Book Review: More to Love by Georgina Kiersten

An Unexpected Love

For Jamir Cunningham, a relationship is the last thing on his mind.  After inheriting his grandparents' bookstore, Jamir has been completely focused on running the business. And if he's lonely, that was between him and the books. Yet, from the moment Emmy Park walked into his life, Jamir was immediately captivated by the plus-size Korean.

A Fresh Start

After his recent divorce, former Olympic wrestler Emerson "Emmy" Park moved to Texas to get a fresh start. After taking a job as an assistant wrestling coach at a nearby university, he stumbles across Jamir's bookstore. Emmy is instantly attracted to Jamir.  Unfortunately, he is big and burly with a resting bitch face and thinks he has zero chance with the gorgeous Black man. However, when a sudden encounter shows them how good they can be together. Is the simmering attraction between them enough for them to see past their differences and finally give in to their desires?

This was my first read of February. As it's Black History Month no matter what anybody says, I specifically tried to choose books with Black characters. I bought this ebook during one of those "stuff your ereader" sales last year. 

The leads meet because Emmy likes to sit in Jamir's bookstore and read during his lunch hour. Jamir is instantly attracted to Emmy and kind of follows him around the bookstore trying-to-be-stealthily; Emmy thinks Jamir stares at him because he's a big, tall Korean. I found the manner in which they get to talking rather contrived; Emmy forgets his beloved copy of Pride & Prejudice at Jamir's bookstore (he really takes his own book to read at a bookstore? ok...) so he goes there during a rainstorm (just wait til the next day??) and Jamir urges him to dry off  in his apartment above the store, sparks fly, etc. 

I found the romance cute, and I liked the relationships the men had with their family and friends. Both men have their own problems to deal with in their jobs and personal lives, but there really wasn't much in the way of an obstacle to their relationship apart from some silly contrived drama towards the end. 

Weirdly, I found the non-romance writing to be kind of awkward while the ~romantic~ writing wasn't; usually it's the other way around. There were also several editing errors and typos in my ebook (and in the summary, which I had to fix). The line in the summary calling Emmy a plus-size Korean, plus the way Jamir's attraction to Emmy's size was described (slightly/borderline chaser-y), made me a bit uncomfortable; those sensitive to how fat characters are described may not like it. No fatphobia though.

Sometimes you just want a simple fluffy romance book, and the fact that there's a bookstore is the icing on the cake. Overall I liked this.

Score: ★★★½ out of 5 stars
Spice score: 🌶🌶🌶 out of 5 chilies
Read in: February 1
From: B&N Nook

Tropes: idk what it's called but that whole "the weather makes the romance/encounter" happen, forced proximity, close proximity, "he's probably staring at me because I look strange/my odd looks", athlete x nerd, "no, [family member], I'm giving up on YOUR dream", the ex tries to get them back in the third act

Representation: Black man MC, Korean man MC, fat MC, I think both are bisexual so bi4bi

Trigger warnings: the author has a list at the beginning of the book so I'll just redirect you to what I wrote in the second to last paragraph about the way the fat MMC was talked about, also I didn't like how Emmy's boss was such a jerk and yelled all the time

Short books update for February through now

 I don't feel like writing up reviews for them, but the other books I read in February include Mere Christianity, The Screwtape Letters, and The Great Divorce (all by C.S. Lewis, of course). I have now finished my CSL class but I feel like rereading Til We Have Faces (the grad student-only read that I skipped as I enrolled in the class as an undergrad), which I only read once at least ten years ago. We'll see if I get around to it. 

I have still not finished reading bell hook's All About Love: New Visions, which I started back in early February. She writes so well, beautifully as well as straightforward, and I am interested in the topic, but I keep dragging myself through one chapter at a time and then not reading again for days if not weeks. I don't know what the issue is. I will say I tend to have this problem with nonfiction over fiction, even if the book topic interests me (remember how I started reading that nonfiction book about the linguistics of/on the Internet right before the pandemic, and never finished it?). I don't want to abandon it; maybe now that I've finished my CSL class I can finish this book. 

