Running with Lions (Book Review)

I’ve seen Running with Lions by Julian Winters repeatedly recommended, but outside the sphere of book bloggers it doesn’t seem to be all that popular; it’s been on my TBR for a while, but it is significantly harder to find than Julian Winters’ more recent novels like, say, Right Where I Left You. Between those good reviews and my recently renewed interest in soccer fiction thanks to Ted Lasso, it seemed like the time to finally seek this one out. Thankfully, after months of not having the book, the library came in clutch for me.

What’s it about?

Looking down the barrel at his last year of high school and an unknown future, Sebastian wants to make the most of his last soccer summer camp with his best friends. But Sebastian can’t just calm down and relax: he’s likely to be named team captain for his last season, and both teammates and coaches alike depend on him to keep everyone on their best behavior. That would be a hard enough job even if it weren’t for the reappearance of Sebastian’s ex-best friend Emir, whose standoffish attitude immediately alienates him from the rest of the team and puts Sebastian in a uniquely uncomfortable position as he’s starting to fall in love.

What’d I think?

The Abby Hayes series was one of my favorites, but it got soccer very, very wrong. I wanted to include the offending picture here, but I think my copy is in storage

I was really excited for Running with Lions, but I was ultimately disappointed. Some authors improve massively from book to book, and Julian Winters is one of them. I might have liked Running with Lions more if I’d read it before Right Where I Left You, but I didn’t and as a result it was a major step down. Winters’ writing has matured massively, and the later novel has a much sharper focus. 

I say this a lot about debut novels, and I hate to be a broken record, but this novel is an example of an author with a fantastic idea but whose writing isn’t quite there to support it. In theory, Running with Lions is exactly the sort of book I’d adore. It’s about looking forward to adulthood and being terrified about what you’ll find there. It’s also about friendship and queer safe spaces and battling self hatred and body dysmorphia. I also really loved soccer back in the day. I don’t watch soccer (I hate watching sports) but a lot of my youth was spent on the soccer field. I started playing when I was five years old and played all the way through high school. I was really good as a young kid, and good but not great in high school (it’s always sad when puberty hits and suddenly the people you were running circles around are suddenly all faster than you; I played varsity my senior year, but was decidedly JV before that). My true love is volleyball, but soccer made up most of my youth and was very formative for me; it’s always nice to read fiction that represents it fairly well (I’m still scarred from that Abby Hayes book that claims that soccer goalies dress up in pads and cage-like masks like they do in hockey). Soccer is also why I have to wear a knee brace when the weather changes, but that’s neither here nor there.

It’s the sort of thing that would never, ever happen… but it would be awesome if Julian Winters rewrote Running with Lions with the writing skill he has now, because I really wanted to love it and I didn’t and it is one hundred percent due to the unsteady execution.

If I had to lay all the flaws of this book on one thing, it would be the size of the cast. I get it. A soccer team fields eleven players and has a bunch of subs, so the average team has something like twenty players. It makes sense that Sebastian, as the presumed team captain, knows all of his guys well and has a good relationship with them all. The problem is that there are so many guys to keep track of that they all end up getting boiled down to a single personality trait, maybe two if they’re in Sebastian’s close circle. Then, on top of the team, there are several coaches, Grey, and a few exes. There are just so many people to keep track of, most of whom contribute to the story only in superficial ways. Winters tries very hard to get the readers to care about everyone, but it’s too big a task in this short a book. Better to focus harder on the characters you really need—Sebastian, Emil, Willie, Mason—and let the others—Zack, Gio, Gray—recede to the back. Better to have a few fantastic characters than a ton of bland ones. Also, and this is minor and a little petty… but did we have to know the hair and eye color of every single person who appears in the novel?

A couple of the characters also come across badly for their only one trait. Like, one of the players is distinguishable only because he occasionally says a word in Spanish. 

Ted Lasso Season 3 (TV Review)

Apparently this is an unpopular opinion, but I thought that the final season of Ted Lasso was pretty great. While it had a couple of minor missteps—I didn’t love the Shandy plotline, there were a few off-screen events that I would like to have seen in full, and Beard should not have ended on that note—on the whole I found it delightful and found myself eagerly looking forward to the next episode each week. I’ve been very invested in the whole Ted Lasso crew since the first season, and I love that the show allowed the characters to develop in ways sitcom characters don’t always get to.

