2021 Ratings and Reviews - Eat, Tan, Read

Book Review – Upside of Falling Down

The Upside of Falling Down by Rebekah Crane

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

New Age, Romance

“Clementine Haas doesn’t exist. She died in a plane crash. I woke up in her body, and until I remember who she is, what she’s made of, I can’t claim her life.”

“No matter what people want to believe, life is locked in the past. It’s all we are—a timeline of events that make up a person.”

Clementine wakes up in a hospital in Ireland with absolutely no memory; nothing about how she ended up in the hospital, what she was doing in Ireland, or even her own name. She is told that she was in a plane crash and she is the only survivor. The hospital is surrounded by media waiting for the lone survivor to wake up. When the nurse tells Clementine that her father is on his way from America, she panics unable to deal with the pressure and expectations for getting her memory back. She meets a stranger in the hospital gardens and convinces him to take her away and let her stay with him for a week or so, confident her memory will be back in that time and she will go home.

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Book Review – Handle with Care

Handle with Care by Jodi Picoult

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Contemporary Realistic Fiction

“If you chose to stop a loved one’s suffering—either before it began or during the process—was that murder, or mercy?”

“I would never have wished for an able-bodied child, because that child would have been someone who wasn’t you.”

“You were Willow, pure and simple. There was nobody else like you. I knew it the moment I first held you, wrapped in foam so that you wouldn’t get hurt in my arms: your soul was stronger than your body, and in spite of what the doctors told me over and over, I always believed that was the reason for the breaks. What ordinary skeleton could contain a heart as big as the whole world?”

Six year old Willow was born with Osteogenesis Imperfecta, which is a brittle bones disease. She will have several hundred broken bones in her, most likely, short life, among an array of other disabilities that will cause pain and constant struggle. Her parents, Charlotte and Sean love her just the way she is, she is perfect. After a nightmarish trip to Disney World, they visit a lawyer who advises them they have a case for a lawsuit, just not the kind they were thinking, a wrongful birth suit.

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Book Review – My Dark Vanessa

My Dark Vanessa by Kate Elizabeth Russell

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Literary, Women’s Fiction, Dark Academia

“Come and be worshiped, come and be caressed,
My dark Vanessa, crimson-barred, my blest
My Admirable butterfly! Explain
How could you, in the gloom of Lilac Lane,
Have let uncouth, hysterical John Shade
Blubber your face, and ear, and shoulder-blade?”

“He compared my hair to the color of maple leaves, slipped poetry into my hands – Emily, Edna, Sylvia. He made me see myself as he did, a girl with the power to rise with red hair and eat him like air.”

“Shielded by the desk, he reaches down and pats my knee gently, gingerly, the way you might pet a dog before you’re sure it won’t turn mean and bite you. I don’t bite him. I don’t move. I don’t even breathe. He keeps writing notes on the poem while his other hand strokes my knee and my mind slips out of me. It brushes up against the ceiling so I can see myself from above – hunched shoulders, thousand-yard stare, bright red hair,”

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