What Kerry Read: March-ish Edition
What I liked! What I didn't! In between as well!
(puff puff, blowing dust off Substack) Does this thing even work anymore?
Here’s the deal, reading rainbowers. Your girl can’t commit to a weekly cavalcade of book reviews, and yet I still find myself keeping track of the books I like and the books I don’t with some inchoate itch to scream about them into the void.
And let’s face it, most of YOU don’t want to read a treatise on, like, the art of the thriller or the lost art of banter before I get to the good stuff (JBS don’t give that idea to anyone else). I know this is true because many people gently tell me all the time. But maybe you want to know a few book ideas, all easy-breezy like?
So for your sake and mine, let’s try this rundown of some of the books I read in March and how I feel about them, with brevity and conciseness to the extent I can manage that! Dispense with all but the bare necessities, book review wise! Attack the superfluousness and frivolity with a DOGE-like ferocity, except with mercy and strategy and intelligence and caring about things and allies and people, so like the exact opposite of DOGE!
Okay, that last paragraph contained a petite bit of excess and nonsense. I do see that now. It’s going to be a journey anyway here we go.
Briefly Perfectly Human: A memoir from a death doula helping us think about creating a good death, and with it a good life. Beautiful. 2/5 lambs.
(Find out what a lamb rating is HERE. I think we still gotta keep the lambies, right?)
Glory Daze: Glory Broussard is BACK in this second cozy mystery about a Black woman of a certain age, running her gambling book, quarreling with the church ladies, and solving murders. Sure, my friend Danielle wrote it, but it’s so good to meet Glory again, funny as ever. Also fun on its own, not just for a sequel. 4/5 lambs.
Throwback: A super cute time traveling YA-ish rom com about a Gen Z girl whose friction with her Gen X mom takes an unexpected turn. Back to the Future meets Mean Girls, or something. Witty and cute, but also quite smart. Better than the summary suggests. 4/5 lambs.
Careless People: It’s not like you don’t already KNOW Mark and Sheryl and the Meta crew are corrupted and siloed by power. But it’s still a whirlwind of a memoir by a former staffer. Not all of these kinds of books are great, but this is very readable. 3/5 lambies (maybe 1-2 for the global destruction of it all.)
Summer Romance: OoohhHH did I enjoy this romance about a divorced mother and her summer fling with her best friend’s brother. It’s really hard to write something that’s light and fun and bantery but also has real, adult complications. Kudos to you, Annabel Monaghan and take 4.5/5 lambies.
We’ll Prescribe You a Cat: Apparently this book is a best-seller and none of you saw fit to tell me about it? This is such a sweet, short, funny, weird, melancholy, heart-swelling trip of a book about an unusual clinic where patients are prescribed cats. I LOVED it. 3.5/5 lambs (but multiple cats.)
Wives Like Us: This is a Crazy Rich Asians satire-excess except set in the British Cotswolds with mostly reprehensible people. I thought it was great fun but you gotta know what you’re getting into. 5/5 lambs.
Sunrise on the Reaping: In my mind, Suzanne Collins is aghast and irritable that her anti-authoritarian dystopian series has been reduced to a Team Gale/Team Peeta teen romance. So she will write increasingly on-the-nose Hunger Games books until everyone gets! the! POINT! and becomes the Resistance, dammit! I did not like The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes, and I did enjoy this. But it hits a lot of the same beats from Katniss’s first games vs exploring new ground. So - do with that what you will. 1/5 lambs, lotsa kids die quite gruesomely, sorry if that is a Hunger Games spoiler?
Kills Well With Others: Similarly - I really loved Killers of a Certain Age and this sequel is still fun! But if feels quite sequel-ish. So. Only if you loved the first one. 3/5 lambs due to the assassinations of it all.
Colored Television: Yes I know everyone loves Danzy Senza and she certainly is quite a writer. But I found myself a little frustrated with this book about a biracial author who’s living on the edge with her family, and who finds herself in a situation she thinks will turn her life around. I felt like Senza’s commentary about the liminal spaces where biracial people live was at odds with what the main character was actually doing and maybe that’s the point but … I wanted to appreciate it more than I actually did. Anyway - other people did love it so maybe you will too. 3/5 lambs.
Welcome to Pawnee: Of course this only for hard-core fans of Parks and Recreation. But if that’s you, go on and give this a read. Genuinely insightful, candid and heartfelt. 5/5 lambs.
The Sequel: I liked The Plot even if it was obvious, but I don’t think in this sequel the author accomplished the arch, meta-critique she was striving for. Didn’t love. Can’t even remember it well enough to give it a lamb rating.
The Housemaid: I know I’m late here but how did the whole world just love this book? So creepy and dark and for me not clever or substantive enough to make it worthwhile. I literally skimmed the ending because it was so violent, and I also thought there were a few plot holes and also not very well-written. Extremely not for me, sorry not sorry. 1/5 lambs.
And that’s it, folks! See you next month with another installment of “I Read Them So You Don’t Necessarily Have To, But Might Want To!” or something more snappily titled. Leave me a comment and let me know how this new format hits you, and if it has the appropriate amount of nonsense.
Also do you also want to know about the books not listed because I have extreme neutrality about them? You tell me.
All links go to The Best Bookstore in Palm Springs, because we’re reallllly gonna have to support indie bookstores now with paper tariffs and printing costs and whatnot. And libraries too, people. Dig in.