A Lady’s Guide to Fortune-Hunting
Sophie Irwin
Fiction, audiobook
“They paused there for a beat, looking at each other with mutual calculation. It occurred to them both, then – though of course they did not know it – that they might equally have agreed to pistols at dawn.”
Kitty Talbot has three months to catch a wealthy husband before her father’s debts are called in. Unfortunately her attempts to manipulate the kind but naive Archie de Lacy have been foiled by his older brother, Lord Radcliffe. Radcliffe knows a fortune-hunter when he sees one, and is determined to keep Kitty away from his family at all costs. But can he protect his heart as well?
This book was completely contrived, full of manufactured scandal, and saccharine to the point of making my teeth hurt — it was fantastic! I appreciated the main characters’ darker edges. They’re more complicated than the typical romance characters: Kitty is actually mercenary and has strong feelings about male hypocrisy, and Radcliffe is working through the trauma caused by his involvement at the Battle of Waterloo. I alternated between rolling my eyes, giggling, and posting dramatic “squee!” gifs in my book club chat. I think it would have been just as good were it a little bit shorter, but overall it was a delightful time.
This one’s a perfect light-but-not-too-light read for February.
Over My Dead Body: Unearthing the Hidden History of America’s Cemeteries
Greg Melville
Non-fiction, paperback
“Graveyards across the country are the time capsules of our communities, recording — and sometimes even shaping — America’s winding path forward. Every cemetery has a story. Yet these treasure troves of Americana are almost completely overlooked in the historical record.”
As long as humans have lived, we have needed to bury our dead. What those burials have looked like and how we treat the earth around them has changed — but not as much as you’d think. Author Greg Melville tells the stories of 17 US cemeteries whose existence, loss, or deliberate erasure have altered the ways we commemorate the dead…and the ways in which we live.
I grew up near Mexico, a country where visiting a deceased loved one is kind of like visiting when they were alive: you bring their favorite food and drink, a bundle of flowers, and you sit and chat for a spell. The cemeteries are a riot of color and statuary. By contrast, American cemeteries have always felt very “buttoned up” — beautiful and boring. Over My Dead Body does an excellent job of explaining why that’s the case, and why many people are returning to older ways of burial. Melville also doesn’t shy away from the shameful ways in which enslaved and immigrant people’s final resting places were segregated, ignored, or covered up. The stories he tells identify cemeteries not as afterthoughts or things we need because we have to do something with the dead, but as places central to the American cultural and political experience.
Give this a read if you’re interested in surprising connections, cemetery-related puns, and/or American history.
Assistant to the Villain
Hannah Nicole Maehrer
Fiction, paperback
“ ‘Sir, I hate to belittle your successes, but there are people who go their entire lives without killing anyone.’
His face remained serious. ‘How dull.’ ”
After a terrifying run-in with the man known only as The Villain, the last thing Evie Sage expects is a job offer. But needs must when she’s the family’s sole earner, and once she gets used to the severed heads and pulling arrows out of the interns it’s not actually that bad. Yes, the boss is disconcertingly attractive; and yes, there may be a mole sabotaging The Villain’s plans. It’s just all part of the job.
This book has been chasing me around for months. I saw it at a bookstore last year, and several people in my book club have it on their TBR. I had no idea that it started as a TikTok series, which has been fun to watch — not only is it funny, it’s interesting to start seeing the impact of digital creators on the traditional publishing market. As for the book itself, I enjoyed it. It’s not groundbreaking literature, but it’s well-structured, has an interesting and funny premise, and includes a nice mystery to boot. I love Evie’s character arc, and how she has to figure out for herself whether she wants to be “good” — or what “good” really even means. My only quibble is that I wish it hadn’t tried to mix modern concepts like assistants and interns with generic medieval things like horse-drawn wagons, skulking in taverns, and knights with swords. Trying to keep a foot in both places was jarring, and I’d rather it have been in a completely modern setting.
Read Assistant to the Villain if you enjoy fantasy and a nice mix of silly, spicy, and serious — just note that it’s the first in a trilogy.
The Butchering Art: Joseph Lister’s Quest to Transform the Grisly World of Victorian Medicine
Lindsay Fitzharris
Non-fiction, paperback
“The adoption of Lister’s antiseptic system was the most prominent outward sign of the medical community’s acceptance of a germ theory, and it marked the epochal moment when medicine and science merged.”
