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| Yup, that's me reading on the beach! |
Red Sparrow by Jason Matthews: I started this book a little bit before our trip, but read most of it while I was there. I wanted to read it before the upcoming movie adaptation, and Sarah and I also decided to pick it as our next book for GCBC. This book is a spy thriller about a young male CIA agent and a young female Russian agent who end up being assigned to spy on/recruit each other. I had very mixed feelings about this book. I really enjoyed the story, but there was just something about the writing that bugged me. It’s hard to explain, it just felt like it was a little sexist - like even though one of the main characters was this super tough woman, she was written with such a male gaze. I also could not understand why each chapter ended with a recipe. And there was a lot to keep track of with all the character names, and as the book went on, there were more and more different POVs, with the end result that the two main characters got lost a bit towards the end. That being said, I enjoyed it and will definitely read the sequels, and look forward to seeing the movie adaptation as well. I haven't had a chance to discuss it with Sarah yet, but I saw on Goodreads that she only gave it 2 stars (I gave it 3.5), so I think we can safely assume that she didn't like it!
Class Mom by Laurie Gelman: This book was an absolutely perfect vacation read, so many thanks to my friend Karen for recommending it to me! This was a very quick and funny book, set in Kansas City, about a woman with two much older kids who is reluctantly the class mom for her son's kindergarten class. It's told just from the main character's very snarky point of view, but over the course of the book we also learn about the other people in her family, other parents in the class, the teacher, etc. With each chapter starting with an e-mail sent to the whole class, it's definitely partially a satire of school politics, but loved all the quirky characters as well. If you like the tv show "Odd Mom Out" you should definitely enjoy this one - it's set in Kansas City not NYC and among regular middle class folks rather than the Upper East Side elite, but very much a similar mentality. I would definitely add this book to my recommended light fiction choices.
Artemis by Andy Weir: I have been dying to read this one, and have been on the library wait list for it since it came out, so luckily for me I finally was able to borrow it right before vacation. It's an enjoyable science fiction novel set in a future where there is a small colony on the moon, and the protagonist is a young Arabic woman smuggler raised on the moon who gets caught up in a bigger plot to control resources on the moon. Standard space caper but well done with interesting characters. Really the only flaw in this book is that it suffers in comparison to Andy Weir’s first book, “The Martian,” one of my favorite books of the last few years, which was just so amazing and original and thus hard to follow up. I would definitely recommend this one, it’s just not a must read, particularly if you are not a science fiction fan. (Whereas "The Martian" was grounded in reality in a way that I think made it appealing even to people who do not usually think of themselves as science fiction readers.)
Queen of Shadows by Sarah J. Maas: This book is quite long, so I'm not even halfway done with it and therefore I'm not going to review it yet, but am listing it here since it was another book I started reading on vacation! This is the 4th novel in Sarah J. Maas's "Throne of Glass" series, a highly enjoyable young adult fantasy series that my 13 year old daughter Allison and I have been reading together over the last few months. So far I'm enjoying it a lot, including enough to actually read it on the plane, when I often can't concentrate on more than a magazine.
And as a bonus, I'll also tell you what all the other members of my family read on this vacation! (Side note: it is a lot easier to read on vacation when your kids are old enough that they'll actually sit and read books too when they're not swimming!)
My husband Dan started with "Throne of Glass" by Sarah J. Maas, the first book in the series I was just telling you about above. He enjoyed it, but not as much as Allison and I did - which is not surprising since the first book is definitely the girliest one of the series so far. Dan then read "Forever Is the Worst Long Time" by Camille Pagan, from my top 10 books of 2017. This is a contemporary novel that, while written by a woman, definitely has a Jonathan Tropper kind of feel if you've ever read any of his books. Dan loved it and he says it even eked out a tear or two from him which is a rare occurrence! Finally, Dan started but did not finish before our trip ended, "All the Feels" by Danika Stone. I haven't read this one personally, it's one of the MANY unread books on my kindle.
Allison has always been an amazing reader, and these days reads both young adult and adult books. On this trip, she read a lot, she just happened to pick two very long books! First, she read "The Twelve" by Justin Cronin. This is the sequel to "The Passage," and discerning readers of this blog will know that "The Passage" was a very memorable read for me and is one of my most favorite books of all time, along with both of its sequels! Just like her mother, Allison deemed "The Twelve" not quite as good as "The Passage" but still worthy of a 5 star review - and that's saying more coming from Allison than from me as she is a very tough critic! Allison then started "Queen of Shadows" prompting me to do the same.
Jonah is 9, and on this trip I believe he read the most books he has ever read in a week in his entire life, by far. He read 3 novels - "The Talented Clementine" by Sara Pennypacker, "Frindle" by Andrew Clements, and "Soupy Saturdays with the Pain and the Great One" by Judy Blume. He also read 6 books from the non-fiction "Who Is" series - "Who Was Alexander Graham Bell?", "Who Was Leonardo DaVinci?", "What Was the Ice Age?", "What Was the Age of the Dinosaurs?", "Where is the White House?", and "Where Is Mount Rushmore?" These books are arguably a bit easy for him now as he can pretty much tear through one of them in an hour, but he loves them so how can I complain! He also flipped through the 2018 National Geographic Kids Almanac, and read some more of "Legends: The Best Players, Games, and Teams in Football" by Howard Bryant. This is a kids book but geared more at older kids, and thank goodness it is long because it was the only book he didn't finish of the books we brought with us!
So there you have it, those are all the books the Hecht family read in Mexico!
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