the big rewind

February 19, 2019

Top Ten Tuesday: Books I Enjoyed with Fewer than 2,000 Ratings on Goodreads

Top Ten Tuesday is a weekly linkup of book bloggers hosted by That Artsy Reader Girl! This week, we’re looking at books we’ve liked that are a bit more under the radar. I cheated a bit and picked two books that almost certainly will go above 2,000 soon but were published late last year so haven’t quite gotten there yet. But if you’re looking for something to read that isn’t the same thing everyone else is reading, these are great choices!

The Anointed One: This is a pretty niche interest (Nevada politics), but it’s also really good and still very relevant even years after it was published.

Seduction: This one is kind of cheating (it was a late 2018 release), but I recommend it very highly. If you enjoy the author’s podcast (and its ratings suggest lots of people do!), it’s very similar to what she does on the show but in book length!

The Butcher’s Daughter: This book was so interesting and different than a lot of historical fiction! I’m bummed it never seems to have found an audience because it’s really well-written.

The Big Rewind: Another one that should have blown up huge (so delightful!) and I will continue to push!

The Sky Is Yours: This one, at least, I can understand why it didn’t take off. It’s very very weird but I also found it really compelling!

Valley of the Moon: This is a sweet time-travel romance that appealed to me even though this is not at all my usual genre.

The Fly Trap: This was a book club selection, and when I found out I was going to be reading a book about a dude that lives on a Swedish island and studies flies, I was very skeptical. It’s actually a really entertaining read!

Once Upon A River: This one is another cheat. I’m sure this book will be widely-read (and it should be, it’s wonderful) but only came out two months ago.

Three and Out: Also kind of a niche interest, this is a well-reported, well-told account of the brief, unhappy tenure of Rich Rodriguez as Michigan’s head football coach.

Messy: This Fug Girls-penned sequel (to their debut, Spoiled) actually worked better for me than the first entry…I’m sure they’ve moved past this series, but I’d love to read another one if they ever wrote it!

September 11, 2018

Top Ten Tuesday: Hidden Gems

Top Ten Tuesday is a weekly linkup of book bloggers hosted by That Artsy Reader Girl! This week, we’re talking about books that are great that don’t get as much love as they should. I used Goodreads to get a sense of what’s less rather than more popular, so here are ten books you may not have heard of that are pretty great!

The Big Rewind: I loved this debut light-hearted murder mystery with a romantic twist. It was delightful and I will continue to talk about how much I enjoyed it forever!

Valley of the Moon: Time-travely romantic drama does not sound like the kind of thing I would like at all, but I found it charming and a very pleasant read!

The Creation of Anne Boleyn: Like so many other lady people, I’ve been fascinated for years by Anne Boleyn and this nonfiction examination of the stories told about her was really interesting!

City of Thieves: This coming-of-age buddy adventure story set during the siege of Leningrad from one of the Game of Thrones showrunners is short and in many ways predictable but so well-told it packs a powerful punch anyways.

The Guineveres: I thought this novel about the lives of four young women, all named Guinevere, that end up in Catholic convent for different reasons was lyrical and powerful and was disappointed that it never took off the way I thought it would because it’s great!

A Leg To Stand On: I am always here for Oliver Sacks, and this book, about his own experience of suffering an alienation from his leg after a horrible hiking accident, has the kind of wisdom and compassion that are a hallmark of his writing.

The Man Without A Face: This nonfiction work by Masha Gessen about the rise of Vladimir Putin feels incredibly prescient and relevant to our times.

So Big: Giant is Edna Ferber’s novel that got made into the big splashy Hollywood movie (I haven’t read it yet, but I have a copy waiting!), but this one won the Pulitzer and its testament to inner strength and finding the joy in life is beautiful and powerful.

The Butcher’s Daughter: If you like Tudor-era historical fiction but want to get out of the palaces and into the villages, this smart, insightful book about a young woman who becomes a nun and then has to figure out what’s next after the Reformation would be an excellent choice.

Stay With Me: You read the back, about a woman in Nigeria whose traditional in-laws push her husband to take a second wife when she fails to get pregnant, and think you know where this is going. But it twists and turns far deeper than ever expected.

August 29, 2017

Top Ten Tuesday: Hidden Gems in Coming of Age Fiction

Top Ten Tuesday is a weekly linkup of book bloggers hosted by The Broke and The Bookish! This week’s topic: hidden gems in a genre of our choice. This is a bit of a struggle for me, since I my reading tends towards things that are fairly popular and I don’t tend to read heavily in any particular genre. My most-read subgenre is probably coming-of-age stories, so I tried to pick ones that aren’t super trendy, at least?

