Adult Fiction

Such A Fun Age by Kiley Reid

March 16, 2020 Leave a Comment

9 hours 58 min. | G.P. Putnam’s Son | Adult Fiction | Release Date: 12/31/19

2020 has been kind of a meh reading year for me so I decided to switch it up with some upmarket book club-y fiction. This is one of those books where it’s better to go in with as little information as possible. Such a Fun Age starts with 25-year-old Emira, a Black girl living in Philadelphia, being racially profiled while babysitting a white child. The book then follows Emira as she tries to figure out how to become a “real adult” and her boss, Alix Chamberlain, who starts noticing Emira in a new way after the incident.

…

Read this Post

Death by Dumpling by Vivien Chien (A Noodle Shop Mystery #1)

December 18, 2019 Leave a Comment

328 pages | St. Martin’s Press | Cozy Mystery | 3/27/2018

I really don’t know how to review a cozy mystery. I picked this book up because I was in the mood for something different and I like seeing authors of color in spaces that have been traditionally very homogeneous.

Death by Dumpling felt very much like an origin story as we are introduced to Asia Village–a quaint Asian shopping center in Ohio—and Lana Lee, our 27- year-old half-English half-Tawainese protagonist. Lana is working at her family’s restaurant in Asia Village after quitting her corporate job and when she delivers the dumpling that kills the owner of Asia Village, she reluctantly joins the case to find the true murderer.

I found Chien’s breezy first-person writing enjoyable as we met the residents of Asia Village and Detective Trudeau–who I think plays a significant role in other books. The book fell a little flat for me but I’m curious to read the next book.

The Monster of Elendhaven by Jennifer Giesbrecht

November 17, 2019 Leave a Comment

3 hours 53 minutes| Tor | Adult Fantasy | 9/24/2019

…

Read this Post

Adult Genre Fiction: A Curious Beginning and Kill The Queen

July 2, 2019 Leave a Comment

I remember being a teenager in Borders (RIP) and hating that one day I’d have to give up YA and read only boring “adult” books. But over the years I’ve discovered adult books are kind of awesome too and this year I’ve been dabbling in adult genre fiction.

…

Read this Post

Book Review : The Care and Feeding of Ravenous Girls by Annisa Gray

June 18, 2019 Leave a Comment

304 pages | Berkeley | Adult Fiction | Release Date: 02/19/2019

I like a book with a really long title. Just throwing that out there.

The Care and Feeding of Ravenously Hungry Girls is this blend of African-American, Women’s and Literary fiction that I’m starting to find myself drawn to more.

This is a very human story of the Butler siblings who are brought together after their seemingly perfect elder sister, Althea, and her husband Proctor are convicted of a crime that shakes up their small lakeside town.

…

Read this Post

Vox by Christina Dalcher

October 27, 2018 Leave a Comment

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.

…

Read this Post