Red, White & Royal Blue - Casey McQuiston

I had this book wait-listed for a while at the library but can honestly say it was worth the wait. Red, White and Royal Blue is most shocking in the alternative 2019-2020 it presents. After Ellen Clermont is elected the first female president in 2016 (no one cares about a private e-mail server, says one of the characters, tongue-in-cheek - I could cry but I digress), her family occupies the white house in all their modern splendor. Ellen is divorced from Senator Oscar Diaz, and their two dazzling brilliant and beautiful children, 23 year old June and 21 year old Alex, work together with the daughter of the vice president to create The White House Trio.

What could be more wonderful than these PYTs? Well enter the devestatingly handsome second son of England's Princess and her James Bond movie star husband and voila, you have Henry. And, as it turns out, Henry and Alex get involved in a little enemies to lovers story and this could be trope-y and boring and saccharine. But it's NOT!! It's hilarious, and perfectly paced and just the right amount of schmaltz and edge.

I really fell for Henry and Alex. I liked watching their relationship turn a corner. I thought McQuiston dealt with the sexuality angle perfectly. There was quite a lot of detail regarding US and British politics and it was really all around perfect. I suddenly wanted to be 25 again and have that youthful energy and spirit. And I desperately wanted to live in a 2020 that had a Wimbledon and a DNC and international love scandal between the FSOTUS and a Prince, because the alternative, this current 2020, is just shit in comparison.

4 Stars. 

In An Absent Dream - Seanan McGuire

As I was looking for Own Voices writers to read for Pride month, Seanan McGuire's name came up and I thought I'd never heard of her. But turns out a couple of years ago, I devoured her Feed series (you can read my review for Feed here and Deadline here). A post-apocalyptic zombie series written under a pen name, Mira Grant. I had no idea. But since the writing in that series was so solid, I was willing to bet the same would be true for something written under her true name. And I was right. In an Absent Dream is well written. It's captivating.

While this is technically book #4 in the series, it is supposedly a prequel so I felt reading it first would be fine. I hope that's true. I suppose I'll find out when I read book #1 in the series, because I am definitely going to read more of these.

In IAD, 8 year old Katherine Lundy is friendless and lonely as the eldest daughter of the school principal. While not bullied outright, Katherine is shunned and escapes into a world of books. That is until she is walking home from school and winds up in front of a tree with a door. "Be sure" a sign above the door says. And while Katherine certainly can't be sure when she doesn't know what is behind the door, she steps through anyway into a hallway where the artwork on the walls provides the rules of the world she has just entered.

During this initial trip she is befriended by a girl with odd colored eyes named Moon, and an older woman known only as The Archivist. Since names have power, Katherine is known only as Lundy. She isn't the first Lundy to visit The Goblin Market, she's told. And in this way we learn that her father has had his own encounter there. While the Goblin Market is richly described and utterly fascinating, McGuire hides several action sequences from the reader. Depositing Lundy out of the Goblin Market and back home with just a mention of a battle against the wasp queen during which Mockery, another girl we never meet in real time, has been killed.

Lundy returns to the market at age 10 and the tension builds as she further learns the rules of the market under which she is to live. Lundy has a choice to make at age 18, to choose the market or forever be banished. She incurs debts within The Market, which insists its citizens pay "fair value" for everything they obtain. Those who fail to pay fair value slowly turn into birds unless their debts are paid off. It's a complicated system, but one that is so deftly explained by McGuire that its richness is enhanced by its mystery.

Will Lundy return and stay at the Goblin Market? That's a spoiler I do not want to give up because I did not see the ending coming at all in this one and it was not what I was expecting. I'm hoping some of the details of what happens after IAD is covered in the other books since it was a prequel. Will Lundy appear in any of the future books? I certainly hope so.

4/5 Stars. 

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.