This review is based on an e-galley received from the publisher.

The Rosie Effect is the sequel to The Rosie Project, which I previously reviewed here. When the action picks up, it's about a year later, Don and Rosie are married and living in New York where he's working at Columbia and she's simultaneously working on her PhD and MD. Then Rosie announces she's pregnant.

This book was lots of fun, with Don's unique approach to research and problem solving resulting in the loss of both of their side jobs, an arrest as a suspected pedophile, and more. I also still love the way that Graeme Simsion conveys more to the reader than Don actually understands about the other characters. However, there were a couple of things that bothered me. First of all, I personally don't care for plots that hinge on one character thinking it's a better idea to assemble a massive conspiracy than to just tell somebody something, and it seems even more unlikely than usual when the person doing so is horrible at lying outright. That's probably as much of a personal pet peeve as anything but it did mean one plot thread annoyed me quite a bit.

Secondly, it seemed to me that Rosie was just as much at fault as Don for the difficulties between them in this book, but that the weight was put entirely on his proving himself as a potential father to her and she wasn't ever really called on her behavior. She seems to set him up to fail extremely early on, really just after telling him that she's pregnant when he was under the impression they weren't planning on doing that yet. (Even he figures out that her failure to take her pill was deliberate.) She goes straight to assuming that she will effectively be raising the baby by herself and doesn't want either to accept his help during the pregnancy or to give him the opportunity to learn parenting skills. She probably has a point that he shouldn't dictate her diet but she should at least accept the evidence that he's trying to help as a sign that he could be a good, supportive father. Furthermore, she actually interprets the fact that he does research and buys the best stroller he can find as his not being interested in the baby, only the stroller. And when he tries to tell her about things that he's doing to learn about babies (aside from the bits he can't mention to her because of plot reasons) she doesn't recognize his intentions at all and says she doesn't want to hear about it. He just can't catch a break.

Those flaws aside, the book as a whole was still a great ride.

Overall: B+

The Rosie Effect will be available December 30.

This review is based on an advance copy received from the publisher and not gotten to in time for that whole "advance" thing.

Flora 717 is a sanitation worker in a highly regimented dictatorship that happens to be a beehive. Through a combination of luck and unusual talents in one of her origins, she able to transcend her place and learn many roles in the hive from serving in the nursery to foraging. But when she accidentally commits a grave crime, and the hive is in trouble, she finds herself doing things she would previously have thought unthinkable.

I have to say, I think that the comparisons to The Handmaid's Tale, The Hunger Games, and even Animal Farm are out of place. Our Flora actually does appear to be biologically different from the rest of the floras; we're told more than once that it's unusual that she's capable of "speech." And I won't go into the later events of the book. Therefore I'd say that comparisons to human dystopias are off because in the case of books about repressive human societies, we are talking about people who are created equal, for lack of a better phrase, when it's clear that Flora 717 is something "better" than the rest of the floras. And even in Animal Farm, the point is that the pigs take over a society in which all creatures with four legs are supposed to be equal, and not that most of the non-pigs really are inferior and the exceptions are special.

That said, the anthropomorphic look at a beehive in trouble through the eyes of a worker is an inventive idea and wonderfully handled (particularly keeping in mind that Flora 717 does not have a human scientist's external perspective of hive function). Just look at it as an exercise in worldbuilding, don't push the symbolism too far, and enjoy the ride.

Overall: A

This sprawling book is why I haven't posted in over a week, and it was so worth it.

It starts with Theo Decker sick and alone in Amsterdam at Christmas, but quickly flashes back to when he was thirteen and his mother was killed when a bomb exploded in an art museum. In the confusion that follows, and possibly suffering a concussion, Theo accepts a ring from a dying man who gives him an address and takes a small painting that his mother loved from the wall. The ring and the painting set Theo on a course that will unfold over the next fourteen years, even as he drifts from home to home.

