Book Review: "Between Friends & Lovers" by Shirlene Obuobi

Dr. Josephine Boateng is better known to her hundreds of thousands of followers as “Dr. Jojo,” the woman who tells it like it is when it comes to matters of health, sex, and love. It doesn’t matter that Jo has never really had a relationship, because she’s been in love with her best friend Ezra since college.

Jo knows that Ezra is aware of how she feels. But the handsome rom-com actor is always quick to throw her over for the woman of the minute without thinking. The last straw, however, is when Ezra’s date for his 30th birthday party is none other than Ashley, who bullied Jo when they were younger, and he took Ashley's side when she and Jo interacted.

Malcolm is a photographer-turned-bestselling novelist, much to his surprise. His debut novel, a love story, is climbing the charts. He’s invited to Ezra’s birthday party because his famous mother is interested in optioning the book for film. But Mal doesn’t really enjoy schmoozing or crowds, so he hides in an empty bedroom in Ezra’s home.

Jo is shocked to find a man in her bedroom at Ezra’s house, especially one as handsome as Malcolm. From their conversation, she feels seen for the first time, and realizes that Mal could be her ticket out of pining for Ezra. Mal is all too interested, but he wants to woo Jo, and this has never happened to her.

Their relationship experiences highs and lows, especially when Jo comes into contact with Ezra, who realizes how much he misses her adulation. And with Jo’s own issues with love and trust, she isn’t sure where to turn, or what to do.

I don’t normally enjoy love triangles, but this one worked for me. While Mal was the only truly sympathetic character, the dynamics between him and Jo, and Jo and Ezra, were fascinating. This was a more emotional book than I expected, but it really was a good one.

Book Review: "The Devil in the White City: Murder, Magic, and Madness at the Fair That Changed America" by Erik Larson

It may be nonfiction, but boy, it reads like a thriller.

How have I gone this long without reading this book? I’ve thought about it so many times and read other Erik Larson books, but for some reason, this has been one I’ve never picked up. I got it a few weeks ago when my colleagues and I did a book swap—one friend had the unenviable task of picking a book out for me. He hit this one out of the park!

The subtitle of this book is “Murder, Magic, and Madness at the Fair That Changed America.” It’s about the 1893 World’s Fair in Chicago, and Larson tells the story of two men, Daniel Hudson Burnham, the famed architect behind the Fair, and Henry Holmes, a doctor and serial killer who used the Fair as a way to lure women to their deaths.

This was such a fascinating read, and I’ve heard that they’re finally adapting it into a movie with Keanu Reeves as a star. If you’ve never read this, give it a shot!!

Book Review: "Part of Your World" by Abby Jimenez

Abby Jimenez's new book is a story of love despite the odds, and about believing you’re worthy of living the life you want. (Bonus: I had the song from The Little Mermaid in my head the whole time.)

Alexis has lived the life she has been expected to. She’s an ER doctor in the hospital her family has worked in for 125 years. She loves her job, and has just gotten out of a relationship which undercut her self-worth severely, and her ex is still trying to manipulate her and those around her.

One night, driving a few hours from home, her car winds up in a ditch. She gets a tow from Daniel, a very sexy man whom she doesn’t expect to see again, but then she runs into him again shortly afterward. And after helping him win a bet, the next thing she knows, she’s sneaking out of his house early in the morning to drive home.

Daniel is the complete opposite of her in every way—he’s 10 years younger, has tattoos, and seems to be immensely happy in his small town. (He’s actually the mayor, among other things.) But while Alexis can’t get him out of her mind, she knows that Daniel could never fit in her world, so they’re just going to keep it casual. (Sure, Jan.)

Of course, the more time Alexis spends with Daniel, the more she realizes she can’t live without him, and she’s starting to love his town, where everyone truly cares about one another. But would a relationship between them really work if she turned her back on her family and the legacy she’s expected to carry on? How can she realize she’s worthy of living her own life and truly being happy?

Part of Your World is the first book by Jimenez that didn’t leave me in a puddle of tears, but that doesn’t mean I enjoyed it any less. She always creates such memorable characters and this book is no exception! (One of my favorite characters, Bri, will get her own book next year.) I loved the chemistry between Alexis and Daniel, and the entire town of Wakan.

