#wayward children

Fiction: 

My Grandmother Asked Me to Tell You She is Sorry by Fredrik Backman 

The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo by Taylor Jenkins Reid 

Daisy Jones and the Six by Taylor Jenkins Reid 

City of Girls by Elizabeth Gilbert 

Lovely War by Julia Berry 

The Henna Artist by Alka Joshi

American Dirt by Jeanine Cummins

All the Light We Cannot See by Anthony Doerr 

The Wayward Children Series by Seanan McGuire 

The Map of Salt and Stars by Zeyn Joukhadar

Neverwhere by Neil Gaiman 

Trigger Warning by Neil Gaiman 

The Ocean at the End of the Lane by Neil Gaiman 

Six of Crows by Leigh Bardugo 

Pride and Prejudice and Other Flavors Sonali Dev

The Bride Test by Helen Hoang 

The Kiss Quotient by Helen Hoang 

Aristotle and Dante Discover the Secrets to the Universe Benjamin Alire Sáenz

The Boy, The Mole, The Fox, and The Horse by Charlie Mackesy

The Alchemist by Paulo Coelho 

Warrior of the Light by Paulo Coelho 

One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel García Márquez

Emma by Jane Austen (Especially if you haven’t seen the movie yet) 

The House of Spirits by Isabel Allende 

The Odyssey by Homer 

Slaughterhouse Five by Kurt Vonnegut

A Moveable Fest by Ernest Hemingway 

Non-Fiction: 

Becoming Supernatural by Joe Dispenza 

Material Girl, Mystical World by Ruth Warrington 

Tao Te Ching by Lao Tzu 

The Essence of Happiness by The Dalai Lama 

How to Win Friends and Influence People by Dale Carnegie 

Psycho-Cybernetics by Maxwell Maltz 

First We Make the Beast Beautiful: A New Journey Though Anxiety by Sarah Wilson 

Sapiens by Yuval Noah Harari 

Homo Deus by Yuval Noah Harari 

21 Lessons for the 21st Century by Yuval Noah Harari 

For those who cannot buy books right now for whatever reason, Scribd (not sponsored) is an app I use a lot. They offer a 30 day free trial for first time users. 

Books I Read in 2022

#13 – Every Heart a Doorway, by Seanan McGuire

• Rating: 4/5 stars

It’s rare for me to wish a novella were longer, but here we are. I loved a lot about this, and a lot of what it clearly wanted to do and say, but I think the basis of most of the problems I felt it has is that it’s too short.

While I understand the gist of how this universe categorizes its magical alternate worlds, and several characters are actively working on refining this system, I wish there had been more depth, more explanation. There were many example worlds mentioned and roughly categorized, but those efforts were complicated by some students not fully sharing (or understanding) their experiences with their “home” worlds, which meant others could only speculate about them. I understand why the story is better suited to an emerging organizational structure rather than a rigidly defined one, but I still think within that framework there was room for improvement.

To some extent this same complaint applies to the characters. There are many of them, and some are noticeably less developed than others, even accounting for their relative importance to the story. Jack as the snarky and dapper mad-scientist wannabe is fantastic and just about my favorite thing in this whole story; Nancy is also interesting and gets a lot of depth from being the most commonly used POV character. Kade, I would have liked to know more about, though he gets a decent amount of attention. But Christopher, for example, feels like a plot convenience: a Latino kid who went to a Day-of-the-Dead-esque skeleton world, who is only relevant because at one point the mystery plot needs someone to talk to bones, and he can do that. He wasn’t introduced until right before he was needed, and he didn’t really do much afterward. The general student body beyond our small main cast of characters is filled random names attached to speculations about their home worlds, and they show up occasionally to be mean to Nancy or Jack or Kade. And the various people killed off by the mystery plot are barely people enough to feel like credible victims. I know we can’t (and shouldn’t) have full histories of every single student and staff member, but again, this aspect of the story would benefit from a little more page time devoted to it.

As for the mystery plot itself, the student body is so fixated on two obvious red herrings that it narrows down the field of actual possibilities to basically nothing, so it’s easy to figure out the whodunit by process of elimination. Once again, making the story longer might have enabled adding at least one or two more possible suspects, or at least fleshing out a few existing characters to the point where they might be suspects, in order to obscure the real killer’s identity enough to make it a revelation rather than a foregone conclusion.

I realize I’m being hard on something that I’m rating four stars, but it’s good enough, and I liked it enough, that I suppose I’m a little angry it’s not actually better than it is.