A few new Relax & Read books

Here are a few short book reviews of items on our Relax and Read shelf:

Fleishman is in Trouble
by Taffy Brodesser-Akner

Summary: Toby and his wife Rachel are in the process of getting divorced. The book details how it’s going and how they got to that point.

Review:  Interesting toward the end when it changes to focus on another character but goes on for WAY too long in the middle. For some reason, the story is told from the point of view of an old friend of Toby’s and it doesn’t really make sense or add much to the story.

Rating (Out of 5 stars): ***

Stay Sexy and Don’t Get Murdered
by Karen Kilgariff

Summary: Stories from two women that have a podcast about true crimes called My Favorite Murder. The book switches between the two women and they ask each other questions at the end of each chapter.

Review: Entertaining and funny. Sometimes it’s hard to remember what happened to each person. There seemed to be informative lessons throughout the book.

Rating (Out of 5 stars): ****

The Wrong End of the Table
by Ayser Salmon

Summary: A memoir by an immigrant woman from Iraq about her experiences in America and trying to fit in as a Muslim woman.

Review: She has an interesting life story comparing her time in Iraq, America and Saudi Arabia. There were also several chapters focused on her relationships. Many of the stories were quite funny. Towards the end it got a bit repetitive.

Rating (Out of 5 stars): ****

84K
by Claire North

Summary: Set in a world where every crime is assessed and given a dollar amount and corporations are in charge of everything. Follows Theo who audits and assesses the crimes until he gets involved with a person from his past.

Review: Super interesting ideas about justice and wealth. Starts out good and then goes off on several tangents and gets very confusing. There were random sentence fragments that seemed like the author was trying to be artsy or poetic but it was just confusing and unnecessary. The time line and narrator kept changing making it a bit unclear what was happening.

Rating (Out of 5 stars): **