Our Next Duty Station Is...

I can’t keep this announcement quiet any longer…it’s official, we’re moving to Okinawa! We’ll be making the move to Japan in September, and while moving with a baby is intimidating, I’m so excited for the opportunities this presents us professionally and personally. We had hoped for the chance to move back to the States to be close to family as ours starts to grow, but we’ve heard nothing but good things about raising a family in Okinawa. With so much to see and do in Okinawa and with the mainland being a short and affordable plane ride away, it’ll be easy to make the most of our time overseas.

I also had two exciting publications go live recently! The first, very appropriately timed with our moving announcement, is my 5-Day Travel Guide to Tokyo for Poppin’ Smoke. This was a labor of love and reflects hours of research and three separate trips to Tokyo across the fall, summer, and winter. I remember how many hours my mom used to pour into making the perfect family vacation, and I have that same spark now to find the best dining, attractions, accommodations, and deals for our adventures. If you’re planning a trip to Tokyo and want more details, feel free to send me a message!

The other publication is for Funky Pedagogy and is a personal piece about my work supporting students in my five years of full-time teaching. I believe in the importance of teaching content and curriculum, but I also believe in the importance of teaching students to be compassionate, empathetic, and reflective. I want students to feel comfortable sharing their stories and experiences just as much as I want them to love reading novels and poetry. Their voices matter, and I dive into the various ways I helped students to feel heard. I miss the relationship-building, the lesson-planning, and the active practice of teaching, but I also am so grateful for the space to grow and explore and focus on our growing family’s needs this year.

Today we’ve got a variety of books that cross the expanse of genres. First up, a memoir that chronicles a famous long-con. Next, my final Barbara Kingsolver book for the foreseeable future. Then, we’ve got a sweet summery romance and a tension-filled historical fiction that centers on a mysterious murder.

---

My Friend Anna: The True Story of the Fake Heiress Who Conned Me and Half of New York City by Rachel DeLoache Williams

If you remember my review of The Woman Who Fooled the World, you know that I love a true story about fraud and con artists. I think it’s in the same vein of why so many people enjoy true crime podcasts; it’s thrilling to read about an investigation, especially when it feels so distant from your own life. From the summary, it seems as though Anna Delvey’s long con was too unbelievable to ever effectively work. How could someone be so trusting and naïve that they lose tens of thousands of dollars and risk their career, their livelihood, their reputation, and their safety for a woman who throws up so many red flags and acts with so little regard for others’ feelings and needs? However, we have to remember how many people have lost thousands of dollars buying gift cards, wiring money to fraudulent princes over email, and investing their life savings into pyramid schemes. We want to trust that people have our best interests at heart and that their promises are genuine. We want to believe that we’re smart enough to see through a lie. We tell ourselves that nothing bad will happen to us, even as our world crumbles around us.

Williams comes across as incredibly naïve and helpless in her own narration of events in which she firmly cements herself as a victim of Delvey’s careless manipulations. Williams is a victim, but we begin to ask ourselves if she’s not partially to blame for her own situation. Yes, Delvey was seemingly generous with her time and money and made Williams feel glamorous and rich. However, Delvey was repeatedly described as a selfish, self-centered, unreliable, difficult, and demanding woman. Williams caved, acquiesced, and bent to Delvey’s demands, going so far as to put tens of thousands of dollars of hotel charges on her personal and work credit cards, sending her into a spiral of anxiety and seemingly inescapable debt. No one put a gun to Williams’s head and forced her to pay, but she felt trapped and obligated by the stress of the situation and her trust in Delvey.

Readers are subjected to repetitive text message exchanges as Williams begs Delvey to repay her and Delvey over and over and over again deflects, delays, and defers. We can palpably feel Williams’s stress over this dire turn of events, but we are also shaking our heads knowing that she is never going to see that money again. The second half of the novel feels tiresome with these unproductive back and forth exchanges that go nowhere and Williams’s eventual pursuit of justice and closure. The con is fascinating and has the same effect of a rubber necked traffic accident. We shouldn’t be watching so closely, but we can’t seem to look away from the carnage. The slow pacing, however, detracts from the previously engaging hooks, and I began to feel impatient and frustrated with Williams.

