Two Terrific Books
Hey folks, I'm adding in a monthly piece on two books I wanted to highlight. Likely these books will also appear in my quarterly reading roundup, but the thing is sometimes I want to talk a little longer about a book, and sometimes all I have to say is, it was great go read it.
I may get a little spoilery in these posts so if you don't want too much info - here are the two books, you can go forth and come back later - After Hours on Milagro Street and I'm Glad My Mom Died.
So, full disclosure, I know the author of this first one, so I am predisposed to like her stuff. But I read Angelina M. Lopez's After Hours on Milagro Street and was really fascinated. First, both characters are holding on to some stuff, and have chosen very different life strategies to handle it. They meet, bang, and then fairly quickly butt heads. He lives over the family bar she has come back to town to save. He's a white East Coaster who has adopted her town, a history professor, who loves the less well-known history of Mexican Americans that her town, and her family represent. She has been making her name as a Chicago bartender. And now has big ideas for how to make this bar something that would appeal to people from cities and even the nearby college.
I will say, there's a lot of people being irritable with each other and not bothering to explain why, and I do think all the pieces do get unveiled in ways that make everything that came before make even more sense, but that is very much a your mileage may vary on that scenario. There's also a bit of lost treasure hunting and a cranky ghost. And at one point there is only one bed.
While I am older than the target age for "iCarly" I did watch it, and have even watched some of the reboot. I of course had noticed that Sam was not in the reboot, had found interviews with both Jennette McCurdy and other cast members saying that no hard feelings, but she wasn't sure about acting these days. The title of this book, I'm Glad My Mom Died, is dramatic and eye catching for sure, but I think it's also very wise. The book starts of explaining how McCurdy's mom had stage 4 breast cancer when she was two, how she had made a video for her kids in case she died, and then she didn't. But they all gathered around and watched this video every Sunday after church. McCurdy wished on every birthday candle that her mom would survive. Her mom brought up the cancer to explain her need to park places she shouldn't, sit in on McCurdy's dance classes, help her shower even when McCurdy was a teen. Her mom's brush with death was a constant presence in her life, up until the cancer re-occurred.
And oof, content warnings galore: emotional abuse, sexual abuse, grooming behavior, disordered eating, OCD, alcoholism, codependence, and cancer.
People get really upset when you speak ill of the dead, but I think the book is so careful in the way that McCurdy presents their relationship. Noting how being a person who is sensitive to the emotions of others can also make you a person other's take advantage of, of how giving so much of yourself can leave you having trouble figuring out how to process emotions carefully, and how much of that can seem normal when you're in it, even as small parts of you are trying to sound the alarm. And how when cancer has been a presence hanging over your family for all this time, it seems both impossible and inevitable.