There’s a lot going on in Summer of '69. The three sisters in the Foley/Levin family are each embroiled in their own worries. The eldest sister is pregnant while her husband is emotionally unavailable and potentially unfaithful, the middle sister is striking out on her own but running into trouble, and the youngest is stuck in Nantucket with her unyieldingly conservative grandmother and her increasingly tipsy mother. Their brother is overseas fighting the war in Vietnam, and their mother is increasingly distraught over this, driving herself to oblivion with alcohol to ease the pain.

But all these issues are treated rather superficially in the book. They feel somewhat contrived (and a tad boring, if I’m honest), and their resolutions are all standard stuff. One of the hooks for this book is that people are keeping secrets, but I didn’t feel any surprise or shock when those are revealed. They all feel rather pedestrian. For a book about females during the feminist revolution, I had hoped that there would be strong female characters for me to cheer for, but that was disappointing too. All the women in here mostly just took what life and men handed to them. Sure, that probably is true to the times of the 1960s, but it didn’t make for a very compelling read (at least to me).

One of Elin Hilderbrand’s strength is her writing, and in that respect, she remains in top form. This story is easy to get into and I found myself flipping the pages even though the story itself wasn’t as riveting. I went into Summer of ‘69 thinking it would be the perfect beachy blend of family drama and secrets, summertime in Nantucket, and growing up during the awakening of the feminist movement. But coming out of the book, I feel only lukewarm about it. While it wasn’t a bad story, it just wasn’t as exciting or as insightful as I wanted it to be.

Readaroo Rating: 3 stars

In Fix Her Up, Georgie is the youngest of her siblings, and has been treated like a kid her entire life by her family and the whole town. It doesn't help that for her job, she works as a clown to brighten kids' days. Travis is the town's prodigal baseball star, returning after an injury ended his career early. When Georgie proposes that they pretend to date each other to help her reputation and his chance of landing a new job, sparks start to fly.

Georgie is the real highlight of this book. She's spirited and witty, refusing to back down when difficulty strikes. She's also loyal to Travis, being there for him when he's going through tough times. I'm a complete sucker for romances with feisty female leads, so it's no surprised that I adored Georgie and totally connected with her.

I also adore this type of story: guy views girl as his friend's little sister and is gobsmacked when he realizes she's all grown up. There's something really cute in rediscovering that the love you've been searching for all your life has been right there in front you, if only you can stop and take notice.

This book was such a charming surprise for me, and I'm so glad I came across it. The characters are lovable, the dialog is sharp, and the development of the relationship is heartwarming. Romances are really personal, so it's hard to say if this will appeal to everyone, but I found so much to love in here. It looks like this is the first in a series, so I look forward to reading more.

Readaroo Rating: 4 stars

I had high hopes going into Disappearing Earth as I had heard so many great things about it. But it pretty much disappointed me from beginning to end. I think this is a case of mismatched expectations. Everything that others loved about this book are all the same reasons I don't.

The premise of this book is interesting enough: two young girls disappear from a Russian town, which sends the the townspeople reeling over the next few months as the investigation turns up nothing. Except what I got isn't what I expected.

First, there was no investigation depicted in this book. It was mostly a bunch of hearsay on the part of gossipy townspeople and inaction/incompetence on the part of the police. So to go into this book thinking it is a mystery of any sort would be mistaken. Unfortunately, that is the part I was most looking forward to.

The writing is somewhat stilted and awkward. There are sentences where the meaning is unclear, so I have to read it multiple times to understand. There are ambiguous pronouns. There are odd dialogues where it sounds like someone is making a joke, but it's not clear why it's funny or who said what. All this made the book hard to read.

The theme doesn't tie together either. This book is written so that each chapter is a month from the perspective of a different woman in town. Unfortunately, with one exception, their stories don't have anything to do with each other, so you are essentially reading standalone stories that all just happen to take place in the same town.

Also, none of the characters are likable or memorable. Most of them are narrow-minded, prejudiced, and quick to judge others. When faced with choices, they inevitability make the wrong ones. But instead of learning from their mistakes, they choose to suffer and look down their noses at others trying have a little joy in their life. It's an odd culture that permeates this town and this book.

I almost abandoned it many times, but I thought it would get better if I toughed on. The only parts of the book I found interesting are the ones related to the crime itself, which are just the beginning and the end. The rest is a meandering journey with unlikable characters making the worst of circumstances and feeling bad for themselves. I'm sorry to say that that isn't for me.

Readaroo Rating: 2 stars

Oh gosh, I'm slightly shocked that I didn't love Recursion. I've been looking forward to this ever since I read Dark Matter, so to say I'm a bit disappointed is an understatement.

(Note: As usual, this is a 100% spoiler-free review. However, I couldn't talk about the book without referencing some events in it. But I haven't figured out how to do spoiler tags on my blog yet, so where it says "(view spoiler)," the actual spoilers can be viewed on my Goodreads review, here.

The premise is certainly intriguing enough. Detective Sutton is investigating False Memory Syndrome, where the victims suddenly come into possession of vivid, intense memories of lives they've never lived. Ten years prior to that, we also follow scientist Helena Smith as she works on creating technology that will allow dementia patients to store memories and access them at a later date.

