what family means and whether family has to mean forgiveness or looking the other way or if one can just break free.  Despite my issues with the story itself, Watkins has shown herself to be a talented author.  She is nonjudgmental and unflinching in her depictions of some pretty horrible shit.  The fact I don’t hate any of the characters is a testament to how carefully she’s drawn them and how impactful the writing is.  I should hate Alex.  I should hate Bacon.  Very much should I hate Helen.  And I don’t.  They’re perpetrators but they’re also survivors.  It’s not black and white.

There are definite echoes of Morrison and Zora Neale Hurston, but it is much more ragged, raw and brutal and it never has the sun break free of the clouds.

It’s a very well-written book, but it’s a not for me book.

MIRRORED HEAVENS – Rebecca Roanhorse

“And I am happy to see your language is still more drunken sailor than Teek queen.”

“Love me.  And let fate do its damnedest to get around that.”

Rebecca Roanhorse’s epic trilogy, Between Earth & Sky, has come to a close with Mirrored Heavens (SAGA PRESS 2024), and it is one of the more satisfying conclusions to a series I’ve read.  The series was inspired by pre-Columbus American cultures and is chock full of strong female characters, gender fluidity, magic, politics, and prophecies.  Fate. Ambition. Love. Ruin.  And the storytelling is of the “gather round” oral tradition that holds my heart.  I loved this series.

Read my reviews here: (BLACK SUN – Rebecca Roanhorse – A Girl Named Tommi) (FEVERED STAR – Rebecca Roanhorse – A Girl Named Tommi)

I anticipated after Fevered Star that the third and final installment would focus more on Xiala and the Teeks, and how happy I was to be exactly right.  This whole series is really Xiala’s story, and what a marvelous story it is.

Mirrored Heavens opens not long after the events of Fevered Star.  Serapio, the Carrion King, rules with a cold and apparent bloodlust, but he is still Serapio, kind and curious and madly in love with Xiala.  Xiala has returned home where she soon learns the Teeks have lost their songs.  Stripped of their power, they are vulnerable to attack.  But Xiala hasn’t lost her song.  Not only does she retain that power, but she’s also realized a connection to the Mother only talked about in stories and whispers.  Much like Serapio has a connection with the Crow god, she has been god touched.  After an attack on her islands, Xiala channels this newly discovered power (she can control the kraken!) and sets on a quest for vengeance.  Her body count will rival Serapio’s.  Driven by vengeance and anger and love, not ambition, her quest will thrust her right in the midst of a political struggle, a planned coup, and some shadow magic soaked in blood that will take her to Tova- that will take her to Serapio.

The final installment is full of blood and heartbreak.  Loyalties are tested.  Lines are drawn and crossed out and redrawn. Lies are uncovered.  And prophecies are met, despite the attempts to thwart them.  But there’s an overwhelming heartbeat that shows love will prevail if given the chance.  There’s a lot of heart in this one, and it’s near perfect.

Read this trilogy.

SNARES WITHOUT END – Olympe Bhêly-Quenum

Current installment of Tommi Reads the World – we’re in the Bs.

Country: Benin
Title: Snares Without End
Author: Olympe Bhêly-Quenum
Language: French
Translator: Dorothy S. Blair
Publisher: Longman Group Limited (English version) 1981; first published 1960

Bhêly-Quenum’s Snares Without End is a slim novel about destiny, colonization, and the monsters inside.  Admittedly, it’s been a long time since I’ve read Camus, but the second section of this novel certainly has some echoes.

The first half of the novel paints a most idyllic scene with Ahouna caring for his family’s livestock.  When Ahouna is a boy, the family has some troubles and their father employs some dark arts to reverse their luck.  It works, but at what price?  Ahouna’s father, forced to work in servitude for three months, kills himself.  Even this seems but a blip in the novel as the idyllic countryside scenes with Ahouna playing his beautiful music continue.  It’s a rather odd pacing.

Ahouna gets married and has several children.  His wife accuses him of adultery, and this awakens a monster in him.  Instead of killing his wife, which he considers, he flees.  While running away, he kills an innocent woman for no reason.  The first half of the novel is what Ahouna tells the man he encounters after the murder – his explanation for his descent into madness.  What follows is Ahouna in prison and a less idyllic depiction of colonization than the first half.

From a history POV, the timing of the novel is very interesting as France granted full autonomy to what became the Republic of Benin in 1958 and full independence came in August of 1960, the year this work was first published.

THE RETURN OF ELLIE BLACK – Emiko Jean

Reading more like a fast-paced, bingeworthy Netflix special than a novel, Emiko Jean’s The Return of Ellie Black (Simon & Schuster 2024) is a quick read that scratches an itch and serves as a good cleanser between reads.  I never know what to say (or not say) about books like this because I don’t want to spoil anything, so I’ll try and toe that line.  If you don’t want to risk it, just don’t read anymore.

