April to June had some travel (which is both good and bad for my reading - airports and airplanes, yay, jetlag boo) and my deeply ingrained sense that there is no new TV once it gets light in the evenings (even though yes, TV does not really work like that now) and so I must entertain myself with books. With an attempt to not just pick the next in the series for some of the first quarter picks, here we are.
The Hungry Hearts anthology - edited by Elsie Chapman and Caroline Tung Richmond has some great stories all set in a fictional town with a great batch of restaurants and food. The stories range from sweet love stories, to ghosts and mobs and murder. It will make you hungry and show how food is such a great connecting force.
Elizabeth Acevedo's With the Fire on High - was an excellent audio read. (I have it in other forms too, but the audio is awesome). It's a story about a teen mom, but it also isn't. Emoni is a teen mom, and that fact permeates everything she does, but it is is many ways a story about figuring out the options available to you in this world be they new courses, or new cute students.
Olga Bicos' Perfect Timing - was a re-read for me. A Twitter convo had me digging it out. The book is romantic suspense, and does some odd things, including an alien subplot I had entirely forgotten. But the plane discussions are as awesome as I had remembered, and the reunited so we can solve this case but of course never getting back together, okay, fine, maybe kind of, was also as good as I remembered.
Blair Braverman's Welcome to the Goddamn Icecube is a travel memoir, looking at journeys to cold places. But it was an interesting reminder of how so many travel memoirs are about folks who get to travel without worry. Not always an easy read, but Braverman's frankness about the challenges of facing those moments where you know nothing has happened to you yet, but it might, and how tough that can be to communicate to others, made it a memoir that seemed truer to me than some others I have read.
Hudson Lin's Fly With Me is a great novella about flight attendants who become more than friends.
Jessie Mihalik's Polaris Rising was recommended to me several times before I finally decided to give it a shot. Sci-fi is often far more interested in the bits of climate or the operation of space doors than I am. Polaris Rising is for me, a delightful on the run, maybe my fellow prisoner wants to help me escape not just this ship, but the even bigger group chasing me story that just happens to involve interplanetary escape. It was great. I have marked the arrival of the next story on my book calendar.
Nisha Sharma's My So-Called Bollywood Life was a fun story about a girl who is just trying to get through senior year being co-president of the film club with her ex, no boys, no distractions, but of course there is a boy, and well. It was pointed out to me later that it bears some similarities to Sandhya Menon's From Twinkle With Love, which I also read and enjoyed and had not really noticed the similarities. So if you like one, the other is likely your kind of thing too.
Anna Zabo's Syncopation is a new band member joining after another leaves following a video being posted online making it look like the lead singer is violent. It involves some kink and everything about the two characters love of music as they learned to appreciate each other was really wonderful.