The Lords of Discipline: I know this was on my list last week as well but I don’t care because it fits both topics. This was a relatively unusual novel, for my own reading, because it takes place at a military academy and is very heavy in the kind of boys-becoming-men narrative that I find mostly boring. But Conroy is a fantastic writer and this book is full of emotional truth.

The Marriage Plot: This is the least acclaimed (and honestly, the least good) of Eugenides’s novels, but honestly even not that great for him is still a really good book. This one leaves the Detroit setting of his first two and traces the relationships/loose love triangle between three university students and has interesting things to say about figuring out who you are.

About A Boy: There are two parallel growing-up narratives here…one an actual young teenager and one an overgrown teenager, and Nick Hornby has a wonderful touch for these kind of stories (he also wrote the screenplay for An Education, a favorite movie of mine).

The Love Song of Jonny Valentine: This book about a Justin Bieber-esque preteen idol trying to figure out who he actually is and what he actually wants creates a voice that pulls at your heartstrings, because he’s simultaneously so naive in some ways and jaded in others.

City of Thieves: This is a buddy road-trip book pairing up a dorky teenager and an older, suave solider in a decidedly grim setting (the siege of Leningrad), which keeps it from getting either too light or too serious, and even though it’s not hard to see the end coming it still has a big impact.

The Panopticon: Anais is just a teenager, but she’s already a hardened vet of “the system” by the time we meet her, and we both explore her past to see how she came to be who she is and watch her decide how she’s going to go forward as she balances between being the worst version of herself or trying for something better.

The Big Rewind: This one is a bit of a stretch for coming-of-age, but our Brooklyn hipster heroine Jett’s revisiting of her past relationships and efforts to get past her own damage and grow put it there for me. This book is charming.

Many Waters: This least-known chapter of Madeline L’Engle’s Time Quartet focuses on the “normal” twin brothers Sandy and Dennys and how they’re impacted by their own adventure: getting sent back into a Biblical story. I love all these books but have a special fondness for this one.

The Guineveres: Four young women, all named Guinevere, spend their teenage years “with the church” being raised by nuns. Each of them is there for a different reason, and each of them has a different response to the stress of the situation. A really lovely book.

Green Girl: This is a book with an odd, non-traditional structure, but the story it tells about a young American woman who recently lost her mother trying to make her way in London has a visceral impact if you can get into it.

January 17, 2017

Top Ten Tuesday: Underrated/Hidden Gem Books I’ve Read In The Past Year Or So

Top Ten Tuesday is a weekly linkup of book bloggers hosted by The Broke and The Bookish! This week, we’re writing about books that we enjoyed reading in the past year-ish that never really got the mainstream love we we think they deserve.

Life Itself: Roger Ebert was a portly movie critic who spent most of his life in the Midwest. But the reason his reviews became so popular is his real skill as a writer, and his application of that talent to the story of his own life yielded a really fantastic book. He wrote it as he was dying from cancer, and his reflections just tugged my heartstrings constantly. The early part of the book recounts a lot of family history and is on the boring side, but the rest of it is really wonderful.

The Last One: I’ve written about this one before, it was actually one of my best books of the year last year. This story of a woman in the wilderness on a Survivor-on-budget-steroids show that doesn’t know that there’s been a pandemic and is making her way through a devastated world is tense and thrilling and I could hardly put it down.

The Lords of Discipline: I’d heard of Conroy’s Prince of Tides and The Great Santini before, but this was the one that went on Kindle sale first, so I picked it up. I wasn’t expecting to love it, because military-themed stories don’t tend to do it for me, but I was sucked in and completely loved it and can’t wait to read everything else he’s ever written.

I Am Livia: The Amazon publishing imprints haven’t been great, honestly, but this book introduced me to a woman with a fascinating life: Livia Drusilla, wife of Octavian. I’m always down for a story about a badass woman, and even though there’s a silly “instalove” component, this is a very solid historical fiction.

Enchanted Islands: This book about a lifelong friendship between two women (and how one of them found herself on a secret mission in the Galapagos when she was in her 40s) wasn’t splashy, but was quietly powerful and very well-written.

Dead Wake: Most people think about Erik Larson’s Devil In The White City when they think about his work, but I actually found Dead Wake better. I loved the shifting perspectives and found myself rooting for the ship to make it to the other side even though I knew going in that it sank.