Thanks so much to Abby and Forever for the advance copy of the book in exchange for an unbiased review!! The book publishes 4/19/22!

Book Review: "Joan Is Okay" by Weike Wang

The second book from Weike Wang, Joan Is Okay is a quirky, thought-provoking look at work, family, our connections with others, and how we handle their expectations.

“Who really wanted to be different? I wondered. And to be treated differently for things about them that couldn’t be changed. Most people who were different just wanted to be the same.”

Joan is an ICU attending physician at a New York City hospital. The daughter of Chinese immigrants, she was instilled with a strong work ethic, and she is willing to work constantly. Even though it can be difficult and stressful, Joan is lost without her work. She’s not one to seek out social connections with colleagues, peers, or potential love interests, but she doesn’t feel lonely or unfulfilled, even though others seem to think she should.

When Joan and her older brother were settled in their lives, their parents returned to China. Their father dies suddenly and Joan returns briefly to China for the first time in a long while. Her time there, coupled with her mother’s subsequent trip to America to stay with Joan’s brother, causes Joan to further increase her workload and reevaluate her relationships, with family, colleagues, and others. The only place she feels in complete control is when she is in charge of the ICU.

Joan’s mother’s return to America sets off family tensions, while at the same the world is on the cusp of dealing with the COVID pandemic. What does this all mean for Joan and her ambitions, as well as her family?

This novel is written in a very spare style, much like Joan herself, but there are many moments of wry humor. It’s one of those books that it feels like there's not much drama happening but at the same time so much character development occurs.

Joan Is Okay might not be a book for everyone but I found it really interesting and it definitely made me think.

Book Review: "Better to Trust" by Heather Frimmer

In Heather Frimmer's upcoming novel, Better to Trust, a woman’s medical crisis lays bare a multitude of issues in her life and her family.

After Alison collapses while teaching one day, she discovers she has a brain bleed which requires surgery. Since her brother-in-law Grant is an acclaimed neurosurgeon, it seems only natural to ask him to take her case.

When complications arise after her surgery leaving her with significant physical and cognitive issues, at first they’re accepted as the risks associated with brain surgery. But it’s not long before Grant’s secret is discovered: he’s addicted to pain pills, and this addiction may have caused negative outcomes in Alison’s case as well as with other patients.

Amidst a difficult rehabilitation and the revelation which threatens to tear her family apart, Alison also has to think about her attraction to a female teacher, which was just starting to progress when she collapsed. What does this mean for her future, or her marriage?

Meanwhile, Grant’s teenage daughter Sadie is becoming friends with a troubled classmate who pushes her to do things she doesn’t want. What will be the ramifications of these risky choices?

I really liked this book. It so accurately captures the challenges faced by individuals recovering from brain injuries, both physical and emotional. But the added issues provided even more depth and tension to the story. The multiple narrations, by Alison, Grant, and Sadie really worked for me.

Thanks to Suzy Approved Book Tours, Heather Frimmer, and Wyatt-MacKenzie Publishing for inviting me on the tour and providing me a complimentary advance copy of the book in exchange for an unbiased review!!

Better to Trust publishes 9/21.

Book Review: The Other Family" by Loretta Nyhan

Family—in all its forms—can be the most powerful tool we have. That's at least a theme of Loretta Nyhan's heartwarming and emotional new novel, The Other Family.

It’s not that Ally is inordinately unhappy—it’s more like she’s been in a state of suspended animation for a long while. First it was discovering that her daughter Kylie had a dangerous peanut allergy when she was very young, but now Kylie just keeps getting sick. Although doctors can’t quite pinpoint exactly what is wrong with her, they know it’s some kind of autoimmune disease.

Kylie’s health has taken its toll on Ally’s finances, her sanity, even her marriage—she and her husband Matt are separated. But that doesn’t matter, because she just wants to find answers about what’s wrong with Kylie, wants Kylie to have the life of a normal 10-1/2-year old.

