Books of 2020- Installment #14

66. Pizza Girl by Jean Kyoung Frazier

This book was very melancholy and took awhile for me to get into. Hello, Pandemic! I would say it was interesting look into the psyche of a pregnant high schooler- well, the summer after high school.

67. More than Maybe by Erin Hahn

This was right up my alley! A fun high school romance with lots of great music thrown in! 

68. Again, Again by E. Lockhart

This high school romance (what's up with three in a row?!?!?!?! That doesn't sound like me at all!!!) was billed as a multiverse romance and I guess so. But it didn't work for me. At all. There were things I found interesting but overall, it felt more like the author's rough drafts to me. Like she couldn't quite bear to let those options go even though they weren't what she ultimately settled on for her characters. That said though I looooooooooooooooved the art discussions throughout the book and that was fantastic. Sign me up for more that that!

69. Mapping the Interior by Stephen Graham Jones

The book was on my TBR since I learned of it right before its release and for various reasons I didn't get it until now. It was so weird and relatable all at the same time. The narrator's voice feels so real that I feel like the author had this experience and just wrote it down as a fiction because that's the only way people would buy it. Otherwise they would say, "Dude! What were you smoking?" And I am sure that's ass-backwards but my point is it was vivid!!!! I felt like I was there in that modular home watching it unfold in front of me, the smell of the cigarettes wafting around me. The jingle of the fancy dancer echoing in my brain!! Wow!

70. Drowned Country by Emily Tesh

This is a continuation of the Greenhollow Series. Silver in the Wood was amazing and I was so excited to read this. I had deleted the ending in my mind and so was a little surprised by what was happening at the beginning of this story. It's a funny experience when you realize you altered a book to be more of what you wanted! 

I've read 70 books and 55 were by woman, 12 were by men, 2 were anthologies by both women and men, 1 was by a nonbinary author, and 7 1/2 were translations. My year of reading lots of women and at least 12 translations is going well in that I've read mostly female authors, but the world is going through a pandemic and state sanctioned murders in the form of police brutality with a horrible man still at the helm and supported by horrible men in the Congress. In short this year has been really rough. What will this global health crisis leave us with? What changes will we make, not only in terms of the huge inequities of our health system where people of color and the poor (which let's face it- the system works really hard to ensure that people of color, especially black people, are poor) are more than extremely disadvantaged, but also all the other ways in which our society, our systems, actively damage people of color? Only time will tell. But I hope it is a greater sense of community, a need to care for one and another and support each other, not just people with the same colored skin as ourselves, not just people with the same sized wallet as ours. My naive? hope is all of this isolation leaves us wanting to lift each other up and not hold others down.