The Unhoneymooners - Christina Lauren

Man, another enemies to lovers book. When I read Red White and Royal Blue, I thought, wow I guess I like these. Then a bookish friend casually mentioned I was a huge dope since my favorite book is Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen. Um, total enemies to lovers action.

In The Unhoneymooners, Olive and Ethan are sworn enemies. On the day of her sister, Amy's wedding to Ethan's brother, Dane, Olive has a laundry list of tasks to perform as the maid of honor. One of those is to make sure she and Ethan have a separate meal not part of the extravagant seafood buffet, to which Olive has an allergy and Ethan a philosophical aversion. Both escape a vomitorium reminiscent of that scene in Stand By Me when everyone is barfing up blueberry pie that results from contamination of the seafood.

The story could have ended there but Amy is a notorious sweepstakes winner. So much so that almost everything at the wedding was the spoilers of her contest entering, including electric lime bridesmaids dresses. So when she's too ill to attend the all inclusive honeymoon to Maui, she offers her spot to Olive. As identical twins, Olive can take her spot. Since Olive is recently unemployed she's available for this week long pampering. Since she lives in Minnesota and it's January, she has the desire to go to Maui. The only wrinkle? Dane has offered his spot to Ethan.

What follows is fairly predictable but entertaining nonetheless as Ethan and Olive explore the island, their mutual attraction, and a budding...well you get it. I've already said it's an enemies to lovers book. So the situation is complicated by some unexpected run-ins in Maui and their families' belief that they hate each other.

Ethan and Olive are asked to figure out some core principles of their relationship and the foundation upon which that relationship is built. It's a rough go. I was pleased with the way it turned out. Again, fairly predictable but with some steam and laughs.

3/5 Stars. 

Every Heart a Doorway - Seanan McGuire

I really fell in love with the Wayward Children series when I picked up a "prequel" giving the backstory of Katherine Lundy in In an Absent Dream (you can read that review here). I hadn't realized it was a part of a series until halfway through but a prequel is a decent way to start a series anyway.

In Every Heart a Doorway, we are first introduced to The Home for Wayward Children and its headmistress, Eleanor West. It seems some children are special. Disappearing through doorways and down wells and into other lands and other realities where the rules are different. Sometimes there are no rules. In Lundy's case, she had gone to the Goblin Market, a place of high logic and wickedness. It seems every world that children fall into go into one of four cardinal directions - nonsense, logic, wickedness, and virtue, as they are explained to Nancy on her first day at the Home.

While In an Absent Dream was a very specific journey into the land of the Goblin Market, Every Heart a Doorway introduces many different worlds through their former inhabitants. Those former inhabitants now reside at the Home, mostly waiting, wishing to return to the worlds from which they were expelled. Having lived in a reality particularly crafted for their personalities, existing in our world, the normal existence is painful.

Lundy is a teacher there, trying to help the children cope with the reality that most of them will not be going back. Nancy refuses to believe this. She has come from the Halls of the Dead and wants very much to return. "Be sure" all the doors tell their travelers and Nancy's was no exception. But how can you be sure when you go only the one time? How can you be sure when you don't know what is lying beyond the door? The Lord of the Dead wants Nancy to be sure. So she heads home where her parents are aghast at her black clothes and bleached hair. They pack her off to the Home with a suitcase full of clothing that would make a flamingo blush.

But once she arrives at the Home, she is quickly shunned by the other students except her new roommate Sumi, Sumi's friend Cade, and the odd twins Jack and Jill. And this would be fine to bide her time while she waits for the Lord of the Dead to send another door, but... Sumi is murdered. Then another girl, and another girl. So this doesn't seem like it's going to work out very well.

So this is part fantasy and part mystery and all just very very good. Because at its core, the Wayward Children series takes those things about us that as teenagers or younger we had such a hard time defining and living with, identifying them as special and then making those traits work somewhere else where we get to really be ourselves. It shouldn't be a surprise that LGBT themes are prevalent in the books or that the characters come from diverse backgrounds. It makes the series really great. There's so much richness in the language and the visuals of the created worlds. Seanan McGuire is a treasure.

4/5 Stars. 

War of the Wolf - Bernard Cornwell

Oh Uhtred. What am I going to do with this irascible hunk of man? He's supposed to be 60 in this latest book (he'll always be 28 to me) but I digress, because no way a 60 year old man is riding his horse for days and then hopping off to swing a big sword around to kill Saxons. Just, not, happening. But he does it with such swagger that I'm willing to forgive him.

In the last book, Aethelflaed died and her brother Edward swept in to to snatch Mercia, because somehow this line of kings has it in their head that all of England is to be a English speaking, one God worshiping paradise. They have a very frank surprise coming in 1066 (pun intended). But for now, there are some Mercian's who are not satisfied with the idea of being ruled by Edward and in War of the Wolf, they show their displeasure by trying to overtake Caester in the name of Aethelflaed's daughter.

