Welcome to Litsy!

Following our end-of-summer pool party, most of my book club migrated over to a “Boozy Book Fair” at a local cider company. I bought a new book AND got ever-so-slightly tipsy…at the same time!

I‘ve long seen memes about such events for the adults who desperately miss the Scholastic book fairs of our youth. Turns out, some memes are really just good ideas.

Next I need that meme of Muppet Pride & Prejudice with Adam Driver to become reality….

Such a real, honest story of an immigrant queer experience. What it is to be other and displaced from family. I liked that the ending was happy, but not as expected

A young college graduate takes an ethically questionable consulting job in Wisconsin to avoid having to move back home India. She starts dating women and enjoying her financial independence, but soon everything threatens to unravel. I really loved this bittersweet coming of age novel!

Sneha, a young twenty something, navigates love, friendship, family, and self discovery in 2008 Milwaukee.

Aimlessness ✨ Millennial ✨LGBTQ

For fans of books about the regular-ness of life (I.e. Writers and Lovers)

In some ways this novel reminded me of Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow. They both focus on a cast of characters that you grow to care about. Sneha is new to Milwaukee, friendless, with a family history that haunts her even as she prospers. She is meant to lead a better life than her parents. Her fortunes change but new friendships sustain her. I was rooting for her all the way to the end. Finalist for National Book Award 2022

I know the year isn't over yet, so I reserve the right to add a few books to this, but I made a list on my blog of my personal fav books I read in 2022! What were yours? (I compiled this list early since I am stuck in bed with Covid 😥) https://caseythecanadianlesbrarian.wordpress.com/2022/12/23/my-favourite-books-o...

Coming of age novel, set mostly in Milwaukee. There‘s a lot going on in the novel- sexual identity, relationships, immigration, employers taking advantage of employees, and navigating adulthood. Good writing, and I felt as if I was following Sneha throughout months of her life. Some relationships didn‘t make sense to me, but overall, a completely different world than what I live.

Little surprises in her writing: image of children‘s hands beneath bed sheets augments an otherwise common declaration of love scene. Sneha‘s fronting & pride elsewhere also enhance vulnerability of scene—well constructed. BIG OPINIONS

P 123 “Some people find it harder to forgive you for not being wrong”

P 424 “The world we knew has always been half-terrible, made as it is by the powerful, for the powerful. We were crowning a different one.”

2013. Indian immigrant & recent grad Sneha navigates corporate ladders & nightclubs of Milwaukee. Characters & city well drawn & specific. 🧡narrator‘s fierce, irreverent voice. Young adulthood, ambition, pride & honesty, shame, queer love, immigrant isolation, capitalism, communal living, found family. Sentences from nowhere that make sense to bring tears to the eyes. Snarky & tender. This is how you put words together & make them feel alive.2022

Gorgeous writing characters a story that drew me in involved me and I will be highly recommending.

A raw and impressive read. S is the daughter of immigrants who returned to India. She‘s on her own in the US and feels the obligation to make her parents proud - they offered so much for her. Her past makes her feels unworthy of love, of almost everything. She is hard on herself and this doesn‘t make her the most easy person to be around. Yet there‘s is this small circle of loving friends, each struggling with adult life in a rather hostile US.

#WeeklyForecast 43/22

Look at these beauties! I am reading Tokyo Ueno Station now and am not sure yet what I‘ll read next. Both have had some great reviews here so I think I‘ll like them both. We‘ll see.

Sarah Thankam Matthews does a brilliant job of creating real, raw characters dealing with themes of shame and guilt and inability to ask for help. This was an immersive story that emphasizes the ever-evolving nature of our lives in the unaccountable, antiknowable future.
"We create our lives saying one small yes to one small thing at a time. We create the world that way."

"We feel so much, most of us, and different layering things, like you can't feel only one thing ever, you know? Can you think of a time when you've felt only one thing at one time? I think crying allows us to midwife our more intense, more complicated emotions, get them outside of our bodies, and then our body feels light and free again."

Sarah Thankam Mathews is clearly a good writer, as she created such a convincing shallow, selfish, bully of a character in the first part of this book that I didn‘t want to keep reading. The redemptive arc wasn‘t significant enough or quite believable to me. Needless to say, this one didn‘t work for me.

This novel made me feel! It‘s an evocative debut for anyone who came of age during the Great Recession. Simply stunning.

S is an Indian woman with a complicated immigration history. In 2012, she graduates college and takes a job as a consultant in Milwaukee. She and her friends have many young millennial complications like debt, job insecurity, poor housing options, coupled with queerness. Mathews brings empathy and urgency to these characters.

One of the best books I've ever read: so viscerally real but at the same time so brilliantly crafted. The sentences frequently stunned me with their sharp insight, exquisite beauty. An intimate, generous, and honest portrait of Sneha, an aloof, emotionally cautious woman making her way in that post-college period in an American recession as an immigrant from India. Work, friendship, romance, food, sex, housing, all the millennial life stuff.

"I did not know how to explain this stubborn love that I staggered under, iridescent, veined with a terrible grief, grief for the ways [my parents'] lives had been compost for my own."

#QueerBooks #AsianBooks

Hurray Monday Book Mail.AllThis Could Be Different beautiful cover rave reviews can‘t wait to start reading 💕📚