April 2024 Wrap-Up

The most important thing about the month of April (aside from my sister’s birthday—happy birthday, Maleah; don’t read past the “read more” unless you want your birthday present spoiled lol—and her very high-quality production of Cinderella)—is that Darcy gets her picture taken in the bluebonnets. It is very precious.

Here’s what I read…

Fence Vol. 6: Redemption by C.S. Pacat and Johanna the Mad

As anticipated, the latest volume of Fence creeps the story forward only incrementally. At this point, I know to expect that and I’m only marginally disappointed by it. The truth of the matter is that I’m not much of a graphic novel reader—I don’t process visual information as well as written, and I’m frustrated by the length of each volume and the release between—but I love this series. Redemption reads like a part two to Rise (although, for what it’s worth, I’m not entirely sure who is being redeemed in it, or even who needs to be redeemed). I really enjoyed the increased focus on Harvard this issue, Seiji starting to respect and even value Aiden was delightful, and I was overjoyed to finally get some real quality pagetime with the long-promised Jesse. By the end, this volume ramps up the romance; this series has always had romantic undertones, but this is the first time the romances get actively pulled to the fore (unless you count the YA novels, which I also love but which are not strictly canonical post volume five). I’m excited to dig more into Aiden and Harvard’s relationship in subsequent issues because they’re dynamic is adorable. I’m more skeptical about Nicholas/Seiji since I had originally thought they were both aroace and still can’t convince myself to totally let that idea go, but I’m willing to be convinced. On the whole, Redemption isn’t my favorite volume—volumes four and five are the best—because it feels a bit more like setup for what is to come (Harvard has a boyfriend who isn’t Aiden! Seiji takes Nicholas seriously now!) As always, I read this as soon as I was aware of its existence, speeding through it in twenty minutes. I’m more than ready for volume seven, but I guess I’m just going to have to hang onto that enthusiasm for another two years.

Previous volume reviews here and here

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The Familiar by Leigh Bardugo

Leigh Bardugo is a phenomenal writer. She has yet to go wrong, and her newest novel fits very well within her existing canon as well as being a standout for its historical setting and the fact that it stands alone. As in her previous novels, The Familiar focuses on balances of power (specifically imbalances of power), the double edged sword that is religion, and the experience of life lived on the peripheries of society. It is an excellent novel and while my personal taste is more skewed to the more exciting and character-driven Grishaverse, I feel certain that The Familiar will bring Bardugo to new audiences. It’s a fascinating stand-alone fantasy novel—there are never enough of those—that deftly handles nuanced power dynamics alongside genuinely interesting characters and a high-stakes story. Unsurprisingly, I enjoyed this novel very much.

Full review here

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Most Ardently by Gabe Cole Novoa

These Silent Woods (Book Review)

Back in December, my sister was in a production of A Christmas Carol. She lives about three hours away, so my mom and I drove up together every weekend to catch as many showings as we can. We often listen to audiobooks together, but between the road trip weekends and the insanity that is Christmas season in retail I’d been exhausted. On at least one of the trips, I slept while she drove and listened to her next book club book, which was These Silent Woods by Kimi Cunningham Grant. I drifted in and out of sleep, so I heard a few scenes wildly out of context (including, unfortunately, the epilogue). What I heard sounded interesting and my mom enjoyed the book so later, on my own time and fully awake, I listened to it for myself.

What’s it about?

Cooper and his young daughter Finch are living off the land in a cabin deep in the woods. Those aren’t their real names, and they’re as much hiding as living in the middle of nowhere; years ago, Cooper did something bad enough that he had to flee with Finch and change their names lest his past come back to bite him and take Finch away from him. After several years of relative peace—occasional visits from their odd and unsettling neighbor Scotland notwithstanding—things start to go wrong, throwing new people into their small world and threatening the closed but safe life Cooper built for them. 

How’s the narration?

These Silent Woods has two narrators. Bronson Pinchot, reading as Cooper, does the vast majority of the novel, with Stephanie Willis taking the sole chapter that is not from Cooper’s first person perspective. Both narrators do a good job: engaging but calm, just what the story needs. This novel is sort of a thriller, but it’s mostly about the careful atmosphere that Cooper creates, and Pinchot creates that with his voice.

What’d I think?

⭐⭐⭐⭐

Rating: 4 out of 5.