If you watched Inventing Anna and want to read the true story behind the hard-to-believe story, it’s worth reading. Just be prepared for the middle and end to drag and to feel yourself rooting less and less for Williams as time goes on. It was interesting to read about a con from someone who was personally scammed, but sometimes that closeness to the crime can make the reporting feel too biased. I wish I knew more about what was going through Delvey’s head and what was happening to her during her periods of absence from New York City.

The Bean Trees by Barbara Kingsolver

This makes five Kingsolver books that I read in the span of about a year, and I definitely need a break. As I’ve said in my previous reviews, Kingsolver is a master of her craft when it comes to prose. She has beautiful turns of phrase and captures emotionally challenging situations well. She is on a mission to raise awareness for the suffering of groups who often don’t get a voice in literature, but, as always, she comes across as a little too preachy, teachy, and judgmental. I wanted to fall in love with this story of found family, but I struggled to connect with the characters and to really feel the love and relationships between them.

The premise takes a moment to accept. Taylor is on an independent road trip journey to escape her small town and somehow ends up with an abandoned Native American child in her car. Rather than going to the police, finding a social worker, or going right to a hospital, Taylor just takes this mute, abandoned, and abused child across state lines, claims her as her own, and muddles her way through unexpected motherhood. Take a moment to take that in and suspend your disbelief.

I wasn’t a fan of this one. I enjoyed Demon Copperhead and can see why it carried so much buzz, though it was a heavy read. The Poisonwood Bible is a modern classic for a reason. Unsheltered felt tedious and tiresome. Animal, Vegetable, Miracle was wonderful in concept but a little too preachy in execution. So, in essence, I find Kingsolver’s work to be a mixed bag. I’ll be taking a hiatus from her work for the rest of the year, at least, but it was an interesting journey to wander so thoroughly through an author’s varied backlist.

Every Summer After by Carley Fortune

I somehow keep reading romance series completely out of order and skipping the first book. I really don’t mean to, and I’m missing out on so many sweet Easter eggs this way. Fortune’s books are the perfect beach read/curled up under a blanket in the long stretch of dark February nights escape. While this is an adult read, the central flashback focuses on Persephone and Sam’s teenage years, which gives it the nostalgic and familiar feel of young adult literature. The characters are flawed and messy, but you want to root for them because their relationship feels real. It slowly unfolds over the course of many summers on the lake while also flashing forward to the tragic present. We know that the once inseparable Persephone and Sam haven’t spoken for years after something unforgivable passed between them, but they are thrust back into each other’s orbit at Sam’s mother’s funeral. Fortune takes her time to reveal the cause of the young couple’s rift, which is something that is normally a deal breaker for me (and is a turn off for many readers as well). However, given the characters’ ages and histories, I didn’t hate the conflict choice. Yes, I was frustrated and disappointed in the characters’ actions, but that’s the point. While I lamented that The Summer I Turned Pretty felt unbearable because the characters were unlikeable and the relationships were hollow, there was a real connection that was built over many chapters.

 I love an emotional payoff, when characters can be flawed and human without becoming tiresome or unlikeable, when friends become lovers, and when the romance feels genuine because it’s the central focus. It’s Fortune’s first and not my favorite (although I really did enjoy it and flew through it), but it’s an essential read if you’re going to fully enjoy One Golden Summer. Don’t be like me and start with her most recent work. Percy and Sam make such adorable appearances in One Golden Summer, and I had no appreciation for them because I didn’t know their backstory. Similarly, Charlie is first introduced in Every Summer After, and seeing his growth and opportunity to step into the spotlight as the leading man feels so much more meaningful when you saw where he started.

The Frozen River by Ariel Lawhon

I’ve been stepping in and out of historical fiction over the past few years, but Lawhon’s well-researched writing and strong sense of voice fully captures my interest. I read I Was Anastasia when I interned at Penguin Random House back in 2019, and I am still thinking about it. There’s not a lot of historical fiction books (or any genre really) that I can say that about, so I was excited to explore her latest work. Set in Maine in 1789, the story follows Martha Ballard, a midwife and healer, as she becomes entangled in intertwined court cases involving murder and rape. Mystery, tension, and intrigue lay like a thick blanket over the town as dark secrets are unearthed over the course of a seemingly unending winter.