The Victorian era was not great for a lot of reasons, but it was especially dangerous if you needed medical treatment. Nowhere was this more obvious than in the operating room. Unwashed hands, instruments with bits of flesh from the previous patient, and surgeons’ garments caked in blood and pus were common sights, and the only “cure” for infection was amputation. Germ theory was a puzzle, and it would be Dr. Joseph Lister who put the pieces together.
First 5-star read of the year and of course it’s non-fiction. This book has so many things I love: history, interesting science/medical stuff, character studies, and of course old-timey medical dudes exchanging petty insults in The Lancet. I knew the basics about Lister, but this book dives deep into the situations, people, and experiments that made it possible for him to develop the theory that revolutionized surgical medicine and saved millions of lives.
Read this if you love well-written history and scientific details — but know that Fitzharris pulls no descriptive punches, so the gore level may make you squirm.
Iron Widow
Xiran Jay Zhao
Fiction, paperback
“But I have no faith in love. Love cannot save me. I choose vengeance.”
When Wu Zetian volunteers for the war against the Hundun, all anyone around her sees is a proper girl willing to sacrifice herself. What they don’t see is a woman bent on vengeance against the ace Chrysalis pilot who killed her sister. When she gains her objective spectacularly and publicly, she is given the dubious title of Iron Widow, the name reserved for girls who kill instead of being killed. But even Zetian cannot imagine the chaos her actions will cause — and the rage it will unleash.
I picked this book up with trepidation, afraid that it was YA in disguise — what I really should have been worried about was excessive mech suit fight descriptions, political drama, and an inconsistent main character. These things don’t interest me in the best of circumstances — adding in the extra layers of aggressive misogyny and repetitive feminist ranting put the last nail in the coffin. I’m a lifelong feminist and see the critical importance of stories that focus on equality, but the author was too heavy-handed with the theme. This book felt like a mishmash of The Great Wall, an episode of Neon Genesis Evangelion, and a Women’s Studies class essay. Which sucks, because I enjoyed the general setting, unconventional love triangle, and the story’s connections to East Asian history and myth.
Iron Widow has 4+ stars on both StoryGraph and Goodreads, but was clearly not right for me. I’d rather have read a biography of the real Wu Zetian from which the book takes its (very loose) inspiration.
The House on Vesper Sands
Paraic O’Donnell
Fiction, audiobook, DNF
“She had served for some years in the Salvation Army, she said, but had come to the view that while soup and soap were well and good, salvation might just as easily be done without.”
When the young seamstress leaps from the third-story window, she knows her body will be found. It will be up to a poor Cambridge dropout, a fiery journalist, and an ill-tempered inspector to discover the truth behind her suicide and the dark deeds that led her to it.
This book has all the right ingredients: a feisty heroine, a snarky but astute cop, and a bumbling but sweet young man in love. Unfortunately author Paraic O’Donnell just couldn’t combine them into anything cohesive or enjoyable. I loved Inspector Cutter and his jabs at everyone around him, but the book was all chatter and no plot. Until I got to the “twist” — rather than being a new hook that lured me back in, it just felt like another ingredient that O’Donnell threw in randomly.
Life’s too short to read a book you don’t like. Next!
The In-Between: Unforgettable Encounters During Life’s Final Moments
Hadley Vlahos, RN
Non-fiction, audiobook
“I believe in medicine and science, but my own experience tells me that, while they can explain a lot, they can’t explain everything.”
A career in hospice nursing was not Hadley Vlahos’ dream job. She only knew it would give her a way to take care of herself and her son — what she couldn’t have imagined was the impact her patients’ deaths would have on her life.
This memoir has been on my list for a long time, but I’ve been hesitant to pick it up since my own grandmother’s death a little over a year ago. I’ve seen firsthand the peace and comfort that hospice can bring to a family, despite it happening in the most heartbreaking of circumstances. This book made me teary-eyed with both sorrow and hope. There’s so much we don’t know and are afraid to discuss about death, and I’m grateful to Vlahos for sharing her (and her patients’) experiences. We can’t know for certain what comes after, but it was kind of wonderful to hear others’ experiences of “the in-between.”
Read with a box of tissues.