Seriously.

Stop.

Chelsea Calhoun followed in her father’s footsteps in becoming a detective.  Despite being adopted and not biologically related to her father, she is truly cut from the same cloth.  (In some ways, to her detriment.) Twenty years ago, her sister disappeared.  Chelsea was the last to see her alive, and she knew where she’d gone that night. The car was found. The boy was dead.  They believed her sister washed out with the waves and declared it a murder suicide, with her sister the victim.  There’s a guilt that lingers and licks and controls everything Chelsea does.

Two years ago, Ellie Black disappeared without a trace.  She haunts Chelsea, and when she suddenly reappears, Chelsea is giddy with adrenaline; she’ll find whoever took Ellie and she’ll bring justice.  Ellie’s case is all she can think about, and her sweet husband gets the short end of the stick again and again and again.  But Ellie doesn’t seem very interested in bringing anyone to justice.

Alternating between Chelsea’s and Ellie’s POVs, the novel does a good job of slowly revealing what happened to Ellie over the past two years, while also showing what Chelsea does with the scant evidence and bits of info Ellie does give her as she forces the investigation forward.  Despite the slow reveal and struggling investigation, it’s a fast-paced read.

Up until page 271, I was onboard with this novel.  Then the “twist” became too twisty.  It was unnecessary for solving the crime. It was unnecessary for the growth and significant epiphanies that Chelsea experiences.  It was unnecessary for the theme of “sisterhood” and the different ways sisterhood can be defined.  And it cheapened the last 30ish pages.

That said, it’s quick, easy read that you can finish in less time than it takes to binge a Netflix series.

THAT TIME I GOT DRUNK AND SAVED A DEMON – Kimberly Lemming

Kimberly Lemming’s That Time I Got Drunk and Saved a Demon (Orbit 2024, previously self-published in 2021) is not my usual read.  (A huge thanks to the publisher for sending it to me.) It’s absolutely ridiculous and outrageous – and everything it sets out to be.  It’s not the type of book that’s for me (I’ve said before I really don’t care for fantasy romance) but if you like your fantasies on the spicier side with characters that remind you of folks you know (minus the whole being a demon thing), it’s definitely worth a read. 

Cinnamon is a spice farmer.  Her world is pretty limited, but she’s perfectly okay with it.  She wants a simple life.  Good food.  Good beer.  Maybe a cat.  All that changes when, as the title suggests, she gets drunk and saves a demon.  Turns out, there’s been a huge misunderstanding and the goddess they worship is actually a witch who creates a madness in demons.  The cure for madness is, of course, cinnamon.  And of course, the demon she saves is wicked hot.

Fallon, the demon, convinces her (using charming threats) to assist him on a quest to destroy the witch’s chalice, which holds her magic.  Turns out there’s more than one.  (Think horcrux!)  Cinnamon teaches him about crawfish boils and how to properly season his food.  He gets beside himself smitten when she’s bathing and just casually kills an alligator for their dinner.  It’s the perfect match. 

Add some various debauchery, the burning of a city, the stealing of a ship, the gathering of a band of mostly demon followers, and a lot of sexual tension and TA-DA – that about sums it up.

This book is 100% not for everyone.  But if these types of reads are your jam, definitely check out Lemming’s Mead Mishaps series.

REMARKABLY BRIGHT CREATURES – Shelby Van Pelt

Shelby Van Pelt’s Remarkably Bright Creatures (HarperCollins 2022) has been hanging out on my TBR stack for well over a year. It’s moved from one stack to another, but I kept choosing something else.  I suppose I didn’t want to be let down by yet another overhyped book.

Long story short: I wasn’t.

Short story long: I could kick myself for waiting as long as I did to read this Backman-esque heart-hug of a novel.  It’s charming and witty, and full of heart and sheer humanness.  Within the first few pages, I predicted that Tova would release Marcellus, a giant Pacific octopus housed at her place of employment, the Sowell Bay Aquarium.  That set me on the hunt for another recent read where a woman released an octopus from her place of employment.  After realizing it was The Memory of Animals, I could then focus on Tova’s tale, which is quite a bit different than Neffy’s.

Tova’s son disappeared when he was 18, lost to the Puget Sound, and nearly everyone but Tova believes it was suicide.  It’s been thirty years since she lost him.  After her husband died of cancer, she took a job cleaning at the Sowell Bay Aquarium.  Not because she needed the money, but because she needed the distraction.  Tova takes pride in her work and in the animals.  Her favorite is Marcellus, a mischievous and intelligent escape artist that becomes her friend.

