How to End a Love Story

How to End a Love Story by Yulin Kuang, 372 pages

When she was 16, Helen Zhang's sister, Michelle, killed herself by jumping in front of a car driven by the homecoming king, Grant Shepard. When Grant showed up at Michelle's funeral, Helen and her mother threw him out, and that was the last Grant and Helen saw of each other. Thirteen years later, Helen's a successful young adult author and her wildly popular series is getting a TV adaptation. One of the lead writers on the show? Grant Shepard. So now Helen has to figure out how to deal with seeing Grant on a daily basis in the writers room for the show while simultaneously figuring out her increasingly confusing feelings toward him.

I'll admit that this setup is not at all something I would expect to find in a romance novel, yet somehow Kuang makes it work. There's good character arcs and a spicy love story to satisfy any romance reader. My one quibble is that the awkward dislike/hatred between Helen and Grant shifts to sexy attraction pretty rapidly, considering there was no previous interest shown between them beforehand (maybe an unrequited mutual high school crush would've helped?). However, their complicated relationship is well handled, and that makes me less concerned about the steep on-ramp to the relationship.

Unbreakable

 Unbreakable by Mira Grant, 114 pages.

Magical Protectors have been protecting Earth from the forces of the Outside for as long as humanity has existed. Teams across the world are prepared to fight to the death to serve that purpose, but none of them expected they would all die at once. After one horrible night all but two are dead, and for those two life is forever changed. After the massacre the governments of the world decide that no more children should be allowed to die for the sake of others, and the world does it's best to pretend that they were never heroes. Piper and Yuina were members of Unbreakable Starlight, and now they haven't spoken in years. Piper has become an alcoholic shut-in, unwilling to deal with the pain of losing all of her friends and even more unwilling to play the role of repentant magical girl for the United States government. Yuina is playing exactly that role, helping to sell the narrative that they were all misled children so that she is still allowed to talk about it at all. But they never really understood what happened that night so many years ago, and time is running out to figure it out. 

This is a super cool novella! It was fast paced and exciting while still having a pretty solid emotional core. Mira Grant is one of Seanan McGuire's pen names, and I definitely recognize her style in this. The handling of heavy emotions that come after a classic childhood adventure remind me quite a lot of her Wayward Children books, and this novella lives up to the expectation that creates. 

Also: I would definitely recommend this book to fans of the show Puella Magi Madoka Magica in particular, it feels like one of it's major inspirations.

When the Stars Go Dark

 

 When the Stars Go Dark by Paula McLain (2021) 384 pages

Main character Anna Hart is running from tragedy which has struck her immediate family. There are little details except visual bits and pieces in the beginning as to what exactly has happened to her. All we know is that she is running from it, and is feeling deeply guilty by what has happened. Anna returns to northern California, Mendocino specifically, where she spent her time in foster care as a child. She feels that Mendocino is the only place where she can return, not only to grieve what has happened recently, but return to the trauma she experienced before ending up in foster care. She is a detective, taking time off from her official position, but is soon drawn into a missing person's case which has struck the small town of Mendocino. A movie star's daughter, also an adoptee, has gone missing. Anna joins the search with her friend Will, a local sheriff who is investigating the case. This story not only draws on themes of abuse and trauma, but how one can identify these things happening in a young person's life, and what that can look like from the outside. Anna becomes obsessed with the case when not only the movie star's daughter disappears, but multiple from neighboring counties. As the story unfolds, we learn more of what Anna went through herself as a young child, being ripped out of the only family she knows when her mother overdoses on drugs and is placed apart from her siblings. I enjoyed the mystery aspect and uncovering the details in the missing person's case, but also in the healing and grieving process in what is happening in most immediate time setting in Anna's life. Overall a really solid read.

The Story of a New Name by Elena Ferrante, 471 pages, 

translated from Italian, Book 2 in the Neapolitan Novels series

I became interested in the novels after watching the HBO series My Brilliant Friend. I immediately fell in love with the two main protagonists, Lila and Lenù, little girls growing up in post WWII Naples. The telling of their brutal childhood is handled with raw innocent grace: difficult childhoods are difficult to narrate. Following Book 1, which lays out the girls’ lives in their dusty square of multi-family apartment buildings, the broken adults, the near feral children, their bare-bones school, and the steely bond between the two, this Book 2 reaches into their adulthood, such as it is. Lila marries at 16, hardly an adult, while Lenù eventually leaves the grey life of Naples by train, attends University in Pisa, to gain academic status, and new bonds. 

Their lives sharply cut away from each other by outward appearances. But both battle restrictions set upon them from within and out, in the backdrop of the 60’s, as social, gender, class upheaval brews. Lila weaponizes all resources within her grasp to fight the life that seems decided before she was born, a life still full of suffocating limits and violence. Meanwhile, Lenù, given opportunities of freedom that Lila can no longer even dream about, wrestles with a chronic unease of not ever escaping her Neapolitan identity no matter how accomplished, masterful and socially connected she becomes. And in these struggles, their bond is measured and tested. I am really looking forward to reading Book 3. The filmed series is very enjoyable, but the writing offers a more exquisite tale. 

The Crooked House

The Crooked House by Christobel Kent, 357 pages.

Alison has spent a long time trying not to get too close to anyone. She has a good reason. When she was fourteen her family was taken from her, and she has never quite recovered from that traumatic night. Her new boyfriend Paul has secrets of his own, and with their shared reluctance to share details, she starts to believe that she may have finally found something, someone. Paul convinces her to accompany him to a friend's wedding even though it's taking place in Saltleigh, the marshy seaside village where Alison had lived in the titular house with her family, when she still had a family. The book draws you in, and if the characters actions don't always make sense, they have enough craziness and buried pain so that you can at least see the point behind their vain hopes and muddled plans. By the end, though, it was just a little too convoluted. The very end was about two twists to far for my tastes, and the clues buried in the flashes of repressed memory, seem a little too deliberately placed, with the narrative misdirection standing out from the story instead of flowing along with it. A fun, if somewhat unsatisfying read.