When the latest doctor they’re seeing, whose methods are somewhat unorthodox, suggests the problem may be genetic, it throws Ally for a loop. She was adopted, so if Kylie takes a DNA test, it could open the door to information about her biological family, information she’s never sought before.

The DNA test finds that Ally has an aunt nearby, an aunt who never forgot about her. But is Ally ready to open up her life to new family members at the same time she’s dealing with her adoptive mother’s feelings about looking into her biological family? Not only that, but Matt is resisting the treatment being proposed for Kylie because he worries about potential harm, and he wants to start dating again. Can't Ally just get her one wish, that Kylie get the help she needs?

The Other Family was a sweet, moving book about the bonds of family and the idea that family is who we choose as much as those to whom we’re born. It’s also a powerful look at the sacrifices parents make for their children, the vulnerabilities we don't want others to see, and the struggles faced by those with autoimmune diseases.

I really enjoy the way Loretta Nyhan writes. I loved her last book, Digging In, too, as it also combined humor, poignancy, and resilience.

Thanks to Amazon’s First Reads program and Lake Union Publishing for an advance copy of the book in exchange for an unbiased review! This book publishes April 1.

Book Review: "The Lady's Guide to Petticoats and Piracy" by Mackenzi Lee

It was so good to get back into this series! I loved The Gentleman's Guide to Vice and Virtue (see my review), Mackenzi Lee's first book in this series, and I hadn't realized how much I missed these characters until I began her new book. Once again, I am so taken by the originality of her ideas, and the way she makes books set in the 18th century feel so modern.

"It would be so much easier if I did not want to know everything so badly. If I did not want so badly to be reliant upon no soul but myself."

For most of her life, Felicity Montague has dreamed of nothing more than a career in medicine, as a doctor or surgeon. Rather than fuss over parties or fashion or social standing, she is most comfortable with her medical texts and science books, where she can learn new things instead of being forced to make small talk. Yet this path is closed off to her as a woman—her family barely cares about her if she's not willing to be married off, and no hospital or medical school will give her an audience, let alone an opportunity to study.

After spending time in Edinburgh, where she hoped to enroll in the city's newly minted medical school, she discovers she is no closer to achieving her ambitions than before. And worse, she must dampen the affections of a kind baker with whom she has worked, as he wants to marry her and essentially "save" her from worrying about her ambitions.

"There are far worse things for a woman to be than a kind man's wife. It would be so much easier than being a single-minded woman with a chalk drawing on the floor of her boardinghouse bedroom mapping out every vein and nerve and artery and organ she reads about, adding notations about the size and properties of each."

With nowhere to turn, Felicity learns that a doctor she idolizes is marrying her childhood friend (from whom she has been estranged since a nasty argument a few years before) in Germany, and there is a chance that this somewhat-unorthodox doctor might have a place for her on his team. She agrees to travel to Stuttgart with a mysterious young woman named Sim, who promises to fund Felicity's travel to the wedding if she can pose as her maid. Despite the fact that Felicity isn't quite sure of Sim's motives, she readies herself to be reunited with her old friend, and hopes her life will change when she meets Dr. Platt.

But when Sim's true reasons for wanting to accompany Felicity are revealed, it upends her plans to get a job, threatens her still-shaky relationship with Johanna, and more importantly, endangers her life, as she becomes mired in a plot to recover scientific artifacts which have effects both sentimental and possibly life-changing. Her involvement pulls her from Germany to Switzerland to Algiers and Gibraltar, and what she sees and experiences toughens her resolve, leads her to some important self-discovery, and opens her eyes to some things she never imagined existed.

"You deserve to be here. You deserve to exist. You deserve to take up space in this world of men."

The Lady's Guide to Petticoats and Piracy is truly a literary jaunt. It's a novel full of adventure, suspense, and some danger, but at the same time, it's a powerful commentary on equality, feminism, gender roles, sexuality, self-belief, and friendship. Yet to have a book explore modern issues against an historic backdrop never seems incongruous, and while at times it feels strange that many of the characters are teenagers given their maturity, I'm reminded of how younger people were considered adults much earlier in those times.

Lee is a fantastic, creative storyteller, and she pays attention to every last detail. I don't know if I loved these characters quite as much as I did Monty and Percy from the first book, mainly because these characters seemed a little less open and accessible emotionally, but I was hooked from start to finish. This is one of those books that is easy to love and not easy to forget.

I hope there's another book in this series coming along sometime soon!!

Book Review: "When Breath Becomes Air" by Paul Kalanithi

Wow. I had to wait a little bit to pull myself together before writing a review of this exquisite book, even though I am tremendously late to the party on this one.

"...See what it is to still live, to profoundly influence the lives of others after you are gone, by your words. In a world of asynchronous communication, where we are so often buried in our screens, our gaze rooted to the rectangular objects buzzing in our hands, our attention consumed by ephemera, stop and experience this dialogue with my young departed colleague, now ageless and extant in memory. Listen to Paul."

Paul Kalanithi was, by all accounts, an excellent neurosurgeon, with the potential of being a true guiding force in medicine and science. He spent most of his early adult life seeking knowledge on multiple fronts, from literature and science to philosophy and ethics. When he finally decided to pursue a career in neurology, he wasn't just content to be a doctor—he wanted to understand and identify with his patients fully, to help them and their families adjust to whatever their new reality would be following a diagnosis, an accident, a surgery.

"I was pursuing medicine to bear witness to the twinned mysteries of death, its experiential and biological manifestations: at once deeply personal and utterly impersonal."

At the age of 36, Paul was diagnosed with Stage IV lung cancer. Suddenly his life has transformed him from doctor to patient, not an easy transition for anyone, especially someone as hands-on with patient care as Paul had been. While he and his internist wife Lucy are prepared for the worst, Paul's oncologist has hope, and doesn't allow him to wallow in his diagnosis. If he wants to stop being a neurologist, she tells him, it has to be because he doesn't want to continue or wants to pursue something else—his cancer won't stop him.

As he struggles with thoughts of his future, however long that might be, he ponders how to fill that time. Should he continue working in a field that has so richly given back to him, and given him the chance to touch so many lives? What gives a life value, and how can that value be measured? What obligations does he owe his family, his friends, his wife, his infant daughter?

"At those critical junctures, the question is not simply whether to live or die but what kind of life is worth living."

When Breath Becomes Air is an intellectual and deeply emotional memoir, written by a young man with so much promise, so much heart, so much empathy. It is both a reflection on coming face-to-face with one's own mortality and a commentary on the responsibility doctors have to help their patients and their families through that same reflection, whether it happens with some warning or suddenly. It is also a love story, of a man and his wife, a man and the child he will never truly know, and a man and his career.

You know from the very start of Abraham Verghese's introduction to the book that Paul lost his battle with cancer, yet the end of his life, and the epilogue written by Paul's wife still feel like sucker punches. You mourn a man you probably never knew, but you feel truly blessed he chose as one of his final acts to share his life, his death, and his thoughts with the world, because we are all better for them.

"'The thing about lung cancer is that it's not exotic,' Paul wrote in an email to his best friend, Robin. 'It's just tragic enough and just imaginable enough. [The reader] can get into these shoes, walk a bit and say, 'So that's what it looks like from here...sooner or later I'll be back here in my own shoes.' That's what I'm aiming for, I think. Not the sensationalism of dying, and not exhortations to gather rosebuds, but: Here's what lies up ahead on the road.' Of course, he did more than just describe the terrain. He traversed it bravely."

This is a beautiful book, truly a work of art that I won't soon forget. Easily one of the finest books I've read in some time. My thanks to the Kalanithi family, and Paul himself, for this opportunity to view such an exceptional man at such a critical juncture in his life.

Book Review: "The Children's Crusade" by Ann Packer

Full disclosure: I received an advance copy of this book from NetGalley in exchange for an unbiased review.

"Children deserve care."

So is the motto of Bay Area pediatrician Bill Blair. When he finished serving in the Korean War, he left his Michigan home and decided to pursue a degree in pediatric medicine in San Francisco. While on a leisurely drive into the Portola Valley one day, he came upon three acres of wooded land which he was so taken by, he purchased it on a whim. Of course, he had no money to actually build on the land, so he just visited it from time to time.