It’s hard to pick a favorite season of Ted Lasso because they all do such different things, and all so well. Season one was a gigantic surprise, a hilarious workplace comedy that was full of heart, softness, and kindness. It rejected toxic masculinity in exchange for something better. Everyone says it was the show that got us through COVID, and even though that’s kind of an exaggeration it’s also kind of true. Season three is a relatively known quantity, the show having had two hilarious seasons before it, but it leaned into the dramatic side of the dramedy, still espousing kindness and hard work but following its characters through darker times when optimism is harder to find. The second season is a blend of both, funny and dramatic in its own right but also working as a bridge to blend what otherwise might have been a drastic step.

I love a good sitcom as much as anyone, and Ted Lasso was a fantastic sitcom. It’s rare for a show to land just about every joke, but Ted Lasso did. My family binged season one in two days and universally loved it. We all laughed throughout the whole thing, and have rewatched it several times since then. That’s quite the feat considering that I typically hate my dad’s favorite media and vice versa; even when we like the same thing, he loves the jokes that I wish had been jettisoned in the edits and he’s not typically invested in the character beats that most excite me. The fact that we both absolutely loved Ted Lasso and even laughed at the same moments? That’s a feat that has rarely been accomplished before or since.

Season two proved that Ted Lasso wasn’t a one-trick pony. I got somehow even more invested in the characters, and I loved that the show was able to keep everyone’s arcs moving. I’ve watched and enjoyed many sitcoms, but as a genre they’re not necessarily known for their steady, incremental character work. Ted Lasso, however, has never lost its warmhearted humor or laugh-out-loud moments even as it told nuanced stories about mental health, divorce, growing up, parental disappointment, and more. It somehow both works to destigmatize anxiety and depression and to make us smile with wholesome ridiculousness like an absurd pun or a professional men’s football team nailing an NSYNC dance break and then cheering like they’d won the world cup.

Hang the Moon (Book Review)

I read Hang the Moon by Jeannette Walls for book club, and I was underwhelmed. I had previously Walls’ memoir The Glass Castle, albeit a decade ago, and liked it, so I had reasonable if not high hopes for her latest offering. Some of the material was promising, but ultimately the fast pace kept me from getting invested in any of the characters and therefore in the book as a whole.

What’s it about?

In short, Hang the Moon is about the rough-and-ready daughter of a wealthy man who weathers loss and hardship during the Prohibition era. As people die left and right around her, Sallie Kincaid tries her best to keep her community strong by doing whatever she feels is right, even—and even particularly—when that falls outside the law.

What’d I think?
I’m starting to think that too-much-story-for-the-runtime is just an element of historical fiction. It’s been a very long time since I read any historical fiction that doesn’t, in my opinion, fail in the pacing and execution. It’s difficult to even summarize Hang the Moon because so much happens and so much time passes. It feels like at least three novels crammed into fewer than four hundred pages. I read some promotional material for the novel before I read it, and they spoiled not one, not two, but three major deaths just by focusing the summaries where they did (for what it’s worth, it appears that the summary, at least on Goodreads, has been changed to be vaguer; it’s also worth mentioning that my fellow book-clubbers did not have this same reaction). A lot of time passes in Hang the Moon, and it covers a tempestuous time in the Kincaid family during which family leaders die, loyalties shift, and fortunes change. It’s possible that Hang the Moon is meant to read like a portrait of a single woman adjusting to a time of extremes—extreme change, extreme grief, extreme anger, extreme violence, etc.—but it feels more like a string of vaguely related events that all happen to take place to or around the same woman, and with each new twist coming quickly enough on the heels of the last that none of them have to be emotionally dealt with. 

