Characters that provoke big feelings, and a thank you to subscribers

Plus the best thrillers of the year and a new Hunger Games novel

First things first, today I’m excited to announce a new benefit for paid newsletter subscribers. Inspired by the paid subscriber goodie boxes

Grace Atwood

gives away, I’m going to start sending a surprise book box to a randomly chosen paid subscriber almost every month. I’m saying almost here because while I plan to do a giveaway every month, I know that occasionally I may miss a month because of a crazy schedule or toddler issues or illnesses, and I want to be up front about that from the onset.

But I am so excited about this because it feels less like a perk and more like a fun way to say thank you to everyone supporting this newsletter. I love writing my Substack, but I couldn’t do it without the financial support of paid memberships. I’m excited to offer some bookish surprise and delight to a reader every month! Additionally and quite selfishly, I simply have way too many books in my house. Clearing out books is always hard for me, and I’m excited to have a way to offload some of my collection and know that they’re going to good homes. Now that I think about it, these giveaways are probably mostly a perk for my husband who is weary of the piles of books around the house and strongly encouraged me to do this 😂.

So, here’s the deal. Each month, I’ll ship a grab bag of five(ish) books to one randomly selected paid subscriber—you don’t need to do anything additional to enter. The assortment will largely consist of ARCs (advanced review copies) with an occasional finished hardback or backlist paperback title. I promise I will not send you the dregs of my library! These will be books that I have enjoyed or am excited to read, but happen to have in duplicate or books that I have heard great things about but know aren’t right for me. I’ll be drawing a name for the June winner on June 15th and that box will include ARCs of two of the books I reviewed for today! These giveaways are limited to US addresses only because of shipping costs, but I have some ideas of how to make something fun work out if an international reader is drawn!

***To my Patreon members: this type of giveaway is something I have always wanted to offer to you, but Patreon doesn’t allow it! I double checked the regulations again hoping things had changed, but unfortunately the rule still stands. I so appreciate your support and wish I could include all Patreon members in these giveaways as well. I’ll keep checking the guidelines frequently and update if and when it’s possible!

Alright…let’s get to the good stuff!

This week in books.

This week I read…

• Oye by Melissa Mogollon. I have been struggling to find good audiobooks lately—mostly because of my own mental space. While I’ve been enjoying reading slower, denser, headier books on the page, those kinds of books are simply not working for me in audio format at the moment. When I decided I needed to pick up this book in paper, I downloaded Oye for my listening time and it was absolutely the right decision because this book is perfection on audio. Told in a series of phone conversations that we only hear one side of, Oye follows 18-year-old Luciana during a particularly tumultuous year in her family’s life. Her sister Mari has left for college and she’s contemplating her next steps. Meanwhile, a hurricane is about to strike her Florida home and her beloved Abue is acting like she’s hiding something. The story is compelling and full of heart, but it’s Luciana’s voice that is the clear star of the show as Mogollon masterfully captures the cadence and sass, irony and earnestness of a girl on the brink of adulthood. I highly recommend this one, especially if you love voicey novels, coming of age stories, and expertly done audiobooks. Amazon | Bookshop | Libro.fm

• Long Island Compromise by Taffy Brodesser-Akner (out 7/9). I have a lot to say about this book and not enough space to say it in so I’m going to save my specific critiques for a longer newsletter or my Ranked Reading Recap, because my feelings on this are extremely complicated. This is the story of the Fletcher family, a very wealthy (like family compound wealthy) Jewish family living in Middle Rock, Long Island. One morning, the father Carl Fletcher is kidnapped from his driveway. He is returned to his family days later but the incident haunts him, his wife, and his children for decades—in spite of a no holds barred effort to bury the trauma and placate Carl. This is all prologue because the majority of the story happens forty years later when we meet the grown Fletcher children and learn about how this trauma has hurt and stilted them in ways that are surprising yet completely understandable. I liked this story a lot—the narrative depiction of inherited trauma and the inertia that can come with extreme wealth was intricately and interestingly drawn. And while I found some of the thematic elements to be heavy-handed, there was a degree of nuance I appreciated, and I enjoyed the way both plot and themes came together at the end. At the same time, I struggled with the writing in this book. I found both the prose style and the structure genuinely confusing, which is not something that typically happens to me. Brodesser-Akner loves details and while that works well when she’s describe a character (or a celebrity in a profile!) it bogged down this novel and actually resulted in several plot and character discrepancies that really irked me. I also found myself not caring about what happened to the Fletchers and frequently asking myself if various tangents and details needed to be included. That’s a rarity for me, because I love tangents and details and it’s difficult for me to articulate why I wasn’t as on board with them in this book. While I didn’t like it nearly as much as either of these comps, I do think fans of The Bee Sting and Wellness may be interested in picking this one up, and I’m going to be curious about how my own thoughts about this novel develop the longer I sit with it. Amazon | Bookshop | Libro.fm

• Practice by Rosalind Brown (out 6/25). I loved so many things about this book! It’s a detailed day in the life of a student at Oxford studying literature. She wakes one Sunday morning and is faced with one simple—yet trying—task: write a paper about Shakespeare’s sonnets. As she sits at her desk reading, strolls through Oxford thinking, and attempts to begin putting ideas on the page, she considers the beauty and ambiguity of language and the great loves and losses of her own life. I really loved the writing in this book and the thinking in this book. This is a novel about the reading life that is decidedly not about the cozy side of reading—it’s a book about books in the academic sphere, and I loved that. My one complaint is this: can we please get a campus novel that reflects on writing and reading and youth in which no one has an affair with an older person?! I have grown so weary of this plot point and I am 100% certain that people do go to college and don’t sleep with anyone twice their age, so it would be nice to see that reflected in fiction. In spite of growing tired of this plot line, I’m going to be thinking about this book for a while and I can see it becoming a favorite of the year. Amazon | Bookshop | Libro.fm

Now I’m reading…

• The Road to the Country by Chigozie Obioma. Amazon | Bookshop

• The Familiar by Leigh Bardugo. Amazon | Bookshop

• Les Misérables by Victor Hugo. Amazon | Join Our Novel Pairings Read Along

Links I love.

10 LGBTQ+ authors on the books that shaped them. (Lit Hub)

Six short story collection recommendations for when you need great writing but have limited time. (The Atlantic)

We’re getting a new Hunger Games book, and I, for one, am thrilled. (Time)

The best suspense novels of the year so far. (NYT gift link)

I really like this idea…how can we make it happen? (Lit Hub)

7 surprising facts about dreams. (NPR)

End notes.

This week in views, listens, eats, and moments of joy.

• Chelsey Feder
  and I have started recording recaps of Les Misérables for our Patreon Lit Scholars and I’m really enjoying reading this big book together. There’s a lot that can be skimmed but there’s even more to dig deeply into and our recap framing provides the perfect balance.

• I got a couple of these glasses and I’m obsessed. They’re bigger than I thought and I really like them for their size and their whimsy.

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Happy reading!

Sara