February Reads

 February reading/listening was mostly mediocre with a couple of standouts.

1) You Could Make This Place Beautiful by Maggie Smith. A gorgeous memoir by the amazing poet. The title comes from the last line of her most well known poem, "Good Bones."

Anyway, this is her memoir of her unexpected, crushing divorce—the before, during, and after—told in snapshots in her lyrical voice. I loved it.

2) What Happened to Ruthie Ramirez? by Claire Jimenez. (audio) Thirteen-year-old Ruthie disappeared without a trace after school one day, and a decade later, her sisters think they see her on a reality TV show. I loved listening to this story of this family’s loss and trauma, told through multiple voices of the Ramirez women: mother Dolores and her three daughters: Jessica, Nina, and Ruthie. This book is raw, sometimes funny, and both heartwarming and heartbreaking. Author Jiménez reads the audio version of this, and she was incredible.

Our Missing Hearts by Celeste Ng was a re-read for me. This time I listened to it, and it was just as good the second time around. If you haven't read it, well, please do! It's a dystopian novel but it sure gets uncomfortably close to reality sometimes.

The Last Green Valley by Mark Sullivan and Westering Women by Sandra Dallas were both good historical fiction. Sullivan tells the amazing true story of a Ukrainian family in World War II who escaped the Soviets. Westering Women traces a group of 40 single women who ventured on the Overland Trail from Chicago to California in the 1850s in search of husbands amongst the gold miners. (*domestic abuse and SA warnings*)

Everything else was a solid 3 out of 5 stars, which is my "pretty good but not really memorable" rating, except for Pineapple Street, which I wasted about 10 hours of my life listening to, and yet I kept listening because I truly believed that *something* would happen. In the end, the entire book was actually just an excruciating look into the lives of the extremely wealthy and privileged.

Audiobooks