The approach of starting near the end of the story and then working back to it did a lot to maintain narrative tension during stretches of the story that otherwise might not have appeared to have a lot going on. Sooner or later, we know that Theo is going to wind up in the middle of something serious in Amsterdam, most likely involving the painting, and the suspense builds as we wonder how he gets there. As we go, we watch how a wide cast of characters deal with the volatility of life. The most interesting is Boris, whom we first meet as a teenager when Theo lives for a time in Las Vegas, a sort of a modern Artful Dodger. Theo's PTSD and the general instability of his life after the bombing seems to have left him with a self destructive streak; Boris's similarly chaotic childhood appears to have taught him to grab everything he can from life and not to worry too much about tomorrow. Others search for stability even if it means giving up what one might call their heart's desire. And through it all, there's the mystery of the painting and what will become of it.

This is the last of the ALA Carnegie fiction shortlist books that I was able to get my hands on, and I'll be rooting for it on June 28, sitting in front of Twitter late at night because I won't be at Annual.

Overall: A+

This is the second of the Carnegie fiction shortlist books I've read, and at this point it's my favorite. Still waiting for the last one to come in at the library.

Ifemelu comes to America as a young woman and finds success as a blogger on race. As a black woman from Africa rather than an African American, she is simultaneously categorized with black Americans while having a different history and having grown up in a different context. Obinze, the man she left behind in Nigeria and with whom she cut off contact sometime thereafter, lives as an undocumented worker in London. Their stories largely told in flashbacks, both eventually return to Nigeria changed.

This book simultaneously addresses cultural clashes directly and maintains the individual stories of all the characters (Ifemelu's family in particular, in addition to the two main protagonists) as people. It was deeply engrossing, and at this point I think the best thing I can say is a simple "read it."

Overall: A

Nominally, Claire of the Sea Light is about a seven-year-old girl in Ville Rose, Haiti, whose father decides on her birthday to give her to a local fabric seller so that she can have a better life and he can leave to make a better living for them, and who then runs away.

In actuality, although the book begins and ends with Claire, and most of the other plots involve something that coincides with her seventh birthday, it's really a collection of vignettes, some of which connect, about Ville Rose. The community is small enough that everybody knows each other, and sometimes Claire or her father will be mentioned, but the connections are loose, and most of the book can hardly be called part of Claire's story or even her family's.

I am probably the wrong reader for this book, since it's rare that I enjoy this sort of loose "novel," and only picked it up because it's on the shortlist for the Reference and User Services Association division's Carnegie Award for fiction, ALA's only single-title award for adult fiction. It's pleasantly written, and there's nothing wrong with it exactly, but it's too low key for me, we spend too little time with any one character for them to be developed, and even the setting is rather sparingly depicted. (It's contemporary enough that there are cell phones; that's the best sense of time that I was able to get.) Overall I was left without feeling like I had a reason to read it, aside from a personal goal to read all the shortlist books.

Overall: B

Garrison Keillor writes two kinds of books; actual novels, and books that function more like a collection of short stories even if they're billed like a novel. This one falls under the "actual novel" heading, with occasional tangents that could have been chapters in the other kind of book.

I'm a faithful listener of A Prairie Home Companion, and I've always gotten a kick out of Guy Noir's sendup of the classic detective caper and the sort of descriptions you'll find in it. (My favorite of all time is "She was wearing a brown UPS uniform and what a parcel she was.") This story, mostly about Guy being hired to serve as security for a weight loss pill company run by a former stripper turned women's studies professor who may not have his best interests at heart, has all of the screwy action and laugh out loud narration that I've come to expect. It also has the strange fascination with alliteration that I've never quite understood the purpose of in the Guy Noir radio sketches, and there are the occasional moments that seem to be going on longer than necessary, as if Keillor was just fitting in a vignette that could have been its own story in a separate collection. Still, all in all, this is a fun romp and a fine way to spend a few hours.

Overall Grade: B

This review is based on an advance reader's copy provided by the publisher about a week after it was published, so not so much with the "advance" part and I didn't feel a lot of pressure to get it read ASAP.

Dark Diversions is less of a novel than a collection of short stories with a shared narrator, an American writer about whom we learn very little. The stories are all about people with power, in various senses, many of them rich, some of them military dictators. They are told with a fine eye for detail, and there is an interesting break midway through where the narrator muses on the purpose of narration. An engrossing and not particularly demanding read.

Overall Grade: B