When he meets shy Penny Greenway, he finds underneath her calm demeanor a reservoir of passion and yearning, and they plan a life together, one in which they will build a house on Bill's land and raise three children. And although the house works out as planned, they wind up having four children, which upsets Penny more than she's willing to let on, and ultimately, being a wife and mother isn't enough to satisfy her, and she seeks the opportunity to become an artist, without much worry about what that might do to her family.

Years later, Bill and Penny's children are grown, with the three oldest still living near their childhood home, while the youngest, James, the hyperactive "problem child," has never settled down. Yet James' return to his hometown unsettles the stable lives of his siblings—Robert, a doctor like their father; Rebecca, a psychiatrist; and Ryan, a schoolteacher—and unearths old resentments among each of them, and raises questions about the state of their parents' relationship when they were growing up. James is still the one no one can contain or control, he is still the one easily dissatisfied and mercurial, yet he desperately wants to belong, whether among his siblings or in the community where he lives.

Ann Packer's The Children's Crusade is a tremendously well-written, intriguing, and emotional look at family dynamics, and how the decisions adults make while parenting have the potential to cause ripples in their children's lives for years to come. It's also a story of regrets, unfulfilled wishes, fears, things unsaid, and both the power and peril of memory.

"I remembered my memory of the moment, because after so long that's what memory is: the replaying of filmstrip that's slightly warped from having gone through the projector so many times. I'll never know what actually happened and what distortions I added."

The book shifts between present day, looking at each of the adult children, and key moments in their childhood and Bill and Penny's marriage. Packer does a great job developing her characters and drawing you into their lives. The majority of the characters aren't completely likeable, but you feel for them, and you want to know what happens to them even after the book has ended.

Packer's The Dive from Clausen's Pier remains a book that has stuck with me years after I read it, and I've always been a fan of her writing. While The Children's Crusade moves slower than that book, it's still a rich, complex story that I enjoyed tremendously.

Book Review: "Revival" by Stephen King

"This is how we bring about our own damnation, you know—by ignoring the voice that begs us to stop. To stop while there's still time."

Jamie Morton is a young boy growing up in a small town in Maine in the early 1960s when he meets the new, enigmatic preacher of the main church in town, the Reverend Charlie Jacobs. Charlie and his young wife, Patsy, create quite a stir among churchgoers—many of the boys and men are a bit infatuated with Patsy, and many of the girls and women feel the same about Charlie.

But while Charlie is interested in being the town's spiritual leader, he is also tremendously interested in electricity, and its power (no pun intended) to change lives, to heal. Charlie's burgeoning discoveries in this area are brought to Jamie's attention in an unusual way, and it creates an even stronger bond between the two. Yet when an unspeakable tragedy affects Charlie's life, it causes him to question his faith in a very public way, and he is forced to leave his job and the town.

Charlie is never far from Jamie's mind as he grows into adulthood. Hooked on the guitar at a young age, he becomes a musician, playing with various bands throughout the years but never quite hitting the big time. But after his family faces its own tragedies, the only way he can cope is through heroin. And when he is at rock bottom, he encounters his old friend Charlie, who, through unusual means, sets Jamie's life back on the right path. But this good deed comes with a very hefty price—and Jamie quickly learns that Charlie is far from the man he thought he was.

As Jamie tries to get his life together, he begins to uncover the truth about Charlie's experiments, and the effects on those he purportedly helped. But Charlie now demands more than Jamie's gratitude for all he had done on his behalf—he wants a partner in his final explorations. And these aren't just basic experiments.

Stephen King is back to his usual tricks in Revival, combining your basic everyday people with an evil streak at the dark end of the spectrum. I feel as if in recent years, King's storytelling has gotten even stronger, as he draws you into a story that is interesting on its own, and then makes you wonder exactly what's going to happen. I really liked Jamie's character, and found Charlie to be a complex addition to the pantheon of King villains.

I've read a great deal of King's books through the years, and I tend to enjoy those that deal more with the evils of everyday life than those which touch on the supernatural. This is a bit more of the former than the latter, although the ending, like many of King's books, tended to go a little awry for a time. But it's a really interesting read, one which King fans will truly enjoy.