Someone to Love, Mary Balogh

A Pygmalion story about an orphan heroine, who carries herself with dignity, and a hero who is a fop. This is the first book in Balogh’s Westcott series, about a family that is thrown into crisis when it is discovered that the Earl of Riverdale, who died, was not actually married to his wife, and that his entire estate will pass to a daughter almost no one knew existed. Anna’s situation is interesting but it is Netherby who carries the tale.

Someone to Hold, Mary Balogh

The second novel in the Westcott series, this features Camille, the rather starchy and proper daughter whose entire life is turned upside down when it was revealed that her parents marriage was not valid. Her trauma leads her to follow the footsteps of the woman who usurped her place – Anna Snow of the previous novel, now duchess of Netherby – volunteering to teach in the orphanage in Bath, where she meets an attractive painter, who had grown up with Anna at the orphanage. I started out enjoying it, and then got tired of the dramatics.

Carrie Soto is Back, Taylor Jenkins Reid

I always feel like I’m not fully into Jenkin Reid’s novels when I’m reading them. But then they stay with me. This one takes off on a strand in Malibu Rising, about the protagonist’s husband having an affair with a tennis player. This is the story about that tennis player, a prodigy of Hispanic descent making her comeback. In some ways, Carrie’s aggression, her outsider status reminded me of Serena Williams.

Home, Harlan Coben

The novel is partially told from the perspective of Windsor Horne Lockwood III, and I’m not sure I liked that. Part of the appeal of Win is his inscrutability. But the actual mystery worked for me, even though it went international.

Shelter, Harlan Coben
Seconds Away, Harlan Coben,
Found, Harlan Coben

This is a spin-off starring Myron Bolitar’s nephew Mickey. I enjoyed the first book, but then it started getting a bit ambitious in the second book, and while I read through to the last one, I was not that into it.

Atlas of the Heart, Brene Brown

I chanced on this blog, and because it resonated with me so much, and also because I felt like I need to read something other than pulp fiction, I decided to give one of the books mentioned on the blog a try. I’m more than a little sceptical of the self-help genre, but Brown’s work is based on her own and others’ academic research. The premise of this book is that a crucial step in dealing with one’s emotions is labelling them accurately because language shapes our understanding. If most people are only able to identify three emotions – happy, sad, angry – then there is a huge emotional terrain that we cannot access because we don’t know how to label hat we’re feeling. Brown takes us through 87 emotions, and while that is a lot, this book did as much for me as two years of therapy.

Becoming, Michelle Obama

I’ve been meaning to read this since it came out, although one part of me wondered what she had to write about, even as I was well aware that she is a highly qualified person in her own right. And then there’s the fact that she had a unique view on Barack Obama, both the man and the president. I was riveted from the get go. The early part about her childhood is a beautiful evocation of what it was to grow up African-American at a particular time in history. Then she met Barack. I knew Michelle was not thrilled about Barack running for president, and I thought it was because of her fears for their safety but it was more complex than that. From the time Barack decided to run for the state senate, Michelle was essentially a single mom. There is this anecdote early on about their young family being on vacation in Hawai at the turn of the millennium, and their baby daughter running a temperature, and Barack missing an important vote on gun control to be with her. Michelle did not ask him to stay, he just decided to. But I loved how unapologetic she was about wanting him to stay, even as she acknowledged the political cost. I teared up realising everything Michelle had to give up so Barack could be president. This was a woman who had gone to both Princeton and Harvard Law School, who had put her career on hold when her children were young, and was just beginning to find her groove, when her husband’s ambitions superseded hers.

The Final Revival of Opal & Nev, Dawnie Walton

This is sort of a black version of Daisy Jones and the Six, but I couldn’t get into it initially. Maybe it was the format which opens with a young woman writing a book, and I wasn’t exactly sure what was going on. Becoming primed me for it, and by the end, I had to acknowledge that it’s a work of art. Ostensibly about a rock group featuring a black and white lead duo, and the lynching of their drummer at a concert, it becomes a reflection of our own post-Trump times. Plus ca change, and all that.