Book review: The Bookshop by Penelope Fitzgerald

You already know why I bought this one. I have a type. Barnes & Noble, this time, as it was on sale for only $7 or so.

Amazon summary:
In 1959 Florence Green, a kindhearted widow with a small inheritance, risks everything to open a bookshop — the only bookshop — in the seaside town of Hardborough. By making a success of a business so impractical, she invites the hostility of the town's less prosperous shopkeepers. By daring to enlarge her neighbors’ lives, she crosses Mrs. Gamart, the local arts doyenne. Florence’s warehouse leaks, her cellar seeps, and the shop is apparently haunted. Only too late does she begin to suspect the truth: a town that lacks a bookshop isn’t always a town that wants one.

This book is really more of a novella; approximately one third of the volume is taken up by an introduction and an essay, for some reason. Anyway, this book was a typical twentieth century English story, with writing to match. That type of writing is comforting to me, because I read a lot of British literature growing up. I liked the slice of life in a coastal rural English town, although I lost track of the characters pretty quickly. Other than that, though, I really disliked this book.

For some reason, the Regina George of the town decides to ask Florence to give up the abandoned, haunted house she's chosen for her bookshop after she already paid for it, and of course Florence says no. We are told repeatedly that this is the kind of small town where everybody knows everybody else's business pretty much immediately, so that woman must have known what Florence was doing before she did it, and she could have asked Florence before the latter put down a down payment. Anyway, this house was laying vacant for like 15 years, which means that at literally any time during this period, this lady could have decided to renovate it and turn it into the fine arts society establishment she wanted. But no, she decided to act like the bratty bully who ignores a toy until another child starts playing with it, and then of course it becomes the only toy that will do, and they do everything possible to snatch that toy away from the other child. 

This bitch invites Florence to her house party before asking her to give up the abandoned house, in hopes that that will make Florence feel obligated to say yes; reports the young girl who works in the bookshop to whatever England's version of Child Protective Services was at the time; sends official uniformed men to the bookshop to try to scare Florence out of it through "official" business-y means; and finally gets her nephew elected to a government position, where "he" passes a law that enables the bookshop to be seized by the government on all sorts of shady legal grounds. In fact, the heinous bitch has her nephew include caveats or whatever that Florence OWES the government money for taking her bookshop away, so she has to sell all her books and probably possessions to pay them!!!! Florence's sole supporter, an elderly rich eccentric, dies after having a private conversation with the bitch where he tells her to leave Florence alone, so of course the bitch tells everybody that he came to her house to tell her he supported her doing away with the bookstore.

 Florence leaves the town, and the last sentence is basically about her crying on the train because the town didn't want the bookstore. But that isn't true! The bookstore was well-used and often visited. It was just that heinous bitch with all that political power that influenced people to kick her out. This better not be based on a true story, or else I'll have to go to hell when I'm dead so I can kick that bitch's ass.

trigger warnings for this book: alcohol mentions, ghost/haunted building, incredible injustice

Score: 3 out of 5 stars
Read in: January 22-3
From: Barnes & Noble
Format: paperback
Status: giving away or selling

Book review: Girl Mans Up by M-E Girard

As I walked to the back door of the library to leave for the night, my eye was caught by the spine of a red hardcover book poking out of some bags of donated books. GIRL MANS UP, the title read. Something pinged vaguely in the back of my mind. Have I heard about this book before? The title sounds familiar. I read the inside flap of the dust jacket, and decided I must have heard about this book from book blogs or bookstagram. I like to keep an ear out for LGBTQ+ books in order to make up for all the straight romances I read growing up. My mind made up, I pulled the book out of the bag and slipped it into my backpack. I'd read it that night and return it in the morning, no one the wiser.

Amazon summary:

All Pen wants is to be the kind of girl she’s always been. So why does everyone have a problem with it? They think the way she looks and acts means she’s trying to be a boy—that she should quit trying to be something she’s not. If she dresses like a girl, and does what her folks want, it will show respect. If she takes orders and does what her friend Colby wants, it will show her loyalty.

But respect and loyalty, Pen discovers, are empty words. Old-world parents, disintegrating friendships, and strong feelings for other girls drive Pen to see the truth—that in order to be who she truly wants to be, she’ll have to man up.