Sex With The Queen: We all enjoy flipping through the occasional tabloid in the checkout line, right? This is basically a tabloid for European royalty over the ages and it’s not super high quality literature but it’s super fun to read.

The Big Rewind: One of my favorite reads of 2016, this is a fresh and fun murder mystery/romantic comedy/ode to the power of a good mixtape was a delight.

Mr. Splitfoot: I didn’t rate this super highly when I first read it, but it’s one of the books that I found myself unable to forget about, while things I thought more highly of initially faded. Really sticks with you.

The Creation of Anne Boleyn: Anne Boleyn has inspired novelists and playwrights and screenwriters for a long time, and Susan Bordo’s look at what we actually know about her and the various myths that have surrounded her (and how they’ve changed over time) is incredibly interesting reading.

December 27, 2016

Top Ten Tuesday: Top Ten Best Books of 2016

Top Ten Tuesday is a weekly linkup of book bloggers hosted by The Broke and The Bookish! This week’s topic: the ten best books of 2016! I don’t read a bunch of new releases, but I read enough this year that I was able to pull together a list of my ten favorites. Many of these aren’t up yet and won’t be for quite a while yet, but they are all books I’ve read this calendar year that were published this calendar year!

The Last One: This story of a woman who doesn’t know that there’s been a massive pandemic while she’s struggling to make it on a big-budget wilderness survival show is well-written and totally unputdownable. One of those books where you promise yourself just a few more pages before bed and then it’s 3 in the morning.

Enchanted Islands: I loved the lifelong female friendship that formed the emotional core of this novel, and that it focused mostly on a woman’s life after 40 and the adventure she had then. It’s not a compulsive page-turner, but it’s subtle and wonderful.

The Serpent King: I don’t tend to read extensively in the YA space, but this novel about three outcasts going through their senior year in small-town Tennessee sucked me in and broke my heart.

The Guineveres: I’m still working on this debut novel, about four young women named Guinevere all being raised in a Catholic convent for different reasons, but I can already tell that it’s magnificent. Such fantastic writing and well-developed characters.

And After Many Days: The deterioration of a Nigerian family when their oldest son disappears is paralled with the destruction that Western corporations wreak in Africa in this well realized,

Mr. Splitfoot: I didn’t actually rate this book that highly when I first read it very early this year, but it’s stuck with me in ways I didn’t anticipate. It’s weird but beautifully written and haunting.

The Big Rewind: I’ve plugged this book a million times this year, but I loved it so I’ll plug it again! A female-centered High Fidelity-esque novel (with a little mystery story nestled in there too) for the millennial set, it’s a really fun, charming read.

Private Citizens: This dark, biting satire of the Silicon Valley tech boom scene features brilliant young people totally ruining their lives in a way that’s half hilarious, half horrifying.

The Queen of the Night: This book, about the life of a European opera singer, is totally insane and totally awesome and I’ve been recommending it to everyone lately.

The Girls: Less of a novel about the Manson cult as it’s often billed and more of one about the painful experience of being a 14 year-old girl, it’s full of passages that resonate with anyone who’s ever lived through that particular hell.

November 29, 2016

Top Ten Tuesday: Holiday Gift Guide

Top Ten Tuesday is a weekly linkup of book bloggers hosted by The Broke and The Bookish! This week’s prompt is to create a holiday gift guide. As my gift guide, I’m going to tell you about ten books that I’ve reviewed on this blog over the last year, and who they would make a good choice for this holiday season!

Beloved: Someone interested in the ways that slavery’s pernicious evil continues to reverberate. Toni Morrison’s classic makes the horrors of slavery, which can almost seem abstract in their scope, personal and real.

All The King’s Men: Anyone who is interested in what can be hiding behind a populist veneer. President-Elect Trump is not the first politician to rise to power behind a populist message. There are some definite parallels to Robert Penn Warren’s Willie Stark in our incoming administration.

The Creation of Anne Boleyn: Budding feminists. Most of us have heard of and are at least somewhat familiar with Anne Boleyn. Susan Bordo’s examination of the myths that have sprung up around her and how they’ve changed over time is a great primer on variable views of women over time.

The Serpent King: Anyone who has ever felt like they don’t belong. Which is kind of everyone, right? Jeff Zenter’s story about three high school misfits in their senior year brings that aching longing of adolescence rushing right back in the best possible way.

