Austin Trip Reads

Time to spend a week in Austin for our team offsite, and thus time to read on airplanes! Here are the four books I finished this week plus one I read the day I came home:

Trust Exercise (by Susan Choi)

Part of Camp ToB. It's narratively playful and postmodern, with point of view changes and so much to discover between the lines. Still pondering the hidden meanings and looking forward to the discussion later this summer.

Eliza and Her Monsters (by Francesca Zappia)

Young adult novel about fandom and anxiety, which treats both with the utmost seriousness. Eliza is an artist who writes an insanely popular web comic, but her identity is secret and at school she is reclusive and anxious. Worlds inevitably collide, with moving results. I immediately picked up another book by Zappia...

Made You Up (by Francesca Zappia)

...whose main character is a high school student with schizophrenia. My notes just say "wow, wow, wow." Again, I ended up in tears by the end. These two books succeed where (sadly) Turtles All the Way Down fails.

Good Riddance (by Elinor Lipman)

A charming and funny romcom, but there is some transphobic and fatphobic language. Not a lot, but here's a content warning nonetheless.  A woman inherits her mother's yearbook and when it fails to "spark joy" she throws it out. It's discovered by a documentary filmmaker (of sorts) and suddenly, family secrets begin to be revealed.  Funny and unpredictable!

Three Laws Lethal (by David Walton)

Speculative fiction that I learned about from John Scalzi's Big Idea feature. It was a really fun page-turner!