I dread going to my [none of your business] doctor for obvious reasons, but I also love it when I have an appointment, because just a block or so away from the building there is a quiet little street that has a cute trendy indie coffee shop where I buy an oat milk latte (mocha or chai or seasonal but always sweet) and then go across that street to an Assistance League thrift store and browse for a while. It's heaven. I bought a khaki mini-skort, two half-priced scarves, and three books, all five dollars or less. The books were 50 cents each (!); one was a Pike Place Market cookbook that I gave my sister (she used to live near Seattle and we visited there once), and the other two were for me: The Eyre Affair and The Daughters of Artemis. I had heard of the Thursday Next series (of which The Eyre Affair is the first) from back when I was reading author blogs (remember blogs?), but I never started it because it felt daunting or something. It's a bookish series that is maybe mysteries and maybe fantastical; I'm not really sure. It being bookish is enough to recommend itself to me. The other one sounds like a thriller mystery book, and judging by the title and summary, I suspect it is sapphic.

This online indie bookstore started by two of my college friends had an International Women's Day sale on their female authored books, so I bought two: Tanglewreck by Jeanette Winterton, who I've read and liked before, and Bookshop Cinderella, a romance novel that is also a Cinderella retelling set in a bookstore. I find the title kind of obvious, but it worked on me, so. Tanglewreck looks like a time travel sci fi book. 

The March Disneybound challenge has been taking up all my free time, so I haven't posted anything about books since February. Also, me reading nothing but C.S. Lewis has been uninspiring for bookstagram posts, even though I love him. Ah well.

Bookworm Math

So I started a bookstagram (read: turned my regular personal IG account into a bookstragram by posting more about books and bookish things) and made a post about a meme that's been floating around Instagram. You've heard of girl math and boy math, and the concept quickly spread into concepts like reading or bookworm math. Here are my contributions.

Bookworm math:

• Buying books from independent bookstores is basically the same as donating to charity.
• i.e. noble, selfless, giving, charitable, altruistic, philanthropic, demanded by my religion, Matthew 10:8, etc.
• Paying $3 for a thrift store book is too expensive, but paying full price for a book at an independent bookstore is not.
• Let's be real here. Thrift stores get so many book donations and they will never run out of books to sell. I don't want to see a hardcover over $2 or a paperback over $1. Who do they think they are, The Strand? Also, see the previous bullet point.
  
• Buying a book from every bookstore, book selling stand/booth/stall, museum gift shop, etc., is the admission fee for visiting it.
• What do you want me to do, be rude?? break the rules?? It's mandatory!
  
• I gave away ten of my books, so now I can buy 20!
• Makes sense to me. I was so good at weeding my books that I deserve a little treat.
  
• Buying yet another bookcase when I run out of shelf space is a good investment.
• My books need a place to live! What, you want them to live on the floor like so much refuse? You know and I know that I'm going to keep buying books for the rest of my life, so it's a good investment really.
• I am justified in buying this bookish T-shirt/tote bag/pin/etc. because I'm a librarian. It's basically for work!
• Note to the IRS: I do not count my bookish purchases as work expenses

Am I right or am I right?

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: Plaid and Plagiarism by Molly MacRae

I think I bought Plaid & Plagiarism from the thrift store. I had initially thought it was from Barnes & Noble, but I didn't buy it online and I don't think I wouldn't have bought it in person, even though it totally is my jam according to the cover and description.
It's a mystery! (lol)

Set in the weeks before the annual Inversgail Literature Festival in Scotland, Plaid and Plagiarism begins on a morning shortly after the four women take possession of their bookshop in the Highlands. Unfortunately, the move to Inversgail hasn’t gone as smoothly as they’d planned.
First, Janet Marsh is told she’ll have to wait before moving into her new home. Then she finds out the house has been vandalized. Again. The chief suspect? Una Graham, an advice columnist for the local paper—who’s trying to make a name for herself as an investigative reporter. When Janet and her business partners go looking for clues at the house, they find a body—it’s Una, in the garden shed, with a sickle in her neck. 
Who wanted Una dead? After discovering a cache of nasty letters, Janet and her friends are beginning to wonder who didn’t, including Janet’s ex-husband. Surrounded by a cast of characters with whom readers will fall in love, the new owners of Yon Bonnie Books set out to solve Una’s murder so they can get back to business.