Any one section of this novel could have been expanded into something dynamic and interesting, but there isn’t enough focus. Hang the Moon should have either been much longer (pagewise) or much shorter (timewise). If, for instance, the novel had started with Mary’s death and dug really deeply into Sallie’s life as Prohibition-era whiskyrunner, it could have been great. The dynamics between her and her partner-turned-fiancé-turned-spoiler-redacted are really engaging, and even as I was growing bored with Hang the Moon on the whole—I need to care about the characters! Sallie is too blandly practical and tough to deeply engage me—I was frustrated that I didn’t get to spend more time with this configuration. It’s more engaging to spend time with a character as they try to figure things out than to skip across a timeline between ‘nothing figured out’ and ‘pretty much got it,’ and it’s far more heartbreaking to witness a betrayal when all the relevant parties are fully fleshed out. Even though that era would have been my favorite, any of them would have worked: the awkwardness of returning to a family after nine years of exile. The political maneuvering that arises when the heir to an empire is too young to rule it. The moral ambiguity of working for a relative who pays your keep all while disagreeing with her stringent methods and morals, as they materially damage the people—particularly those in the minority—under her charge. There is so much to work with in Hang the Moon, and the wide scope disguises that.

The Sun and the Star: A Nico di Angelo Adventure (Book Review)

Is it possible to be a millennial fantasy fan without having been deeply into Percy Jackson and the Olympians? If it is, I wouldn’t know: as a kid, I was deeply into Percy Jackson and the Olympians. Correction: to this day, I am deeply into Percy Jackson and the Olympians. Even though I’ve supposedly aged out of the target audience, I still buy each new book as it is released. I think the only Rick Riordan book I’ve skipped is Daughter of the Deep, and even that I’ve not as much ‘skipped it’ as ‘haven’t gotten to it yet’ (the delay is because I didn’t care for 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea). I love Riordan’s world of sassy demigods and epic prophecies, and his deep roster of characters lets each story have a slightly different feel while still having a definite collective energy.

One of my favorite recent additions to the canon was The Hidden Oracle, the first of the Trials of Apollo series. In it, we see the god Apollo (in the form of a mortal teenager) team up with his son Will and Will’s boyfriend Nico, who has been a central character in the extended PJO universe almost from the very start. I loved Nico and Will in that book, and immediately wanted to spend more time with them. I was going to read the newest book regardless, but I was particularly excited by the prospect of a novel focused on those two because their opposites-attract energy was a major highlight of the Trials of Apollo and I was lightly disappointed that only a few of the books in that series capitalized on it.

Additionally, Rick Riordan’s obvious dedication to using his platform to represent underrepresented groups, particularly the LGBTQ+ community, is a huge point in his favor. There have been important queer characters in most of his recent books, but The Sun and the Star is the first one to focus on a gay character in such an upfront and obvious way. That was exciting enough in of itself, but Riordan’s decision to bring in Mark Oshiro—a queer Lantinx writer—as his cowriter seemed an especially promising sign: Oshiro is a talented writer with several novels under their belt, but they don’t have the platform Riordan does. Riordan could have told Nico and Will’s story himself. I suspect he would have done a good job of it alone, as he is a great writer and works very hard to represent minorities in honest and sympathetic ways. But he didn’t do that, because no matter his intentions or his research, he couldn’t understand that experience like an LGBTQ+ writer could. By teaming up with Oshiro, Riordan is both extending his platform to a minority voice and ensuring authentic representation. He’s a good egg in addition to being a good storyteller.

Is The Sun and the Star a standalone novel?

Yes and no. While The Sun and the Star is technically a self-contained story with a complete adventure in it, it builds off Nico’s existing story from the previous novels. For that reason, I’m attaching a spoiler warning here, not for The Sun and the Star but for the previous books. I don’t spoil much, but there is a significant sacrifice in The House of Hades and a major character death in The Tyrant’s Tomb, and any discussion of The Sun and the Star has to acknowledge them at least in passing.

The Sun and the Star’s plot is an extension of a storyline in the Heroes of Olympus series, and the emotional storyline—which is about Nico’s trauma and depression—reaches back even farther, all the way to Nico’s first appearance way back in The Titan’s Curse. There are repeated references to almost all of the most significant events in Nico’s story across all the previous books he appears in. I have listed all the books below in order and have indicated the ones which have significant and oft mentioned events on Nico’s timeline.