I read this book in 1 sitting, as it was a fairly easy and interesting read. Pen is Portuguese and clashes with her traditional immigrant parents all the time. I was angry at their heteronormative and sexist ideas and demands, and their being so controlling. They would not let Pen explain herself and demanded total and unquestioning obedience. Pen's only champion at home is her big brother, whom she looks up to. On the other side, Pen is friends with popular Colby, who uses her to get girls for him, which he then uses and loses. Pen's growing friendship with one of those girls, who ends up in a worst-case scenario because of Colby, threatens him, and it ultimately turns out that Colby feels he has just as much ownership and jurisdiction over Pen as her parents feel they do. Throw in having to deal with homophobia and falling in love with a girl for the first time, and you have lots of issues to deal with.

I enjoyed this book, although of course it made me angry and sad. I was glad that Pen learned how to choose female and male friends that actually cared about her, instead of only being "friends" with douche-y guys who constantly mocked her and made her feel like she had to earn her place in their group. The romance was very sweet, and the whole first love/butterflies in the stomach type stuff was well written. It was also really valuable to have an insight into what it's like to be gender nonconforming, as Pen is a butch lesbian. Despite being a stereotype that gets bandied about, butch voices aren't heard as much, especially in YA. 

Overall, I would recommend this book for teens and up. I don't love the idea of my teen cousins reading about drug use and mentions of sex and fooling around, but ultimately that is already the reality for a lot of teens, or at least their classmates. They can probably handle it ok. 

trigger warnings for this book: nonconsensual semi?-sexual occurances, drug use, sexual harassment, underage sex, abortion, homophobia, transphobia, religious homophobia, sexism, heteronormativity, controlling parents, emotional abuse, verbal abuse, physical violence, gender issues, dysphoria, blood, vomiting mentions

Score: 4 out of 5 stars
Read in: January 21
From: library/borrowed
Format: hardcover
Status: returned

Book review: Love Saves the Day by Gwen Cooper

Spoilers throughout but honestly it's for your own good

First book of the year! I grabbed this one from the dollar store because of its colorful cover. I know it's a record store but it reminds me of a bookstore, especially with the cat there. The cat doesn't hang out in a record store in this story, though.

Amazon summary:

When five-week-old Prudence meets a woman named Sarah in a deserted construction site on Manhattan’s Lower East Side, she knows she’s found the human she was meant to adopt. For three years their lives are filled with laughter, tuna, catnaps, music, and the unchanging routines Prudence craves. Then one day Sarah doesn’t come home. From Prudence’s perch on the windowsill she sees Laura, the daughter who hardly ever comes to visit Sarah, arrive with her new husband. They’re carrying boxes. Before they even get to the front door, Prudence realizes that her life has changed forever.

Suddenly Prudence finds herself living in a strange apartment with humans she barely knows. It could take years to train them in the feline courtesies and customs (for example, a cat should always be fed before the humans, and at the same exact time every day) that Sarah understood so well. Prudence clings to the hope that Sarah will come back for her while Laura, a rising young corporate attorney, tries to push away memories of her mother and the tumultuous childhood spent in her mother’s dusty downtown record store. But the secret joys, past hurts, and life-changing moments that make every mother-daughter relationship special will come to the surface. With Prudence’s help Laura will learn that the past, like a mother’s love, never dies.

Poignant, insightful, and laugh-out-loud funny, Love Saves the Day is a story of hope, healing, and how the love of an animal can make all of us better humans. It’s the story of a mother and daughter divided by the turmoil of bohemian New York, and the opinionated, irrepressible feline who will become the bridge between them. It’s a novel for anyone who’s ever lost a loved one, wondered what their cat was really thinking, or fallen asleep with a purring feline nestled in their arms. Prudence, a cat like no other, is sure to steal your heart.

This book was well-written, with the parts narrated by Prudence the cat being the most funny and lighthearted as well as the most infantile and lacking (to be fair, Prudence is only 3). The parts from Laura's and Sarah's points of view are third person omniscient, while Prudence's parts are in first person, which some people might find annoying. 

I found the parts detailing Sarah's and Laura's lives in bohemian 1970s-'80s New York to be very interesting. It is unfathomable to me how two broke teenagers could afford the rent on a loft in Manhattan, even in 1973 or whatever. Their lives sounded very interesting, with Sarah knowing all sorts of fascinating characters and Laura having a rich and well-formed childhood. 