The Namesake: Someone with a complicated relationship with their parents. In Jhumpa Lahiri’s justly lauded novel, Gogol’s angst over his given name mirrors the tension he feels with his immigrant parents and their culture as he grows up in America.

A Tree Grows In Brooklyn: Anyone who’s loved someone unreliable. Little Francie Nolan worships her ne’er-do-well father in Betty Smith’s coming-of-age classic. The pain that he causes both Francie and her mother, Katie, without really “meaning” to will be instantly recognizable to anyone who has tried to count on someone that they shouldn’t.

The Big Rewind: Nostalgic older millennials. Remember mixtapes? If the actual creation of a putting songs on a cassette before your time, Libby Cudmore’s witty, entertaining debut probably won’t resonate with you very hard. But for the rest of us, it’s a treat!

American Gods: Mythology buffs. Neil Gaiman is an incredible writer, and this is one of his most popular works for a reason. It posits a world in which the gods of classical mythology (along with more modern subjects of worship) are actual, corporeal beings…a great mind-stretcher for people who love myths!

The Group: Young women who’ve just graduated from college. When you graduate, you feel like the whole world is in front of you. And it is! But the struggles that exist out there in the real world: relationships, work, motherhood are the same ones that we’ve been dealing with for nearly a hundred years. It’s comforting to realize we’ve all been through it before.

Enchanted Islands: Anyone who feels like the later stages of their life are fated to be boring. After a difficult but not particularly exciting life, the heroine of Allison Amend’s novel experiences real adventure for the first time in her late 40s, in a way that continues to play out through the rest of her days. Life’s adventures never really end.

July 26, 2016

Top Ten Tuesday: Top Ten Things Books Have Made Me Want To Do or Learn About After Reading Them

Top Ten Tuesday is a weekly linkup of book bloggers hosted by The Broke and The Bookish! This week’s topic: things that books have made me want to do or learn about after reading them! This one was a little bit of a struggle…while I’ve never watched a dance movie without immediately wanting to take a dance class the next day, books don’t usually inspire the same kind of “I need to go do that now!” mentality for me. But I went through my reading list and found some books that sparked a new interest for me!

To Do:

Black Beauty: Horseback riding- It was this and many other horsey books, to be honest. Like pretty much every little girl ever, I took horseback riding lessons. It never went anywhere because I’m terribly allergic to cats and most barns have cats so I’d get allergy attacks when I went, but every time I read a book about horses I feel like I should maybe start it up again. It’s never too late to learn, right?

Black Star, Bright Dawn: Dogsledding- Reading about a young Native American woman who races the Iditirod made me really want to get a team of huskies of my own and hitch up a sled! I’m glad my mom never indulged this particular whim of mine, I’m sure I’d have managed to get badly hurt.

The Big Rewind: Make a mixtape- Sure, I make iTunes playlists all the time. But actually putting one together for someone else and giving it to them? Never happened. But since reading this book, I’ve found myself wanting to put my feelings for someone else into music and let them experience it.

The Interestings: Look up my old summer camp friends- The book revolves around a group of kids who meet at a summer camp and stay close for the rest of their lives. I went to a day camp as a kid in the summers and I made some sweeps through facebook after I read it to see whatever happened to the kids I was friends with. I’m no longer close to any of them and we’re all scattered to the winds now.

The Egypt Game: Visit Egypt- The book doesn’t take place there, but it fed my Egyptophilia as a kid and, along with all the other reading I did about Ancient Egypt (which was a lot), made me want to go to there. This one is still on the to-do list…I want to see the pyramids and the sphinx!

To Learn About:

The Other Boleyn Girl: Tudor England- I remember reading a book or two about Elizabeth I that I liked as a young teen, but it was when I first read Phillipa Gregory’s bestseller that I really got hardcore into the Tudors, which is now one of my favorite time periods to read about in fiction and nonfiction alike.

The Man Who Mistook His Wife For A Hat: Psychology- When I first started college, I was a political science major. While in light of future developments (since I’m a lobbyist now and everything), I might should have stuck with that, reading Oliver Sacks’ book got me passionately into psychology and made me change my major and I regret nothing.

Blonde: Marilyn Monroe- Yep, another white chick who’s all into Norma Jean. How original, I know. But there’s a reason there are a bazillion biographies of her out there…she’s undeniably compelling. Before I read this, I’d loved many of her movies, but I’d never given much thought to the human being behind the dumb blonde routine. Turns out she was a really interesting person.