Here’s the order for the books/series:

Percy Jackson and the Olympians

1. The Lightning Thief
2. The Sea of Monsters
3. The Titan’s Curse (Nico’s first appearance)
4. The Battle of the Labyrinth
5. The Last Olympian (Will’s first appearance)

The Heroes of Olympus

1. The Lost Hero
2. The Son of Neptune
3. The Mark of Athena (this is the one Nico spends imprisoned in Tartarus)
4. The House of Hades (this is Bob’s big book, as well as being the one with the Cupid incident)
5. The Blood of Olympus (this is the one with Nico and Will’s first significant interactions)

The Trials of Apollo

The Swifts (Book Review)

It’s been a while since I read many books written for young readers. I used to pick them up all the time because I worked as a children’s librarian and wanted to stay in the loop, but I don’t have as much call to keep up anymore. I have a TBR a mile long and young readers aren’t my priority anymore, so it takes a lot to push one to the top of the list. The Swifts: A Dictionary of Scoundrels by Beth Lincoln piqued my interest, though. I saw it compared to Trenton Lee Stewart’s The Mysterious Benedict Society, which is a favorite of mine, and a coworker whose taste in books vibes well with mine recommended it. Then it won Barnes and Noble’s Children’s Book Award. Admittedly I”m skeptical of BN’s picks these days, but since the kids’ and YA books tend to be decent, I gave it a try. I’m glad I did.

What’s it about?

Shenanigan Swift lives with her sisters, great aunt, and uncle in a crumbling old house full of hidden passages, dangerous traps, and a long-lost family treasure. Every once in a while the rest of the Swifts—all named with the peculiar method of running a finger through the family Dictionary—descend on the house for a Family reunion to search for the treasure. Shenanigan is determined to be the one to find it, but her treasure-hunting may have to wait when someone tries to murder her Great-Aunt Schadenfreude, the family Matriarch. Shenanigan, along with her favorite sister Phenomena and a new friend/cousin Erf, decides to find the killer.

What’d I think?

⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐

Rating: 5 out of 5.

Some young reader fiction is enjoyable for kids to read but painfully juvenile for adults. Some of it is fun for kids but has deeper layers that will engage older readers. Happily, The Swifts is the latter. There’s a time and place for the former, but I’m never there anymore and with my limited time I want to read books that I enjoy, not books that I would enjoy if I were still ten. 

The Swifts surprised me in a lot of ways. I expected to like it, but I didn’t expect to love it. The Mysterious Benedict Society is an excellent comp for it, because like that series, The Swifts is full of mysteries and puzzles, has a compelling cast of different-but-compatible young heroes, and has a smart sense of humor. I was sucked very quickly into the novel even before the main story/murder because the characters are so fiercely realized from the first page. It’s impossible not to love Shenanigan right off the bat. She’s clever and mischievous, openhearted and curious. Beth Lincoln did a really interesting thing with the Swifts’ naming system: as soon as you meet each new character, you have a general idea of who they are. Shenanigan, for instance, is a mischief-maker who pulls shenanigans. Her sister Phenomena is remarkable and is associated with science. Gumshoe is a detective. And so on. The names are not the be-all-end-all of anyone’s characterizations. When a character suggests that Shenanigan “can’t help her name,” indicating that the Swift family Dictionary is in some way magical, Phenomena decides to make a scientific study by observing Shenanigan’s activities. What does she do that is in character for her name, and what does she do that is out of character for the name?

This gives the reader a starting point with which to quickly understand the individual Swifts… or not. I’m nearly thirty years old and I didn’t immediately know every word used for a name. There are those like “Shenanigan” or “Atrocious” or “Candour” that are pretty quickly apparent even for a young reader. Then there are those that an adult would likely know but a child reader would either have to look up or wait for the novel to provide context (“Schadenfreude,” “Gumshoe,” “Pique”) and still others that even the average adult wouldn’t have in their immediate vocabulary, or wouldn’t necessarily know how to interpret it as an identity (“Fauna,” “Cantrip,” “Pamplemousse”). This makes it easy to keep the many characters straight but it also leads to some interesting exploration as the characters investigate the power of the names that came from the Dictionary. The names are great as a starting point, but as we read more deeply we see that some of the characters don’t fit their name exactly as first interpreted. The is it magic? element also gives Lincoln lots of space to work and for the readers to wonder. We are at once certain and uncertain about these characters within moments of meeting them. As a fun bonus, I learned some new words with this book, but I barely noticed it because I learned them through meeting a family of lovable weirdos; that’s way more fun than a vocabulary lesson. 