I have slightly mixed feelings about These Silent Woods, and it’s all due to the end. There’s the slightest disconnect between the setup and the payoff, and even though I could kind of see the end coming I still found it a little underwhelming.

March 2024 Wrap-Up

After an easy month in February spent off work, sleeping, and watching my sister’s amazing community theatre production of Sister Act, March was a lot harder. Work was relentless and would have felt so even if I hadn’t gotten used to getting enough rest. Still, I found time to read and to watch a bunch of musicals both old and new. This blog is called “A Blog of Books and Musicals,” after all. I don’t always recap what I watched because that’s a lot of effort, but since I had such a great time bopping to show tunes this month I figured I’d make the effort to actually write about some of the new ones that I was finally able to get to this month. I’ve been looking forward to Mean Girls for so long, you guys!

Here’s what I read…

Good Material by Dolly Alderton

⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐

Rating: 4.5 out of 5.

Good Material surprised me. As a person who generally dislikes romance books and is largely uninterested in romance in real life, I suspected that it would be difficult for me to relate to or care much about a novel deeply concerned with the ins and outs of a romantic relationship. To my surprise, though, the book is far more than just a novel about a couple who didn’t make it. With insight and humor, it dives deeply into the societal norms that can make modern life—particularly modern life for an almost-middle-aged millennial—particularly difficult. While telling an entertaining, character-driven story, Good Material dives into the rift between men and women’s emotional support structures, the loneliness of atypical life choices, and the pressures to have it all put together (in a particular way) by a particular age. The voice is confident and funny, and it is emotionally very refreshing and compelling. This is far from my usual fare, but I highly enjoyed it and would enthusiastically recommend it. 

Full review here

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Okay, Cupid by Mason Deaver

⭐⭐⭐

Rating: 3 out of 5.

The Heaven and Earth Grocery Store (Mini Book Review)

The Heaven and Earth Grocery Store by James McBride is the 2023 Barnes and Noble Book of the Year. It was also Amazon’s Book of the Year and won the Kirkus Prize for Fiction. Nothing about the cover or premise particularly caught me, but in light of these achievements I felt that I should read it.

What’s it about? (Description from Goodreads)

The new novel from the bestselling, National Book Award-winning, Oprah Book Club-picked, Barack Obama favourite James McBride.

In 1972, when workers in Pottstown, Pennsylvania, were digging the foundations for a new development, the last thing they expected to find was a skeleton at the bottom of a well. Who the skeleton was and how it got there were two of the long-held secrets kept by the residents of Chicken Hill, the dilapidated neighbourhood where immigrant Jews and African Americans lived side by side and shared ambitions and sorrows.

As these characters’ stories overlap and deepen, it becomes clear how much the people who live on the margins struggle and what they must do to survive. When the truth is finally revealed about what happened on Chicken Hill and the part the town’s white establishment played in it, McBride shows us that even in dark times, it is love and community—heaven and earth—that sustain us.

How’s the audio?

I listened to the audiobook, which is narrated by Dominic Hoffman. It’s a fairly straightforward narration. This sort of treatment would have been fine for a different book, but I needed something a little more dynamic for this plodding, meandering novel to keep my interest.

What’d I think?

February 2024 Wrap-Up

I had a fantastic month. Because of various familial scheduling problems, I ended up not taking any vacation last year and ended up with my full two weeks to take in February. With lots of days off and nothing in particular planned, I spent the days sleeping late and then playing with my puppy. I got to work out, catch up on all my book reviews, and take some weekend trips to my sister’s college town to catch her bizarrely good community theatre production of Sister Act. Strangely, I didn’t read any more than usual—and not particularly widely, either—but I did listen to lots of musical cast recordings (I may have to do some more posts about musicals because I’ve been in a very musically mood lately). Tragically I have now used up all my vacation and am expected to go back to working five days a week every week, but it was amazing while it lasted.

Here’s what I watched…

Waitress

⭐⭐⭐⭐

Rating: 4 out of 5.

