CBR17 Book 69: "The Song of Achilles" by Madeline Miller

Page count: 369 pages

Audio book length: 11 hrs 15 mins

Rating: 4 stars

Nowhere Book Bingo 25: Reimagining or retelling of a classic

CBR17 Pie Chart Challenge: History

Patroclus is exiled from his father's kingdom after he accidentally kills a boy and is sent into fosterage with King Peleus. Here is where he meets Achilles, whose mother is the sea nymph Thetis. Achilles is supposed to become the greatest warrior who ever lived, and trains diligently to achieve this goal. While they are vastly different, Patroclus and Achilles become sworn companions, and Patroclus accompanies Achilles to train with the legendary centaur Chiron.

The boys stay with Chiron for several years, until they become young men. Their bond deepens, and they become lovers. Unfortunately, their pastoral life is cut short. Helen, rumoured to be the most beautiful woman in the world, has been abducted by Prince Paris of Troy. All the kingdoms of Greece are oath-sworn to accompany King Agamemnon and Menelaus to rescue her. Thetis takes her son and attempts to hide him away in a distant kingdom, since there is a prophecy that if he faces Prince Hector of Troy on the battlefield, he will die. However, Achilles is tracked down and seduced by the chance to fulfil his destiny. He can't become the greatest warrior ever if he doesn't go to Troy. He figures he'll just stay away from Hector, and then he can't be killed.

The quick and decisive victory the Greeks were expecting instead becomes a gruelling siege that lasts over a decade. Agamemnon, the leader of the Greeks, grows ever more resentful of Achilles, who refuses to show him the respect he believes he is owed. The tension and conflict between them keep escalating, eventually ending in tragedy. Prophecies can only be evaded for so long before the gods decide to manipulate matters to end as they have been foretold. 

Ok, fair warning, I'm not going to spoiler tag a myth that is literally thousands of years old. If you don't know the story of Achilles and how and why he eventually met his tragic end, that's really not on me. They even made a big movie starring many hunky men! Of course, in that one, Patroclus is Achilles' "cousin", and they give our dashing hero a female love interest and everything. No homo when you're Brad Pitt. Suffice it to say, in this book, which is frequently found in the top ten of banned books every year, Patroclus and Achilles are NOT cousins. They come of age together, yes, but they are in no way related, and their feelings for one another are most definitely romantic and sexual. Pretty sure no one would bother banning this book if they were just cousins and bros, happily seducing the various priestesses they captured as prizes of war. 

Having finally read this, which I have owned for oh so many years, I won't say that I was disappointed, because it is a very well-written book, but neither was I swept away by the story. Since Patroclus is the narrator of the book, I was idly curious whether he would keep narrating from the afterlife (turns out, I was right!). This is a good book, but I had read so much about how it had people in floods of tears. I felt no such emotions, probably because I knew when I started the book how it would end. Miller's other mythological novel, Circe, affected me much more strongly. I should re-read that and The Odyssey before Christopher Nolan's movie comes out next year. 

Judging a book by its cover: The cover for my audiobook is this fairly simple teal green one, with a golden Greek helmet on it. I much prefer it to the alternate cover with the big shiny golden breastplate. 

Crossposted on Cannonball Read

CBR17 Book 61: "Reading Lolita in Tehran" by Azar Nafisi

Page count: 384 pages

Rating: 3 stars

Nowhere Book Bingo 25: A Bookish Memoir/biography

CBR17 Pie Chart: Education

CBR17 Bingo: Citizen (Nafisi lived and taught in Iran during increasingly more dictatorial strictures against its citizens)

Official summary:

Every Thursday morning for two years in the Islamic Republic of Iran, a bold and inspired teacher named Azar Nafisi secretly gathered seven of her most committed female students to read forbidden Western classics. As Islamic morality squads staged arbitrary raids in Tehran, fundamentalists seized hold of the universities, and a blind censor stifled artistic expression, the girls in Azar Nafisi's living room risked removing their veils and immersed themselves in the worlds of Jane Austen, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Henry James, and Vladimir Nabokov. In this extraordinary memoir, their stories become intertwined with the ones they are reading. Reading Lolita in Tehran is a remarkable exploration of resilience in the face of tyranny and a celebration of the liberating power of literature.

I got this in an e-book sale during the summer of 2018, because it sounded interesting and like something I should own. It fit in a number of my reading challenges this year, so I decided to read it this summer. Unfortunately, while some of the stories Nafisi told about the increasing totalitarianism that was introduced in her country were really interesting, the actual literary analysis was rather boring, and even the historical events got a bit dry after a while.

This book is a mix between a biography, writing about Nafisi’s life in Iran as it became subject to an increasingly more authoritarian government. One of the reasons I had trouble sticking with it was that, sadly, the news cycle was so depressing and so much in the real world America was mirroring things I was reading about that it was distressing to read. With the world being the way it is at the moment, escapist reading is becoming more and more essential for my mental health. 

