Reading List by Jayne for April
Cherry Baby by Rainbow Rowell
Everybody knows that Cherry’s husband, Tom, is in Hollywood making a movie . . .
Almost nobody knows that he isn’t coming home.
Tom is the creator of Thursday—a semi-autobiographical webcomic that’s become an international phenomenon.
Semi-autobiographical. That means there’s a character in this movie based on Cherry . . . “Baby.”
Wide-hipped, heavy-chested, double-chinned Baby.
Cherry never wanted this. No fat girl wants to see herself caricatured on the page—let alone on the big screen. But there’s no getting away from it. Baby looks so much like Cherry that strangers recognize her at the grocery store.
While her soon-to-be ex-husband is in Los Angeles getting rich and famous and being the internet’s latest boyfriend, Cherry is stuck in Omaha taking care of the dog he always wanted and the house they were going to raise a family in . . . and wondering who she’s supposed to be without him.
Cherry had promised to love Tom through thick and thin.
She’d meant it.
One night, Cherry decides to leave all her problems, including Tom’s overgrown puppy, at home. She ventures out to see her favorite band play her favorite album . . . and someone recognizes her from across the room.
Russ Sutton knew Cherry when she was a young art student with a fondness for pin-up dresses and patent leather heels. Before Tom.
Russ knows Cherry. He likes Cherry.
And best of all . . . he’s never heard of Thursday.
Tender, funny, and utterly human, Cherry Baby is Rainbow Rowell’s richest, most surprising—sexiest—novel yet.
Warning – Spoilers ahead
CW/TW – body image issues, body shaming
Review
I love Rainbow Rowell’s books and have since Attachments way back in 2011. So I was really psyched for her newest one. What the blurb promises is not what the book delivers. The blurb made me think I was going to get a divorced heroine getting a new start with a guy who has crushed on her for years. But nope, that’s not it. I feel baited and switched.
I also have issues with how flat Cherry’s character is. Cherry knows she’s fat (word used 91 times in the book) but she’s okay with her weight and how she looks. She leans into her strengths and dresses nicely in vivid and bold clothes. But her entire personality is about how much she weighs which gets boring even if she’s fine with her weight. She has four sisters who have also been fat for most of their lives. Three still are but one is shunned for losing weight on Mounjoro. I thought this incredibly cold especially as Cherry mentions that the whole family has high blood sugar and these drugs were originally designed to treat diabetes! I guess the sister should have just stuck with insulin to stay in her sisters’ good graces or maybe the sisters could just accept what their sister decides to do with her own body?
Anyway, readers who have body image issues need to be ready for the near constant fixation on Cherry’s weight.
One thing would probably not be an issue with some people but bothered the hell out of me is about her dog. Cherry is stuck taking care of the dog that her husband wanted. The opening scene is of Cherry putting the dog up before going out to a concert. Then Cherry comes home with an old friend she met and they head straight upstairs to bed. It’s not until the next morning that Cherry finally drags herself out of bed to let the dog outside. I guess poor Stevie Nicks (the dog) was crossing her back legs until then.
The romance is also an issue as the seemingly (he’s also got issues about Cherry’s weight) great guy Cherry starts dating is not who she ends up with. No, that would be the almost ex-husband with whom she doesn’t communicate well and who cheated on her. I can like messy relationships but I wasn’t behind this one. The prose is great with sparkles of humor but at 25% in this is a DNF for me.
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The Lost Book of Elizabeth Barton by Jennifer N. Brown
A dual-timeline murder mystery set in an English country manor, when an ambitious professor discovers the long-lost manuscript of a Reformation-era prophetess
Historian Alison Sage has made a groundbreaking archival discovery—she found a manuscript containing the prophecies of a 16th century nun, Elizabeth Barton. Barton’s prophecy condemning Henry VIII and Anne Boleyn led to her execution and the destruction of all copies of her prophecies—or so the world believed.
With Alison’s discovery, she is catapulted to academic superstardom and scores an invitation to the exclusive Codex Consortium, a week of research among a select handful of fellow historians at a crumbling manor in England, located next to the ruins of the priory where Elizabeth herself once lived.
What begins as a promising conference turns into a nightmare as the eerie house becomes the site of a murder. Suddenly, everyone is a suspect, and it seems that answers lie at the root of a local legend about centuries-old hidden treasure. Alison’s research makes her best-suited to solve the mystery—but when old feelings resurface for a former colleague, and the stakes of the search skyrocket, everyone’s motives become murky.
Alison’s cutthroat world of academia is almost as dangerous as Elizabeth Barton’s sixteenth-century England, where heretics are beheaded, visions can kill, and knowing who to trust is a deadly art. The Lost Book of Elizabeth Barton is a thrilling novel, crackling with the voices of the past and propelled by a mystery that will leave readers in suspense until the very last page.
CW/TW – Torture scene is graphically described. Also spoilers
Review
Well, this is another much anticipated book that didn’t pan out as I hoped it would.
The academics are talking to each other as if they’re in a mutual admiration society – very stiff and over complementary to each other. It read as very stilted and clunky. I also thought that these world renown people doing and presenting their “research” felt sophomoric, more like a high school book report.
The story is not very subtle with its clues. I felt as if there were BIG RED ARROWS being pointed to things. The romance is cringe. Just straight out cringe. The plot promises a murder mystery but I had to keep waiting for this to finally appear. Both timelines move fairly slowly and there is a fair amount of repetition and unnecessary description especially in the modern section.
Is Alison gullible? Yes, Alison is so gullible. At first I can see why she is so eager to fit in with these fellow academics as they could be important contacts and women in academia seem like they need to network to break into the big-time. But after a while of Alison shrugging off weird things I wanted to hand her a clue. After she continually made excuses and kept trusting people who were projecting VILLAIN, I was ready to shake her. I know that this is often what women do – make nice – but I hate it IRL and in fiction.
I wanted to see more time spent on Elizabeth’s dawning realization that the men in her life were controlling her and shaping her narrative. Her eagerness to learn to read and how this is shutdown or ignored by others is heartbreaking. Elizabeth might be unlettered but she’s not stupid even if she begins to overreact in an attempt to maintain her importance and position – something she’s never had in her life before.
But the book is good at showing how women are manipulated and deceived. It’s definitely f*ck the patriarchy. Both women suddenly come to the attention of (usually) Men with Agendas and soak up the spotlight without being quite clever enough to realize what’s going on. I stayed with the book to find out who was going to be killed and see if the mystery would be solved. I wish the final bit hadn’t seemed straight out of a Nancy Drew book. C-
Oh, for something macabre, look up transi-tombs, aka cadaver tombs, and hellmouth paintings.
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I agree with you that the blurb for Cherry Baby was completely misleading. The story worked fairly well as women’s fiction or maybe litfic lite, but it’s NOT a romance novel. Cherry’s journey is towards self-acceptance, believing that she deserves good things, and that she herself *is* a good thing. The dynamics of her marriage were not great, but she had some responsibility in its failure. The messy ending isn’t romance novel HEA, but it’s hopeful. I gave it 3.5 stars.
I’m not going to even dip a toe into the fatphobia issue. Too many landmines.
@SusanS: Yep, with a another blurb I would have started this with different expectations and it might have worked better for me.
Well, drats for books that lead to unmet expectations, Jayne. I hope that your next few books will be more satisfying.
@Kareni: I did learn what transi-tombs and hellmouth paintings are so at least one wasn’t a total loss. ☺