Welcome to my 2nd challenge for the Black Friday Readathon, please feel free to enter both !
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Black Friday Readathon Challenge: Title Scramble
Welcome Black Friday Readathon (#BFRaT) participants to my title scramble challenge!!
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Join The Black Friday Readathon ! #BFRAT
Let’s Talk About Love by Claire Kann
Rating: unrated | Swoon Reads | Contemporary New Adult | Release Date: 1/23/2018
Let’s Talk About Love is an upbeat, modern romance-y novel that feels way more like millennial (Gen Z ?) women’s fiction than like a true romance.
Alice loves a pleasing aesthetic, her best friends and herself–asexuality and all. When she meets her new co-worker the sweet, generous and soon-to-be teacher Takumi she finds herself on a journey to balances her smoldering attraction with her identity as asexual.
I think I basically agree with Carrie’s review on Smart Bitches, Trashy Books, this book has a lot of drama and angst that comes from characters not talking to each other but I also like following them around as they try to tackle this whole adulting thing.
Alice was recognizable as a young person today, she loves Tumblr, fandom, bingeing tv and making memories with her friends.
I personally had a hard time seeing this book as a romance because Takumi felt–to use a term Kat uses a lot–unknowable to me. Perhaps it’s because I’m used to romances where we get into the other characters but he never felt like a real person to me. He was just a little too perfect.
We’ll Fly Away by Bryan Bliss
Release Date: 05/8/18 | Contemporary YA | 8 hours 49 minutes | Harper Audio
Toby, an academic wisecracking high school senior and his best friend Luke–a dedicated star wrestler are an unlikely pair. The two survived their abusive and impoverished home lives together and with Luke’s college wrestling scholarship locked down, they were prepared to head into the next chapter of their lives together.
But now Luke is on death row.
Told partially in Luke’s letters from death row and partially in a close omniscient third person, Bliss crafts a story of friendship, coming-of-age and poverty that manages to deliver a gut punch at the end–even though you know where Luke is going to end up from page one.
I really liked the way this book is set up with Luke’s letters opening the book and then having it slowly build to the precipitating event. It reminded me of Big Little Lies and it adds so much tension to every scene because you keep thinking is this it? Is this the thing he did? With that in mind though the book moves at a slower pace.
I picked up this book because James Fouhey did the audio, I’ve enjoyed his narration in other things and his performance in this book is one of the best I’ve heard. He takes on each character perfectly with a nuanced and intentional performance. I think he could have easily done stereotypical Southern accents but he avoids that completely while still making the characters sound authentic. Needless to say Fouhey has remained on my auto-buy audiobook narrator list.
Between this and Jeff Zetner books I’m really starting to think any YA book by a straight white dude will be sad AF.
Vox by Christina Dalcher
Release Date: 08/21/18 | Speculative Fiction | 9 hours 27 minutes | Penguin
Vox takes place in the near, near, near future where the government has limited women to 100 spoken words a day in an effort to Make America Great Again reinforce traditional gender roles. Dr. Jean McClellan is a cognitive linguist who has never quite adjusted to the new rules of society and brings the entire system down–which by the way isn’t a spoiler. It’s literally the first line of the book.
I added this book to my to-reads shelf the minute I heard about it on the What Should I Read Next podcast and was so excited to get into it…but this book really disappointed me. I think it’s because I went into this book thinking it was supposed to be this feminist dystopia but when you read Dalcher’s interviews you find out she’s a linguist who just wanted to write a book about her passion.
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