CBR18 Book 34: "Shrunkation" by Janine Amesta

Page count: 235 pages

Rating: 3.5 stars

This was an ARC I received from the author, Janine Amesta. My opinions are my own. 

Catalina and Trey's marriage is in trouble. Catalina is exhausted from her demanding work, nearing burnout, and incapable of forgetting some foolish and hurtful things Trey said to her months ago. She's feeling unappreciated and ignored, not to mention misunderstood. Trey knows that he screwed up, but he thinks all they need is some quality time together. He won a weekend stay at a luxury resort in Cancun, and hopes that in this new and exciting place, he will be able to persuade Catalina to fall in love with him again.

Things take a turn when the arguing couple find themselves shrunk to a quarter-inch size by the whims of an arrogant tech billionaire. Now, as well as trying to figure out a way to reconcile, the couple need to dodge enormous obstacles like crabs, sand fleas, and hungry gulls, as well. They have very little food and water, and have to make their way back to the hotel, hoping they can attract the attention of someone who might be able to help.

As well as Catalina and Trey's POVs, we also get to follow Sasha, a minion of the evil tech billionaire. Even when she's had misgivings about the company, she still stayed in the job to make enough to help pay for her dad's hospital bills. She's the only one who figures out what happened to Catalina and Trey, and she goes against the advice of the company to stay behind at the resort to look for the teeny-tiny missing couple.

This is a fun book, clearly inspired by Honey, I Shrunk the Kids. However, that was not a movie that made much of an impact on me. I know I watched it a very long time ago, when I was little, and while I know many have fond memories about it, it never made much of an impact on me. On the other hand, if there was such a thing as shrinking technology, I find it terrifyingly plausible, in today's political and financial landscape, that some moronic tech bro would callously use it for fun, never bothering to think about the dangers or wider consequences.

When they get to the resort, the rift between Catalina and Trey is getting wider, made worse by their failure to communicate clearly with one another. Catalina is overworked and exhausted, and Trey, for all that he clearly adores his wife, has not been shouldering as much emotional labour as she. Once they end up in an unusual and perilous situation, they are forced to work together to survive, but even that starts out as fraught because of the tensions between them. After being exposed to repeated danger and starting to communicate more honestly with one another, it turns out that a lot of their problems have been made worse by their own unspoken insecurities that they've been projecting onto the other person.

This book was entertaining, and the concept is very novel. I liked it well enough, and Amesta writes engaging characters. I just don't see myself wanting to pick it up for repeated re-reads, which is what characterises my favourite romances. 

Judging a book by its cover: Apparently, when Ms. Amesta tried to post images of this cover on Threads, her posts were flagged as inappropriate, and she was in danger of having her account shut down. I genuinely don't see why. There is no more nudity than you see on a lot of romance covers, and this one is cute and clever and funny as well. Go home, algorithm, you're drunk!

Crossposted on Cannonball Read. 

CBR16 Book 59: "Bad Blood: Secrets and Lies in a Silicon Valley Startup" by John Carreyrou

Page count: 352 pages

Audio book length: 11 hrs 37 minutes

Rating: 4 stars

Nowhere Book Bingo: From a genre you've never read (true crime)

CBR16 Bingo: Fiasco (Theranos was a massive fraud and a fiasco)

I've owned this book since 2020 and am pretty sure I picked it up in an e-book sale because of the many Cannonball reviews I've read about it over the years. Not being particularly interested in the tech world or medical science, and certainly, not someone who reads a lot of business news, I didn't really hear about this case as it was unfolding, and I'm aware that there have been podcasts, a documentary and a mini-series starring Amanda Seyfried about the scandal, but this book was pretty much forgotten in my e-book collection until the Nowhere Books bingo required me to find a book from a genre I've never read.

Readers of my reviews will know that I have certain genres I prefer - romance, fantasy, YA, the occasional mystery or sci-fi novel. If I read nonfiction, it's usually historical biographies, celebrity autobiographies or something I need to read for work. Nevertheless, I like to challenge myself, so over the years I've read a LOT of different books in so many different genres. It was genuinely a challenge to come up with one I hadn't already tried. My husband suggested I look up subgenres of nonfiction, as it was clear that was where I'd find something that might fit the bill. When True Crime came up, I realised that would work. I know that lots of people find True Crime fascinating, but I just don't really see the appeal in exploring grisly murder cases or other horrific crimes. This book, which I remembered that I had on my shelf didn't seem to involve any murders, so it would probably not traumatise me too much. 

John Carreyrou is the journalist who wrote the Wall Street Journal articles which began to expose Elizabeth Holmes as a fraud and brought attention to the very shady business practices of her tech company Theranos. He later developed his thorough research into this book, where he details how Miss Holmes, a young and charming Stanford dropout managed to bamboozle the tech and business world for years, promising her company could deliver quick, accurate and almost pain-free blood tests with devices so small and portable they would be possible for the public to have in their homes. At one point, Theranos was valued at 10 billion dollars, without ever having actually managed to produce the testing machines or blood testing results they were promising.

Holmes was beautiful and persuasive, and clearly excellent at fundraising for her company. Along with her boyfriend, Sunny Balwani, who was COO of Theranos, they managed to perpetrate their fraud for so long by intimidating and threatening their employees, firing anyone who spoke up about their suspicions of underhanded dealings, and because very few of their investors actually understood the science behind what they were trying to do. Holmes was featured in a number of highly flattering articles, and the board of directors of Theranos at various points included several senators, former secretaries of state (including Henry Kissinger), a former secretary of defence, an admiral, and a general - all seduced by Holmes' promising tale of deception. 

Once Carreyrou started investigating the case, he had a hard time finding people willing to talk to him, since Holmes and Balwani made all their employees sign iron-clad NDAs and were fiercely litigious towards anyone they thought might be a threat to their company. However, Carreyrou were able to publish several critical articles, which again led to investigations into Theranos' business practices and inspections of their laboratories. The results were disastrous for the company, proving that not only were the test results their labs produced extremely unreliable and could endanger patients because of it, but they were mostly using equipment from other producers to get their results since none of the proprietary machines made by Theranos worked at all. They had not only misled their investors, they had put countless patients' lives in danger with their inaccurate blood tests. 

It was a fascinating story, and I will probably check out the HBO documentary and the mini-series at some point as well. Now, having read this, I can't really think of any genres I haven't tried at least once.

Judging a book by its cover: Some editions of this book feature a gloved hand holding up a tiny vial of blood, but my edition, and most that I've seen, have this fully black cover with the bold red title. Not exactly the most exciting, but the contents of the book more than might up for it.

Crossposted on Cannonball Read

CBR16 Book 42: "To Say Nothing of the Dog" by Connie Willis

Page count: 512 pages

Rating: 4 stars

Nowhere Book Bingo: Award Winner (Won the Hugo and Locus awards in 1998, plus a bunch of others)

Smart Bitches Summer Bingo: Scene on a boat or body of water (there's a lot of rowing on the river)

CBR16 Bingo: Tech (time travel requires pretty specific technology)

This is the second book in the Oxford Time Travel series, but you really don't need to have read the first one, Doomsday Book, to understand and enjoy this one.

In the universe these books are set in, time travel was discovered, but once it was further discovered that no items could be taken back to the future, so it couldn't be used to gain riches or plunder the past of treasures, the technology became used solely by historians, and there are strict rules that must be followed when doing it for academic pursuits.

Ned Henry is an Oxford historian in the 2050s who feels like he's going mad. Lady Schrapnell, a frightfully wealthy and extremely demanding woman is funding the recreation of Coventry Cathedral (in Oxford, for reasons not really explored in the book) and is demanding that absolutely everything is exactly like it was before the Cathedral was destroyed in an air raid during World War II. Ned has been sent on countless missions back to the past to locate something known as the bishop's bird stump (I had to google this, it turns out it's an incredibly ugly vase shaped like a tree stump with decorative birds on it), because that was one of the items apparently present in the church at the time. Because he has been unable to locate it, Ned has had to go back to the past and visit any number of church bazaars and jumble sales in the hopes of finding the blasted relic. If people are sent back too often, they start getting delerious and behave very oddly, so Ned is ordered by his boss to get some rest.

He can't get the required rest in the present, however, because if tyrannical Lady Whatsherface discovers his whereabouts, she'll just demand that he keeps looking for the bird stump. So Ned's boss sends him back to the Victorian age, to hide out for a few weeks and get the much-needed break he requires. In the Victorian age, he encounters a fellow Oxford historian, Verity Kindle, who is trying to undo an unfortunate mistake, and if they don't manage to set things right, it could have consquences for the entire future timeline. While working together to fix Verity's mistake, she and Ned also have to try to make sure that Lady Schrapnell's ancestor, a truly dimwitted girl, doesn't fall in love and marry the wrong person, a task that proves more complicated than one might first have imagined.

I read Doomsday Book back in 2016 and don't remember it very fondly. It was far too long, the plot meandered a lot and because most of the story takes place during the Black Plague, it was also pretty depressing. This book is much lighter in tone, and a lot of the plot plays out like a farce, with humorous mix-ups, misunderstandings, mistaken identities, and a fairly large cast of rather ridiculous characters. The book is also full of literary allusions and clever references to all sorts of academic things, at least 50% of which went entirely over my head. I'm not sure I'm clever enough to appreciate this book on as many levels as the author intended.

Ned and Verity are both extremely likable characters, and my main complaint about the book is that there is so much faffing about and preventing romances between other characters, so there isn't enough time for them to spend together on page, developing their own romance. Nevertheless, this was a fun read, and I'm very much looking forward to my book club's discussion of it in August (we were supposed to have the meeting in June, but too many people were sick or busy, so we just postponed everything over the summer, which also gives more people the chance to read the book). Considering some of the books we've had in the previous months have been rather disappointing, this one felt like a breath of fresh (albeit confusing) air. 

Judging a book by its cover: This book has been out for decades, and as such, there are a lot of different covers for it, most of which I dislike. The cover for my e-book copy isn't great either, but at least I like the warm colours on it. 

Crossposted on Cannonball Read