Get Rec’d with Amanda – Volume 42

Hey hey! Welcome back to Get Rec’d!

How are we all doing?!

I have another eclectic assortment. There’s a graphic novel, some literary fiction, and memoir with plenty of wry humor. I feel like I don’t recommend a ton of genre fiction in this column, as we cover a lot of that in other places of the site. Not something I see as good or bad, but merely an obseravation!

Do you have any recommendations to pass along?

  • Birnam Wood

    Birnam Wood by Eleanor Catton

    Thriller meets environmentalism meets a touch of horror. There’s a touch of spookiness similar to Catton’s previous, award-winning The Luminaries, but this is much more tense.

    Birnam Wood is on the move . . .

    A landslide has closed the Korowai Pass on New Zealand’s South Island, cutting off the town of Thorndike and leaving a sizable farm abandoned. The disaster presents an opportunity for Birnam Wood, an undeclared, unregulated, sometimes-criminal, sometimes-philanthropic guerrilla gardening collective that plants crops wherever no one will notice. For years, the group has struggled to break even. To occupy the farm at Thorndike would mean a shot at solvency at last.

    But the enigmatic American billionaire Robert Lemoine also has an interest in the place: he has snatched it up to build his end-times bunker, or so he tells Birnam’s founder, Mira, when he catches her on the property. He’s intrigued by Mira, and by Birnam Wood; although they’re poles apart politically, it seems Lemoine and the group might have enemies in common. But can Birnam trust him? And, as their ideals and ideologies are tested, can they trust one another?

    A gripping psychological thriller from the Booker Prize–winning author of The Luminaries, Eleanor Catton’s Birnam Wood is Shakespearean in its drama, Austenian in its wit, and, like both influences, fascinated by what makes us who we are. A brilliantly constructed study of intentions, actions, and consequences, it is a mesmerizing, unflinching consideration of the human impulse to ensure our own survival.

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    Birnam Wood by Eleanor Catton

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  • Godshot

    Godshot by Chelsea Bieker

    I remember when The Book of Essie was making the rounds in reading circles. If you want more coming of age stories like that, try this one! Definitely ALL THE TRIGGER WARNINGS as the main character is raised in a cult.

    Drought has settled on the town of Peaches, California. The area of the Central Valley where fourteen-year-old Lacey May and her alcoholic mother live was once an agricultural paradise. Now it’s an environmental disaster, a place of cracked earth and barren raisin farms. In their desperation, residents have turned to a cult leader named Pastor Vern for guidance. He promises, through secret “assignments,” to bring the rain everybody is praying for.

    Lacey has no reason to doubt the pastor. But then her life explodes in a single unimaginable act of abandonment: her mother, exiled from the community for her sins, leaves Lacey and runs off with a man she barely knows. Abandoned and distraught, Lacey May moves in with her widowed grandma, Cherry, who is more concerned with her taxidermy mice collection than her own granddaughter. As Lacey May endures the increasingly appalling acts of men who want to write all the rules, and begins to uncover the full extent of Pastor Vern’s shocking plan to bring fertility back to the land, she decides she must go on a quest to find her mother, no matter what it takes. With her only guidance coming from the romance novels she reads and the unlikely companionship of the women who knew her mother, she must find her own way through unthinkable circumstances.

    Possessed of an unstoppable plot and a brilliantly soulful voice, Godshot is a book of grit and humor and heart, a debut novel about female friendship and resilience, mother-loss and motherhood, and seeking salvation in unexpected places. It introduces a writer who gives Flannery O’Connor’s Gothic parables a Californian twist and who emerges with a miracle that is all her own.

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    Godshot by Chelsea Bieker

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  • Home Sick Pilots, Vol 1: Teenage Haunts

    Home Sick Pilots, Vol 1: Teenage Haunts by Dan Watters

    One of the best book people I follow is Rachel Conrad, a bookseller and the events coordinator at Print in Portland, Maine. She described this one as “What if a haunted house was also a Gundam?” SOLD!

    In the summer of 1994, a haunted house walks across California. Inside is Ami, lead-singer of a high school punk band- who’s been missing for weeks. How did she get there? What do these ghosts want? And does this mean the band have to break up?

    Expect three chord songs and big bloody action as Power Rangers meets The Shining (yes really), and as writer DAN WATTERS (Lucifer/COFFIN BOUND) and artist CASPAR WIJNGAARD (Star Wars/Peter Cannon: Thunderbolt) delve into the horrors of misspent youth.