Right? The Scottish setting makes this book unique (to me), as I generally read books set in the US or England. Owning a bookshop sounds just divine. Janet is a reference librarian who worked for years in a public library! Overall, I should've liked this book more than I did.

I kept losing track of the many characters. There are four (seriously) main characters: Janet, the librarian; Christine, her best friend who is a social worker; and their daughters, who are a lawyer and an investigative journalist, respectively, and whose names I can't be bothered to look up. I kept forgetting whose daughter was who, as well as who everybody was. Was X the constable (police officer), the man who used to own the bookstore, or somebody else? Una was the only person that I didn't mistake for anyone else, as her name is distinctive and she's the one who was murdered.

I knew this was a cozy mystery going in, as the protagonists own a bookstore, hello, but it was hilarious to me that "solving the murder" consisted of the four of them chatting and texting about it every so often and writing in a shared cloud document. They also pestered people with questions and called the constable about everything, of course. Despite all this, and the continual adding of clues and red herrings and characters, I was surprised when Janet (and the others, maybe?) all of a sudden knew who the murderer was when something went down at the local crime author's place. There was nothing that led up to that revelation, apart from the murderer and their spouse acting suspicious.

This is spoilery, so don't read if you want to read this book, but I have to vent about it: the whole trash-dumping plotline was so annoying. At first the women thought it was a warning or a clue about the murder, and it ended up being (get this) Janet's son's mother-in-law, who was still livid at Janet because she "supported" her son and his wife (the lady's daughter) eloping instead of having a big wedding. Which was five years ago. And which Janet had nothing to do with (it sounds like she just went "oh well, congratulations" to her adult son AFTER the elopement had already taken place). For THAT that witch was dumping trash all over her grandchildren's other grandma's house??? And she got no comeuppance!! I would have told her off so hard.

Still spoilers: Also, at some point Janet meets the lady that was renting Janet's house from her with her husband when Janet was in the US, and the woman basically screams at her that it is NOT nice to meet her, that Janet's house ruined her life because her husband had an affair with Una. Like what? This chick really blames Janet and her house for something her husband and some other woman did? I was shocked she wasn't more of a suspect in Una's murder, but we're immediately told there's an alibi. Nobody ever gave her the dressing-down she deserved, either.

Spoilers continue: You know what also made me really mad? Janet kept being told by the constable  that her house wasn't ready and she couldn't go back for like over a week, and it turned out the constable's grandmother needed a place to stay until her spot in the nursing home was available, and instead of having the old lady stay in his place or renting a hotel room for her like a normal person, he LIES TO JANET AND PUTS HIS GRANDMOTHER UP IN HER HOUSE!!!!!!!! During the day, he had the old lady stay in the bookshop where Janet and co. would bring her tea and scones without knowing who she was or anything about it, which means that not only were they unwittingly giving her free room and board, but also free elder care during the day!!! I would have yelled at this idiot so hard. I would have yelled at his superiors and demanded they punish him. I would have made him pay me rent. That's just so unethical!! It's a police officer misusing his power!! And Janet was definitely miffed but she did nothing!!!! LITERALLY WHAT THE EFFFFFF.

While the story did keep me turning pages, I found the writing to be clunky and awkward in parts, and that kept taking me out of it. There was too much awkward description of people's hand gestures, and there was one semi-physical encounter that involved three of the characters that I kept rereading because I could not figure out what was going on, and why. The way they all talked didn't feel much like real people talking. Idk, the mystery just wasn't formulated in a way that I'm used to. I'm not going to go out of my way to find the next book in the series, but if I find it in the thrift store or the library, I'll read it.

I love this book cover. I think it is my favorite part of the book. It's infinitely better than the other options I've seen for this book.

Score: 5 out of 5 stars
Read in: March 6
From: thrift store?
Format: paperback
Status: I know I should give it away but the cover is so cute

My shortest iTunes playlist

Books
-"B*tches in Bookshops" by Annabelle Quezada & La Shea Delaney [better than the original (Jay-Z & Kanye West's N****s in Paris) imho. Lyrics at the above link]

-"Book People Unite" by The Roots & friends for Reading is Fundamental