Popsugar Reading Challenge category: A collection of linked short stories.
An Elderly Lady Is Up to No Good, by Helen Tursten, translated from Swedish by Marlaine Delargy.

This is a dark comedy about an 88-year-old Swedish woman who murders people who annoy her or make her feel threatened. The victims include a neighbor trying to take over her apartment, an antique dealer she suspects of trying to swindle her, and a wife-beating neighbor (Maud finds the noise irritating).

The fourth story is told in first person from a neighbor's point of view. The final story is the same murder, in third person from Maud's POV. Either works as a standalone, as do all the stories in the book. There are sequels, but honestly all the stories are pretty similar.

To say that Maud is unsympathetic may seem like stating the obvious. But I find this sort of story works best if the main character has a sort of "I shouldn't like this character, but I do" charisma. Maud is sort of a one-note grouch.

Popsugar Reading Challenge category: A book with a character experiencing menopause.
Girls Will Be Girls, by Leslea Newman.

This was a collection of stories about Jewish lesbian life in the 1990s. The era definitely came across: cell phones were not yet ubiquitous, queer partners and parents had no legal protections, and AIDS was usually a quick death sentence. There were a lot of stories about parents and children: controlling parents, rebellious lesbian daughters, and lesbians wanting children. Most of the romance stories had a strong butch/femme vibe.

The quality of the stories was uneven. The best one was "Laddy Come Home," a heartbreaking story about a lesbian parent bereft after her partner broke up with her and took their child out of state. There were a few good love stories, like "The Babka Sisters" and "A Femme in the Hand." The story about menopause, "Eggs McMenopause," was a surreal piece about a woman becoming obsessed with eggs.

The least enjoyable was "Family is Family," a 14-page monologue with every negative "Jewish mother" cliche. Unfortunately it was the first story in the collection, and was followed by "The Kiss," another unsatisfying unhappy-family story.

The title novella was an over-the-top farce in which a therapist's girlfriend had an affair with one of the therapy clients. By the end, it was clear that all three of them needed to have their heads examined.

Popsugar Reading Challenge category: A book about soccer.
One Life, by Megan Rapinoe.

Soccer star Megan Rapinoe talks about her athletic career, her personal life, and her political activism. She was out as a lesbian at a time when many were staying closeted. She has also been active in the fight for equal pay for women players.

​Rapinoe is reticent about some aspects of her personal life. She acknowledges that she broke up with fiancee Sera Cahoone and immediately started a relationship with basketball player Sue Bird, but has little else to say about it, except to add that she and Bird were just friends until the engagement ended. On the other hand, she's very open about her brother Brian's long-term drug problem and repeated incarcerations, and how hard it was on the family. She notes that while in prison, he became involved with white supremacist gangs, though apparently this ended when he was released.

Rapinoe also talks about her choice to kneel in solidarity with Black Lives Matter. She got far more hate and harassment over this than any of her other political activism. She is still certain it was the right thing to do, putting her popularity as a white female celebrity in the service of an important cause. She begins the book with a quote from poet Mary Oliver:

"Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?"

My flash fiction piece, "Souvenir Postcard," was a finalist in the WAWA flash fiction competition.

Popsugar Reading Challenge category: Healing fiction.
The Midnight Library, by Matt Haig.

I'd never heard of "healing fiction," but this title came up a lot in discussions. Maybe this genre just isn't my jam.

Predictability is not necessarily a fatal flaw in a book. We all know the detective will solve the mystery, and the romance will end with happily ever after. But in this book, the predictability is so obviously in the service of Making a Point.

After a series of emotional blows, a depressed Nora Seed takes an overdose. Hovering between life and death, she finds herself at the Midnight Library, with an infinite number of books. Each represents one of the different lives she could have had, if she'd made different choices. Nora can try out as many lives as she wants, and stay if she finds one she'd rather have.

You see where this is going, right?

Every life turns out to have its own disappointments. When she makes an objectively "better" choice, it leads to a tragedy that could not have been foreseen or prevented. In her original life, her father's death was devastating for Nora. But when she winds up in a life where he survived, she still chooses not to stay. It would seem inevitable that she would experience some guilt (however irrational) that his chance of survival was indirectly due to a choice she made, but this is just glossed over.

Finally she finds a life that's perfect. But wait - it's too perfect.

It can't possibly be a spoiler to say that she returns to her original life. And lo and behold, it wasn't as bad as she thought. There were people she thought had rejected her, but she'd misunderstood. Things that she'd thought were her fault, actually weren't. A brighter future awaits.

​The book deals with some heavy issues: suicide, addiction, mental health. But the "Making a Point" tone makes it feel like it was written for kids.

Popsugar Reading Challenge category: A book that takes place at a luxury resort.
Floating Hotel, by Grace Curtis.

The Abeona is a spaceship that functions as a luxury hotel, making the rounds between the planets of the Empire. The Empire has two obsessions. One is denying the existence of aliens - even fiction about the possibility is illegal. The other fixation is catching the Lamplighter, a mysterious figure who pens revolutionary missives - and whose schedule in spreading them coincides exactly with the Abeona's route.

Everyone among the staff & guests has a secret or a tragic backstory. A refugee from a mobbed-up planet. A former pop star. A pair of hired killers. A servant casually left behind when her employer disembarked. And, of course, a couple of academics who've discovered a message from aliens. The book is almost like a collection of overlapping short stories.

And somewhere, in the midst of all that, is the Lamplighter.

Popsugar Reading Challenge category: A book where nature is the antagonist.
The Stone Sky, by N. K. Jemisin.

​This book is third in the Broken Earth trilogy, which began with The Fifth Season. The story takes "nature as the antagonist" to a whole new level: the earth is sentient, and it's very, very angry at what humans have done to it.

The point of view alternates between Essun, the main character of the previous books, her daughter Nassun, and Hoa, Essun's stone eater companion. Nassun was taken from her mother and endured a whole lot of trauma discovering her powers. Like Essun, Nassun is an orogene, with power to control earth and stone. Orogene children sometimes accidentally cause earthquakes, or turn people to stone.

The earth is enraged that the moon has been knocked out of its orbit, drastically changing the climate. (Hoa explains the how and why of this, but I found it somewhat confusing.) Essun plans to sacrifice herself to bring the moon back; Nassun plans to use the moon to destroy the earth. Naturally, they wind up facing off.

This series is original and ambitious, but really grim. There are multiple instances where some have to suffer or die for the Greater Good - but as Hoa points out, these supposed necessities are choices, and there were always other options with a different price to pay. As with the Inheritance Trilogy, Jemisin is ultimately optimistic, but trigger warnings for pretty much every form of cruelty, including toward children.

Popsugar Reading Challenge Category: A prompt from the 2015 Popsugar Reading Challenge (The first book by a famous author).
Evelina, Or, The History of a Young Lady's Entrance Into the World, by Frances Burney.

Frances Burney was one of the most popular authors of the late 18th century, but I'd never heard of her until I read Jane Austen's Bookshelf. I was expecting her work to be stuffy and moralizing, like Samuel Richardson's Pamela. or Susanna Rowson's Charlotte Temple. Considering Burney's influence on Austen, I should have known better. Evelina is entertaining, funny, and surprisingly relatable.

Evelina is the daughter of a nobleman, but her mother died young, and her father denies their secret marriage and has never claimed Evelina. She is raised by a country clergyman, who allows her to visit London with some friends, with warnings about the dangers of the city.

At her first London  ball, Evelina is approached by an unpleasant man who asks her to dance. She politely (if falsely) claims she's already committed to dancing with someone else. The guy follows her around the whole evening, haranguing her with questions and generally making a pest of himself. I thought: wow, some things haven't changed in 250 years!

The "gentleman," Sir Clement Willoughby, quickly becomes the bane of Evelina's existence, always popping up on her excursions and even insinuating himself with the family that's hosting her. He has a knack for weaponizing the rules of politeness against her: when he offers her a ride home in his coach, she can't refuse without appearing to accuse him of ill intent, which would be rude of her. But he does exactly what she'd feared, "accidentally" giving the coachman wrong directions so she's stuck alone with him.

Not to worry: there's a much nicer gentleman, Lord Orville, around to give Evelina her happily-ever-after ending.

Popsugar Reading Challenge category: A book that includes something from your bucket list.
Psychic Hang Gliding, by Pittsburgh Pat.

I was only able to find one novel about hang gliding. Psychic Hang Gliding is a fun, quirky book. Putting "a sexy beach book" on the cover seems a little over the top, and the focus of the story is definitely on the psychic parts, not the sex.

It's 1990, and Blaze is a 23-year-old student of spiritual practices. He develops involuntary telepathy, which makes his bartending job overwhelming, and he quits to work as a hang gliding instructor in a remote area. His psychic powers include levitation, healing, and weather control. What he can't control is his yearning for the woman who left him, even when someone new is aggressively pursuing him.

The author does a good job of putting the reader in the scene, giving us the feel of hang gliding and even of spiritual experiences.

There's a weird epilogue where Blaze's spiritual mentor visits him with a warning. It feels like it's setting up a sequel, but as far as I know, there isn't one.

"Yay! All Queer" is a forthcoming fiction anthology from Inkd Publishing. It includes my short story, "Victorious Love," a rom-com about two women who fall in love at an "ex-gay" conference.