Ugly Love by Colleen Hoover
My rating: 1 of 5 stars

I think I might be done with Colleen Hoover. This one just felt lazy to me. Both of the stories felt super dragged out just to make a book. I thought all of the characters were not well developed and the plot was way way too contrived. This one wasn’t for me.

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Now Is Not the Time to Panic by Kevin Wilson
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

“But Zeke needed to know. You had to choose sides. And you always chose the person who didn’t fuck everything up. You chose the person who was stuck with you.”

What an incredibly unusual story. This is the story of Zeke and Frankie who spend a summer together making a poster that has Zeke’s art and Frankie’s words on it. They then plaster the poster all over town. Next thing you know, it gets enmeshed with a story some teens make up to get out of trouble and things get out of hand and copies start appearing all over the world. It becomes a phenomenon. Crazy things happen. It gets out of hand.

And the whole time, no one knows they started it all.

“I thought that the saddest thing that could happen was that something inside your head worked so hard to make it into the world and then nothing happened. It just disappeared. Now that I’d put those words into the open air, I needed them to multiply, to reproduce, to cover the world.”

This book captured the feeling of being a teen and coming of age in the 90s. What art is. What friendship can look like during those years: intense and like it’s your whole world. The characters are so real, jump out of the page so much that you can’t help but root for them.

“And I wanted to say that it wasn’t his fault, that it was an accident, but maybe everything is an accident. Maybe nothing in the world is intentional. Maybe everything that has ever happened and ever will happen is some dumb mistake. So who cares if you apologize?”

Wilson’s stories have so much heart and are so unique and so bittersweet and the characters are so flawed and yet beautiful. It’s not possible not to love the books. And this was no exception.

with gratitude to netgalley and ecco for an advanced copy in exchange for an honest review

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The Winners by Fredrik Backman
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

“It’s a terrible moment for all kids when we realize that our parents can’t protect us. That we won’t be able to protect our own. That the whole world can come and take us whenever it likes.”

I have loved every book Backman has written. I have loved the Beartown series so very much and I wasn’t sure I was prepared to read another book on it and I also wasn’t sure I was prepared for it to end. I loved this small town with its broken and violent and struggling and loving people. I both wanted to swallow this book up in one sitting and also savor every single moment I spent with it.

I wanted to go slowly and yet I couldn’t stop reading it. These characters are all so real, they jump off the page and they pull you into their lives. You fall in love with each of them in unique and inexplicable ways.

“There ought to be a different word for it once you’ve been married for enough years. When you’ve long since passed the point where it stopped feeling like a choice. I no longer choose you every morning, that was a beautiful thing we said on our wedding day, I just can’t imagine life without you now. We aren’t freshly blooming flowers, we’re two trees with intertwined roots, you’ve grown old within me.”

And even though you know the book is going to break your heart, you know it from the first line because Backman tells you, you can’t stop hoping that it won’t happen. You can’t stop falling apart when it does even though he’s warned you again and again. Because you’re so invested in these characters and you’ve grown to love them so very much.

Backman has a way of creating characters that are so flawed and yet still so lovable. He has a way of getting to the heart of what makes us each human and pulling out the essence of his characters. Once you’ve seen their beauty, even in the midst of all the terrible things they do, you can’t help but root for them. Every single character in this book is three dimensional, flawed and broken and also extraordinary. They are showing up to life. Facing it head on. You can’t help but root for even the most irredeemable ones.

“All children are victims of their parents’ childhoods, because all adults try to give their kids what they themselves enjoyed or lacked. In the end everything is either a revolt against the adults we encountered or an attempt to copy them. That’s why someone who hated their own childhood often has greater empathy than someone who loved theirs. Because someone who had a hard time dreamed of other realities, but someone who had it easy can hardly imagine that things could be any different. We take happiness so easily for granted if we’ve had it from the start.”

There’s so much in this book, like all of them. So much about parenting, marriage, community, love, friendship, family. So much heart. I loved every single minute I spent with it. I was worried it would be too many pages and in the end it felt like not nearly enough because these characters will stay with me forever.

with gratitude to atria books and netgalley for an advanced copy in exchange for an honest review

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I Guess I Haven’t Learned That Yet: Discovering New Ways of Living When the Old Ways Stop Working by Shauna Niequist
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

3.5 stars.

I enjoyed this essay collection and loved the parts where I felt the author went deep into what it means to start over and give oneself grace and space. In some ways, I felt like maybe she hadn’t spent enough time in this new life yet to really dig deep enough to pull out all of her learnings/lessons. Like it was still all a bit too new. So it still felt a bit more on the surface than I would have liked. Still enjoyed them.

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