oomilyreads's reviews
163 reviews

Dr. Adam Kay is hilarious – at times I’d laugh so loud because I relate so badly to his stories. I, too have numerous stories when I was a medical student and later as a resident. Kay’s collection of diaries entries as a junior doctor in the UK which is equivalent to medical residents in the United States (we go by PGY-1, -2, -3, -4). His witty, sarcastic and at times dry humor really hooked me as I know so many of these stories as my own. He talks about the exhaustive hours, extremely low pay, rarely appreciative grunt work as a junior doctor. He chooses to become a OB-GYN so many of the stories he told which sound almost too extreme to be true are in fact VERY true. If you tell it a certain way, it is almost always funny because when you are that tired and stressed, sometimes humor is the only way to get through it.

However, it ended surprisingly somber. He quits the medical profession for reasons that he let few know until the publishing of this book.

I would recommend this book to anyone with a sense of humor. Everyone needs to know how physically & mentally and emotionally taxing the medical profession can be. We are all human, too.

Spoiler

Spoiler: He could not save a patient’s baby, and ultimately the mother had irreparable damage from the massive loss of blood. He was so profoundly affected by it but not offered any counseling in his profession that he could not continue working as a physician.

Spoiler

A broken Cherokee family attempting to mend itself after the tragic murder of their 15 yo son, Ray-Ray at the hands of police. The Removed refers to their ancestors who were “removed” from their land during the Trail of Tears and forced to move west, many dying along the way.

4 POV from the Echota Family:

Maria (matriarch) who is level-minded and her POV is the least confusing and most stable. She and her husband (who has Alzheimer’s disease) foster a boy who resembles Ray-Ray.

Sonja (older sister) who sought vengeance for the murder of her brother – her story is very odd and felt like I was following someone who had borderline personality disorder.

Edgar (youngest brother) who became a drug addict to numb himself from pain. His story was the most confusing and dream-like. I felt frustrated reading his POV and I never understood where he ended up at the end of the novel.

Tsala is the family’s ancestor that is an immortal spirit that retells the grief and loss during the Trail of Tears.

This novel draws heavily on the Cherokee folklore & beliefs to illustrate a dream-like existence for the living & dead. It’s the dream-like writing that frustrated me. Maria may be the only character that was fairly developed & her story was so interesting while they fostered Wyatt & how it affected her husband who had Alzheimer’s. Otherwise, I felt it hard to relate to or care about the other characters & difficult to grasp the interweaving of the past and the present.

Thank you Netgalley & Eccobooks for this ARC of The Removed!
Expected Publish Date: Feb 16, 2021

This middle grade story is semi-memoir to author Lai’s history. Lai said that she did not have to deviate too much from her real life to easily write this free-verse poem. The style in which is written is fitting with its crisp imagery similarly to the Vietnamese language that is quick tongued. The book was awarded the 2011 National Book Award for Young People's Literature and one of the two Newbery Honors.

As Saigon falls in 1975, 10-year-old protagonist Kim Ha, her mother and 3 older brothers escape Vietnam by boat. As thousands of Vietnamese seek refuge in different countries, Kim’s family first arrives to a refugee camp before finally getting sponsored to Alabama in America. They must start over, adapt to a new country, customs and even religion while facing racism & discrimination. Ultimately finding protection in each other and kindness from their sponsor, a wonderful neighbor who teaches her English and is able to make 2 friends at school. This Vietnamese refugee story hits close to home as it is heartbreaking but heartwarming as well. As Ha and her family grieves what is left behind as so many refugees do, she also learns to create new memories in her new country.

“No one would believe me
but at times
I would chose
wartime in Saigon
over
peacetime in Alabama."

Identical twin sisters, Desiree & Stella Vignes grew up in a tiny Louisiana town where black people are very light skinned. Colorism is more than real here. The twins are bound to each other after witnessing a horrific hate crime against their father. Desiree lives as herself, marries a very dark skinned black man and has a dark skinned daughter meanwhile the other passes for a white woman, marries a white man and has a biracial but extremely light skinned daughter. Their lives are completely different and when reading this, I wondered when and how their lives will collide again.

Jude (Desiree’s daughter) & Kennedy (Stella’s daughter) live very different lives as well. The question remains, how and what drove one identical twin sister to abandon the other without as much as an explanation? She is the ‘vanishing half’.

This story is character-driven with themes of dysfunctional family dynamics, racism, & colorism. I was saddened by Desiree’s story. I felt it was left unfinished & her personality and life was put on hold indefinitely until the end. I wish Bennett put more emphasis on her life and why she chose to live it that way considering her circumstances. There were too many themes in this novel that it became untidy. The character Reese was not fully fleshed out and he felt out of place. Was Bennett trying to make a point that Jude never judged Reese although she was quite self-conscious of herself. Their relationship seemed toxic as well. Is Bennett ok with how Reese treated Jude? Are we supposed to be ok with it?

Spoiler

Spoiler!!: Truthfully, the book annoyed me for the first 70% of the book, having twins myself, I cannot imagine what horrible things one twin can do to make her identical sister shed her to live a better life without as much as a more than a sleezy one-sentence note. But it turns out, Desiree had done nothing wrong and for decades yearned for her sister. When Stella had a chance to redeem herself, she snuck off like a coward in the night. Stella had NO redeeming qualities. I’ve heard from many others who said they needed to know what else happened afterwards. Most of all, most people wanted to know if Stella got what she deserved. I felt she definitely got what she deserved. To live a very lonely life, no one even bothering to let her know when her mother died.