Clever children’s mysteries are really the best. The wordplay in The Swifts is fantastic, and the mystery itself is tons of fun as well. I’m usually pretty good at predicting the end of this sort of book, but I fell for several red herrings. I was very, very confident that I’d figured it out right at the beginning and then there was a major plot twist that blew my mind. As Phenomena says, having a hunch is not enough to base a murder accusation on. I love the teamwork between the children as they investigate. The mix between Shenanigan’s headfirst action stance and Phenomena’s methodical scientific method is really fun, and I can’t think of another kids’ book that has a team like this. I love Shenanigan a lot, but Phenomena is by far the better detective, and she’s the one who feels especially fresh and new. The headstrong dive-into-everything heroine is relatively popular (though, for the record, Shenanigan still feels unique), but the scientific egghead isn’t as regularly celebrated (especially the female ones! Phenomena will be amazing for scientific-minded little girls). I love that both kinds of detective work were needed for the murderer to get revealed: both the inclination and ability to run headlong to the rescue when needed and the patience and knowledge to follow the clues to the truth without getting waylaid by mistaken gut feelings. Phenomena without Shenanigan couldn’t have done it any more than Shenanigan without Phenomena could have (and they both needed Erf, who has their own set of necessary information). I just love teamwork. A single detective is fun, but a group of detectives with complementary skills and driving interpersonal dynamics? Wonderful.

Plus, there’s a treasure hunt in addition to the murder mystery. It really doesn’t get much better than that. 

May 2023 Wrap Up

Between my brother visiting during a vacation from work and my sister coming home from college for the summer, I’ve had a pretty good month. Life is always better when you spend your evenings playing games—board games, card games, video games… I love ’em all—and having most of the family together in a way that, sadly, rarely happens in adulthood. Probably because I’ve spent my time there (and watching TV: Ted Lasso has a vise grip on me) I didn’t spend as much time reading or writing. I reread some old favorites and spent more time in nonfiction than usual, which naturally slows my reading pace. I even tried an audiobook (Becoming by Michelle Obama, but I haven’t finished it, hence its absence from this wrap), so I felt pretty adventurous. I’m hoping to read more this month, or at least get caught up on my reviews, which are unfortunately quite behind.

Here’s what I read:

Solitaire by Alice Oseman (2015 version)

⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐

Rating: 5 out of 5.

I absolutely love Alice Oseman, and Solitaire was the book that cemented that love; although it is her first book, it is the second one that I read and therefore the one that proved that Radio Silence isn’t a one-hit wonder. I’ve read it several times over the years, and have recommended it as widely as possible considering the circumstances (specifically that, until recently, it hasn’t been readily available in the US, which is where I am). It was time for a reread anyway, but the new US edition seemed as good an excuse as any. It’s such a beautiful novel: sad and angry and raw and so, so human. It is absolutely wild to me that Oseman wrote this when they were a teenager, because it’s the sort of deeply relatable, emotionally nuanced, character-driven work that any writer regardless of age could be proud of. It’s a great book that can stand up to a third reread, but Solitaire absolutely does.

Full review here

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Solitaire by Alice Oseman (2023 version)

⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐

Rating: 4.5 out of 5.

It’s a really great book that can stand up to being read twice in a row/at the same time. I’d already read Solitaire twice when this new 2023 version dropped, and I couldn’t help myself. I got it and decided to compare the versions side-by-side. I read chapter one of the 2015 version, then I read chapter one of the 2023 version, and then I took notes. It was a slow but very rewarding process. As a reader, it was really fun to both revisit an old favorite and experience it in a new way. As a writer, it was fascinating to see the evolution of the novel. Both are great, and if I were to assign points for every change, both versions would get some. I like the ragged edges of the older version, but I like the updated references in the new one. Personally, I prefer the original versions of Nick and Charlie, but I suspect that their slightly altered forms will appeal more to Oseman’s newer Heartstopper-won fans. Either way, either version, I’m going to keep recommending this one.

Full comparison here

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A Scatter of Light by Malinda Lo