Book Review – The Baker Thief by Claudie Arseneault

Goodreads Synopsis:

Adèle has only one goal: catch the purple-haired thief who broke into her home and stole her exocore, thus proving herself to her new police team. Little does she know, her thief is also the local baker. 

Claire owns the Croissant-toi, but while her days are filled with pastries and customers, her nights are dedicated to stealing exocores. These new red gems are heralded as the energy of the future, but she knows the truth: they are made of witches’ souls. 

When her twin—a powerful witch and prime exocore material—disappears, Claire redoubles in her efforts to investigate. She keeps running into Adèle, however, and whether or not she can save her sister might depend on their conflicted, unstable, but deepening relationship. 

Review:

So because I can never stick to my “to read” plans, I deviated from the list I made at the start of the month and chose this book as it meant I was still sticking with my “Queer books for Pride” theme. I picked this up a while ago because I will almost auto-buy any SFF with Asexual characters (Adèle is Biromantic Demisexual) and was super excited to read it. Also, the cover is just absolutely beautiful – I probably would have bought it for that alone if I didn’t know about the awesome representation in the book.

The main character of the book is Claire, also known as Claude, is a genderfluid aromantic baker. Adèle is a police officer who has just moved to the city after having to leave her last team for investigating things people wanted to stay secret. The book starts with Claire breaking into Adèle’s new home to steal her exocore and from there the plot focuses on Claire’s attempts at discovering who is behind the exocores while Adèle focuses on hunting down the mysterious thief.

The best part of this book is definitely the characters, both Adèle and Claire are very well written and you could put them in any situation and I’d enjoy reading about it – the fact that they tend to end up in pretty interesting ones is just a bonus. The side characters are also all very well written and I loved them all (at least, the good ones).

This is set in a very obviously French setting, and the characters themselves speak French (written in English for us readers, but there’s little snippets of French in there such as the cute phrase Adèle and Claire say to each other). The author is from Québec and as I’ve never been, I’m unsure how much is based on there but I personally got a very strong Parisian vibe from it, especially the bridge which reminded me a lot of the many beautiful bridges across the Seine.

I was originally going to describe this as a perfect short read, but turns out it’s actually 400 pages! I was reading it on my Kindle and was so engrossed I didn’t notice the length of it.

This is a book I would highly recommend, especially if you’re looking to read more Queer books for Pride month. Be warned though, it will give you huge cravings for delicious French pastries!

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Book Review – Radio Silence by Alice Oseman

Goodreads Synopsis:

Frances Janvier spends most of her time studying.

Everyone knows Aled Last as that quiet boy who gets straight As.

You probably think that they are going to fall in love or something. Since he is a boy and she is a girl.

They don’t. They make a podcast.

In a world determined to shut them up, knock them down, and set them on a cookie cutter life path, Frances and Aled struggle to find their voices over the course of one life-changing year. Will they have the courage to show everyone who they really are? Or will they be met with radio silence? 

Review:

I picked this up from a list of books with Aro/Ace characters as it happened to be one of the few on the list that I could get from the library. I knew nothing about it until I collected it and despite not usually being a fan of YA Contemporary, I was immediately intrigued by the fact that it’s made clear straight away that Francis and Aled are not going to fall in love.

Now, I would disagree with that. They’re definitely in love with each other but a platonic friendship love rather than romantic. Indeed their growing friendship was the highlight for me as it was so nice to see such a nice, comfy friendship grow as I loved both of them and was just so happy seeing them happy. At it’s core, this is a book about friendship and growth and dealing with that awkward “What am I going to do now?” phase at the end of High School.

Reading this, with all the references to things like social media, reminded me so much of when I was a teenager on Tumblr and made me think of how much I would have loved friends like Francis and Aled at that age. I found them both very relatable, particularly Francis with her self-doubt and fear of not being good enough. I loved the idea of the Podcast and really enjoyed the snippets of it we saw throughout the novel.

