Transitive Verve

 After my previous post on romance tropes that I dislike, I wanted this next post to be about a romance writer that I am really enjoying right now, and whom I think deserves some attention! (Note: I don't know her, have never talked to her, am not working for her, etc. I just really admire her writing.) I am currently trying to complete Book Riot's Read Harder challenge for 2022 , and task #7 is "Read a romance where at least one of the protagonists is over 40." When Book Riot sent out their list of suggestions for the task, Olivia Dade's book, 40-Love , was on the list.  As you can tell from the cover, the protagonist is a fat woman. Not merely "curvy," the way some books will describe their protagonists (when really they mean, she has an hourglass figure and flat stomach, a la Kim Kardashian or something), but an actual plus-sized woman. So I saved it to my TBR list. HOWEVER, that was not the book I ended up reading. Teach Me, which is in the same seri

As a longtime reader of romance, I naturally have preferences about what I enjoy in my books, same as everyone else. This isn't meant to be some sort of revelatory list full of deep insight, but just a share-out of what makes me choose to keep reading a book, and what makes me DNF it. I do want to issue a disclaimer, though, that it's a list that comes from a longtime relationship with the genre. I don't think it's fair to be the sort of person who scoffs at romance, who doesn't take it seriously or see the good in the genre or has read it extensively in good faith (hate-reading doesn't count), and THEN come up with a list of what's not great about it--I'm making this list BECAUSE I love reading romance, and I want to see the good things get better, and the bad things decrease.  So without further ado... romance tropes (or even just literary/fiction tropes) that I'm not in love with, in no particular order: Racial insensitivity  - This one is a "

  The downside of keeping a book journal instead of writing reviews on a book blog is that sharing those thoughts online isn't quite the same. The upside, though, is that writing a journal entry by hand, instead of typing a review , shifts the gears in my head a little bit about how I want to frame my thoughts. I initially struggled REALLY hard about how I was going to review this book, and then I ended up deleting my draft altogether. And then I thought about deleting this entire blog altogether, because I wasn't sure if I still wanted to review books so much as just ruminate on them, which is why I started a book journal for myself. I don't know if I still want to offer my opinions on books for other people anymore; I want to explore my opinions on books for myself. For now, though, I will just share what I wrote about this book, by posting the pictures of the pages from my book journal. I don't know if I will keep blogging, keep journaling, keep posting my journal o

The Anthropocene Reviewed began its life as a podcast . Perhaps I should just share the podcast's description, because I really can't explain it better in my own words: The Anthropocene is the current geological age, in which human activity has profoundly shaped the planet and its biodiversity. On The Anthropocene Reviewed, #1 New York Times bestselling author John Green (The Fault in Our Stars, Turtles All the Way Down) reviews different facets of the human-centered planet on a five-star scale. I'm not sure where along the way I started listening to the podcast, but while I liked it a lot, I also found myself putting off listening to the episodes because usually, when I listen to podcasts, it's because I'm doing something else and I just want some audio to fill the space while I'm doing what I'm doing. I knew after a couple of episodes that TAR  is NOT a space-filler type of podcast; it deserves attention, and consideration, and reflection. Thus, I have no

  *edited to add* I apologize for errors and typos and I typed most of this with one hand while holding a fussy baby. I have been SO excited for this! I'm a big Leigh Bardugo fan, and I've been following the progress of this adaptation since they first announced it and started announcing the cast members. (PS--to see my reviews of the books, click the "Leigh Bardugo" tag! I still have not read the newest Grisha series though--I am going to reread the originals first.) I'm not going to summarize the plot here because that's easily google-able, but I will sum up the major "difference," which is that the series combines the main plot of the original Shadow and Bone  trilogy, and then melds in the Six of Crows  characters by incorporating some new original content plus some character backstories, since SaB takes place a bit before SoC does. So we meet the Crows before the events of the actual books take place. So it really is a full Grishaverse that we g

A biromantic ace protagonist who is also a black woman, with a Japanese-American male opposite. This book was soooo good, and actually, took on a whole lot of education and emotional labor. If you've never understood what being asexual means, I feel like this had a lot of good explanations. (I say this as someone who doesn't quite feel like I am ace, but I'm at the lowest of the low end of the spectrum of asexuality. In fact, this book really helped me figure out a lot of things.) I started reading it because I wasn't sure how it would go, a romance novel where the main character is primarily uninterested in sex (because isn't that a big part of the allure of romance novels?), but what I got was so much more than that. It wasn't just about romance, but about communication---there are a whole lot of communication issues in this book, mainly because Alice is trying to figure herself out (and how can you communicate your needs and wants when you're not quite su

Note: This review may contain spoilers for all the previous books in the ACOTAR series, but will not contain spoilers for this particular installment. The wait for this book was already extra long--all the ACOTAR books had come out a year apart, but this one came out two  years after the last one--and it  felt  even longer, because 1) ACOFAS contained a preview of this book that was FIRE, and 2) on the whole, I was less than satisfied by the SJM release that we got last year, the first novel of her new Crescent City series . (I can't ever seem to remember its actual title, even right after I've just read it.) I liked it, I mostly just wished we could have this next ACOTAR book instead. And now we have it. For starters, I want to point out that the covers have been redone for the entire series, because I think they're trying to rebrand it as adult, which I fully support because OH MAN, this book was raunchy. I mean, I'm pretty sure we were all expecting it--Cassian and N