Xcaret Books

Here are the books that I finished on my trip - fewer than usual, because my friends and I were doing a "pass and play" board game on the flights! 

And the Category is…Inside New York's Vogue, House, and Ballroom Community (by Ricky Tucker) 

For the Read Harder Challenge category "a nonfiction book about BIPOC and/or queer history."  This is the history of the ballroom community, as you can probably guess from the title. I enjoyed this, although I found it structurally disjointed.  I would have loved this as, for instance, an oral history in chronological order. Maybe with a glossary of terms. Instead it's kind of a mishmash. But a lot of good information about an important political movement. 

It’s Been a Pleasure, Noni Blake (by Claire Christian) 

Another RHC book, this time "a romance with bisexual representation." Noni goes through a bad breakup and decides to take a sabbatical for work and go back to sleep with the ones that got away. It's very sex-positive and body positive, pretty light, but has interesting things to say about deciding what you want in life and going for it.  Enjoyable. 

Friday I’m in Love (by Camryn Garrett) 

My favorite Garrett YA novel so far. I enjoyed how it's essentially a Sapphic romance about Black joy, but also deals in a real way with issues of class and generational trauma that don't have easy answers. Loved our main character and the crackling chemistry with her love interest. Really an excellent YA.

The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida (by Shehan Karunatilaka) 

This is a Tournament of Books selection but also qualifies as "a historical fiction book set in an Eastern country" since it is set in the late '80s in Sri Lanka. I learned a lot about the history of this country and the civil war.  The narrator is a ghost who is in the "in between" and trying to solve his own murder. Beautifully written, as you might expect from something that won the Booker Prize last year. I wouldn't be surprised to see this win the ToB (I mean you never know, it could be out in the first round, but nonetheless it would be a deserving winner.) Really fabulous.

The Violin Conspiracy (by Brendan Slocumb)

This is advertised as a "mystery" so I guess I'll put the mystery tag on it, but really it's more of a künstlerroman with a splash of mystery in it as a framing device. The main character is a classical violinist whose Stradivarius gets stolen in the opening. Lest we think he's overreacting (he reacts really badly) we flash back to find out the whole history of how he got the violin and how he - a Black musician - has faced racism throughout his entire career as a violin prodigy. The emotional importance of the violin to him becomes very clear by the end of this.

This is a Tournament of Books pick and starts off slow, but picks  up steam through the end. The resolution of the mystery is fine and I enjoyed the main character and his insights into the racism of the classical music world (which is based on the author's real experiences). However, the characters are incredibly flat. For example, his mother is just awful. He says he loves her but... why? She never says or does anything that isn't awful and all we see her do is crush his dreams and demand money from him. 

This is a real miss because his family (who is 90% evil) has a good point about the violin being their family legacy, and even the racist family (former slaveowners of his family) trying to get the violin back doesn't need to be comprised of evil caricatures. I guess that sums it up: the writing is good and the main character compelling, but a bit more moral complexity would have been good. 

Never Kiss Your Roommate (by Philline Harm)

I was in Barnes and Noble, browsing book covers for the category of "read a book you know nothing about based solely on the cover" and, although I chose a different book for that, I did think this cover was cute and figured I'd check it out from the library.

About a third of the way in, the fanfic language and references started, and I finally looked up this book to discover the author was part of the Wattpad author program and wrote this when she was 19.  This explained a lot. On Goodreads, there is a lot of anger about the racist portrayal of one of the main characters, but I'm not going to pile on. I certainly wrote some embarrassing stuff in my own YA novels and I wrote them as an adult.   I will say that Wattpad needs a sensitivity reader because although clearly the intentions were good... let's just say this British boarding school somehow has a co-ed basketball team* so the only Black character can be a basketball star. 

(*And a cheerleading squad. The school presented here doesn't make any sense at all. This is fanfic-quality writing, for sure, for better or for worse. Once the author matures and gets a real editor, her books could well be much better.)

Why did I continue reading it? Well, for a silly reason. One of the challenges this year is, once again "Pick a challenge from any of the previous years’ challenges to repeat."  Last year, I did one of the 2015 challenges, since the two years I haven't done the RHC were 2015 and 2016.  I haven't decided which challenge I'll repeat this year, but for the books I've read for fun, I've kind of been keeping track of which 2015 categories they fit. (Some are very broad - like "read a book by someone of a different gender" - and so this is relatively easy.) Anyway, this one qualified as "a book written by someone when they were under the age of 25" and so I figured if I finished it, I could cross off another 2015 category.