The characters in this are also all very diverse – not only are the majority of the main and side characters Queer, but several of them are also varying ethnicities (Francis is half Ethiopian, Raine is Indian and Daniel is South Korean). It’s always great to see more intersectionality in representations of Queer characters.

If you are looking for a great book to read for Pride month then I highly recommend this. It’s an absolutely fantastic book and I just want to hug every single character in it.

Book Review – Let’s Talk About Love by Claire Kann

Goodreads Synopsis:

Alice had her whole summer planned. Nonstop all-you-can-eat buffets while marathoning her favorite TV shows (best friends totally included) with the smallest dash of adulting—working at the library to pay her share of the rent. The only thing missing from her perfect plan? Her girlfriend (who ended things when Alice confessed she’s asexual). Alice is done with dating—no thank you, do not pass go, stick a fork in her, done.

But then Alice meets Takumi and she can’t stop thinking about him or the rom com-grade romance feels she did not ask for (uncertainty, butterflies, and swoons, oh my!).

When her blissful summer takes an unexpected turn and Takumi becomes her knight with a shiny library-employee badge (close enough), Alice has to decide if she’s willing to risk their friendship for a love that might not be reciprocated—or understood.

Review:

This has been on my to-read list for a while and after seeing a post on twitter about #AroAceApril I got it out from the library as knew that would motivate me to read it. I’m not normally a YA Romance person but I absolutely adored the last Romance I read featuring an asexual character so thought I’d give this a go.

As expected, the majority of the story follows the romance between Alice and Takumi and dealing with her struggles of identity and figuring out her future. The romance parts were very sweet but I feel like I would have enjoyed it to be a bit slower with more build up. Takumi is adorable but at the same time, doesn’t seem to have that much depth – you don’t really learn that much about him as a person beyond a few interesting traits.

What I really loved about this though was that it was fantastic for representation – I loved that Alice was a Biromantic Asexual and, as you can tell from the cover, she’s also Black and Takumi (as you can guess from the name) is Japanese so both leads in this as POC which is rather rare.

The thing that spoilt this book for me was Feenie, Alice’s best friend, who just comes across as a horrible person and I don’t understand why Alice stays friends with her once she gets more confidence. She and Alice have a big falling out which is entirely due to Feenie’s selfishness and well, I could rant about her for ages but that would give away spoilers. Suffice to say, I do not like Feenie and I don’t feel she added much value to the story as a character.

If you enjoy YA Romance novels then I highly recommend this as it’s very sweet and it’s also nicer to see the focus on older characters who are at University instead of High School but I feel that if that’s not a genre you like, you probably won’t enjoy it.

Book Review – The Bone People by Keri Hulme

Goodreads Synopsis:

THE BONE PEOPLE is a love story. It begins when a mute six-year-old, full of blasting hurt and strange charm, wanders off the beach and into a home of a despairing artist. Kerewin has given up everything but drinking, thinking and fishing, but the arrival of the boy Simon and, later on, of his Maori foster-father Joe, drags all three into the gyre of possibilities. Cruel, funny, ardent and beautiful, THE BONE PEOPLE is a powerful and visionary New Zealand fable.

Review:

It’d been a while since I’d read a book for my Around the World challenge and so I decided that I’d pick New Zealand next as I saw mentions of this book online due to the fact that the author is Aro-Ace. She’s also part Maori and both of these aspects of her identity are represented in the novel. The main character, Kerewin, is asexual and part Maori (she may also be Aromantic but I don’t remember if it’s ever explicitly stated) and there are plenty of other Maori characters, who also speak Maori to each other. There’s a small glossary at the back of the book to explain all the terms used, and I felt it really helped with immersion into the novel and the setting.

