June Reading List

“The Haunting of Cambria” by Richard Taylor is both the story of a haunted house and a horror story that asks us about our expectations for ourselves, especially when we deal with grief. I don’t typically read horror, but this book had been sitting on my shelf for years since I picked it up at a garage sale; also, I do like Stephen King’s work and I heard about similarities in Taylor’s style. Taylor manages to thread humor quite effectively into a horror story, which I also enjoyed.

“Lunar Love” is a romance from Lauren Kung Jessen. The story follows Olivia, who is in the process of inheriting the family business: a matchmaking business that uses Chinese astrology to achieve compatible matches; when she encounters a young man who is set on using the same concept to create seemingly incompatible matches in a modern app, she is appalled and feels the need to bring down his startup. I think most modern romance stories are pretty predictable; readers can tell from the start where this is heading: of course, the enemies will fall in love with each other, right? Still, it was a cute story, and I appreciated the focus on family and culture. The author also mentions that she is half-Irish and half-Chinese in the acknowledgements and addresses mixed children in her dedication; as a writer myself, I could tell that many of the elements she talks about (both main characters are also half-Chinese) are important to her, and that she wrote the book with a greater purpose than simply telling a love story. As a mother of children who are also half-Asian, I feel drawn to characters who may share some of the issues and also joys that my kids may also experience.

Last, I read “The Shadows of Men” by Abir Mukherjee (simply by fun coincidence I apparently read two Mukherjees in a row; both authors have quite different styles with two similarities being awesome writing talent and membership in the vast Indian diaspora). This is a mystery series set in 1920s Calcutta in the British Raj era and features the crimefighting police duo of Brit Sam Wyndham and Bengali Surendranath (Suren) Banerjee. The first book I read in this series was solely Sam’s perspective and I remember thinking it would be neat to hear from Suren (the character I preferred), so imagine my joy when I discovered this book includes split narratives told from both main characters. Yay! This is book 5 in the series. Sam is no longer addicted to opium and not as obtuse regarding Britain’s actions of the time, and more of a friend to Suren (TBH he was kind of a dick earlier)– all positives. Hearing from Suren, we get to see both interpretations of events and some entertaining bantering between him and Sam (“I was thinking that in five years you haven’t learned to pronounce Indian names or even learn their gender. This chap of yours is a woman.”) Their latest adventure includes Suren being wrongly accused of murder and needing to flee Calcutta as the two work to track down the true murderer.