“What's the point of having a voice if you're gonna be silent in those moments you shouldn't be?”
This book is ALLLL THE FEELS!!!! It is endearing, painful, and emotion-provoking.

Through the eyes of 16 year old Starr, we witnessed the murder of her two best friends. When Starr was 10, her best friend, Natasha was killed during a gang drive-by and now her other best friend, Khalil is gunned down by police. As he dies in her arms, the office points his gun at her head. She is forever changed but we follow her transformation from frightened and overwhelmed to finding her strength in her voice. Her two worlds collide over police brutality and violence, social injustice and black family and community.

She is a good student at a wealthy prep school that is majority-white but lives in the “hood” as she calls it, with her Daddy who is a former gang-member and mother and siblings. They are a loving protective family. My favorite scenes were the love within her family and the extended family. When her Daddy was in jail for 3 years, her Uncle Carlos became her other daddy who helped to raise her. He still is protective of her. But she learns that the young black men of her community including her best friend are in gangs. Is it by choice or is survival? This is how her “other” world views her home community.
After reading this book, I can understand why riots happened. When we ask “Rioting ? Why not peaceful protest?”. Riots depict the deep-seated anger that Black American feel for generations upon generations. Angie can evoke these feelings from me and I am not black. But I am angry and ashamed. She mentions Dr. King vs Malcolm X and the Black Panthers. This book does not bash police, but it points out the flaws in the system that seem to not be able to correct itself. Even today, it is still a severely broken system. Justice has not prevailed in so many instances in real life. But now more than ever black voices are being heard. We must support change and to change. We must uplift BIPOC and by doing so, uplift ourselves.

Thomas is able to weave so many different themes of social injustice within her novel. From white friends who say racist comments, to police not wanting to cross the blue line and protecting only their own, to young black males are automatically thugs instead of human beings. She explores the reasons why young men join gangs many times due to survive.

This is my favorite book of the year! Every single scene and every single character is necessary. This story is IMPORTANT & POWERFUL. There were times I would read a scene over and over, sometimes crying, screaming and my favorite scenes caused me to laugh loudly. I tandem read the physical & audiobook, Bahni Turpin is an incredible narrator.

Esme (My Tran) is a young 23-year-old Vietnamese/Caucasian blended woman who is living in poverty in Vietnam. She has nothing to lose when she travels to America to meet a random man, Khai in hopes of convincing him to marry her by the end of summer. He is handsome, intelligent, successful (but he is unable to express his feelings. Is he even capable of love?

I am Vietnamese-American, so I was intrigued to read a romance story written by a Vietnamese author. While I normally do not gravitate towards romance novels, I wanted to give the genre another try. This was pleasantly good and ended on a good note, albeit being unrealistic.
Autistic people see, hear and feel the world differently from other people. What intrigued me about this story is that I was able to view how an autistic person who has experienced traumatic events may act in a relationship. There is a notion that people with autism generally lack empathy and cannot recognize feelings but this is untrue. Autistic people are certainly capable of loving and experiencing heartbreak but their outward and inward thoughts are likely to be different.

“This is you being sad, Khai…This is how your heart breaks. It’s like you hurt too much for your brain to process, and then your body shuts down, too…” (Quan to Khai).

THIS is an essential concept to understand and accept in autism.
I absolutely adored the relationship between Khai and his older brother, Quan. There were interactions between Khai and Quan that would make me belly laugh for 5 minutes. Quan is such a wonderful big brother and he’s my FAVORITE character in the book. I actually can’t wait to read Hoang’s 3rd book which will be from Quan’s POV

This historical fiction written with dark comedy & satire, spy-thriller & war fiction that weaves a complex literary story about a communist mole in the South Vietnamese Army during & aftermath of the Vietnam War. Our unnamed protagonist is a spy colluding with the S. Vietnamese Army & backstabs them by sending secret information back to his handler & best-friend, Man. While in America, he often writes to Man to confess his guilt & confusion, his actions and inactions.

Nguyen shifts the view of how the world & Americans see the war to how it actually affected the country, Vietnam. Most American books & movies are written from American heroic standpoints despite losing & pulling out of the Vietnam War. VTN takes a satirical critical approach towards dominant American culture & how the Vietnamese were portrayed. While this novel’s narrator is a communist, it starts to unravel by the end as he doubts his socialist ideals. VTN criticizes the communist government who have taken the idea of “freedom & independence” to a level that disastrously harms itself.

“What does the revolutionary do when the revolution triumphs? Why do those who call for independence & freedom take away the independence of others”

While none of the characters are honorable & moral, I did feel love for the 3 best-friends, (narrator, Bon, & Man) who saw each other as “blood brothers” & sought to protect each other in life & to death, despite one of them being completely unaware that the other two are communists. This seems to represent how North & South Vietnam are blood brothers that differ in sociopolitical ideologies but are tied together by their own history & trauma. Similarly, the narrator is of mixed race, French & Vietnamese, both countries rejecting him. People expect him to choose a side but that’s impossible as he is a man of two sides & both are a part of him.

I felt angry, deep sadness & significantly triggered by several scenes & rarely did I feel joy while reading this novel. This is to say that it made me pointedly uncomfortable to know that in war there are no true winners. No side can ultimately stay virtuous in times of war. VTN holds all sides accountable in this war that remains on the mind of those who still live in Vietnam & the refugees who’ve fled.

“Now that we are the powerful, we don’t need the French or the Americans to f*** us over. We can f*** ourselves just fine”.