bits and pieces

The dirty book club by Lisi Harrison.  This book didn't quite reach it's full potential, but I still devoured it in less than 36 hours.  As you could guess from the description and the cover, this is a light women's-fiction-type story.  The characters are likeable if a little thin.  The main character especially is a bit frustrating; she's in her 30s but most of her problems feel like "New Adult" indecisiveness.  I wanted the characters to connect more to, and connect more over, the book club books, but that's also a bit floppy: months go by where they only see each other at book club, but they get miffed at each other that they aren't up to date on each others' goings on. 

Not exactly recommended, per se, but suggested for fans of Janet Evanovich.

If I was your girl by Meredith Russo.  I read this at the end of January but I can't find a note about it; I guess I missed reviewing it somehow.

This book did a good job of achieving it's purpose: presenting a teen whose main concerns are family, friends, and boys, and balancing her gender transition with regular teen life.  The main character seemed fairly realistic and likeable.

This book did not do a good job of being a well-written teen problem novel.  Several plot points felt completely unsupported, (spoiler maybe?) particularly the character's election as prom queen: new in town her senior year, she makes a few good friends and dates a jock but is in no way presented as super duper social, or even really remarkable.  The prom business seemed like... the author's fantasy that got shoved in? 

Other characters seemed rather shallow, especially when the main character's "secret" became known.  A few obviously "good" people had no problems, most were presented as unthinkingly bad and unaccepting.  The few characters who struggled with the information seemed to lack depth or subtlety.  It also seemed like maybe the whole point of setting the book in the rural south was so that the author could lean on the unthinking-rural-southerner thing.