maybe I need to read less

Children of Blood and Bone, Tomi Adeyemi. I felt like there was a lot of buzz about this book and I had to wait in an almost 200 person library queue to get it (12 digital copies, which is the most I've ever seen of something) and then I ended up not liking it at all. When your whole book is pitched at the same emotional monotone of urgent!! danger!! angst!! and tragedy!! it's just exhausting. Time to break out a sentence I feel like I use a lot: maybe it would work for actual Young Adults, but not me. I think if I want to keep trying to read YA I need to get a lot better about just stopping reading things that I'm not into. I'm usually a compulsive finisher but that's not really compatible with trying to strike gold in an increasingly hit-or-miss genre for me.

The Kiss Quotient

The Kiss Quotient, Helen Hoang. Het romance: an autistic economist hires a male escort for relationship practice. So it's part fake/practice relationship trope, part gender-flipped Pretty Woman, and very good. Romance hung a little heavily on "they're just sooo physically attracted to each other" for my personal romance-reading tastes (and ew, PDA) but there were a lot of great character beats and moments too; would rec to people who read contemporaries or people who want to see a nice autistic lady get her HEA with a sweetheart slab of beefcake (WHAT it's ROMANCE he's TOTALLY FAIR GAME to objectify). Oh, and it's own-voices, the author said in her author's note that she herself got a diagnosis as an adult. Own-voices about the autism, I mean, not afaik the escorting or beefcakiness.