Uhtred, who is always stupidly giving oaths, promised Aethelflaed he would protect Aethelstan, the bastard/not-bastard eldest son of King Edward. So when he gets notice that Aethelstan may be in danger he rushes to Mercia to help. Surprise, Aethelstan is fine and Uhtred's love for people has been used against him to lure him out of Northumbria just as a new threat from the Norse threatens the last independent kingdom. (The TV show is called The Last Kingdom for a reason).

A Norse leader, thrown out of Ireland by the fierce Irish fighters, has taken refuge in Cumbraland, a lawless area to the west of Northumbria and North of Mercia, marginally held to be part of Northumbria. The leaders, Skoll, a warrior at the helm of a group of berserkers called the ulfhednar (wolf head), seeks to make Cumbraland and all of Northumbria his own. Well c'mon. He has to fight Uhtred first. And my man is not going to let some Norse dickhead roll over Northumbria unchecked.

True to Uhtred form, he underestimates at some point and overestimates at another and then gets a little lucky and... VICTORY. I'll leave the details to you. I will be DEVESTATED when Uhtred finally dies. We've had this thing going for a couple years now and I don't want to give him up. But all good things must come to an end. And a 60 year old man living in the 900s is not long for this world. Wyrd bid ful araed.

4/5 Stars. 

A Foreign Country - Charles Cumming

Being an American and reading a British spy novel is so hilarious to me, because mostly it's "Wow, why would France try to compromise a British intelligence officer?" And then vaguely remembering that England and France have been at war far more in their history than they've been "friends". So, apologies in advance British friends for my absolute incredulity at the idea that France would go so far as to kill two of it's own citizens just to further its attempts at international espionage against a friendly nation.

Have I given enough away yet?

The beginning of this fairly formulaic thriller is a bit scattered. In A Foreign Country, a young au pair leaves following an affair with the father of the children she has been hired to care for. An elderly couple is brutally murdered while on vacation in Egypt. And a small strike force yanks a target off the night time streets of Paris. All to find ourselves with Thomas Kell, a man still in his prime, but hungover after a night of drinking. He's bereft of options following his ouster from MI6 (apparently for something I've seen James Bond do it basically every movie so this is an injustice).

But when the head MI6 officer in waiting goes on an extended vacation, he's pulled back in to find out what she's really up to. Kell is anxious to get back into the good graces of MI6, and also to make a little cash. So he agrees to this slightly skeasy role and follows Amelia Levene to Nice France and then to Tunisia. Now if Amelia is the name of the au pair from twenty years before it's not a coincidence. Looks like our girl grew up to be named as the next chief of MI6.

So it makes sense that her soon to be number 2 wants to find out what exactly she's doing taking a vacation right before taking the helm of MI6. Poor Thomas Kell has some affinity for Amelia, having worked with her before and liked her personally. But he seems less squeamish when going through her personal belongings in an unattended hotel room. Something is going on in Tunisia with the very young man Amelia is spotted spending time with.

In the meantime, some other young man is being held captive by some unsavory folks. I spotted the old switcheroo before Kell, but admittedly that was the author's intent. Recapping anything else will give too much away.

All in all this was a decent spy novel from an author I'd never heard of before but will likely read again.

3.5/5 Stars

The Water Dancer - Ta-Nehisi Coates

When I first heard that Ta-Nehisi Coates was going to write a novel, I was hopeful that his plot and storytelling could keep up with the beauty and fully alive quality of his narration. I wasn't disappointed. In The Water Dancer, Coates tells the story of Hiram Walker. A slave born on the Walker Plantation in Elm County, Virginia at the beginning of the end of prosperity for the county. Son of his owner, born of the rape of his mother, Hiram is intelligent and equipped with a photographic memory.

It is the hope of his father that he will help his half-brother, Maynard, who has become a symbol of the lazy corruption that has overtaken the white slave-owning class ("quality" in Coates language). Maynard is slovenly, lazy, and ignorant. And when both men are thrown into the river, Hiram's special ability to "conduct" or transport himself elsewhere brings him several miles inland to his home. This gift of conduction is known to be possessed by only one person, Moses, Harriet Tubman herself.

Bereft of his life, and knowing he must seek change, Hiram runs and is caught. And the brutality of his circumstances worsens, until he is plucked out and given a position on the Underground. The complexity of the Underground was fascinating and Hiram's discomfort with his own place in the world was a great exploration on the limits of our own autonomy. Hiram escapes slavery but becomes beholden to the Underground because the very color of his skin puts him in peril.

I felt that the end of the book came a little abruptly given the unhurried cadence of the entire story. What happened to Hiram after the closing pages is something I've been wondering about for days even after finishing the story. Because the narration is done past tense, we know that Hiram grows to be old and live a long life, but he only hints at specifics and it's largely unknown what that long life entails. But perhaps not wanting the story to end is not such a bad way to end it. 

4/5 Stars