I finally watched Waitress! (I still need to catch up on Mean Girls and The Color Purple; even when there’s a movie I really want to see, I typically wait for the streaming release because I’m cheap). Waitress has really beautiful music, and I’ve never met a musical proshot I didn’t like so needless to say I was very excited to watch the recently-released Sara Bareilles vehicle. It’s excellent, unsurprisingly. There’s a magic to live musicals that cannot be denied, even when you see it through a screen. I’ll take a proshot over a movie adaptation any day of the week, and while I know it isn’t financially feasible, I deeply wish that every show got recorded, even if it were just a single stationary camera. As long as you can see the stage and hear clearly, I’m happy. Waitress, having been done with multiple angles and cameras, is a professional affair, which is even better. I’ve listened to the cast recording many times, and it was interesting to actually see it, comparing the actual show with what I’d constructed mentally between publicity performances and the Wikipedia synopsis. It’s darker than I realized and I don’t love the thematic statements it ultimately makes about pregnancy/motherhood, but excellent nonetheless. The acting is great. The singing is great. The songs are catchy as heck (Ogie’s songs get stuck in my head all the time, but they’re so fun I don’t even get mad about it), and I’m really happy to have gotten to see it after COVID denied me the chance to catch it live (it was supposed to come through my theatre, but it was one of only a handful of shows that never got rescheduled). I’m not sure how Waitress did financially, but I’m hoping well so that we can get some more quality proshots released. I’m still waiting on Six and have a few other shows in the back of my mind that, to my knowledge, don’t have a proshot but which I desperately want to see.

Full review here

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Sister Act

⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐

Rating: 5 out of 5.

My sister’s community theatre put on Sister Act, and it was phenomenal. I truly do not know where all the stereotypes about community theatre being bad came from, because all the high school and community theatre shows I’ve seen have been great. I am obsessed with musical theatre but I have absolutely none of the talent required to be involved in it beyond the audience (I can’t act, can’t dance, and have less than one octave of vocal range), so I am a little jealous of her ability to not only be involved but to absolutely kill it. She played Mother Superior and was amazing (she also painted all the sets: double amazing). I did not expect Mother Superior to be such a comic role; I thought she’d mostly be the straight man, but she has some hilarious sequences that are just as funny if not more so than the over-the-top chaos of the other rambunctious nuns. The whole show is delightful. The music is joyous (Alan Menken is consistently wonderful), the humor is top-notch, and overall the show was easily charming enough to warrant multiple viewings. This will probably sound like an overexaggeration but—the insanely talented Patina Miller notwithstanding—I would actually rather have a cast recording of my sister and her costars than the original London cast recording: my sister sang her songs rather than opting for the infinitely inferior speak-singing choice that apparently often done when the show is professionally staged (also, Mother Superior’s big solo isn’t even on the recording), and her male costars in particular brought a lot more charisma and humor than comes through in that cast recording, although that is still very good.

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Abbott Elementary

⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐

Rating: 5 out of 5.

January 2024 Wrap-Up

January 2024 has been one of the most bizarrely long months I’ve ever experienced. It’s not that it’s been bad—it hasn’t, just pretty standard—but I swear it feels like a good quarter of the year should have passed already and somehow 2024 has still barely started. Wild.

Inspired mostly by the recently-ended Percy Jackson TV show (that I will hopefully review briefly at some point), I decided to reread the whole series and then, inspired by childhood nostalgia and having a blast, I decided to keep going into the Heroes of Olympus series. I flew through them, adn while I did read a few other things and presumably did some other things, definitely my main takeaway from January was PJO.

Here’s what I read…

Remarkably Bright Creatures by Shelby Van Pelt

⭐⭐⭐⭐

Rating: 4 out of 5.

I really enjoyed Remarkably Bright Creatures. It’s a sweet, gentle story about living life even after a tragedy. I love that the older heroine gets to be a fully-fledged character with rich relationships and interests and isn’t relegated to just being an old woman. More than anything else, I love the POV of the Giant Pacific Octopus who elevates and differentiates Remarkably Bright Creatures. Part mystery, part coming-of-age (just not the age you’d expect!), part family story, Remarkably Bright Creatures is charming. I would highly recommend it to literary fiction readers, animal lovers, and anyone worried they’re living life on the wrong timeline.

Full review here

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Percy Jackson and the Olympians: The Lightning Thief by Rick Riordan (audiobook read by Jesse Bernstein)

⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐

Rating: 5 out of 5.

