April Reading Recap

Another month has passed, and I've read another big batch of books!

→ BACK AFTER THIS by Linda Holmes: Cecily is an experienced audio producer who's ready for a turn hosting her own podcast. She's pitched plenty of great ideas to her boss, but when he finally offers her a show, it's not an idea she ever would have chosen. The concept is that a dating coach will demonstrate her guaranteed methods by setting Cecily up on 20 blind dates. Cecily hates the whole plan, but the associated ad deals might keep the company safe from the layoffs always looming over the volatile audio industry, so she agrees. Just as the project gets underway, Cecily has a meet-cute with Will that involves chasing after a very good, very large dog. She can't think about serendipitous encounters while she's committed to following the dating coach's program, but somehow she just keeps running into Will everywhere she goes.

This book was so much fun! I was constantly chuckling over great lines, and I loved all the insider details about podcast recording, audio editing, and ad sales. I appreciated the strong pacing and the balance between different plotlines. The characters are wonderful, and it was easy to understand what Cecily and Will like about each other immediately, and as they get better acquainted. I recommend this for fans of romantic stories, especially those who are also fans of podcasting.

→ TILT by Emma Pattee: Annie is 37 weeks pregnant and shopping at the Portland, Oregon, IKEA for a crib she should have purchased months ago and can't really afford. Then the earthquake hits, the rupture of the Cascadia subduction zone expected to devastate the Pacific Northwest. Inside the IKEA, after the long minutes of shaking, Annie is briefly trapped, but she makes it out of the store. She's lost her phone and car keys, so all she can think to do is walk across the city in search of her husband. In the hours that follow, Annie's walk takes her through ruin and tragedy, while flashback chapters reflect on her marriage and the trajectory of her life.

This intense, introspective novel is an absorbing read. I enjoyed the combination of detailed disaster survival with a close look at a difficult but loving marriage. The story always feels painfully real, whether about the earthquake's impact or the strain that financial precarity puts on a relationship. Annie is a complicated character who doesn't make perfect choices but instead behaves in flawed and not always justifiable ways, just like a real person. I'll be excited to see where Pattee's fiction career goes next.

→ OPTIONAL PRACTICAL TRAINING by Shubha Sunder: Pavitra, a citizen of India, has just graduated from a Pennsylvania university and moved to Boston to teach math and physics at a private high school. She's in OPT status, allowed one year for optional practical training, and if the teaching job works out, she'll be sponsored for a work visa. Everything about her life feels uncertain: whether the school will consider her a successful teacher, if she even wants to teach, how much to put down roots, and what it means to be marked as an other in America. Over the course of the OPT year, Pavitra's encounters with colleagues and friends raise and explore these questions.

I enjoyed reading this novel at a slow pace, a chapter or scene at a time, because the sections are mostly separate vignettes. Each episode focuses on an interaction with another character, and while some people recur, there isn't a strong continuing throughline or chronology other than the background of Pavitra's teaching and housing issues. Often the conversations are more descriptive than realistic, with the goal not to convey how people actually speak but to evoke scenes and ideas. This isn't my favorite style of fiction, but Sunder does it very well.

→ ABSOLUTION by Jeff VanderMeer: Long before the Forgotten Coast was engulfed and the Southern Reach was established to explore the mysteries of Area X, the region was already under investigation by Central. A team of biologists encounters strange creatures and unsettling events, and their mission goes badly, as so many will later. Some years after, an agent at Central known as Old Jim studies the records of their mission and prepares for his own time on the Forgotten Coast.

VanderMeer recently published this fourth book in the Southern Reach series, a decade after the original trilogy. The novel is largely a prequel that continues to expand on the story, which means along with providing some bonus insights, it opens up many new questions. I found it to be a good but not essential addition to the series. The book has several parts, and I enjoyed some more than others. I particularly liked the character of Old Jim and the relationships that evolve between him and several other characters.

→ ZERO STARS, DO NOT RECOMMEND by M.J. Wassmer: Dan is enjoying a resort vacation with his girlfriend when the sun explodes. Or disappears, or something, but in any case, the world is plunged into sudden and permanent night. The resort is on a remote island, all communication is down, and the planes that delivered the guests aren't scheduled to return for two weeks. Everyone is desperate to speak to their loved ones and find a way to get back to them, but at least they have plenty of food and booze and are in a tropical paradise. Well, for the moment, because the temperature is rapidly dropping. And the wealthy guests soon commandeer all the supplies, claiming they'll distribute them fairly while actually imposing an authoritarian regime. Dan has never done anything impressive in his life, but he accidentally becomes a leader in the revolt that's brewing.

I was disappointed in this. Part of the problem was my expectations: I was anticipating the focus to be disaster survival rather than class warfare. But since the story did turn out to be largely about the rich people taking over, I wanted either more plausible details or a more insightful satire. The characters and situations were too often generic, and while the book occasionally made me laugh, much of the humor didn't land for me. I kept reading because I wanted to learn the resolution of some mysteries, but the answers were underwhelming. A lot of other readers found this much more fun, but I can't recommend it.

Good Stuff Out There:

→ At Reactor, Jenny Hamilton makes the case for Why Romantasy Needs to Grow Beyond Trends: "Contributing to this relentless sameness is the way these tropes can calcify into prescription—not just the presence of the tropes on which the whole book hangs, but the way you get recurring trope clusters that are understood to all go together. I can't throw a rock in a bookstore these days without hitting five sprayed-edged romantasies where the girl has to reluctantly team up with a dangerous, sexy enemy in order to save her family / reclaim her throne / overthrow the oppressive ruling class. Fine, I don't have any objection to a girl getting it on with her dark and deadly enemy. (Au contraire!) But it becomes immensely tedious when every book starts hitting the same exact beats, with slightly different set dressing."