Lies My Girlfriend Told Me - Julie Anne Peters

Angst. I have a love hate relationship with teen angst. I felt a lot of it in my teens and resented adults who didn't "understand" and now I'm an adult and just think teens should get over it already and hate myself for it. So while the angst expressed in Lies My Girlfriend Told Me made me roll my eyes at the teen characters several times, I also couldn't figure out why the parents were sometimes being real douches.

In the story, Alix wakes up on a Saturday ready to head off snowboarding with her girlfriend, only to be told by her mom that said girlfriend, Swanee, suffered a cardiac arrest while running and has died. Alix is devastated. This was her first real girlfriend, her first love. And she was planning to "go all the way" with Swanee this weekend. Begin eye roll at exclamations of never loving again and wishing she had died with Swanee. Give major eye roll to Mom who doesn't seem to understand that her daughter is genuinely grieving, even if the relationship did only last six weeks.

Well after the weird funeral service put on by Swanee's eccentric but "cool" parents, Alix finds Swan's cell phone in her room and on this cell phone are a lot of texts from "L.T." expressing love and asking where Swan has been. Ruh-roh. Turns out Swan kind of sucked. Watching Alix come to terms with this was probably the most interesting part of the book. Because at first, Alix leads L.T. on in an effort to find out who she is and who she was to Swan.

Turns out, Swanee Durbin gave a fake name (Swanelle Delaney) to another girl in a town not far away complete with a fake facebook account. But this part of the book was a little bit of a stretch for me. LT or Leonna Torres as we come to find out, is an extremely hot cheer leader and has no idea that Swan has died. Oh she saw a report on the news about Swanee Durbin, but even after not hearing from Swan for an entire week, didn't think it could possibly be the same person. Even though Swan won the high school track state championship the year before.

Did I mention Alix and Leonna meet later in the book at a track tournament where Leonna is cheering for her high school and Alix's is competing, meaning wouldn't have Leonna met Swan at some kind of even before? I know I'm reading too much into this part because we're supposed to be focused on the fact that Alix and Leonna fall in LOVE. And then Alix has to admit that she was the one who was texting her as Swan when Leonna didn't know Swan was dead.

Look, I'm happy these two ladies found love in the end. Swan sucked and they deserved it. But the narrative was a little too convenient. As introspective as Alix is, she never quite gets the lesson as deep as you expect. Swanee's parents never made her do laundry or start dinner. Ah gentle reader, this is why Swan sucked. Swanee's parents are in a poly-amorous marriage and this is why she slept around. And yes, I want to be more like Alix's parents even while realizing they are held up as a foil to Swan's parents to explain her suckage. It's probably a little unfair to people in open marriages to assume that is why they raise spoiled unfaithful children.

Anyway, this was a well constructed teen romance with a small mystery with maybe just the right amount of angst on both sides.

3.5/5

The Immortalists - Chloe Benjamin

The Immortalists is a book that ends up on a lot of Pride month reading lists because one of the four main characters is gay. It's been on my kindle for a while and I've been meaning to read it for a while. It is not, however, Own Voices, which is one of the goals I had for reading books during Pride. So I missed the mark on this for my own goals. But that's not to say that I don't think The Immortalists is a worthy read.

I think I've said before that I love sibling books. I love exploration of the sibling relationship. I have only one sister, so larger sibling groups are a mystery to me. The Immortalists explores four siblings from New York who visit a fortune teller to learn their future. Eldest Varya, Daniel, Klara and youngest Simon are all given the dates of their deaths. We get limited views of the each sibling but learn that Simon is told he will die "very young" and Klara at 31, Daniel in his 40s and Varya at 88. The book then spends 1/4 of its pages with each sibling.

Simon is first and his journey is heartbreaking as he rushes to fit as much life as he can prior to the early death predicted in his youth. I ripped through this section of the book. I loved Simon very much and his young and tragic life were particularly compelling. The knowledge of the dates of their deaths compel the characters in odd and fascinating ways.

Are they doomed to the dates they were given? Or does the knowledge of the date create a self-fulfilling prophecy. This is a question that is played with and explored in the story without actually giving a real answer. Benjamin lets her readers reach their own conclusions. The Immortalists is part character dissection and part psychological exploration. It tells the story of the four siblings without resorting to odd narrative devices like The Last Romantics (you can read that review here). The characters are compelling and the book is well written. 

4/5 Stars. 

Hunger - Roxane Gay

It took one round of mowing the grass and one road trip to finish up this brief but necessary read. I really like Roxane Gay. In Hunger, I love how straightforwardly she talks about the burdens of her body. I have had many of the same thoughts she voices regarding body image and none of the violet criticism she's received from being a fat person in a public space.