Cameron is the son of a junkie.  Despite being brilliant, he can’t hold a job down.  His Peter Pan syndrome likely developed from the trauma from his mother and lack of father figure, but it is at times a little too much.  He’s a thirty-year-old man child – you just want to shake him.  He’s in Sowell Bay because he thinks some wealthy developer in the area may be his father and he wants to shake him down for money.

The mystery isn’t really a mystery.  I don’t much think it was supposed to be, but the unveiling is the warmth of a hug or freshly baked cookies.  Marcellus has some cute little sections – they may seem quaint, but Marcellus is our detective and ultimately the driving force of the novel that breathes life into a past and adds flesh to bones long thought buried.

Read this book.

THE PEACH REBELLION – Wendelin Van Draanen

“Each year, as the sweet smell of peaches filled the June air and ripened into summer, I found myself looking for Ginny Rose Gilley.”

*Spoiler to come.  I’m warning you!*

Wendelin Van Draanen’s The Peach Rebellion (Random House Children’s Books 2022) is a delightful middle grade novel set in California in 1947.  Ginny Rose Gilley is an “Okie” – or as she likes to call it, a survivor.  She remembers the farm the family had before it was taken by the bank.  She remembers the old shacks they called homes.  She remembers when her younger brothers died on her birthday.  And she remembers helping her father bury them in a ditch.  She also remembers summers spent on the Simmons peach orchard, playing with Peggy Simmons and picking peaches.  When her father finds himself a stable job, she finds herself back in town.  It’s been years, but Peggy hasn’t forgotten her.

Peggy lived for those summers with Ginny Rose.  Ginny Rose made the work seem less dull.  Without Ginny, she has continued to hustle, preparing the harvest and even manning a roadside stand to help the family business. Her best friend, Lisette, is the daughter of a banker.  Peggy would give anything to be able to pay her way into places like Lisette, to earn real money, instead she pays her way with peaches and quietly takes Lisette’s offered hand-me-downs. Peggy’s got her eyes set on Rodney St. Clair.  What she doesn’t know is that so does Lisette.

Peggy would love for her two friends to become friends, but Ginny Rose wants nothing to do with the daughter of a banker.  And Lisette doesn’t really want to be friends with an “Okie.”  But the summer of 1947 will see all three of their lives shaken up just a bit, and they realize what they can accomplish if they trust each other together.

SPOILER **************************SPOILER************************SPOILER**********

Beyond the surface level romance, the main plot of the novel is Ginny Rose trying to get the bodies of her brothers back so they can be buried at a church. Her mother’s depression is getting worse, and Ginny Rose thinks if she has somewhere to visit the boys, somewhere to call home, it might improve. She gets Peggy to help her try to find the unmarked grave and dig them up, and even Lisette agrees.  Some folks have called this morbid, but that doesn’t bother me.  The one issue I really have with it is how she suddenly decides this is what her mother needs, and when they get there, she sees they’re doing construction over where they were buried so they can’t back out.  I’d have preferred it if she went to try and find their grave or heard of the construction, and then decided to bring them home.

It’s a sweet and sticky novel of summertime and the forging of friendships that will last forever.

Read this novel.

JAMES – Percival Everett

“Folks be funny lak dat. Dey takes the lies dey want and throws away the truths dat scares ‘em.”

“With my pencil, I wrote myself into being. I wrote myself to here.”

Confession: I’ve never read Adventures of Huckleberry Finn OR Adventures Tom Sawyer.  (I was very dedicated in charting my path towards a Masters in English to avoid as much of the “dead white guy” canon as I could.)  That said, so much of Mark Twain is embedded in everything, particularly in other works even to this day, that I’m somewhat familiar with both Tom and Huck and their boyhood adventures in the South.   When I saw that Percival Everett was releasing a retelling of Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, I was already sold.  You know I love those “the empire writes back” retellings.

Everett has one of the more unique voices and storytelling prowess of authors I’ve read in a long while, and while his novels are dark and weighty, they are full of wit and charm and a humor that perseveres.  James (Doubleday 2024), a retelling from the perspective of the slave Jim, did not disappoint.

Admittedly, it is very hard to review the novel because so much of what makes it work is experiencing the unexpected wrapped in the known, and I think readers would benefit from just jumping in and letting James’s story happen to them.  From a “writing back” standpoint, Everett does provide an ending that is less “white savior” and more resilient as it reclaims a narrative; there is something profoundly powerful in that clear deviation from Twain’s adventurous lads and the intentional act of James putting his words on paper.

If you’re a diehard Twain fan, you probably won’t like this novel.  I would, however, recommend that you give it a go.  And, of course, I will always recommend that you read Everett’s The Trees. 

Read this book.