Popsugar Reading Challenge category: A book published the year you were born
T Zero, by Italo Calvino

Calvino books are hard to describe. Each of his books is different, not only from other authors, but from other Calvino books. (For someone first checking him out, I recommend If on a Winter's Night a Traveler, which at least has a linear - if wonderfully weird - plot.)

T Zero is a collection of short stories, tied together with scientific and mathematical themes. For instance, "Mitosis" contemplates the point of view of a creature that reproduces by dividing in two - which means, in some sense, that the original creature ceases to exist. "The Chase" applies mathematical probabilities to a life-and-death pursuit at very slow speeds in a traffic tie-up. "The Night Driver" has a desperate lover driving to his beloved's home to apologize after a phone call turned into an angry breakup. But what if she's also driving to his home at the same time? (This was in the ancient era of landlines, of course.)

A couple of the stories felt a bit over my head, but I kept reading, because sometimes the ending makes it all clear. Even if - as in "Meiosis" - it ends with the discovery that our narrator is a camel.

Popsugar Reading Challenge category: A book with alliteration in the title
Pain and Prejudice: How the Medical System Ignores Women - and What We Can Do About It, by Gabrielle Jackson

This book is part biology lesson, part history, and part polemic. Jackson traces the history of women's medical issues being dismissed as "hysteria," and how a woman with unexplained pain is still more likely than a man to be offered anti-depressants instead of painkillers.

Conditions that mainly affect women tend to be under-researched, which makes them difficult to diagnose and treat. With little real information about them, conditions that are "contested" (that is, some doctors don't believe they exist) are overwhelmingly conditions that mostly affect women: chronic fatigue, irritable bowel syndrome, fibromyalgia. The author described her own experience going to an emergency room for severe pain: the moment she mentioned having endometriosis, the staff stopped taking her seriously and quickly sent her away. (The pain was later diagnosed, elsewhere, as an infection.)

Medical research is overwhelmingly done on men or male animals. Even when there are no concerns about test subjects being pregnant, or the tests are on rats, the argument offered is that including women introduces too many variables to get clear results. But the result is that findings aren't necessarily valid for half the population.

Jackson takes pains to stress that this isn't a vast conspiracy of the medical establishment to intentionally harm women. It's easy, even "natural," for people to pay attention to issues that may affect them personally. And most of the people in charge of research and funding are men. So erectile dysfunction (which denies men pleasure) gets about five times as many studies as conditions (such as endometriosis) that make sex physically painful for women. One eye-popping anecdote: one of the few studies of endometriosis to get funding recently was designed to rate the "attractiveness" of women with that condition. No, seriously.

Jackson's proposed solutions appear simple, yet somehow they still elude those in a position to make change. A shift in research funding so that conditions affecting mainly women actually get studied. Including women in all studies of all conditions not exclusive to men. And the most oft-repeated statement from women throughout the book: "If only doctors would listen to their patients!"

Last week I wrote about my fiction reads for 2022. Here’s the rest: politics, memoirs, a whole lotta poetry, and miscellaneous. As before, the ones for the Popsugar Reading Challenge have links to short reviews on my website.

Politics/Current Events:
Ruth Ben-Ghiat, Strongmen: Mussolini to the Present
Mona Chollet, In Defense of Witches: The Legacy of the Witch Hunts and Why Women Are Still on Trial
Nikole Hannah-Jones, Ed., The 1619 Project: A New Origin Story
Mike Isaac, Super Pumped: The Battle for Uber
Ibram X. Kendi, How to Be an Antiracist
Laurie Penny, Sexual Revolution: Modern Fascism and the Feminist Fightback
Joan Smith, Home Grown: How Domestic Violence Turns Men into Terrorists
Deborah Tuerkheimer, Credible: Why We Doubt Accusers and Protect Abusers

In starting to write this, I was struck by how many of the political books I read were about intersections of oppressions, or connections between past and present. The 1619 Project is as amazing as you’ve heard: essays by historians tracing the connections between slavery and the present, from the Electoral College to the freeway system.

Home Grown is also about making connections: how terrorist groups use misogyny as a recruiting tool, how mass killers first “practice” violence on their own families, and see that the community tolerates it. Smith’s examples are mostly from Britain, which doesn’t have the USA’s bizarre gun culture. Sexual Revolution makes the sort of connection that’s easy to miss yet obvious in retrospect: coercive “consent” is used individually in sexual exploitation, and collectively in capitalism.

