I imagine this book has a lot of similarities to the The Summer I Turned Pretty series, because it was certainly reminiscent of the TV adaptation I've seen several times. Which is so fun! And what I look for in a romance book with a fun, colorful cover like this one! It encapsulates what I imagine an East coast summer surrounded by best friends would feel like (I've only experienced West Coast summers in my 23 years of life thus far). And really, I loved all the romance packed into this story, but most of my post-read thoughts are drifting to this book's strong female friendships. As I've noted with Book Lovers, Emily Henry knows how to write some great dialogue; I feel like her characters actually talk the way people talk in real life, even if those things are cringey at times. But through the dialogue and flashbacks, the relationships between Harriet, Cleo, and Sabrina jump up in three dimensional, relatable quality. From the very first chapter, nostalgia for specific college memories of mine had me hooked. Because the descriptions we get of these three girls going from randomly-placed college roommates to inseparable, sister-level kinds of friends is something I've been blessed to experience in my own life. The motif of a happy place, whether existing in Harriet's state of mind or the physical Maine beach house and quaint town, also manifests in how Cleo and Sabrina are a part of her girlhood, during and post-college. I could get so sappy with my own recollections of meeting my versions of Cleo and Sabrina, of dinners and beach trips and movie nights and late night drives that solidified friendships I can't believe I ever lived without. But I'll cut it short here by saying this: my favorite part of this book is its spotlight on the importance of holding onto best friendships through life's changing seasons. I should mention Wyn now, cause I love him and his self-deprecating humor, furniture making, and cute gentlemanly manners. He's a golden retriever/boyfriend/leading rom-com man if I've ever seen one. I like how he and Harriet balance each other out in so many subtle ways, and how they like to point those things out even when they're fighting and technically broken up. The fake dating trope popped off again and again and again. I loved the tension. I think one of Henry's strongest narrative decisions was  jumping back and forth between the series of events happening at the beach house post-breakup, and revealing the story of how they met, fell in love, and broke up. Clues are dropped left and right about what happened, because I really was leaning in thinking what happened, these two kids are clearly meant for each other. But when the whole picture comes into focus, and they finally talk about what should've been talked about months ago (classic miscommunication trope), the pay off was satisfying. I will say this, though -- I started to get annoyed with the pacing just a smidge. I have a minimal understanding of the romance genre's general plot blueprint, but I know it relies on dramatic irony. Aka, readers screaming like the characters can hear them, Just talk about it! You clearly love each other! But the amount of times Harriet and Wyn acknowledge that there isn't anyone else for them but each other almost made the whole thing feel like a joke. Because, if I were them, I would throw the rest of my cares and anxieties to the wind and say, I love you. We'll figure out everything else as we go along. So when Wyn says they should choose to be together rather than in love from a distance, I actually threw my fist in the air and said, "Finally!" Okay. Rant over. I did, however, like this book's spin on the "third-act breakup," instead having the two love interests broken up before the story's really begun. I cannot tell a lie -- Book Lovers still sits on its pedestal as my favorite romance novel, but this one's sitting primly on the pedestal right below. :)

​

Some of my favorite quotes from Happy Place:

"My best friends taught me a new kind of quiet, the peaceful stillness of knowing one another so well you don’t need to fill the space. And a new kind of loud: noise as a celebration, as the overflow of joy at being alive, here, now."

"Like even when something beautiful breaks, the making of it still matters."

"I want my life to be like-like making pottery. I want to enjoy it while it's happening, not just for where it might get me eventually."

"He laughs against my cheek. I wish I could swallow the sound, that it would put down roots in my stomach and grow through me like a seed."

"'What if she wants to be alone?'
She has a point. It’s possible.
But people don’t run or hide only when they want to be alone.
'What if,' I say, 'she needs to know she isn’t?'"