So I have to confess that while I didn't DNF this book, I also didn't manage to read all of it. I ended up skipping probably about half, reading the first few sections, then skipping to the last one, to see how everything ended. I also think it’s important to mention that while this book wasn’t really for me, it may be a better fit for someone else. It does feature a lot of literary analysis, though, mostly of books I have neither read nor have any interest in ever reading, so I should possibly have researched it more closely before I started it. 

Crossposted on Cannonball Read

CBR17 Book 60: "Can't Escape Love" by Alyssa Cole

Page count: 192 pages

Rating: 3.5 stars

CBR17 Pie Challenge: Inclusion

CBR17 Bingo: Borrow (read through Libby, since I don't actually own the book)

Regina "Reggie" Hobbs is working hard to make her nerdy website, Girls with Glasses, a success, and prove to her over-protective parents that she's perfectly capable of taking care of herself, even if she's in a wheelchair. She loves the work, she loves her very capable team, but lately, she's been struggling with insomnia, and the only thing that seems to soothe her to sleep is the voice of a puzzle podcaster, Gustave Nguyen, she used to follow, but he no longer podcasts, and the archive of his episodes has been deleted. So Reggie goes to the unusual step of contacting him, asking if he could make some recordings for her, to help her sleep.

Gustave "Gus" Nguyen is autistic and often has trouble with social interactions, especially with women. He remembers Reggie from chats they used to have on his live streams, but doesn't want to give a virtual stranger voice recordings that he would no longer have any control over. He sympathises with her plight, however, and offers to call her if she has trouble sleeping, to talk to her until she falls asleep. Thus begins their friendship, and soon it becomes clear that while Gus can help Reggie with her insomnia, Reggie can help Gus succeed in completing an escape room he's working on. He's been contracted to design an escape room based on a very popular romance anime for Anime Con, and he knows absolutely nothing about the anime, nor does he see what is so fascinating to others about it. 

Reggie, on the other hand, is a superfan and offers to help him understand the show and the characters in return for his nighttime phone calls. Once they discover that they both live fairly close to each other in Queens, they can meet up in person, and it doesn't take long for their friendship to develop into something more. 

Both Reggie and Gus have some personal issues to resolve before they can fully commit to a relationship, but since both feel more comfortable with each other than apart, and help complement each other's skills beautifully, there is never any doubt that they will find a HEA, without too much conflict.

While I've read all the full novels in the Reluctant Royals series, I have yet to complete all the novellas, and with this fitting into a number of my reading challenges this summer, it felt like a good quick read to choose. There are several mentions of Reggie's twin sister Portia in this, the heroine of A Duke by Default, a book that still makes me annoyed every time I think of it. Naledi, the heroine of A Princess in Theory also has a cameo. Even though it's part of an ongoing series, this novella would mostly work fine on its own. There are some issues with Reggie's parents and her sister that are not entirely resolved (that happens in Portia's book). But it's not anything that would ruin anyone's reading experience if this was the first book of Cole's they picked up.

The inclusion of neurodiverse characters has become quite common in romance now, but back in 2019, when this book came out, I think it was more unusual. Considering this also has a heroine who is mostly wheelchair-bound (she can stand for short periods of time, but lost the use of her legs after viral meningitis when she was younger), this book crosses off a lot of squares on a diversity bingo board. It therefore felt like a good choice for the "Inclusion" pie slice of the CBR Pie Challenge. It also works as "borrowed" as I got it through my library app Libby, and don't actually own the book. 

Judging a book by its cover: Cole usually has really good covers for her books, with cover models that actually look close to how they're described in the story. It's not often you see people in wheelchairs on romance covers. 

Crossposted by Cannonball Read

CBR17 Book 47: "Partners in Crime" by Alisha Rai

Page count: 400 pages

Rating: 4 stars

Buzzword Cover Challenge 25: Skyline

CBR17 Pie Chart Challenge: Diversity 

Yet again resorting to the official plot summary, because I finished this in mid-April and I just cannot remember all the of details of the plot anymore:

At thirty-five, with a stable job as an accountant, Mira Chaudhary wants nothing more than to find a boring man to spend the rest of her life with. Having had enough excitement in her younger days and desperately trying to escape her dysfunctional past, she turns to a matching app specializing in Indian American singles to help her find someone to settle down with.

Enter Naveen Desai. An English professor with an uneventful, normal, and—dare she say it, boring—life, Naveen is perfect.

But just when things are going well, Mira receives news that her aunt has died. Suddenly, a trip to Las Vegas to settle her aunt’s affairs turns into a mad dash to escape kidnappers, evade art thieves, and consorting with hackers who can decipher just what it was Mira’s aunt was involved with. Mira just hopes that Naveen isn’t chased away by the very same life of “excitement” that she’s been trying to get away from. But maybe, over the course of one wild night, Mira and Naveen will find the love connection that neither expected.

Mira is trying to be traditional and respectable, to distance herself from her family's less than savoury past. Naveen is trying to help his grandfather keep his lawyer's practice. The two of them have a past, and Mira broke up with Naveen via text message. Not exactly classy. He's right to be pissed off at her.

However, when they end up drugged and abducted together to Las Vegas, they try to figure out what the bad guys want from Mira's dad and aunt's pasts, before bad things happen to them (or people they care about, like Naveen's grandfather). They are forced to work together to stay ahead of their pursuers, and over the course of a whirlwind adventure in Vegas, they also get a chance to reconnect, reevaluate their past relationship and see each other honestly as the people they really are now.

Unfortunately, I don't remember a lot of details particularly clearly, but at the same time, I also don't remember anything that annoyed me while reading it, either. It was a fun read, and I finished it in less than 48 hours. 

Judging a book by its cover: Standard grumble about cartoon cover trend - but I do appreciate that both the characters on the cover look approximately as described in the story, and the scene in question, complete with fancy car and evening wear, does actually take place in the story. 

Crossposted on Cannonball Read. 

CBR17 Book 30: "Along Came Amor" by Alexis Daria

Page count: 512 pages

Rating: 4.5 stars

CBR17 Pie Chart Challenge: Diversity

Thank you to Netgalley and Avon for this ARC. My opinions are my own.

Ava is nursing her hurt feelings over the dissolution of her marriage in a hotel bar, when a handsome man approaches and offers to make her a better drink than the one she currently has (she made a face when sipping it). The man clearly has bartending experience, and after a brief conversation, Ava discovers that the charming man in fact owns the hotel she's currently in (not to mention a whole chain of them). Ava decides to do something entirely out of character for her, and agrees to a one night stand with Roman, which turns out to be a lot more memorable than either of them expected.

Roman Vasquez barely ever takes time off; he lives and breathes for his business empire, always striving for more and better. Yet the chance meeting with the downcast, but lovely Ava at the bar makes him uncharacteristically order his assistant to clear his entire schedule, and while they agreed it was to be a one-time thing, the two continue to meet up every few months or so, when Ava is feeling especially upset and dejected. At first, Roman doesn't mind being this beautiful woman's comfort hookup, but with every new meeting, he begins to fall more and more, and wants to pursue a proper relationship with Ava. He's always been hard-working and goal-oriented, and now his goal is to win Ava.

Ava has a very meddling family with a lot of strong opinions, and was basically made to feel like it was her fault that her husband cheated and that their marriage dissolved. She therefore wants none of her friends and family to find out about Roman, to avoid endless speculation and mean-spirited gossip about a relationship she doesn't see leading to a long-term future anyway. So it complicates matters rather a lot when she discovers that Roman is the best man at her cousin Jasmine's upcoming wedding (where Ava is the Maid of Honour). How is she going to keep their hook-ups secret when she can barely keep her eyes and hands off him every time he is near, and now they have to spend a lot of time together wedding planning?

This is only the second Alexis Daria novel that I've read, the first one being Take the Lead, a reworking of her debut novel. That was a perfectly good read (although I remember very little about the plot a year later), but it took me much longer to get through than many romances, since the plot and characterisation weren't really grabbing me. That is certainly not the case in this book. Eva is a really interesting protagonist, Roman is an excellent foil for her, and from their first meeting, I just wanted to keep reading to see what would happen next. 

Some of the supporting characters in this story are the couples from the previous two books in the Primas of Power trilogy (both of which I own, but haven't gotten round to reading yet). While Ava's cousins Jasmine and Michelle are ride or die for her and would support her through anything, it's quite obvious that most of Ava's family are really toxic and constantly make her feel like a failure. In contrast, Roman's mother and sister (who both live with him in his swanky apartment, at his insistence) are extremely supportive of him - they just want him to find a better work-life balance (in fact, get any sort of life outside of work) and do so much for them. 

I read this book after having finished some books that were either frustrating and rather boring or merely fine. So it's possible that my very high rating of this is because it was just so delightful to find an entertaining and well-written book as a palate cleanser to those other ones. I'm pretty sure that if I re-read it, I'll stand by my rating, though. It's not a full five stars (Ava takes a bit too long to wake up and realise that Roman is perfect for her), but this book balances some heavy themes and a lot of emotional topics in a good way. It's rare to find an author who can skillfully balance genuine emotion and romance, with cringeworthy embarrassment, cathartic long-overdue emotional confrontations with overbearing family, and still manage to include more than one laugh-out-loud moment. Yet in the final chapters of this book, Daria manages to do just that. 

That excellent balance also makes it possible for me to ignore the "baby in the epilogue" of it all (much easier to do now that I'm no longer involuntarily childless). This book seems to have more endings than the movie version of Return of the King, but I guess that might be natural, since this book finishes up Daria's entire Primas of Power trilogy, and it doesn't just show us Ava and Roman's continued happiness, but what happens to the other two couples, as well. Now that I've read and thoroughly enjoyed this, I'm absolutely going to add the previous two books in the series to my reading list over the summer. 

Judging a book by its cover: I really like the style of the covers for this trilogy, making the covers look like old-time movie posters. They're all distinct and suitable for the book in question, but eye-catching with bold colours, and the couple front and centre in a passionate embrace. I'm so very ready for the drawn covers to move on to something else, but these are better than a lot of other romances out there right now. 

Crossposted on Cannonball Read