​Strongman pulls examples such as Hitler, Pinochet, Ghadaffi, and Putin, and shows the playbook that brings strongmen to power: scapegoating minorities, fetishizing toxic masculinity, and promising “law and order” while stealing everything that isn’t nailed down. She also examines what brought them down, in some cases — and occasionally what brought them back after defeat.
Super Pumped traces Uber’s rise and fall, from startup to phenom to cautionary tale. Whatever you’ve heard about Silicon Valley corporate evil — these guys are worse.


Memoir:
Henry Bibb, Narrative of the Life and Adventures of Henry Bibb
William Wells Brown, Narrative of the Life of William Wells Brown
William Craft and Ellen Craft, Running a Thousand Miles for Freedom
Donna Freitas, Consent: A Memoir of Unwanted Attention
J. D. Green, Narrative of the Life of J. D. Green, an Escaped Slave
Audre Lorde, The Cancer Journals
Rebecca Solnit, Recollections of My Nonexistence
Sojourner Truth, Narrative of Sojourner Truth, a Northern Slave

Several of these were from William Andrews and Henry Louis Gates’s collection Slave Narratives, which also includes better-known memoirs such as Incidents in the Life of a Slave-Girl by Harriet Jacobs, and Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass. Henry Bibb’s story was particularly heartbreaking: he escaped while in his 20’s, then made several attempts to go back & free his wife, all of which were thwarted — including once by a a fellow slave for $5. The Crafts’ story had some unexpectedly funny moments: light-skinned Ellen posed as William’s enslaver on their journey north, but it would have drawn attention for a white woman to travel alone with an enslaved man, so she disguised herself as a man, and William laughingly refers to her as “my master” in the narration.


In The Cancer Journals, Audre Lorde reflects on her struggle with breast cancer, and on the community of women who helped her through. She also writes about the amount of pressure she got to either have reconstructive surgery or get a prosthesis, as if “looking normal” was the important thing in her recovery. It was bittersweet reading this with the knowledge that the cancer finally took her.


Rebecca Solnit is best known for her essay Men Explain Things to Me. Her memoir talks about her career in art, literature, and activism. It also dives into the way women’s voices and experiences get erased. She talks about adult family friends hitting on her in her teens, strangers asking her apartment manager which apartments was hers, and a really disturbing experience of a man following her when she walked home one night. Technically “nothing happened” — she wasn’t assaulted or raped — but she addresses the toll it takes on women when constantly feeling like prey is normalized. Similarly, “nothing happened” in Danna Freitas’s Consent; her professor gradually insinuated himself into her life, constantly calling, sending gifts, even befriending her family. Any one of the interactions was easy to dismiss, but taken together it was a constant barrage of stalking — by a Catholic priest.


Plays:
Jean Anouilh, Eurydice
James Goldman, The Lion in Winter
Emily Mann, Greensboro


Emily Mann’s plays are about violence, usually addressed in a collage format (similar to The Laramie Project). Greensboro  deals with an infamous attack where the KKK killed five anti-Klan protesters, and while some of them were arrested, all were eventually acquitted. It’s grim.


The Lion in Winter is about the ultimate dysfunctional family: the British royals (12th century edition). Henry II keeps his wife Eleanor of Aquitaine imprisoned, their 3 sons (Richard Lion-Heart, Gregory & John) are vying for the throne, Henry is sleeping with Richard’s fiancee, and the constantly-changing alliances and betrayals proceed at a dizzying pace.


