morsecode's reviews
14 reviews

On Our Best Behavior: The Seven Deadly Sins and the Price Women Pay to Be Good by Elise Loehnen

This book was a little all over the place. There were some things I found interesting (the chapter on the origins of the Seven Deadly Sins, for example), but I don’t think I’d recommend this book. Good concept (and good cover), but underwhelming and a bit preachy. Lots of anecdotes from the author’s life, some from her friends’ lives, as well as knowledge gleaned from various people she interviewed in the course of her career. Frequent exhortations that we (women, society as a whole) to do X or change Y, but little in the way of concrete advice for doing so. Also, the strict focus on the masculine/feminine  dichotomy was at odds with the self-conscious references to privilege and intersectionality. 

The Woman in the Library by Sulari Gentill

mysterious

• Plot- or character-driven? Plot
• Loveable characters? It's complicated
• Diverse cast of characters? It's complicated

This book was a staff recommendation at a local bookshop and it was excellent. I’ll admit to having some doubts about the narrative structure, but it worked well in the end. 

Shady Hollow by Juneau Black

lighthearted medium-paced

• Plot- or character-driven? Plot
• Strong character development? No
• Flaws of characters a main focus? No

I picked this up at a local bookstore while visiting my sister. The cover art caught my eye and I was intrigued by the premise (and pleased to see that there were more books in the series). I thought the book was fine. For me, it was better in theory than in actuality. I do like a cozy mystery (and have no issue with the suspension of belief required to imagine all the creatures living side by side), but the book fell a little flat for me and did not do much to sell me on the series. The “cast of characters” in the beginning of the book was unnecessary. There really weren’t that many of them and it was very easy to tell them apart, particularly because many of them had really (and unnecessarily) obvious names and most were not very highly developed.  The mystery also didn’t feel particularly substantive.  I might listen to book 2, if it’s available from my public library as an e-audio when I’m waiting for my holds, but I have no strong desire to do so. 

The Love Hypothesis by Ali Hazelwood

medium-paced

• Plot- or character-driven? A mix
• Strong character development? Yes
• Loveable characters? Yes
• Diverse cast of characters? Yes
• Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

This was fine for a light romance novel (though I feel a bit odd calling it “light” when the one of the points, it would seem, was highlighting the difficulties of being a woman in STEM, including and especially sexual harassment). So much about the book was preposterous, though. Before I read the author’s note, I would have assumed the author was not in academia given some of the glaring misrepresentations of how things like placement and grants actually work. I know these were done in aid of the story, and it wouldn’t bother most readers, but on top of the everything else (the inexplicable character decisions and preposterous, but convenient happenings typical of this type of book), the book seemed to ask to much of me in the way of suspension of belief. 

There were some things I really liked about the book like Adam’s character in general (though, personally I would have preferred if he wasn’t a perfect physical specimen) and that the main characters were not sexually motivated (demisexuals? There’s specific discussion of the possibility of Olive being asexual)

But there’s a reliance on tropes and stereotypes (including a promiscuous bisexual) and, what bothered me the most after reading the author’s note was the fact that the author decided to make Olive’s major professor a woman. The gender of that character didn’t make any difference to the story, but having the distracted (by family concerns), checked-out advisor be a woman does nothing to make the case for women in STEM and/or academia.