All of this ends when, completely un-hinted-at in the summary, Sarah and Laura are forcefully evicted from their apartment building, and the city bulldozes the building with all of their and the other tenants' belongings inside as they watch. This was a jarring change in tone, even with Sarah's death and Laura's grief and miscarriage being described in the book so thoroughly and sympathetically. The event is absolutely crushing in print, and even more so when you learn, thanks to an author's note in the back of the book, that the event really did happen in 1994 (I think. I'm not looking it up). How could the city of New York do that? Those tenants were human beings! The city should have given the tenants plenty of advance notice so they could pack up their belongings and move. Instead they sent firefighters to lie to all the residents and tell them the building was moments away from collapsing, so that the tenants all ran out with only the clothes on their backs and were forced to stand there in the rain for hours, watching their home (some of them had lived there for decades) being bulldozed with all their possessions and some of their pets still inside, right in front of them. It made me so very angry I was practically vibrating with rage for days. How could they do that? There better be a special place in hell for all those perpetrators, including Bill Diblasio.

Anyway, this is of course traumatic to them both (to make things worse, their beloved elderly neighbor dies of grief) and they spend the rest of their lives together fighting, which caused them to be estranged from each other after Laura left for college. She blamed her mother for choosing her music over her and letting her live in poverty, thinking that they could have avoided the building event if they'd lived in middle class reliability. This is stupid and untrue. They were definitely working class, but Sarah gave up her DJ dreams and made a decent living from her record store, and she was always there with/for Laura. Sarah should have realized her daughter was traumatized by the event and by Sarah screaming at and slapping her after Laura ran back into the building for the neighbor's cat, and talked to her about the event instead of fighting with her. Everything we hear about Sarah's parenting before this is that she is a loving and understanding parent, despite her own selfish and emotionally absent parents (a big reason for why she ran away to New York when she was a teen). I realize Sarah was traumatized by this as well, but she was an adult and should have realized how much worse it was for her daughter, and so many of their relationship problems would have been resolved if they'd just sat down and talked about it. 

Anyway, this book left me angry and depressed, even though Laura is able to mourn her mother the way she needs to, repairs her relationship with her husband, and chooses the kind of life she's going to have for her child, most of it thanks to Prudence. This book was good but I don't really want to think about it ever again. 

trigger warnings for this book: death, grief, emotional abuse mention, one-time slapping and screaming at a teen, drug mentions, teen pregnancy, miscarriage mention, animal death, animal illness, forcibly disenfranchised and made homeless by the city through unscrupulous means

Score: 3.5 out of 5 stars
Read in: mid January
From: dollar store
Format: paperback
Status: giving away 

Books read in 2019

• Total books read during this year: 25
• Total books that I started to read but didn't finish: 2*
• physical books read: 25
• ebooks read: 0
• physical books started but unfinished: 2*
• ebooks started but unfinished: 0
• Library books read: 2
• Library books started but unread: 0
• Books I liked: 10
• Books I loved: 7
• Books I hated: 0
• Books I disliked or found meh: 6
• Books I felt strongly about but can't classify as love or hate: 1
• Books given away: 11
• #1 most loved book this year: The Twistrose Key by Tone Almhjell
• #1 most hated book this year: The Little Giant of Aberdeen County (too sad and angry-making)

*I'm counting the holiday story compilation I read every year during the holidays (aka after the year ends because it contains New Years stories), Christmas with Anne and Other Holiday Stories.

I read fewer books this year than last year, per usual, but 25 books is fairly decent. Apparently "normal" people are lucky if they read 10 books a year. The main reason I didn't read as many books this year is because I became obsessed with the app game Matchington Mansion. I also traveled a lot (even more than 2018 I think), and while I did bring my kindle, all the flights had movies, so. I'm going to make an effort to read more this year, especially during my ref desk shifts (again, per usual). I'm going to continue not checking out library books (still don't have my local library's card and we're entering my fourth year here!), and I'm going to stop buying books from Barnes & Noble (but not the dollar store or thrift stores, although I will try to stop visiting Saver's, which is the biggest culprit). The book buying is so fast and the reading is so slow... I'm also going to start using my reading journals, which were bought by/for me because we loved the idea, but I stopped using them like immediately. 

A huge shoutout to BookRiot and their fantastic Google Sheets reading log! I cannot recommend it enough. I loved the stats and pie charts of my reading categories and results! #virgo Here is their blog post with the link to and instructions for their 2020 version. 

Here are some of the most interesting pie charts of my reading this year: