Vacation Reads: Glamping Edition

Foolish Hearts (by Emma Mills)

Utterly delightful young adult novel. Great characters, loved the various romances and the Claudia/Iris frenemyship. God, I love a good YA. As soon as I was done with this I immediately put another of her books on hold. I don't have a ton to say about it but I really loved it and as a young adult author, admired the writing on top of that.

Love Warrior (by Glennon Doyle Melton)

I would probably not have finished this memoir, except this was an Oprah Book Club Selection and thus qualified for the Read Harder Challenge. It's not bad, but as honest as Melton seemingly tries to be, it comes across as kind of easy and superficial. So many convenient epiphanies and then smug pontificating.  At one point she's describing a scene where she "told her daughters" this long inspirational speech about beauty and prettiness and sexiness, supposedly off the top of her head, and it simply doesn't feel authentic. Doesn't hold a candle to memoirs like Blackout and Wild, which are both more authentic-feeling and way more compellingly written.

There's also the fact that it's pretty clear between the lines that she's probably gay, although the book ends with her not having reached that conclusion like, at all, except she sort of backpedals her own ending in an epilogue and now she's married to Abby Wambach so yeah.  And it turns out she got her start as a blogger, which, ugh, of course. And the title is dumb. So I don't know, maybe it's not bad but it's also not good.