Review: Red Thread of Fate (by Lyn Liao Butler)

My Rating:  3.5 stars

This book started off strong, with the defining event of the accident that kills two of the main characters — Tony Kwan and his cousin Mia — occurring within the first couple of pages.  From there, the story focuses on the aftermath of the accident and those left behind: Tony's grieving widow Tam, who ends up with legal guardianship of Mia's five-year-old daughter Angela.  At the same time, Tam receives the acceptance letter that she and Tony had been waiting for — the letter confirming their adoption of a son from an orphanage in China — which she will now have to decide whether to go through with on her own. As she tries to pick up the pieces of her life, Tam also has to reckon with her husband's and his estranged cousin's pasts, as well as deal with a long-held secret that could upend everything.

I'm actually a little torn with this one, as there were quite a few aspects of it that I enjoyed, but at the same time, I also felt parts of the story fell a little flat in some places.  One thing that surprised me is that I didn't feel anything emotionally for any of the characters, which I wasn't expecting given my shared cultural background with these characters (Chinese American) and also a certain familiarity with their struggles from an immigrant story perspective.  It's not that the characters weren't likable, because they were, but I guess I was expecting a little more depth to some of the characters than what came across in the story.  I also had a little bit of an issue with the way Angela was portrayed in the story, as I didn't feel at any point that she was only five years old — the way she came across based on how she acted and talked in nearly every scene, I felt like I was reading about someone in her teens at least (there were even a few instances where Angela seemed to act more like an "adult" than Tam). In the end, this uneven portrayal of the characters impacted my reading experience more than I was hoping it would.

Having said all that, I still appreciated the story overall and the writing was solid (though the plot was very much predictable and the ending I wasn't too fond of).   I'm glad I read this one and at some point, I hope to pick up Lyn Liao Butler's first book, The Tiger Mom's Tale, while waiting to see what she has in store next. 

Received ARC from Berkley Books via NetGalley.

Review: Black Cake (by Charmaine Wilkerson)

My Rating:  4 stars

Charmaine Wilkerson's debut novel Black Cake is one of those books where a key component of what makes the story work is the "journey of discovery" where important elements of the characters' pasts are revealed slowly and gradually over the course of the entire narrative. Because of this, it's best to go into this one knowing as little as possible outside of the main characters and basic premise.  

To that point, the story revolves around estranged siblings Bryon and Benny, who are forced to reunite after their mother Eleanor Bennett dies and leaves behind an inheritance consisting of a traditional Caribbean black cake and a voice recording — along with strict instructions that they must put aside their differences and come together to share the cake as well as listen to the recording.   The story that their mother shares with them is a harrowing one filled with heartbreak and loss, but also love, courage, and resilience.  Will hearing their mother's story and understanding her past mend the siblings' once close relationship or drive them further apart?

I definitely enjoyed this well-written debut, though in all honesty, there were times when I really wasn't sure where the story was going.  In addition to a lot of jumping around in terms of timelines and plot points, the way some of the characters were introduced took a bit too long at times, to the point that it felt like the story was meandering off course — but just when you start to wonder what the purpose of all this long discourse is, Wilkerson would suddenly veer the story back into relevance, and then, the previous sections would start to make a little more sense.  In terms of the characters — while I didn't feel much of an emotional connection to them, I liked all of them well enough to want to root for them and also care about what happens to them. 

 Overall, this was a solid debut and definitely a worthwhile read.  It did take a little bit of patience at times though due to certain parts of the story taking awhile to get to the point, but I feel that the effort does pay off in the end.

Received ARC from Ballantine Books via NetGalley

Review: Us Against You (by Fredrik Backman)

My Rating: 5 stars

I read Beartown for the first time this weekend (I know, I’m late to the party, as usual) and was absolutely blown away by it.  I loved everything about that book — from the writing to the story to the realistically-rendered characters — to the point that I didn’t want it to end.  So of course, I was glad that I already had the sequel, Us Against You, on my shelf ready to pick up. 

I will be honest and say that, in general, I’m not a fan of sequels, especially when it comes to a work (be it a book, movie, or TV series) that I absolutely adored.  This is because, from past experience, many sequels I’ve encountered often end up falling short of the original work, with a few extreme instances where the sequel actually ruined the original for me (this is also a reason why I’m not a fan of retellings either, but I digress…).  This is why, despite how much I LOVED the characters in Beartown and wanted nothing more than to keep remaining in their company for as long as possible, a small part of me was apprehensive going into this sequel. For me, Beartown was too wonderful, magical, and beyond exceptional to the point that I couldn’t help wondering:  will the sequel live up to the original?  Or am I setting myself up to be disappointed?

Well, I shouldn’t have worried because the sequel was absolutely fantastic!!!  Without a doubt, the sequel not only lived up to the original, it actually surpassed it in some aspects (specifically with the characters).  I rated Beartown a solid 5 stars…for Us Against You, let’s just say definitely more than 5 stars if I could!!

The story in this second book picks up pretty much where the first one left off, with the same beloved characters — Benji, Amat, Bobo, Ramona, Sune, Maya, Ana, Kira, etc. — who stole my heart the first time around now embedding themselves permanently into my soul.   In fact, I loved these characters so much and resonated with them so deeply that, once again, I found myself on a roller coaster ride of emotions (from laughter to sadness to anger and everything in between).  I cared about what happened to these characters so much that, when Fredrik Backman wrote in the first few pages of the book that “someone we love” will die by the end of the story, I felt an immediate ache in my heart (and even though, in the end, the person who died wasn’t who I thought it would be, I still couldn’t help bawling like a baby when the scene happened). Even the new characters introduced in the sequel — despite the fact that we didn’t get to spend as much time with them as those from the first book — managed to still find a place in my heart by the end of the story.  

It’s rare for me to be so emotionally invested in a story and it’s characters to this degree, but so far, with each of Backman’s novels that I’ve read, this has been my experience.  No one writes about the human condition as realistically as Backman is able to do in his fiction.  He also has the unique ability to write his characters as real people, human beings who look and feel and experience the way you and I do — flawed creatures who make mistakes, who have good days and bad, who say things we don’t mean and mean things we don’t say, who can be cruel and lash out when we’re scared or hurting, but yet also be compassionate and kind in moments when it’s needed most (I’m just scratching the surface, as there’s no way to relay the wide range of themes and emotions that this story explores).

I actually read this book all in one sitting, which is definitely a first for me (especially considering this book is 400+ pages)!  Without a doubt, this was worth every minute of my time and if I didn’t already have a boatload of books that I still need to get to, I would happily re-read both Beartownand this one in a heartbeat.  The third (and last) book in the series is supposed to come out later this year and needless to say, I can’t wait to read it (though I’m praying that the publication date for the English version doesn’t get pushed back because if it does, so help me God, I will find a way to read the Swedish version if I have to!).

Review: Beartown (by Fredrik Backman)

My Rating: 5 stars

Once again, I am rendered speechless by a Fredrik Backman book!  The man definitely has a way of telling a story that is so utterly compelling that, every time I read one of his books, I find it nearly impossible to tear myself away (which is why I'm glad I started this on a weekend so I could spend all day reading if I needed to).  

Before I go further, I need to make a confession: I've never been into sports and under normal circumstances, I probably would not have gravitated toward a book about hockey.  But as nearly everyone who has read and reviewed this book mentioned, this is more than just a novel about hockey (or, more accurately, about a small town in the forest that is obsessed with hockey). In fact, this book blew me away with the wide range of themes it explored, which ran the gamut from parent/child relationships, to identity, belonging, class conflict, society bias, love, friendship, loyalty, the difference between right and wrong, etc.  

Beyond all that though, this is also a richly rendered character study about ordinary people living their lives and struggling with real life issues such as loneliness, abandonment, death, abuse, bullying, financial hardship, circumstances outside our control, etc.  These are characters that we can absolutely relate to because they are flawed and realistic — characters that make us feel the entire spectrum of human emotion and then some.  

Backman is a masterful storyteller with a unique writing style that I absolutely love — a combination of serious and slightly humorous, yet also gut-wrenching and emotional.  I've been told that it's nearly impossible to come away from a Backman novel without feeling something (whether positive, negative, or indifferent) for the characters and I have to say that I absolutely agree!  That was definitely the case with every single character in this story.  In fact, by the end of the book, I was so emotionally invested in these characters that I didn't want to leave them — which is why I intend to pick up the sequel, Us Against You, right after this one so I can stay with the characters longer (and yes, I am eagerly looking forward to the final book in this series, which is scheduled to be published here in the U.S. in September).

Review: Activities of Daily Living (by Lisa Hsiao Chen)

My Rating: 3 stars



I have mixed feelings about this book.  On the one hand, I appreciated the uniqueness of this book's structure, where the entire story essentially followed the main character Alice as she went through various "activities of daily living" that included becoming a caretaker for her stepfather as well as working on a project about reclusive artist Tehching Hsieh. Each chapter consisted of seemingly random snippets into Alice's life, interspersed with various tidbits about the Artist (as that is what he is referred to throughout the story), though the details ended up melding together to the point that it becomes difficult to tell whose life — Alice's or the Artist's — was being described.  

Having said all that, the unique structure was also what made this a difficult read for me — the narrative seemed to lean toward the philosophical and abstract, with the story also going off on so many different tangents that it made the main arc hard to follow.  To be honest, even after finishing this, I found it hard to describe what the story was about.  There was tons of "name-dropping" — references to famous people from the literary, art, and philosophy worlds as well as historical places and events, which in itself wasn't a problem, but then the author, Lisa Hsaio Chen, would follow those references with details that would go on for pages, only circling back to the current situation at hand near the end of the chapter.  While Chen never makes any connection outright between all the random people / places / events that get brought up throughout the story and the things going on in Alice's life, my guess is that, in structuring the story this way, perhaps Chen was expecting us to see the parallels and make the connection ourselves.  Nothing wrong with that technically, but it just made for an exhausting read that I had neither the time or patience for at the moment.