I love that Martha is a multi-faceted character that cannot be easily defined by a single trait. It is easy to reduce a heroine to being just a bold and defiant seeker of truth and justice, but Lawhon is careful to show that Martha was a wife and a mother and a friend. Martha can stand up to bullying and doubtful authority figures and assist at difficult births, but she is also gentle and meditative and kind. What I am trying to say is that Lawhon takes care to capture Martha’s humanity rather than taking shortcuts and letting her become a caricature. While some reviewers found Martha to be too preachy, I didn’t find her to be overwhelming as she butted heads with the societal norms of her time. However, I’m also coming off a Barbara Kingsolver year of overly preachy characters, so I might be a little biased there.

Mysteries and thrillers are not normally my cup of tea, but I really was hooked on trying to discover the cause of death and to see how the narrative threads all tied together. The ending felt a little too much like a villain’s stereotypical monologue once the truth was uncovered, but the narrative was compelling and strong otherwise. If you’re normally a fan of mysteries and faster-paced books, you may not like the day-to-day details that quietly build Martha’s world, but I didn’t feel as though the narrative dragged.

The Frozen River is the perfect book club material, especially if your group likes a variety of genres and is eager to explore historical fiction outside of the typical World War II/Holocaust narratives. There’s historical nuance to help you feel immersed in Martha’s world, tension to keep you flipping the pages, and a likeable narrator and heroine that you’ll be rooting for.

---

Listening: I absolutely binged Ask Not: The Kennedys and the Women They Destroyed on audio, and now I want to keep reading and researching about this infamous family. I knew that the Kennedy men were cruel cheaters, but I didn’t fully grasp the extent of their villainy, irresponsibility, and criminal actions. Daisy and Tom from The Great Gatsby felt like an ever-present parallel; you can destroy someone’s life and just simply disappear if you have the safety net of your wealth and family reputation. The idea of legacy and how political leaders are remembered can be controversial, and I wonder if there will be a reckoning with the ways that JFK is remembered.

Watching: In line with my audiobook, I began watching Love Story, a new docu-drama about John F. Kennedy Jr. and Carolyn Bessette Kennedy’s famously ill-fated romance. I feel like Caroyln’s cool-girl style is spot-on, but their relationship seems softer and sweeter than it really was. This, of course, makes for compelling television. Yes, John makes mistakes, but he’s a far more sympathetic figure than his contemporaries would probably have described him. The Kennedys, in many ways, became more myth than man, so it’s interesting to have the curtain pulled back to humanize them.

Baking: It’s official: I’ve found my new favorite cookie recipe. These banana bread chocolate chip cookies from Sugar Spun Run are the perfect marriage between the two desserts. The batch is huge, the steps are straight forward, and the texture is perfection. There hasn’t been a banana dessert I’ve made from Sugar Spun Run that’s failed me yet.

Cooking: Sometimes when I eat something, I get hooked on it, and I’ve got a few combinations that I’m loving right now. Avocado toast on sourdough with scrambled eggs, parmesan, and nitrate-free bacon or sausage has been my go-to breakfast. I’ve learned that protein is essential in the mornings; if I don’t have enough, I feel sick by lunch. The Japanese grocery store Don Don Donki has been coming in clutch with fresh vegetables and yogurt, and the combination of roasted chicken, carrots, and Japanese sweet potato with yogurt sauce is my current fixation.

Doing: Tom and I attended a new-to-us Navy tradition: Dining Out. Chiefs and officers from the hospital dressed to the nines (and with some zany and creative touches) to enjoy a Miami Vice themed dinner. Along the way were many toasts in seriousness and in jest, the traditional “parading of the beef,” and some lighthearted roasting. Finding a gown to wear while 30 weeks pregnant was a little intimidating, but empire waists are my maternity wear savior. After going to Mass the following morning, we took a trip to Café Gudcha to have some coffee and play some cribbage.