The Stranger Beside Me: Ted Bundy- On the one hand, he was a smart, charming, and handsome young man who volunteered for the suicide call center and would seem to have a bright future ahead of him. On the other, he killed several young women in horrible ways. That kind of internal contradiction was fascinating, and I read a few other books on Bundy, but none that got at his simultaneous humanity and inhumanity the way this one did.

The Hot Zone: Deadly viruses- The plot of this book could have easily been a fictional thriller, it was so tightly constructed and urgent. I was fascinated by the people who spend their whole lives running towards the terrible sicknesses instead of away, but nothing I read in this area afterwards had the same kind of propulsive intensity.

June 21, 2016

Top Ten Tuesday: Top Ten Favorite 2016 Releases So Far This Year

Top Ten Tuesday is a weekly linkup of book bloggers hosted by The Broke and The Bookish! I’m actually barely squeaking this one out: I’ve only read about 15 books published in 2016 at all (I’m doing some backlog catching up!), so here are the best ten I’ve read, some of which I haven’t even gotten to publish my reviews for here yet!

The Serpent King: I loved this YA novel about a group of outcast teenage friends in the rural South and only wish I had been 16 when I read it for the first time because I would have loved it all the more.

Enchanted Islands: This piece of WWII-era historical fiction based on a real person is written beautifully and has the kind rich character development I can’t resist. Not your typical WWII by a long shot (it takes place in American and the Galapagos Islands, not Europe).

The Big Rewind: Fun, witty, engaging, light…I’ve recommended this as a beach read more than once and I stand by that: put it in your tote bag and bring it along to the water!

The Winged Histories: This loose sequel is slow to start and get yourself oriented in, but the writing is just heartbreakingly lovely and it is very worth it to stick with it even if you can’t get into it at first.

And After Many Days: I love books that work on multiple time tracks, and the way this novel parallels a family’s despair when a beloved son disappears with the lives of his parents and the choice they made during their younger years

Private Citizens: Millennials (especially those on the older edge, like me) are finally old enough to have biting satire written about us by one of our own. Thought-provoking and skewering at the same time.

Mr. Splitfoot: This wasn’t always the most even book to read, but it was haunting and as I thought it might, it’s stuck with me since I read it.

On The Edge of Gone: A teenage biracial autistic girl with a drug-addict mother and a transgender sister could seem like melodrama in the wrong hands. But in Corinne Duyvis’, Denise and her family are real and relatable. A fresh take on the “end of the world” drama.

Approval Junkie: With super well-known comedians, there’s such high expectations for these kinds of books of short essays to be just incredible from top to bottom. Faith Salie’s lower profile makes the genuine humor of hers a pleasant surprise

Thirst: Living out west, especially with the protracted drought we’ve seen lately, makes you wonder about a world without fresh water. The pacing is spotty, but the horror is real and visceral.

May 31, 2016

Top Ten Tuesday: Beach Reads Week

Top Ten Tuesday is a weekly linkup of book bloggers hosted by The Broke and The Bookish! This is a topic very near and dear to my heart: I grew up on an inland lake in Michigan, and until I moved out to Nevada, you could find me in the summer going back to my mom’s pretty often to take advantage of the opportunity to lay out on the boat. I did plenty of reading while basking in the sun, and even though I’m generally of the opinion that any read can be a beach read if you take it to the beach, here are ten books I think match the breezy feel of a day by or on the water!

The Devil Wears Prada: I’ve talked about the life lessons about balancing work and home that can be taken away from this novel, but it’s also a thinly-disguised expose about working for Anna Wintour at Vogue and the descriptions about how the rich and fashionable live are frothy and fun to read about.

Pride and Prejudice: A lot of Austen would be very beach-readable, but this one, to me, has the most lightness and humor. There’s lots of romance, too, and it’s very easy to just enjoy without having to think too hard.

Gone Girl: Gillian Flynn takes the domestic drama suspense novel to a whole new level. Nick and Amy’s awful behavior gets you hooked and the plot races forward at a breakneck pace, so you’re sucked in and it’s hard to put down.

Bridget Jones’ Diary: This book is as rip roaringly funny now as it was when I first read it in high school. Whenever I feel like I’m not adulting very well, a dip into Bridget’s story makes me realize I have it much more together than I give myself credit for. And that I’d rather die than record my daily calories and alcohol units in my diary.

