Review: Sea Change

Sea Change, by Gina Chung (Vintage Books, expected March 28, 2023)

First line: “This morning, Dolores is blue again.”

I’ll fully admit to requesting this one from the publisher solely due to the octopus on the cover.

I think we’re all a little obsessed with octopuses, now, huh?

For me, it wasn’t even because of last year’s bookstagram sensation, Marcellus, from Remarkably Bright Creatures, because I haven’t read that. I did read and love The Soul of an Octopus a couple years back, but I think I had a fascination for them even before then. So I see an octopus named Dolores on Netgalley? Sure, sign me up.

What we find in the pages of this debut, however, is less about Dolores and more about Ro, one of her keepers at the mall aquarium where she lives. A couple decades ago, Ro’s father found Dolores on a research trip in the Bering Vortex, an area in the Bering Straight that has succumbed to the toxins of oil spills, and where a unique group of animals have mutated enough of their genetic material to not only survive, but to thrive into huge, near fantastical iterations of their former species. Dolores, a giant Pacific octopus, is giant and much older than any modern day octopus could hope to be. But 15 years ago, Ro’s father disappeared on another research trip, and that loss has dug its way deep into Ro’s psyche. We’re talking major daddy issues. Now, Ro’s longtime partner, Tae, has left for a special mission to Mars with hopes of human colonization, and Ro is spiraling from a second abandonment.

While I struggled connecting with the “young woman reels from breakup” plot line featured here (have I read too many of these? Am I just not in that phase of life anymore?), there is a lot I found interesting and compelling in this story. Chung chose to place her story in a near-future setting, which always intrigues me to see where we might end up in the next couple decades — though I’m not altogether clear on why she made that choice. There’s also a best friend element to this novel whose resolution caught me by surprise (in a good way). The conclusion to Ro’s story wrapped up satisfyingly (although not tidily), but it was a messy middle for sure. I think a lot of readers are going to love this one when it debuts in a couple weeks, but I didn’t quite get there.

Thanks to Vintage Books and Netgalley for an advanced copy of this book in exchange for an honest review.

Review: The Strange Inheritance of Leah Fern

The Strange Inheritance of Leah Fern, by Rita Zoey Chin (Melville House 2022)

It’s hard for me to turn away a book with an elephant on the cover, even a statue of an elephant like the one featured here. Which, I’ll admit, is the initial reason I clicked on this book on Netgalley. But the description sounded right up my alley too: roadtrip novel, mysterious treasure hunt of letters, a circus setting for at least part of it — sign me right up!

On the eve of her planned suicide, Leah Fern receives a package from the lawyer of her recently deceased neighbor with a letter that implores her to spread the neighbor’s ashes at various points around North America, offering Leah answers to a mystery she’s held most of her life — what happened to Leah’s mother. When Leah was young, her mother dropped her off with an old friend, Edward Murphy, and never returned. Now, fifteen years later and desperately alone, Leah finds the possibility hard to resist, setting her off on a solitary adventure in a dusty old pickup with only the company of a bejeweled urn filled with the ashes of a woman she barely knew.

I think the premise of this story is impeccable. I am all in on this premise. But there were some parts of the execution that fell apart for me. Firstly, I didn’t and still don’t understand the initial suicide plan of Leah’s, both why it was included and the ritualistic method she planned to use. I felt like we didn’t know her well enough to understand her desperation at that point, and it never really explained itself. I also had a hard time following the timeline, as we jump between not only Leah’s present and past, but also the present and past of Essie East (the deceased neighbor) as she slowly reveals her story through letters scattered around North America. I loved the character of Edward Murphy, Leah’s foster parent of sorts, with his gentle kindness and far-reaching compassion, but I wished we got more of him, his motivations, his backstory, why Leah’s mother chose him to raise her child.

However, I did love the characters Leah met along her journey. At each and every point, she meets at least one fantastic character, that both reveals more of Leah’s character to the reader and just spices up the narrative in delightful ways. There were a couple stand-outs to me (namely the first and last), but not an uninteresting one in the bunch.

There’s a lot to unpack in this story, and I’m not sure it got unpacked all the way, but still held my interest and I’ll be interested to see what else Chin writes in the future!

Thanks to Netgalley and Melville House for an advanced copy in exchange for an honest review!

Review: Lessons in Chemistry

Lessons in Chemistry, by Bonnie Garmus (Doubleday 2022)

First line: “Back in 1961, when women wore shirtwaist dresses and joined garden clubs and drove legions of children around in seatbelt-less cars without giving it a second though; back before anyone knew there’d even be a sixties movement, much less one that its participants would spend the next sixty years chronicling; back when the big wars were over and the secret wars had just begun and people were starting to think fresh and believe everything was possible, the thirty-year-old mother of Madeline Zott rose before dawn every morning and felt certain of just one thing: her life was over.”

This book seems to be everywhere right now, and in my opinion, it’s for good reason. Lessons in Chemistry, and its heroine Elizabeth Zott, is one of the freshest and most unique novels I’ve read in a long time. It’s delightfully humorous, while still addressing real, meaningful, and often upsetting, issues in a substantial way, and Garmus’s pacing kept me flipping the pages till the end.