The other thing that made this a frustrating reading experience for me was the inconsistency of the writing, which made parts of the story hard to follow.  In addition to more grammatical and sentence structure issues than I would've preferred (I mean, I understand that this is an ARC, but still), there were also times when the author would insert new characters into the story without introducing them or wait until several pages in to introduce them— this was frustrating in the sense that it was both distracting and it broke the flow of the story, as I had to flip back to previous sections of the book to see if I perhaps missed a reference somewhere.

Going into this book, I really wanted to like it and while I found the premise interesting, plus the concept of the story had a lot of potential, the execution unfortunately didn't really work for me. There wasn't much of a plot to speak of, which is usually fine as long as the characters are well-drawn, but in this case, I couldn't seem to connect to any of the characters either.  

With all that said though, there were some elements that were done well and held my interest (hence I didn't rate this as low as I probably would have normally), it's just that I wasn't expecting for it to be so tedious and require so much patience. Of course, it could just be me — since this one doesn't publish until April, I would suggest waiting for a few more reviews to come out first to get a more well-rounded opinion before deciding whether to pick this one up.

Received ARC from W.W. Norton Company via BookBrowse First Impressions program

Review: These Precious Days (by Ann Patchett)

My Rating:  5 stars

Happy New Year!



I can't think of a better way to start off the new year than with a 5 star read, especially one written by one of my favorite authors, Ann Patchett.  I actually started Patchett's newest essay collection (published in November last year) on Christmas Eve and even though I technically could've finished it in one sitting, I decided instead to savor it over the New Year's holiday. Going into this book, I already knew it would be one I'd love and now after finishing, I can say with certainty that Patchett definitely did not disappoint — reading her essays evoked in me a roller coaster of emotions, but more importantly, the experience made me reflect on aspects of my own life and gave me food for thought on a few things.

Even though some of the essays I had actually read already back when they had been originally published in magazines and papers such as The New Yorker, Harper's Magazine, etc., I still re-read every word, and in so doing, picked up one some things I had missed the first time.  The ones I hadn't read before, I learned things that I would not have known otherwise, which is the beauty of a collection such as this one where the essays run the gamut from funny to poignant and every emotion in between. 

This is also a book where the cover (or, in this case, two covers) added tremendous meaning to the content — to this point, it was fascinating to read about how the cover came about and the significance of it to this particular collection of essays.  Content-wise, I also loved the additional insights into Patchett's previous novels and story collections, which made me want to go read (and in some cases re-read) her other works.

Overall, I loved all the essays in this collection, but if I really had to choose my favorites, they would be as follows:

"Three Fathers" — This essay, in which Patchett wrote about her relationship with her father and two stepfathers, was actually published in The New Yorker last year and I had already it at that time, but I still enjoyed reading it again.  

"My Year of No Shopping" — This was a short essay, only a few pages long, yet there was a profound lesson about learning how to value the things we have.

"How to Practice" — This was another essay I had already read when it was published in The New Yorker and I remember at that time, how fascinated I was with it, mainly because I also have a lot of stuff that I don't realize I have because a lot of it is hidden (out of sight, out of mind).  Reading it a second time now was actually more meaningful because I've been in "decluttering mode" lately so the timing was perfect.

"To the Doghouse" — Omg, this was one of my favorite essays!  I love Snoopy and to learn how big a role the world's most beloved beagle had on Patchett becoming a writer, I was absolutely there for it!  

"Flight Plan" — In this essay, Patchett writes about her husband Karl's love for flying planes, but it also reveals why their relationship works so well.  So sweet!

"There Are No Children Here" — This essay especially resonated with me, as I've had many of the same encounters with people about the decision to not have children.  I love how Patchett handled the various scenarios she found herself in — it definitely made me admire her even more!

"The Nightstand" — In this essay, an unexpected chance encounter opens the floodgates for Patchett to go through some old papers that help her rediscover parts of herself that she didn't realize meant so much and how much her family inadvertently helped her come to this realization.  

"Cover Stories" — I loved learning the behind-the-scenes stories about how the covers for her books came to be! 

"These Precious Days" — This essay, about how Patchett came to form a close friendship with Tom Hanks' assistant Sooki Raphael, was essentially the backbone of the book.  I had actually read this one previously as well, yet on second reading, it felt so much more poignant (especially after reading the Epilogue to the book).

"What the American Academy of Arts and Letters Taught Me About Death" — This essay was absolutely fascinating and so learned so much about the literary world that I had no clue about.  And of course, as an avid reader, seeing so many great authors mentioned here whose works I admire was especially meaningful.

"A Day at the Beach" — The last essay in the book and also a follow up to Sooki's story  — poignant, heartfelt, and one of the most touching pieces in the book!