The Other Boleyn Girl: I imagine lots of people will have long since read this one, but a good royalty-behaving-badly book based in the Tudor era will never not be a great way to pass a day in the sun. If you’ve read this one but you haven’t read any of the companion novels dealing with Henry’s other wives, they’re cut from the same cloth.

Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs: Chuck Klosterman is a fantastic writer, and his collection of insightful and witty essays on pop culture pull tons of references together to make you think (but not too hard) about the world we live in.

Dead Until Dark: As you’ve probably heard even if you never watched the series, True Blood was a sexy, soapy romp that also touched on some larger themes. The book series mostly stays away from the larger themes part, but keeps all the steamy fun recounting the romantic adventures of Sookie Stackhouse, psychic waitress. This whole series is actually pretty delightful even if paranormal romance isn’t really your genre.

Chocolat: They made a movie out of this, but I hated the movie so if you did too don’t let that dissuade you. This story of Vianne, a single mother, who makes chocolate, and her young daughter in a small French village has romance, female friendship, and a running battle between our heroine and the local priest who takes a strong and instant dislike to her.

The Rosie Project: When a socially awkward and intensely logical (and probably autistic) college professor decides it’s time to get married, he devises an intensive questionnaire to find him the most ideal mate. But when one of his friends puts Rosie, who definitely would not score highly on the survey, in his path, he finds himself drawn to her despite knowing she’s not “right” for him. Or is she? I’m no fan of romance, but this is sweet and funny and perfect to take for a day by the water.

The Big Rewind: I juuust posted about this, but it’s the best beachy book I’ve read in a while, so I’m adding it to this list. Fun and smart and witty and a quick read, this is a great choice to tuck in your beach bag.

May 19, 2016

Book 25: The Big Rewind

“I glared up at her. If there are vampires anywhere in the world, they’re in this end of Brooklyn, sympathy-sucking leeches living every day like it’s their own private reality show, latching on to anything that might get them a moment of attention, a warm body, a subway seat on a ten-minute ride.”

Dates Read: February 28-March 1, 2016

Rating: 8/10

I remember making mixtapes. When you were a kid growing up when I was a kid, there were two ways to get songs onto your tape: a dual tape deck (covetable, and eventually something my family had, but not until later) or the good old radio. I don’t know how many nights I sat there in my bedroom, waiting for a song to come on so I could add it to my mix. Obviously this made for some haphazard tracklists because things were in the order you could get them off the radio, so I never got much into the mixtape as artform. I am an obsessive playlist curator on my iTunes today, though, which is for all intents and purposes the same thing.

Mixtapes as artform are at the heart of Libby Cudmore’s The Big Rewind. We’re going back to Brooklyn…but this time, the modern-day hipster-infested version. Jett Bennett is subletting her grandmother’s rent-controlled apartment and working temp jobs while she tries to figure out what to do with her life now that she has her Master’s in music journalism but no one seems to want to pay her for her writing. When she gets a mixtape in her mailbox meant for her neighbor KitKat, she goes to drop it off…and discovers KitKat’s body, murdered by a blow to the head. Jett works to try to solve the crime, the only clue to which is the mixtape, and is inspired to go back through her own collection of mixtapes from lost loves, reaching back out to them along the way.

The Big Rewind was obviously inspired by Nick Hornby’s High Fidelity, with both books featuring main plotlines in which the music-obsessed protagonist reconnects with ex-lovers as they try to figure out where they’re going with their lives. But it’s not a gender-swapped rip-off: there’s the mystery of what happened to KitKat to move the plot forward, and Jett is a very different person than Hornby’s Rob Fleming. But the parallels are clear, and if you enjoyed Hornby’s, you should enjoy Cudmore’s, too.

This is a perfect summer/beach read for 20- and 30-somethings. It’s entertaining and moves quickly, blending together light mystery and light romance with bright, witty prose. The reason I throw an age range on there is that the book very much reflects the world as it would exist to a mid-to-late 20s resident of Brooklyn: it’s peppered with references to Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, blogs, Reddit, etc, that might just fly right over the head of people who use social media primarily to post family photos and political memes. As someone who spends a lot of time online myself, it feels very organic and natural, but for someone who experiences the internet as a less integral part of their life, it might be confusing. That being said, I really enjoyed it and would definitely recommend it. This is Cudmore’s debut novel, and I’m excited to see what she does next!

Tell me, blog friends…when was the last time you made a mixtape?

**I received a free copy of this book from the publisher, William Morrow Books, through Edelweiss in exchange for a fair and honest review**

Note: Review cross-posted at Cannonball Read

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