Also, WTF is wrong with people? From comments she receives to strangers pulling food from her grocery cart, why do humans believe it's appropriate to comment on other bodies. (Also me looking through magazines: hmmm look at those abs - I get it, our culture is sick with objectification of bodies, all bodies). I've been able to quiet the external voice but my internal voice is still a struggle. Because I've internalized all the same things Roxane talks about regarding body image. I know that society values thin people more than fat. I know that being fat leads to shame and judgment - it's part of why three times a week, I force myself outside to run. See how this memoir about her body turned into an internal debate about my own? She's so honest about herself it asks the reader to be honest too. That her size is tied up in her trauma is heartbreaking (because of the trauma) and must have come as a deep revelation to her family who only learned about it after the publication of Bad Feminist (you can read my review of that book here). I can't imagine carrying around that kind of hurt silently.

4.5/5 Stars. 

I read Bad Feminist last year and really liked Roxane's voice in that piece as well. I was happy to connect with her again on a work that feels important because it shouldn't be "groundbreaking" or "brave." It makes me think of all the times you read in a magazine about someone "showing off their beach body" when it's really just a celebrity who is going to a beach in the only body they have. That's not showing off, it's just living. So let's agree to stop clicking on those types of headlines.

We get one body for our whole lives. And it is OUR body. FU to anyone who wants to violate it, comment on it, or co-opt it for a clickable headline (including People Mag

The Dreamers - Karen Thompson Walker

Is it a good idea to read a book about a deadly contagious disease while staying at home to avoid a deadly contagious disease? I don't know about any of you but it did feel a little surreal.

The Dreamers explores what happens when a contagious sleeping sickness strikes a small Southern California college town. The inhabitants are at first carefree and oblivious to the possible danger participating in daily activities and even celebrating Halloween trick-or-treating with abandon as the disease spreads from person to person. Who gets it and who doesn't, doesn't seem to follow any particular pattern.

Since we are all amateur virologists these days, there were some technical aspects of the disease I expected the book to address which it did not. This is not a "Contagion" style book. This is a book that looks more at the societal collapse under a viral threat combined with a thoughtful contemplation of what it means to dream and what it would mean to dream for weeks at a time without the touchstone of reality to fall back upon.

The beginning of the book begins with a quote from the book Blindness, by Jose Saragamo (you can read my review of that here), which I read several years ago and still stays with me at times. This book doesn't dip into the levels of depravity found in that book, but the cycle of the disease and the exploration of the citizenry is evocative of that novel.

I was pleased to find that the writing and the narrative in The Dreamers was finer and tighter than The Age of Miracles, which I read a couple years ago but didn't enjoy as much as this one. (You can read my review of that book here).

3.5/5

Your Best Stride: How to Optimize Your Natural Running Form to Run Easier, Farther, and Faster--With Fewer Injuries - Jonathan Beverly

I loved the practical approach to improving form in this fast and informative book. Jonathan Beverly lays out the main areas of form weakness and gives concrete exercises and routines to improve those areas.

I've been a sometimes runner since I joined the cross country team my senior year of high school in order to try to stay in shape. It's been a thing I do for myself and it gives me joy, but almost two years ago I developed a case of plantar fasciitis that I could not beat. It kept my running sidelined for 18 months and after PT, massage therapy, dry needling and everything in between, I'm finally back to running. As I try to recondition myself, it's really important to me that I don't get injured again.

But I also appreciate that the book doesn't proclaim one exact right way to do anything. Everything is based on general principles of strength and flexibility which aid in running form. But every body is unique and so too is the stride generated from that body.

I've been putting some of the techniques into practice over the last week and I'm hopeful I'll run injury free into the future.

4/5 Stars. 

Girls Like Us - Christina Alger

I like a quick police procedural and Girls Like Us did not dissapoint on that level. In brevity it cut a few corners that required suspension of disbelief, but otherwise didn't impact the overall pace or enjoyment of the story.

Nell Flynn has returned to Long Island, NY to bury her father, a homicide detective who has died in a motorcycle accident. Marty Flynn's detective buddies accompany her to the Long Island Sound to scatter his ashes. Nell has avoided returning for ten years, ever since a falling out with her father. Their relationship was strained by her mother's murder during her childhood and her father's continual drinking.

Nell, on medical sabbatical from the FBI, is asked by a young detective she knew from high school, to assist in a murder investigation that hints of a serial killer. A young woman has been killed, dismembered, wrapped in burlap, and buried in a state park, mimicking a murder one year earlier.

The details of Long Island and Suffolk County are well done. The books does a great job drawing distinctions between the Haves who populate the Hamptons, and the Have-Nots, who scrape out a blue collar life in the smaller areas of the island. 

Nell begins to uncover a trafficking ring and corruption that implicates her own father. In investigating the case, Nell learns more about who her father truly was. The ending snowballs pretty quickly and involves some rather dramatic sequences that don't really fit the overall tenor of the crimes but don't alter the overall enjoyment of the read.

3/5 Stars