The Lightning Thief is a solid start to the series. It’s a bit more episodic than some of the later books, and thematically it’s a little more simple than what comes after it, but it still establishes everything solidly. It hits the ground running, with all the main characters being established quickly and well. There’s lots of room for them to grow throughout the whole series, but I appreciate the foundation in the first book. This is clearly written for middle grade readers, and while it is perfect for that age group (I used to be a children’s librarian, and the sheer number of “I don’t like reading” kids who read this book and changed their mind was staggering and heartwarming) I’ve found that my enjoyment has not diminished as the years passed.

Full review here

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Percy Jackson and the Olympians: The Sea of Monsters by Rick Riordan (audiobook read by Jesse Bernstein)

⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐

Rating: 5 out of 5.

The Santa Suit (Mini Book Review)

For her book club this December, my mom read Mary Kay Andrews’ newest Christmas romance Bright Lights, Big Christmas. At the meeting, the person who had picked it said that she enjoyed it, but that Andrews’ previous Christmassy book The Santa Suit was far preferable. In an attempt to be festive, we decided to listen to the audiobook. 

(For what it’s worth, my mom said that the two books are very much cut from the same cloth.)

What’s it about?

Needing a change after her divorce, Ivy buys and moves into an old farmhouse sight unseen. Even though it’s full of the previous owners’ old things, the place is going to need significantly more work than she’d first thought, but thankfully her real estate agent Ezra is more than willing to help with any physical labor she needs. Before long, Ivy learns that her new home is more than just an old building: it’s the Christmas center of town. The previous owners had dolled the house up with lights every year and dressed as Santa and Mrs. Claus. Shortly after arriving, Ivy finds a resplendent Santa Suit and, within in, an old letter from a little girl with an impossible Christmas wish.

How’s the audio?

The audiobook is five hours long and read by Kathleen McInerney. I grew up watching Barbie movies and playing Nancy Drew computer games, and McInerney’s voice reminded me of those enough that I googled her to see if she’d ever done voice work for either. She hasn’t, but apparently she’s the English voice for Pokémon‘s Ash Ketchum, so I did actually grow up wither her voice. She gives exactly the performance warranted by The Santa Suit. A little over the top, a little cheesy. It works for what’s required. 

What’d I think?

⭐⭐⭐

Rating: 2.5 out of 5.

The Santa Suit is a Hallmark movie in book form. The plucky heroine moves to a new place where everyone is obsessed with Christmas. There’s a handsome guy just hanging around with nothing better to do than tend to her every need, a quirky girl who has lived in town her whole life but apparently has no other friends, and a spunky old man with a sad past who needs help getting reintroduced to society. If you can’t guess the resolution of every plot point near the beginning of the book, you’ve either not watched any Christmas movies before or you did what this book requires and you turned your brain off.

October 2023 Wrap-Up

October is always one of my favorite months. The weather starts to cool down. My family is famous for amazing birthday parties, and October is my turn. Plus, I love Halloween. It’s nice to have a holiday that doesn’t have a lot of major commitments. You don’t have to cook a big meal or fight coworkers for time off; you can just throw on a silly costume and eat a bunch of chocolate. There are few things I love more than dressing up in nerdy costumes, and as I’ve gotten older I’ve aged out of being a total scaredy-cat and into enjoying spooky stories.

Since we’re moving into November, it’s worth mentioning… November is NaNoWriMo. Hopefully I’ll be writing an amazing novel. Most likely I’ll be writing a bunch of garbled nonsense. In any case, I’m going to be much less present here for at least a month, maybe slightly longer.

Here’s my last few years of silly costumes (occasionally costarring Darcy). Congrats to me for finally having the right hair color/length to make it work.

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I’m going to start with the TV shows this time, because they’re more atmospherically October/Halloweeny. I’m not a seasonal reader because I just read whatever is next on my to-read list regardless of the time of year, but I am a seasonal watcher, at least when it comes to spooky season.

Here’s what I watched…

Our Flag Means Death (season 2)

⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐

Rating: 5 out of 5.

If you’ve visited this blog before, or even if you scrolled through that costume slideshow above, you know I’m a huge fan of Our Flag Means Death, a wholesome yet hysterically funny romantic pirate sitcom. I’ve been eagerly anticipating season two since the moment I finished season one almost two years ago, and thankfully it did not disappoint. The second season has a slightly different feel than the first: it starts in a much darker place after that extreme cliffhanger, and the characters are all having to fight heartbreak and trauma. That’s a difficult story to tell in a half-hour comedy, but this has always been a show that manages to balance intense emotions with silly shenanigans in an way that impressively undercuts neither. I love how the characters are able to have such large, dramatic character arcs while the tone of the show overall remains buoyant. It’s not often you see a comedy show of all things entirely reinvent a character and have it actually work.

The focus this season moves firmly onto the leads, with Stede, Ed, and Izzy taking on most of the major action and the others playing a decided second string. I missed having slightly bigger plotlines for the crew—Jim and Lucius, in particular, faded back more than expected—and wished that there had been an extra two episodes—season two only has eight, whereas season one had ten—but enjoyed myself thoroughly nevertheless. It’s a mark of a good show when you’re willing to stay up to watch after you definitely should be asleep and week after week I absolutely was.

Season two just ended and I’m already ready for season three. I really, really hope it gets renewed because this is the sort of delightful show that absolutely deserves to get its mapped-out full arc, particularly when it’s as short as three seasons. If you haven’t watched it yet, why not? If you’re reading my blog it will appeal to you.

Season one review here

Full season 2 review here

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Interview with the Vampire (season 1)

⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐

Rating: 4.5 out of 5.

I was a little skeptical when I started Interview with the Vampire because I’ve never been hugely into vampires. I mean, I had a Twilight phase like everyone else, but beyond that… no. I typically don’t like anything gory or violent, and vampires are very much that. Despite their popularity, I’ve never read any of Anne Rice’s books on which this show is loosely based (I’m interested to correct that, but I suspect the parts of Interview with the Vampire I liked best are the parts that were added for this new iteration) and I haven’t even watched the Brad Pitt/Tom Cruise movie (again, I’ve vaguely interested to correct that, but I HIGHLY suspect the parts of the show I liked best won’t be in the movie). Still, I’d heard some good things and any time I see something sharing a Tumblr Venn Diagram with the aforementioned Our Flag Means Death I pay attention.

July 2023 Wrap Up

Another month gone! I’m going to miss the summer, not for the heat (I’m in Texas and it’s miserable) but because my sister is still in school and it has been fun to have her home. I didn’t read much this month—I read one clunker that took nearly the whole month—and what I did read was uncharacteristic: I listened to some audiobooks, and kept entirely out of YA. I spent my time playing family games (I’ve gotten pretty good at Spades and Hearts, at least in the context of my family) and watching TV. In the scope of things, it has been a pretty good month but not all that much happened.

Here’s what I read…

Becoming by Michelle Obama (audiobook read by Michelle Obama)

⭐⭐⭐⭐

Rating: 4 out of 5.

My mom spends a lot of time driving, and she recently joined a book club; getting Audible seemed like a logical investment. She’s enjoyed getting back into reading via audiobook, and since she drives me to work every day—I don’t have a car—we figured why not listen to something together? We started with Becoming since she’d long wanted to read it and because I always mean to read more nonfiction but never get around to it.

It’s kind of a daunting book in this format, just over nineteen hours, and listening to it in twenty-to-twenty-five-minute increments it took two months to finish. That being said, I found it a very interesting and rewarding experience. I’m old enough that I should know more about the Obama presidency than I actually do—politics depress me and stress me out, so when there are good/competent people in charge I find it easier to mostly check out and assume it’ll be okay; that’s obviously a lazy and immensely privileged mindset, and I’m trying to do better now, but that’s where I was out back in high school—so Becoming helped me to be retroactively more aware of that era on top of being a warmhearted and enlightening narrative about feminism, race, privilege, power, love, family, and America.

Reading a book like Becoming in 2023 is absolutely wild, because it’s at this point almost impossible to imagine a time like that. My mom and I just kept turning to each other and saying things like, “Man, remember when we had a president who read constantly and genuinely cared about people?” In Becoming, Michelle Obama hits a lot of the highlights of her husband’s career and presidency, but this is first and foremost her story. I knew she was a woman with grace and accomplishments, but I hadn’t known much about her life beyond what she did in the White House. My favorite part of the book was actually the beginning, when Michelle was still Michelle Robinson and her life was defined more by her own accomplishments and aspirations than her husband’s. It’s a sad but perhaps understandable, and it’s something that Michelle does dig into in Becoming, the way that she necessarily had to put some of her own goals to the side to support Barack’s political aspirations. It’s an interesting balance, that of being smart and talented and ambitious but being in a position of being eternally second, even intentionally so.

It was really nice to experience the book with Michelle herself reading it. It’s always fun to hear people tell their own stories, and that gave it something special that it wouldn’t have had if read by someone else (or read as a physical book). It was interesting to get a peek at a side of politics you don’t usually hear much about, and I was particularly struck by the optimism and kindness that is so alien in today’s political landscape. Nineteen hours of life story and Michelle had only the most generous takes, steering away from judgement and extending empathy and warmth to everyone and everyone except Donald Trump and, amusingly and for me heartbreakingly, Les Misérables.

I enjoyed this. It made the commute go relatively quickly, and I felt like my worldview was broadened a bit, which for my money is the best thing you can say about nonfiction.

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Good Night, Irene by Luis Alberto Urrea

⭐

Rating: 0.5 out of 5.

The less said about Good Night, Irene, the better. I was bored out of my mind. The characters are flat and one-dimensional. It has big men-writing-women energy. There’s no plot, more a series of disconnected scenes. This took me three weeks to read, and I truly thought that it was going to be the first book club book I was going to have to DNF because I really and truly couldn’t make it through. It’s never a good sign when you’re literally falling asleep on a book repeatedly or when you’re texting family members photos of the pages with the caption “can you believe someone published this garbage?” The moment when I read the sentence “Irene sensed their male presence in her general radar way, and turned to admire the abdomen of the tall one” a little bit of me died inside; I pretty much gave up and speed-read the rest of this mess. I have to believe that this is Urrea’s worst book by a massive margin, because otherwise I’m going to be eternally upset and offended that he has somehow won awards for writing. The only good thing I can say about Good Night, Irene is that it’s cute that Urrea wrote it in homage to his mother’s heroism in the war.

Full review here

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Her Majesty’s Royal Coven by Juno Dawson

⭐⭐⭐⭐

Rating: 3.5 out of 5.

Born a Crime: Stories from a South African Childhood (Book Review)

I really like Trevor Noah; I think he’s hilarious, and I watch a lot of him on YouTube to try to bridge the gap between being a person who knows nothing about what’s going on in the world to being a person who knows something about what’s going on in the world. I noticed that I’d been on a major YA kick lately (which is saying something coming from me, since I’m always on a YA kick) and figured I would broaden my horizons a bit and read his memoir, Born a Crime: Stories from a South African Childhood.

What’s it about?

Born a Crime is an autobiographical collection of essays about Daily Show host Trevor Noah’s childhood as a half black, half white kid growing up first under apartheid and later in its aftermath. The subjects covered in the book include Trevor’s mother’s unconventional love, the foibles of awkward teenage dating, life in the hood, navigating complicated race relations as a person who doesn’t fit into any group, religion, and more.

What’d I think?

My main takeaway from Born a Crime is… wow, I have an easy life. Also, I’m amazed that one person could have this wide array of experiences. I also felt like I learned a lot: about race, about Africa, about apartheid, about privilege, etc. I love how many different topics are covered, but even though I don’t really see a better way to have told all the stories, I wasn’t a huge fan of the essay format because it jumps back and forth in time and is not particularly narrative. To be fair, that is characteristic of memoirs, so I can’t really complain about it.

I particularly like the way Trevor talks both about really intense things (like when his mother got shot in the head or how his existence was literally illegal for the first few years of his life) and comparatively simple, silly ones (like his childhood dog that used to hop his fence and live with another family while he was at school).

The book is funny in places, but overall not quite as funny as I expected it to be. Considering the material, I don’t think it is intended to be hysterically funny but I did expect a few more laughs than I got.

Even though I generally dislike audiobooks, in this case I kind of wish that I’d listened to the audiobook instead of reading the physical copy of the book, because the writing definitely mimics the way that Trevor speaks; it very much sounds like it was meant to be spoken, and Trevor’s speaking patterns and accents are a big part of why he is so entertaining as a performer.

What’s the verdict?

Even though I don’t generally like memoirs, I did enjoy this one. There are memoirs that seem pointless, and there are some that use extraordinary personal experiences to make interesting social and political commentary. Born a Crime is the latter. The mostly lighthearted tone provides a nice juxtaposition for the intense events and concepts depicted, and if I had to pick one memoir to recommend, this might be it. Report card: A

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