The synopsis describes this as a love story, but to me it’s more a journey of healing. At the start of the novel all three characters are rather broken. Kerewin spends most of her time drinking, Simon is mute and acts out a lot while Joe beats Simon as he doesn’t know how else to control him. Kerewin and Simon bond and he behaves really well with her as she learns how to communicate with him and recognises that his behaviour is due to frustration at not being understood. The way Simon is written, it’s highly likely he is autistic and I really appreciated the fact that Kerewin just accepts this as how he is and works to ensure they can communicate.

As the novel progresses, they slowly get to know each other and start to heal both mentally and physically due to the influences on each other. This is a very slow book, focusing on the journey made by each of the three characters and on the relationship between the three of them. As this is the central focus of the story, I won’t say too much on the characters or the plot, suffice to say that it was an enchanting journey and I didn’t want to put it down as I kept wanting to find out what happens to them.

The settings described in the novel are fantastic, with evocative imagery and lots of attention given to the biology of the locations allowing you a very clear mental image of what the various settings are like. My favourite setting was that of Kerewin’s tower, partially due to the fact that I always wished I could have a tower when I was younger.

This novel won the Man Booker prize in 1985 and is also an excellent novel focusing on New Zealand which I would highly recommend. It’s ideal if you’re also doing a read around the world challenge, and I also recommend it to those who not only want to see representations of asexual characters but also want to support an author who is asexual and aromantic.

Book Review – Sea Foam and Silence by Lynn E O’Connacht

Goodreads Synopsis:

Be careful what you wish for…

She warned of the pain. She did.
But no warning can prepare you.
Nothing can.

How could I have known
What it is like on the dry sand?
We just watched.

It’s hard, not being able to ask
Questions, though I have learned some speech
With my hands. ˆ_ˆ

I miss my sisters.

I have made friends here.
I have laughed with them,
Learned with them, played with them.
I love them.

She said I would die if he loves someone else.
Will I die? At the beginning I wanted to. It hurts
So much. Life isn’t easy, will never be easy, but…
I don’t want to become sea foam.

Review:

This is another book I read thanks to the fantastic Ace Book Club on Twitter and when they announced it I thought it sounded amazing! A little mermaid re-telling in verse with an asexual character? Wow! Unfortunately, this book was just not for me, however, the reasons I didn’t love it were all personal to me and so other people will likely love it for the exact reasons I didn’t enjoy it.

First I’ll start with the writing itself. It’s written in verse and I’m a huge fan of verse novels. Unfortunately, this is in free verse and so to me and my background in very strict forms it was something I struggled with a lot. However, to people that aren’t used to verse novels then free verse is the perfect way to introduce them to the concept because it’s much easier to read. It’s also written in first person and I’m also not a big fan of that. There are also a lot of emoticons used in the text and again, that’s just my personal preference but all these things combined to make me really dislike the way it was written but since it was so short, I kept reading the entire thing. What I’d say is that the extract from Goodreads is a perfect example and if you enjoy that, you’re likely to enjoy it all.

Now that we’ve got the parts I didn’t like out of the way, let’s focus on the amazing parts. For example, the world building in this is really, really good. Unfortunately, we’re restricted a lot in what we see due to the first-person narrative and so just get wonderful glimpses of mermaid society. I also really enjoyed the characters and their interactions and although the main character seemed incredibly naive at points which is something I usually dislike, it makes total sense for somebody not used to human society to appear very naive. I shouldn’t really need to mention it given that it was for Ace Book Club so seems self explanatory but obviously the fact that there are asexual characters was another fantastic inclusion and I really enjoyed that interpretation (Not only is the main character asexual, she also definitely seems aromantic too)

Despite personally not being a fan, I would definitely still recommend this to others because it was just my own personal preferences that stopped me from enjoying it and there was nothing objectively bad about it – I’m just super picky in my verse narratives and found it difficult to get over that. However, for those that enjoy free verse (or have never read any verse narratives) then you should definitely read it as the world and the characters are just enchanting and you’ll be left wanting to know so much more and wishing you could spend more time with them in the fantastic world that has been created.