That all sounds good, but then we get to the crux of the science for this book: (view spoiler) This is explained by some odd interpretations of quantum mechanics, but the explanation doesn't actually work for me. Obviously, being that this science fiction, there's a lot of leeway on what could be real. But unfortunately, the way it's explained in the book can't ever be real. (view spoiler) Also, the science doesn't make sense, even within the book's universe. (view spoiler)

The story is very ambitious, maybe a little too much so. Along with the scientific impossibility, there's also a lot of scientific jargon and philosophical musings meant to sell the reader on this idea. But it just comes across as a lot of mumbo jumbo, at least to me.

However, I'm willing to stop being a wet blanket and suspend my scientific disbelief, if only the rest of the story was great. But the rest was over-the-top too. The thrills felt artificially amped up, with lots of random craziness thrown in just to keep it all going. It soon became exhausting. (view spoiler) This happened multiple times. My eyes rolled so hard, I might've bruised them.

No doubt following up Dark Matter is a tough task. And I wonder how much of my feelings of this book is tangled up in my love for Dark Matter and my high expectations going into this. Also, writing about (view spoiler) is extremely challenging, and this just didn't gel together into a cohesive story for me.

Still, even for all my complaints, I guess I did find it to be decently entertaining, if a bit silly, for the most part.

Readaroo Rating: 3 stars

Chasing New Horizons details the exciting NASA/APL mission that started in the late 1980s with the pitching to NASA of a Pluto mission, and ultimately culminated in New Horizon's successful flyby of Pluto in 2015. Along the way, the book takes us into the inner workings of a space mission to see how it was funded, planned, designed, built, and executed. It was a long and arduous journey, with numerous obstacles and setbacks along the way, which added to make this fascinating account even more thrilling.

I'm a total space buff, so this book was right up my alley. At the time of the Pluto flyby, I had some personal things going on that made me less aware of this event, so it's wonderful to have a second chance to relive this momentous occasion. The last time a new world had been explored was during Voyager 2's flyby of Uranus and Neptune in the 1980s, and I was too young then to understand. So New Horizon's Pluto mission is even more special to me because it is the defining space exploration mission of my lifetime.

I've read a few space exploration books in the past, which cover missions to the moon and aboard the International Space Station. After a while, the content of those books did overlap a bit, so going in, I was worried that this book may be similar. But that didn't turn out to be the case at all. This book's content was completely novel and fresh to me, so I was learning something new on every page.

As an aside: Pluto is and will forever remain a planet in my eyes. I'm not sure what the IAU was smoking when they said otherwise, but it seems like their proclamation wasn't even based on science or logic. So there.

Needless to say, I found this book to be utterly captivating. If you are even a little bit interested in space exploration, I highly recommend it. It is uplifting and inspirational, reminding us all of what we can be accomplish through perseverance, hard work, and ingenuity.

Readaroo Rating: 5 stars!

Normally I love Jane Green, so it's somewhat of a surprise to me that I found The Friends We Keep to be a letdown. Evvie, Maggie, and Topher meet during their freshman year in college and instantly become best friends. When they graduate, they vow to remain close friends, but real life slowly intrudes and they lose touch. Thirty years later, they meet up again and have another chance at closeness, but a dark secret from the past threatens to tear everything apart.

The story isn't bad per se, but it isn't compelling either. I found most of it to be boring and plodding. The early years when the three friends first meet isn't that interesting, and neither is the intervening years as they live their lives. The only riveting parts of the story are those related to the dark secret, but that's very little of the book. Otherwise, it feels like the story is padded to fill an entire book's worth of pages.

Reading this, I felt very little of any emotion or attachment. The words are on the page, and there should be characters I care about, but I just don't. The writing and the plot felt uninspired and tired. If you were looking to try out Jane Green, I think this one is entirely skippable and I would pick a different one to start with.

Readaroo Rating: 3 stars

The Porpoise starts off with the tale of a widowed father raising his daughter after his wife is killed in an airplane crash. At first, all seems well, but soon it becomes apparent that there is something off about the relationship between father and daughter. In comes a young man named Darius who discerns the secret, and the father drives him away while mortally threatening his life. Darius on the run then morphs into the story of Pericles, the daring adventurer from the Shakespearean play.

This book was hard to rate because there was so much I liked about it, but there was also a lot that didn't work for me. I really enjoyed the portion of the story that is about Pericles, which is the majority (about two-thirds) of the book. I've never read the Shakespearean play, but Haddon made the character, his adventures, and his heartbreaks come alive for me. Even though the Pericles story is based on an ancient character, his issues feel relevant and interesting. The story of the father and daughter is interesting enough too, but it feels not fully fleshed out, probably because once Darius shows up, the story pivots to Pericles.

What didn't work for me is all the back and forth between the different stories. Just as we reach the pivotal moment with Darius, we leave his story behind. And when the Pericles story reaches a crucial part, we switch back to vignettes of the father and daughter. There are even a few scenes with Shakespeare and George Wilkins (who is suspected to have written parts of the Pericles Shakespearean play), which did not make any sense to me at all. And the back and forth weren't clearly labeled, so confusion was inevitable for a few paragraphs.

Instead of the author trying to be clever and fitting two different stories that mirror each other into one story (along with random Shakespeare/George asides), I wish he had just concentrated on the Pericles retelling. It would have been awesome to read that story from beginning to end, instead of starting around the middle. I think this is a case of the author being too ambitious, so that the story ended up more complex and difficult to understand than it needed to be. Still, the riveting tale of Pericles made me glad I picked this up.

Readaroo Rating: 3 stars