Poetry:
Kim Addonizio, Lucifer at the Starlite
Kim Addonizio, What Is This Thing Called Love
Kelli Russell Agodon and Annette Spaulding Convy, Eds., Fire on Her Tongue: An Anthology of Contemporary Women’s Poetry
Jericho Brown, The New Testament
Cynthia Cruz, Ed., Other Musics:  New Latina Poetry
Timothy Donnelly et al, Eds., Poems for Political Disaster
Mark Eisner & Tina Escaja, Resistancia: Poems of Protest & Revolution
Annie Finch, The Goddess Poems
Annie Finch & Alexandra Oliver, Eds. Measure for Measure: An Anthology of Poetic Meters
Federico Garcia Lorca, Selected Poems: A Bilingual Edition (Christopher, Maurer, Ed.)
Nikita Gill, The Girl and the Goddess
Amanda Gorman, Call Us What We Carry
Marilyn Hacker, Squares and Courtyards
Marilyn Hacker, A Stranger’s Mirror: New and Selected Poems, 1994-2014
Kathy Jetnil-Kijiner, Iep Jaltok: Poems of a Marshallese Daughter
Rose Lemberg, Ed., The Moment of Change: An Anthology of Feminist Speculative Poetry
Amanda Lovelace, Shine Your Icy Crown
Cynthia MacDonald, (W)holes
Czeslaw Milosz, Ed., A Book of Luminous Things: An International Anthology of Poetry
Gabriela Marie Milton, Ed., Wounds I Healed: The Poetry of Strong Women
Daniel T. O’Brien, Ed., Poems of Resistance, Poems of Hope
Pat Parker, Jonestown and Other Madness
Marge Piercy, On the Way Out, Turn Off the Light
Zoe Spoor, Efflorescence: A Feminist Poetry Collection


My two rules for poetry: I like it to be (1) understandable, and (2) actually about something. Unfortunately, I’m at the age where the poets I loved in my youth are now writing about aging and mortality. Marge Piercy and Marilyn Hacker still write brilliantly; Hacker is one of the reasons I love sonnets, villainelles, and other formal poetry. Speaking of which, Finch & Oliver’s Measure for Measure is a delightful sampler of poems in different meters, demonstrating why some forms are good for dirges and others for light verse. (You wouldn’t want to write a dirge in limerick form — it just sounds wrong.)


I like political poetry when it’s well done. Pat Parker’s 1985 volume Jonestown and Other Madness only has a handful of poems, but every one of them hits hard. Rose Lemberg’s anthology The Moment of Change combines feminist poetry with elements of science fiction, fantasy and fairy tales, and it works beautifully. Eisner & Escaja’s Resistancia has political poetry from Latin America and the Caribbean, each presented in both English and the original language (Spanish, Portuguese, French, and a couple of Indigenous languages). Donnelly’s Poems for Political Disaster and O’Brien’s Poems of Resistance, Poems of Hope were both published during TFG’s administration. The former came out shortly after the election, and is pretty depressing; the latter is more hopeful.


There were some where I agreed with the sentiment, but found the poems...not bad, exactly, but not particularly memorable. Those included Gabriela Marie Milton’s Wounds I Healed and Zoe Spoor’s Efflorescence. 


Kathy Jetnil-Kijiner was new to me, and her Iep Jaltok: Poems of a Marshallese Daughter covers a range of styles and topics, including local mythology, coming to the Marshall Islands after growing up in Hawai’i, the islands’ history of being used for nuclear tests, and the very visible, visceral effects of climate change. All in a vivid, powerful voice.


Although I first encountered Amanda Gorman reading her inaugural poem out loud, a lot of her poetry is visual. She uses erasure and shaped poems in a way that literally has to be seen to be appreciated.


Nikita Gill’s The Girl and the Goddess is a novel in verse, about a young woman from India finding herself, moving to London, dealing with misogynist violence and racism, and coming out as bisexual, interspersed with encounters with Hindu Goddesses who show her the parallels between her story and theirs.


This section’s getting kinda long, but if I get to pick two favorites: Jericho Brown and Kim Addonizio. Brown often uses a form he calls the “duplex,” where lines are repeated in slightly altered form, taking on new meaning. (Example). He captures the strange intersection of being a Black gay man in an era where Obama was president but any random Black man could get shot by police at any time. Addonizio writes about love and loss in a way that’s intense without being sentimental. The essence of poetry is writing something that’s very specific yet connects in a way that feels universal — like her incomparable To the Woman Crying Uncontrollably in the Next Stall.


Misc Nonfiction:
Kevin Boyle, Arc of Justice: A Saga of Race, Civil Rights, and Murder in the Jazz Age
Charlotte Drummond, Skirt Steak: Women Chefs on Standing the Heat and Staying in the Kitchen
Ronan Farrow, War on Peace: The End of Diplomacy and the Decline of American Influence
Adam Hochschild, King Leopold’s Ghost: A Story of Greed, Terror, and Heroism in Colonial Africa
Carl Sagan, The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark
Ann Tusa and John Tusa, The Nuremberg Trial
James Walvin, The Zong: A Massacre, the Law, and the End of Slavery


Some of the books I read this year were about grim slices of history. The Zong massacre was one of the most horrifying episodes in the history of slavery, and I’d never heard of it until a couple of years ago. Similarly, King Leopold’s Ghost tells about the evils committed by Belgian colonialism in the Congo for the sake of greed. 