Set in the 1950s and 60s, chemist Elizabeth Zott is a bit ahead of her time. Fiercely independent, she’s determined to make a name for herself in the science research world, despite encountering endless misogyny, sexism, and assault along the way. She certainly never expects to fall in love with the standoffish, Nobel Prize nominated, top-notch scientist in her company, Calvin Evans, but when the two physically collide outside the office, they are both surprised to wind up finding their soulmate. Elizabeth’s life is not short on tragedy, however, and soon she is forced into a field that upon first glance seems radically different than her previous one: that of daytime television cooking shows.

While the premise of this novel is fun and original in itself, what really drew me in to the story was the utterly delightful and strange cast of characters, so many of whom were impossible not to fall in love with and root for until the end. Elizabeth (and Calvin, as it happens) has never known a loving family, and in these side characters, she builds (whether she tries to or not) a wonderfully support network, and you guys know I love a found family story. I found the storytelling to be completely charming and compulsively readable, and I will be thinking about these characters for a very long time.

Review: Olga Dies Dreaming

Olga Dies Dreaming, by Xochitl Gonzalez (Flatiron Books 2022)

First line: “The telltale sign that you are at the wedding of a rich person is the napkins.”

I finally dove into my first backlist Book of the Month pick of 2022 and it did not disappoint. I first selected this book because I’d heard it got picked up for series with Aubrey Plaza playing the protagonist Olga, and Jesse Williams costarring, and that pairing intrigued me. What I found in these pages was a book unlike any I’ve read before, a huge mash-up of genres all spiraling around the titular Olga, a Nuyorcan wedding planner for the elite and her brother Prieto, a congressman representing their hometown of Brooklyn, in the months leading up to and following Hurricane Maria in 2017. In different authors’ imaginations, this book could have been a hundred different things: a contemporary romance, a family drama, a disaster story, a rich-people-behaving-badly story, a political corruption novel, a revolutionary epic… but the Olga presented to us by author Gonzalez blended all those things into one.

Some reviewers have commented that all the story lines made for too much chaos, and I agree that it felt a little hard to focus at times because there was just so much going on. But for me, I think the chaos accurately depicted a character’s complicated life, one that is riddled with past traumas, current struggles, and hopes for the future. Yes, Olga and her family have a lot going on, but don’t we all? If you were to summarize your life story, could you? Additionally, Gonzalez’s writing is excellent, blending great conversational dialogue, often in Spanglish, and really profound prose at other times. I was taken in by Olga, and fell in love with her messiness. I can’t wait to see her portrayed on the small screen in the tv adaptation.

Review: The Project

The Project, by Courtney Summers (Wednesday Books 2021)

First line: “She’s at Mrs. Ruthie’s house, eating one of Mrs. Ruthie’s peanut butter cookies, staring out Mrs. Ruthie’s living room window and waiting for her parents to come home.”

It’s hard to talk about this novel without giving anything away, but let me try. The things we know within the first couple chapters… We know Bea is devoted to her little sister Lo who is six years younger. We know that when Bea is still a teenager, her family is in a car accident that kills both her parents and almost takes Lo too, leaving her in a coma for an unbearably long time until an apparent miracle pulls her out. We know that six years later, Lo is an administrative assistant at a magazine although she’s desperate to write her own stuff, when she sees a young man — who somehow knows her name — die after purposefully laying down on the subway tracks. The boy’s father comes to the magazine determined to prove that his son was in fact murdered by the cult he was a part of, the same cult where Bea has spent the last six years, after leaving Lo at the hospital.

The premise of this book is gripping — who can stop themselves from rubbernecking around a cult story?? My own sister knew well enough to pre-order this baby for me for Christmas last year. But I’ll be honest and tell you it took me a while to feel invested. Summers is a masterful plotter and the reader can tell there is a ton of stuff she’s keeping from us in this story, and I was impatient to get some of those answers. However, the second half of the book was fast and furious and I couldn’t keep the pages turning fast enough as the twists began revealing themselves. The book is structured with alternating timelines, switching between Bea’s third person story starting in 2011 and Lo’s first person narrative starting in 2017, and those timelines get closer and closer together as we near the end in a way that was a super satisfying reading experience for me. I also thought Summers did an excellent job at portraying the charismatic leader phenomenon in the Unity Project’s Lev Warren. As we read and watch documentaries about groups we have deemed to be cults, it’s so easy to be dismissive of the members, because from the outside it seems so obvious that the leader is a villain. How could you ever join this group, we think, and how could you EVER stay? But Summers shows us how — she left me unsure about the Unity Project and Lev through almost the entire book. Is the Unity Project really a cult like Lo thinks, or are they truly a people of faith living out a mission of social justice?

There was one aspect of the story that I didn’t feel like I got a satisfying explanation of (and I’m not talking about the WHOA moment of the climax – that I was okay with honestly), but for the most part, I think this is a compelling new adult thriller that really had me questioning what I thought I knew.