Ordinary human failings

Read Ordinary Human Failings by Megan Nolan

It’s 1990 in London and Tom Hargreaves has it all: a burgeoning career as a reporter, fierce ambition and a brisk disregard for the « peasants » – ordinary people, his readers, easy tabloid fodder. His star looks set to rise when he stumbles across a scoop: a dead child on a London estate, grieving parents loved across the neighbourhood, and the finger of suspicion pointing at one reclusive family of Irish immigrants and « bad apples »: the Greens.

At their heart sits Carmel: beautiful, otherworldly, broken, and once destined for a future beyond her circumstances until life – and love – got in her way. Crushed by failure and surrounded by disappointment, there’s nowhere for her to go and no chance of escape. Now, with the police closing in on a suspect and the tabloids hunting their monster, she must confront the secrets and silences that have trapped her family for so many generations.

Ordinary human failings is a sad and painful exploration of everything that can go wrong in a poor immigrant family. It takes place in 1990s London and follows an Irish family, after the youngest child, a ten-year-old girl, is taken into custody for possibly killing a toddler from the same neighbourhood. Points of view alternate…

River East, River West

Read River East, River West by Aube Rey Lescure

Shanghai, 2007: Fourteen-year-old Alva has always longed for more. Raised by her American expat mother, she’s never known her Chinese father, and is certain a better life awaits them in America. But when her mother announces her engagement to their wealthy Chinese landlord, Lu Fang, Alva’s hopes are dashed, and so she plots for the next best thing: the American School in Shanghai. Upon admission, though, Alva is surprised to discover an institution run by an exclusive community of expats and the ever-wilder thrills of a city where foreigners can ostensibly act as they please.

1985: In the seaside city of Qingdao, Lu Fang is a young, married man and a lowly clerk in a shipping yard. Though he once dreamed of a bright future, he is one of many casualties in his country’s harsh political reforms. So when China opens its doors to the first wave of foreigners in decades, Lu Fang’s world is split wide open after he meets an American woman who makes him confront difficult questions about his current status in life, and how much will ever be enough.

River East, River West was nominated to the Women’s Prize for fiction. It follows two stories: The main one is 14 year old Alva, born of an American immigrant and an unknown Chinese father. She wants to be American; her mom has completely rejected her country of origin and loves China more than anything. The…

Re:RSS feeds or blogs?

Replied to Reading Indie Blogs Right (thoughts.uncountable.uk)

Loren put out an interesting post on why he prefers not to use an RSS reader: […] I did a post a few weeks back about why I’d actually prefer if you read my posts in RSS than the website itself.

I’m somewhere between the first two blog posts. My flow for news consumption, in short, is see in RSS reader -> send anything longer than a couple of paragraphs to my e-reader for comfortable reading. For the shortest posts, I often click just to give people a view (if they have analytics) and check if…

The No-Girlfriend Rule

Read The No-Girlfriend Rule by Christen Randall

Hollis Beckwith isn’t trying to get a girl—she’s just trying to get by. For a fat, broke girl with anxiety, the start of senior year brings enough to worry about. And besides, she already has a boyfriend: Chris. Their relationship isn’t particularly exciting, but it’s comfortable and familiar, and Hollis wants it to survive beyond senior year. To prove she’s a girlfriend worth keeping, Hollis decides to learn Chris’s favorite tabletop roleplaying game, Secrets & Sorcery—but his unfortunate “No Girlfriends at the Table” rule means she’ll need to find her own group if she wants in.

Enter: Gloria Castañeda and her all-girls game of S&S! Crowded at the table in Gloria’s cozy Ohio apartment, the six girls battle twisted magic in-game and become fast friends outside it. With her character as armor, Hollis starts to believe that maybe she can be more than just fat, anxious, and a little lost.

But then an in-game crush develops between Hollis’s character and the bard played by charismatic Aini Amin-Shaw, whose wide, cocky grin makes Hollis’s stomach flutter. As their gentle flirting sparks into something deeper, Hollis is no longer sure what she wants…or if she’s content to just play pretend.

Remember how I’m exhausted of queer novels always being YA and cannot relate to any of it? Well. The No-Girlfriend Rule is a young adult (high school) novel about a girl who realizes she might not be super straight while playing a tabletop RPG with a group of feminists, only one of them blue-haired. I’m…

Auditing my social media use and news consumption

Replied to Auditing my social media use and information consumption (Elizabeth Tai)

When you get such extreme mental fatigue from social media and you just want to check out and sleep all day – you know you’ve got a problem.

I’m following Elizabeth’s example here, as I think her template is excellent and very easy to follow. My relationship to news and social media has drastically changed in the past couple of years, and I’m happy to say I’ve been having a much more positive approach to social media especially − I was extremely addicted…

Last night at the Hollywood canteen

Read Last Night at the Hollywood Canteen by Sarah James

Perhaps the best place in 1943 Hollywood to see the stars is the Hollywood Canteen, a club for servicemen staffed exclusively by those in show business. Murder mystery playwright Annie Laurence, new in town after a devastating breakup, definitely hopes to rub elbows with the right stars. Maybe then she can get her movie made.
But Hollywood proves to be more than tinsel and glamour. When despised film critic Fiona Farris is found dead in the Canteen kitchen, Annie realizes any one of the Canteen’s luminous volunteers could be guilty of the crime. To catch the killer, Annie falls in with Fiona’s friends, a bitter and cynical group–each as uniquely unhappy in their life and career as Annie is in hers–that call themselves the Ambassador’s Club.
Solving a murder in real life, it turns out, is a lot harder than writing one for the stage. And by involving herself in the secrets and lies of the Ambassador’s Club, Annie just might have put a target on her own back.

A polyamorous, bisexual murder mystery set in 1940s, pre-Singin’ in the Rain Hollywood? Do I need to say more? Here is my original draft for this review: do you know how rare lgbt thriller mysteries are? do you???? Now − I’ve read a few queer crime novels recently, so clearly there’s more and more going…