Arc of Justice is about Ossian Sweet, a Black doctor who bought a house in a white neighborhood in 1925. When the neighbors mobbed the house, Dr. Sweet and his family and friends shot back, killing one of the attackers. All 11 people in Dr. Sweet’s house were put on trial, defended by Clarence Darrow. Even after an eventual legal victory, the attack and trial had long-ranging consequences.


​Carl Sagan’s The Demon-Haunted World was recommended by someone here on Daily Kos, who used it as a way to get through to people who rejected science. Sagan warned of the consequences of having a scientifically illiterate population, and it’s all the more relevant today.

Popsugar Reading Challenge category: A BookTok recommendation
Bargaining Power, by Deborah J. Natelson

A very original mix of spy thriller and urban fantasy. It's set on a secret island in the Atlantic, where shipwrecks have provided it with population and technology over the centuries. So they have cars, cell phones & TV, but no contact with the outside world. The heroine, Mercedes, is the personal assistant to a cryptoanalyst, and they are working frantically to stop an assassination plot against the king - but first they have to infiltrate the plotters.

The villainess, Theodora, is the personified Spirit of Deals & Bargains, and any deals made with her will be twisted against you in the worst possible way. She has a mysterious hold on Mercedes's boss, and is now attaching herself to Mercedes's beloved brothers.

The ending wraps up the main plot in a satisfying way, while leaving some important questions unanswered. (Like, why is the king such a weirdo?) So I'm hoping Book 2 shows up soon.

This year I read 97 books, a personal best. 50 of them were for the Popsugar Reading Challenge, a sort of literary scavenger hunt where the object is to read a book in each of 50 categories (a book by a Latinx author, a Hugo Award winner, a book with a tiger on the cover or in the title, a social-horror story, etc., etc.) I wrote short reviews of those 50, linked below.

Classics:
James Baldwin, Another Country
Charles Chestnutt, Conjure Tales and Stories From the Color Line
Wilkie Collins, Basil
Charles Dickens, The Old Curiosity Shop
Jack London, The Scarlet Plague
Vladimir Nabokov, Ada
Kurt Vonnegut, Cat’s Cradle
This year I checked out some of the lesser-known books from famous authors. Nabokov’s Ada is possibly an even weirder book than Lolita, though at least the adolescent sex is consensual in this one. It’s about a lifelong affair between “cousins” who are actually siblings, and it’s set in an alternate-history earth where technology & politics went in a different direction. Wilkie Collins is best known for mysteries, but Basil is more of a melodrama, down to the final life-and-death struggle. The Scarlet Plague is a brief novella by Jack London about a pandemic that drives everyone back to primitive living. Baldwin’s Another Country is hard to summarize: there are multiple love affairs, some crossing then-taboo lines around race and/or gender.

I hadn’t read Charles Chestnutt before, and I really loved this short story collection. Set in the Reconstruction era, the “conjure tales” are told by a Black servant to his Yankee employers, always with a point aimed at getting something he wants from the boss. The “tales from the color line” are about the gray area where mixed-race people existed in that era, some trying to climb the racial hierarchy by leaving their Black families behind.


Science Fiction/Fantasy:
Isaac Asimov, The Gods Themselves
Philip K. Dick, The Man in the High Castle
Nalo Hopkinson & Uppinder Mehan, Eds., So Long Been Dreaming: Postcolonial Science Fiction & Fantasy
Maggie Shen King, An Excess Male
Ursula K. LeGuin, Always Coming Home
Jamie Marchant, The Kronicles of Korthlundia series: The Goddess’s Choice, The Soul Stone, The Shattered Throne, and The Ghost in Exile
Janet Morris and Chris Morris, Eds., Lawyers in Hell
Kit Rocha, Deal with the Devil and The Devil You Know
Catherynne M. Valente, Space Opera
My favorite SF/fantasy books this year were An Excess Male and Space Opera. An Excess Male imagines a near-future China where the gender imbalance is addressed by allowing women to take multiple husbands. The story is told from 4 points of view: the first husband who’s still treated as the “head of household,” the autistic second husband who’s never felt he fit in, the man who’s desperately trying to become the third husband, and the woman who yearns for a love she’s never had.

Space Opera is a hilarious book in which Earth is contacted by aliens who are trying to determine if Earthlings are a sentient species. To prove their worthiness, earth’s representatives — a washed-up glamrock group — must participate in a Eurovision-like music contest. And from there it gets really weird.

Deal With the Devil and The Devil You Know are the first two books in Kit Rocha’s Mercenary Librarians series. In a post-apocalyptic world, the Librarians help build a community where they distribute books, food, and other resources, in the shadow of the all-powerful TechCorps. Each book concentrates on a different badass librarian and her mercenary lover.

The Gods Themselves and The Man in the High Castle are both SF classics. The Gods Themselves is about a cheap source of energy that’s eventually going to destroy the world, but nobody wants to hear that part. The Man in the High Castle is about an alternate world where the Nazis won WWII. Both books hit a little different in the current political climate.

Always Coming Home is the book every SF/fantasy writer wants to write: 500 pages of almost nothing but world building.


Romance:
Casey McQuiston, I Kissed Shara Wheeler
Casey McQuiston, One Last Stop
Casey McQuiston, Red, White & Royal Blue
Courtney Milan, Hold Me
Can you tell I discovered Casey McQuiston this year? Her books are queer romances with wonderfully improbable premises. A closeted British prince falls for the son of the first female US President (RW&RB, the single most fun book I read this year). A lesbian becomes an accidental time traveler permanently stuck on the NYC subway (OLS). The too-perfect girl at a Jesus-y school kisses her female rival and disappears, leaving a series of puzzling notes as clues to find her (IKSW). Courtney Milan’s Hold Me is also a queer romance: it’s the You’ve Got Mail trope with a trans heroine. (Refreshingly, her being trans is not the issue/conflict between her and the hero; he’s pansexual.)


Mystery/Thriller:
Sarah Caudwell, The Shortest Way to Hades
A. E. Osworth, We Are Watching Eliza Bright
The Shortest Way to Hades is a fun comedy-mystery from Caudwell’s Hillary Tamar series, with an assortment of clueless attorneys. We Are Watching Eliza Bright is a thriller apparently inspired by g*merg*te: a game designer’s complaint about sexism snowballs into her being harassed, fired, doxxed, and stalked. The book has a really well-done “Greek chorus” unreliable-narrator voice that was brilliantly spot on.


Young Adult/Middle Grade:
Elizabeth Acevedo, Clap When You Land
Jeff Ayers, Skate the Thief
Leigh Bardugo, Six of Crows and Crooked Kingdom
Eoin Colfer, The Fowl Twins series: The Fowl Twins, The Fowl Twins Deny All Charges, and The Fowl Twins Get What They Deserve
April Daniels, Sovreign
Carl Hiassen, Hoot
Lillie Lainoff, One for All
C. B. Lee, Not Your Villain and Not Your Backup
Rick Riordan, The Battle of the Labyrinth and The Last Olympian
Catching up on the later books in some series here. If by some mischance you haven’t read Rick Riordan’s Percy Jackson books, start with The Lightning Thief. The Fowl Twins series is the follow-up to the Artemis Fowl books. Myles is a lot like Artemis; Beckett is...weird. There’s a lot of gross-out humor in each book.

C.B. Lee’s Sidekick Squad books are set in a world where the Heroes’ League of Heroes is not all it seems. Each book features a different man character, all of them queer and most POC. Start with Not Your Sidekick. April Daniels’s Sovreign is the sequel to Dreadnought, a superhero story with a trans heroine. As in Lee’s books, the superheroes’ league has a definite dark side. 

Six of Crows is a wonderful heist story set in a world where magic has suddenly become a lot more dangerous. Skate the Thief is another great fantasy story, about a child caught between the criminal syndicate that saved her, and the wizard she’s supposed to be robbing. One for All is about a secret academy for female Musketeers; like the author, the main character has a condition that gives her sudden dizzy spells.

Clap When You Land is a novel in verse, about two half-sisters, one in NYC and one in  the Dominican Republic, who discover each other’s existence when their father dies in a plane crash.


Misc Fiction:
Louise Erdrich, The Sentence
Cait Gordon and Talia C. Johnson, Eds., Nothing Without Us
Joseph Guzzo, Mousetrap Inc.
Tea Obreht, The Tiger’s Wife
Alice Randall, The Wind Done Gone
Vaddey Ratner, Music of the Ghosts
Colson Whitehead, The Nickel Boys
Some of Colson Whitehead’s books (The Intuitionist, The Underground Railroad) venture into the surreal. The Nickel Boys is firmly grounded in reality, and it will break your heart. It’s based on a true story about a “reform school” with a secret graveyard. Even knowing this, I was unprepared for the devastating final chapter.

The Wind Done Gone is a parody of Gone With the Wind, from the point of view of Mammy’s daughter — Scarlett’s secret half-sister.

Music of the Ghosts is about a Cambodian refugee who fled as a child during the Khmer Rouge, then returns  decades later to find out what really happened when her father disappeared.

Nothing Without Us is a short story collection by and about disabled people. The stories are funny and serious, SF/fantasy and real-world, but all of them have disabled characters as the stars, not the “inspirational” sidekicks. A particular favorite was "Search and Seizure," by Shannon Barnsley, about a ghost haunting the doctor who told her that her symptoms were all in her head.

​The Sentence is set in a Native American bookstore, where the most annoying customer has died and is now haunting the store. Set in Minneapolis in 2020, it really conveys the feel of the early pandemic era, and the George Floyd/BLM protests as well.

Popsugar Reading Challenge category: A book with a map
​Dance With the Devil, by Kit Rocha

The Popsugar Reading challenge is back! Last year I included Deal with the Devil, the first of Kit Rocha's Mercenary Librarians series. The Librarians are three extremely badass, genetically altered women who help hold together a neighborhood in post-apocalyptic Atlanta. Each book concentrates on one pairing of a librarian and one of the Silver Devils, ex-mercenaries trying to stay one step ahead of the TechCorps after defecting.

Book 3, Dance With the Devil, spotlights Dani and Rafe. She's a surly ex-assassin; he's a cinnamon roll who still believes in love and family. They have to infiltrate the highest levels of the TechCorps executive aristocracy (while pretending to be married, naturally). I don't think it's a spoiler to reveal that eventually they can't keep their hands off each other.

The last third or so of the book is the final (?) battle with TechCorps, and we get chapters from all the major characters' point of view as they face their personal and collective nemeses. It's a fun, twist-filled book - and there's one final twist in the epilogue.

I shelved this under "book with a map," but the maps aren't essential - they just add a dash of the flavor of the world beyond the area our characters inhabit. 

For the first week of January, The Cosmic Turkey is just 99 cents on Kindle!

Please remember to drop a review at Amazon or elsewhere! It doesn't have to be long. Reviews tell the algorithm to make the book more visible.

Popsugar Reading Challenge category: A Sapphic book
Book: I Kissed Shara Wheeler, by Casey McQuiston

There are certain things I've come to expect from Casey McQuiston: a wonderfully over-the-top premise, a bisexual main character finding first love, new friendships that bring the main character out of isolation, a lot of laughs, and of course a happily-ever-after ending.

Chloe is a heathen Californian at a very Jesus-y private high school in Alabama. Her rival for valedictorian is the principal's daughter, Shara Wheeler, who's almost too perfect: beautiful, smart, friendly, devout but not obnoxious about it. Over the course of 24 hours, Shara kisses her football player boyfriend Smith, her bad-boy neighbor Rory, and, inexplicably, Chloe. Then Shara disappears, leaving a series of mysterious hidden notes that lead the other three on a sort of treasure hunt to find her.

By the end, all four of them have discovered things about themselves they hadn't known, the school's pristine reputation is upended, and Chloe and Shara have to confront how they really feel about each other. Equally important, Chloe discovers how many of her classmates felt as out of place as she did. There's a lot of playing against stereotype: Smith is a jock, but he's neither dumb nor macho, and Rory isn't quite the "bad boy" he tries to appear. Unlike McQuiston's other books, there's no sex in this one, but there's a lot of characters rethinking their notions of gender, sexuality, and who they are vs. who they thought they were supposed to be.

​A lighthearted, entertaining ride, all the way to the final kiss.