The 2019 version of me who first picked up this book and said "Not for me" is not the version of me writing this book review. That 2019 version evolved into a 2022 version who decided to give the TikTok-trending Song of Achilles a try. She bought a copy in a busy Florence bookshop and finished it quietly sobbing next to a total stranger on her flight home. But the 2024 version of me writing this review found a $5 copy of Circe at a North Park, San Diego book fair and thought, "It would be good to read for my thesis research. Why not give it another try." Madeline Miller's prose and storytelling style is one of my favorites among the great and the mediocre, but her ability to make seemingly unrelatable characters into three-dimensional, raw, humane characters isn't limited to Song of Achilles. While I enjoyed some of the subtle references to her other novel and its famous Greek characters, Circe is entirely its own. And even though many different renowned Greek myths see Circe, the exiled goddess and sorceress, lingering on the edges of their narrative, this book is clearly Circes' to illuminate. It begins at Circe's beginning, the kind of beginning that sort of feels like a middle, because gods and the descendants of Titans operate on their own calendars. The  passing of time and its effects are so well-captured in this book, especially because Circe is a narrator as aware of her own divinity as she can be while still only knowing what it's like to be immortal. It felt like a kind of mind trick to realize that hundreds and thousands of years pass between the events in this book, because Circe recounts her tales with the perspective of a goddess. The only instances where she comments on time are when she's made painfully aware of the many things she loves having expirations dates: the herbs and natural ingredients used in her draughts, the rise and fall of cities, the men eaten by the monster she turned Scylla into, and her own son, Telegonus. And then there's the matter of her three main lovers: the wise and creative Daedalus, the rampaging and complex Odysseus, and finally, Telemachus the Just. Her story doesn't revolve around the men who keep her company before their time is up. But her brief time with them lasts. I think this theme concerning time, specifically time from the point of view of a goddess never wanting for more of it, just makes the ups and downs of living a finite amount of minutes and hours and days all the more stark. I've gotten existential enough; I'll comment on something more lighthearted. I loved all the descriptions of Circe's island! It's the definition of an "I want to go to there" kind of place for an introvert who dreams of having a magical house that stocks and cleans itself, and beautiful private beaches, forests, and cliffs to go with it. Seeing the treatment Circe endured in the household of her father makes the solitude she receives in her exile ironic. Even Circe acknowledges that getting to finally rid herself of the family that never treated her like true family is a reprieve, not a punishment. Her island isn't a utopia, hence her iconic "I'll turn these men into pigs and be done with them" era. But the island brought her freedom. It, I think, allowed her to blossom into a version of herself she never would've been able to find in the environment of her childhood. She certainly never would've met the people she did, or become a mother and learn what it's like to care for a son she'll far outlive. Circe is made relatable in her trial and error, her mistakes and guilt, her choice to endure because it's not actually a choice at all. In this way, the human race is reflected in her: hurting, but enduring. And Circe is repeatedly good in her helping mortals and gods alike, time and time again, even when she's slighted in return and has every reason to become as callous as some of the gods she can't stand. This doesn't strike me as overtly feminist literature, and perhaps it's meant to be subtle, the opposite of in your face, but Circe is a feminist icon if I've ever seen one. She's also the one who warns Odysseus about the Sirens he'll have to sail past, marking him as the one man to hear the Sirens' call and survive (insert relevancy to thesis research here :). Oh, and the ending? It reminded me bittersweetly of La La Land's genius end, flinging itself so far ahead like a net that hasn't caught any fish yet. It implies Circe's plan to eat the flowers she's used to transform others, and in turn transform herself into a mortal, so she might live the rest of her days with a husband and children. So she might walk through the Underworld one day to be with them. To have an end. And readers can only hope she gets to live a version of that flashing epilogue once she drinks from her bowl. Now that's the kind of ambiguous ending I'm talking about.


Some of my favorite quotes from Circe:

"That is one thing gods and mortals share. When we are young, we think ourselves the first to have each feeling in the world."

"All this while, I have been a weaver without wool, a ship without the sea. Yet now look where I sail."

"I had no right to claim him, I knew it. But in a solitary life, there are rare moments when another soul dips near yours, as stars once a year brush the earth. Such a constellation was he to me."

"My name in his mouth. It sparked a feeling in me, sharp and eager. He was like ocean tides indeed, I thought. You could look up, and the shore would be gone."

"I had once told Daedalus that I would never marry, because my hands were dirty, and I liked my work too much. But this was a man with his own dirty hands."

"I loved his certainty, his world that was an easy place of right action divided sharply from wrong, of mistake and consequence, of monsters defeated. It was no world I knew, but I would live in it as long as he would let me."

"'It is strange to think of a goddess needing friends.'
'All creatures that are not mad need them.'"

"He does not mean that it does not hurt. He does not mean that we are not frightened. Only that: we are here. This is what it means to swim in the tide, to walk the earth and feel it touch your feet. This is what it means to be alive."

I think it might be impossible to not give this book's title a second glance. It really is eye-catching, and it certainly caught mine. I listened to the audiobook version, which I highly recommend, considering it's read by the author herself, Jennette McCurdy. There are plenty of clever, "haha, that was witty" moments in the writing itself; I genuinely think McCurdy has committed to a writing style and voice that works well for her personality and the story she has to tell. Be warned, it's a sad story. A story that had me speechless and open-mouthed at times, shaking my head in disbelief at others, and contemplative throughout. As one could probably guess, McCurdy focuses on her tumultuous relationship with her mother, and the multitude of ways said relationship effected her. The narrative is broken up into two parts, "Before" and "After," and the opening scene vividly sets the tone for the kind of story readers are in for. I didn't grow up watching iCarly, or really any Nickelodeon at all, so learning about McCurdy's early acting career and experiences with "the creator" as well as the pressures any prepubescent teen girl must face didn't come with any sort of bias from my own childhood days spent watching her on TV. I think McCurdy spends careful time describing the living environment of her house, the dispositions of her other family members, and the constant control her mother had over every aspect of her life well into her adulthood. The book's tone sets readers up perfectly to be outsiders looking in, aware of the clear abuse McCurdy suffered from a mother she looked up to and wanted to please. It's extremely psychological, to say the least, and intriguing to read through the lens of the now far-removed and clearer-eyed McCurdy. The narrative deals heavily with issues of anorexia and bulimia McCurdy learned from her mother. I haven't dealt with eating disorders, but I resonated with these parts of McCurdy's life on a level that every young woman subjected to societal standards and oversexualization can (sadly) relate to. She captures what it feels like to be aware of your own body for the first time, to see and be a little afraid of how it's growing and changing before your very eyes. She evokes a certain kind of melancholy for young female friendships, that yearning to just fit in when you have no idea who you even want to be yet. McCurdy's honesty about her love life and experiences with sexual intimacy were also empowering to listen to. I appreciated a lack of "fade to black" scenes and her raw delivery in the audiobook. It's books like these, plainly displaying the author's insecurities, mistakes, and fears, that readers can actually connect with as well as respect. They make you stop and think, Wow, they really didn't hold back. That takes guts. McCurdy writes about her mother in such a delicate way, and I get it. Despite the abuse, gaslighting, trauma of hospital visits and cancer and pressure, that woman was her mother. The way McCurdy looks back and comments on everything that happened because of and since her influence is honest, in a word. I once again recommend listening to the audiobook to literally hear from McCurdy herself. I don't think you'll be disappointed.



Some of my favorite quotes from I'm Glad My Mom Died:

"I don’t like knowing people in the context of things. "Oh, that’s the person I work out with. That’s the person I’m in a book club with. That’s the person I did that show with." Because once the context ends, so does the friendship."

"Loving someone is vulnerable. It's sensitive. It's tender. And I get lost in them. If I love someone, I start to disappear. It's so much easier to just do googly eyes and fond memories and inside jokes for a few months, run the second things start to get real, then repeat the cycle with someone new."

"Through writing, I feel power for maybe the first time in my life. I don’t have to say somebody else’s words. I can write my own. I can be myself for once. I like the privacy of it. Nobody’s watching. Nobody’s judging. Nobody’s weighing in. No casting directors or agents or managers or directors or Mom. Just me and the page. Writing is the opposite of performing to me. Performing feels inherently fake. Writing feels inherently real."