    Add to Goodreads To-Read List →

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    Home Sick Pilots, Vol 1: Teenage Haunts by Dan Watters

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  • Sorry I’m Late, I Didn’t Want to Come

    Sorry I’m Late, I Didn’t Want to Come by Jessica Pan

    This one reminded me of The Year of Yes by Shonda Rhimes meets The Bloggess. I also just want to say that introverts don’t need to change (unless they want to).

    An introvert spends a year trying to live like an extrovert with hilarious results and advice for readers along the way.

    What would happen if a shy introvert lived like a gregarious extrovert for one year? If she knowingly and willingly put herself in perilous social situations that she’d normally avoid at all costs? Writer Jessica Pan intends to find out. With the help of various extrovert mentors, Pan sets up a series of personal challenges (talk to strangers, perform stand-up comedy, host a dinner party, travel alone, make friends on the road, and much worse) to explore whether living like an extrovert can teach her lessons that might improve the quality of her life. Chronicling the author’s hilarious and painful year of misadventures, this book explores what happens when one introvert fights her natural tendencies, takes the plunge, and tries (and sometimes fails) to be a little bit braver.

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    Sorry I’m Late, I Didn’t Want to Come by Jessica Pan

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Comments are Closed

  1. JoanneBB says:

    Amanda! You recommended Garlic and the Vampire (Bree Paulson) last month and my kid LOVED it. We bought the sequel, Garlic and the Witch, from our local bookstore too. I appreciate that you list a range of books in these posts.

  2. DonnaMarie says:

    Just going to say it: Where are the books about extroverts who try to rein it in?

  3. DiscoDollyDeb says:

    @DonnaMarie: Ditto. I can’t imagine anything more exhausting than trying to be outgoing when that’s not your natural setting. While I know I could be wrong, it seems to me that the starting point of SORRY I’M LATE is that it’s somehow a character flaw to be introverted. I know humans are social animals, but some of us need more time to recharge our social batteries and require more downtime between events featuring large groups of people. I’d love to read a book where an extrovert tries staying home, sitting quietly with a good book and some soft music playing in the background, and maybe a dog or cat sitting in the sofa with them.

  4. Star says:

    I tried several times to write a calm, rational, considered, nuanced comment about the existence and copy of that last book, but the incandescent wrath kept bleeding through, so I wrote this comment instead.

  5. Kareni says:

    Was it you, Amanda, who was once drooling over some taxidermied mice in a gift guide? If yes, I can see your interest in God Shot which does indeed sound intriguing.

  6. Amanda says:

    @JoanneBB: I’m so glad! Graphic novels are such a great genre for kids right now.

    @Kareni: Yes, that was me. >.< I'm a sucker for taxidermy.

  7. Lauren says:

    Oh I think there are a fair number of “extrovert reigns it in” stories out there. It’s just that a lot of them are cloaked as recovery memoirs. At least, that’s how they’ve read to me, for what drives recovery more than turning inward and self- reflection?

  8. catscatscats says:

    I read “Sorry I’m late” when it came out, I think, 2019. I enjoyed it and it gave me a bit to think about (some of which was along the lines of Are you insane? Stand-up comedy?). I’m not sure I’d have read it if the blurb on the copy I had had talked about being “braver” in the way this one does. Not a helpful or accurate way of talking about the introvert-extrovert distinction, in my view.

  9. Linastew says:

    Never heard of Sorry I’m Late before today, and the blurb had me on the fence. I love reading about unapologetic introverts, but the apology is literally in the title with this one. But from everyone’s comments, it sounds like the book itself is a little more nuanced and a little less judgy than the blurb? (Is that right?) @catscatscats I’d love a good chuckle but also some food for thought, as both a not-loud and proud introvert, and someone with social anxiety working on applying the concept of “openness” to new experience, or whatever, to my life. I think I’ll give this a go.

  10. Gwen who lives in urban California says:

    I’m stuck on “barren raisin farms” from the God Shot blurb. Raisins are dried grapes, and so it should be a grape farm. But wouldn’t a grape farm be a vineyard? But vineyard implies wine is the final product… Turns out I don’t know the actual name for raisin-raw-material agriculture. I’m so stuck.

  11. Big K says:

    As an extroverted extrovert, I was offended by the blurb in the last one, too. You shouldn’t do something just because it scares you, you should do it because you want to do it. I love to read and have time away from other people, but I need people time to keep me going. I wouldn’t want anyone to judge me, why should we judge introverts? Silly premise.

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