March 2020 Books

All (abridged) summaries taken from Good Reads. Notes are my own.

#1: Marcel the Shell: The Most Surprised I’ve Ever Been by Dean Fleischer-Camp and Jenny Slate, Paintings by Amy Lind

Summary:
Marcel the Shell with Shoes On is walking on the blanket when he is unexpectedly launched high into the air. Tumbling through space, the bird's-eye view offers our small friend not only a glimpse of the important things in life--his beloved Nana who sleeps in a fancy French bread, a stinky shoe, and a monstrous baby--but also a much bigger picture. Sometimes the most wonderful discoveries are the ones we least expect.

Personal Rating:
10/10

#2: Marcel the Shell with Shoes on: Things About Me by Jenny Slate and Dean Fleischer-Camp, Paintings by Amy Lind

Summary:
From wearing a lentil as a hat to hang-gliding on a Dorito, Marcel is able to find magic in the everyday. He may be small, but he knows he has a lot of good qualities. He may not be able to lift anything by himself, but when he needs help, he calls upon his family. He may never be able own a real dog . . . but he has a pretty awesome imagination.

Personal Rating:
10/10

#3: i’ll be your blue sky by Marisa de los Santos

Summary:
The New York Times bestselling author revisits the characters from her beloved novels Love Walked In and Belong to Me in this captivating, beautifully written drama involving family, friendship, secrets, sacrifice, courage, and true love for fans of Jojo Moyes, Elin Hilderbrand, and Nancy Thayer. On the weekend of her wedding, Clare Hobbes meets an elderly woman named Edith Herron. During the course of a single conversation, Edith gives Clare the courage to do what she should have done months earlier: break off her engagement to her charming, yet overly possessive, fiancé...Shifting between the 1950s and the present and told in the alternating voices of Edith and Clare, I’ll Be Your Blue Sky is vintage Marisa de los Santos—an emotionally evocative novel that probes the deepest recesses of the human heart and illuminates the tender connections that bind our lives. 

Personal Rating:
8.5/10

#4: The Bookshop of Yesterdays by Amy Meyerson

Summary:
A woman inherits a beloved bookstore and sets forth on a journey of self-discovery in this poignant debut about family, forgiveness and a love of reading. Miranda Brooks grew up in the stacks of her eccentric Uncle Billy’s bookstore, solving the inventive scavenger hunts he created just for her. But on Miranda’s twelfth birthday, Billy has a mysterious falling-out with her mother and suddenly disappears from Miranda’s life. She doesn’t hear from him again until sixteen years later when she receives unexpected news: Billy has died and left her Prospero Books, which is teetering on bankruptcy—and one final scavenger hunt.

​Personal Rating:
8.5/10

#5: No One Is Too Small To Make A Difference by Greta Thunberg

Summary:
No One Is Too Small to Make A Difference brings you Greta in her own words, for the first time. Collecting her speeches that have made history across the globe, from the United Nations to Capitol Hill and mass street protests, her book is a rallying cry for why we must all wake up and fight to protect the living planet, no matter how powerless we feel. Our future depends upon it. 

Notes:
- “This is the time to wake up. This is the moment in history when we need to be wide awake,” (118).

Personal Rating:
10/10

#6: Citizen by Claudia Rankine

Summary:
Claudia Rankine's bold new book recounts mounting racial aggressions in ongoing encounters in twenty-first-century daily life and in the media. Some of these encounters are slights, seeming slips of the tongue, and some are intentional offensives in the classroom, at the supermarket, at home, on the tennis court with Serena Williams and the soccer field with Zinedine Zidane, online, on TV-everywhere, all the time. The accumulative stresses come to bear on a person's ability to speak, perform, and stay alive. Our addressability is tied to the state of our belonging, Rankine argues, as are our assumptions and expectations of citizenship. In essay, image, and poetry, Citizen is a powerful testament to the individual and collective effects of racism in our contemporary, often named "post-race" society.

Notes:
- “The space next to the man is the pause in a conversation you are suddenly rushing to fill...your body speaks to the space you fill and you keep trying to fill it except the space belongs to the body of the man next to you, not to you,” (131).

Personal Rating:
6.5/10

#7: The Power Notebooks by Katie Roiphe

Summary:
Katie Roiphe, culture writer and author of The Morning After, shares a timely blend of memoir, feminist investigation, and exploration of famous female writers’ lives, in a bold, essential discussion of how strong women experience their power.

Notes:
- “Strong interpretations or opinions or worldviews are somehow better received if they are couched in approachability...Especially if the writer is a woman,” (59-60).- “Fantasies of quasimaternal power involve a tricky kind of subjugation to someone else’s difficulties; it is an antique female idea of taking care of things, assuming control, but at the same time erasing one’s own desires,” (88).

Personal Rating:
8.5/10

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