And the holiday season has begun! We had a fairly busy month, actually, and then next month has some stuff as well, and then it’s time to hunker down and wait for the baby to show!

In Books…

• Dumplin’: I’m a little older than the target audience for this young adult book, but I found it mostly pretty charming. I thought Willowdean was a well-rendered teenage girl, full of contradictions, but her relationship with Bo was too flat to really center the narrative the way it might have.
• The Lying Life of Adults: Giovanna, too, feels like a realistic teenage girl, particularly in her righteousness and spitefulness. But I couldn’t actually get invested in her story, Ferrante never gave me a reason to care about her. The Neapolitan setting feels rich, but the language is clunky and the narrative has no drive.
• Clariel: I love the original Old Kingdom trilogy, so when Garth Nix announced that he was returning to the world to write additional novels I was really excited! This was released several years back now, so I’d heard the disappointed feedback and…I don’t get it? Is it quite up to the standard of the first few books? No. But it’s not far off, and I found Clariel herself to be an interesting character. I liked it!
• Shadowshaper: I didn’t realize that I’d read so many books focused on teenage girls this month until I put this list together! This, for me, was the weakest one. I loved the setting, but found Sierra a deeply under-written character and the magic system to be also inadequately built out. I wanted to like it more than I actually did, I mostly got bored with it.
• Underground: I knew vaguely of the sarin gas attacks on the Tokyo subway, but had never read about it in much depth. Japanese novelist Haruki Murakami’s way of writing about it (by conducting interviews with various people who were on the trains about their experience) was intriguing and compelling in its own way, and the interviews he did with former members of the Aum cult who carried out the attack were an interesting way to look at how it operated.

In Life…

• Weekend getaway to Las Vegas: My husband has access to Raiders tickets through his work, so we took advantage of that and did a quick trip to the other end of the state. The stadium is gorgeous, and even though neither of us are invested in the team, it was fun to watch live sports! This is probably our last trip away, just the two of us, for a while so I’m glad we did it!

One Thing:

I’ve been living for the past few months in Old Navy’s maternity leggings. I can’t speak to their durability since I won’t be wearing them for an especially long period of time or anything, but they go over the bump, they’re comfortable, and they have pockets, which are surprisingly impossible to find on, like, any other maternity leggings south of $100.

Gratuitous Pug Picture: