Review: The Unexpected Waltz by Kim Wright

I will probably do a written review for every book I read, mainly for my personal reading archives, and perhaps also, to help fellow readers out and to create discussions about the books.

My first review is on The Unexpected Waltz*. I got this as an ARC from the bookstore I work at and it came out June 3. Here's the goodreads synopsis:

From the author of the critically acclaimed debut Love in Mid Air comes this moving novel about a middle-aged widow who finds her feet by embracing a new hobby: ballroom dancing.

Kelly Wilder becomes recently widowed from a much older wealthy man with whom she spent her married life doing charity work, building a lovely home, and, as she says, “pretending to be a whole lot more conservative and stupid and nicer than I really am.”

Now, with too much time and money on her hands, Kelly has absolutely no idea what happens next. So on a whim she signs up for a ballroom dancing class, and slowly, step by high-heeled step, begins to rebuild her life with the help of friends old and new: Nik, a young Russian dance teacher who sees the artistic potential she left behind; Carolina, a woman in hospice, anxious to experience a whole lifetime in a few months; and Elyse, Kelly’s girlhood best friend who knows all of her past secrets—including the truth about the man who long ago broke Kelly’s heart.

In the vein of Jennifer Weiner's novels, Unexpected Waltz is a deeply felt story about moving on after loss and finding a new walk—or dance—of life through the power of second chances.



Overall, I liked this book. I thoroughly enjoyed the ballroom dance aspect of it and the characters that were brought in through that part of the story. All of the characters in the story were likable and it was a light read that didn't hold emotionally intense or extremely negative topics. If you aren't looking for too much from a book other than a fun story and an array of different characters, then this is great. 

There was a lot I didn't personally enjoy, however. I love adult fiction, especially books where we get a lot of character development. Being able to see how characters became the way they are through their past and then seeing them grow throughout the story is one of my favorite tools in fiction and I thought this book would be ideal for that. Perhaps it was supposed to be, but it really felt short in that aspect. Everything was very surface level. Death, hospice, cheating, affairs; normally these things are emotional. I didn't feel much emotion at all when these topics came up because I felt they weren't dug into deeply and I didn't feel connection to the characters. There were different people and settings the main character, Kelly, interacted with and the flow seemed very choppy. Parts of the book I enjoyed more than others and it was a very nice ending. But a lot of the time I went, "Eh." 

It was disappointing for me because it sounded like it could have been so much more than it was. But if you are looking for a light, quick read, then this definitely works. It wasn't awful by any means and in general I liked it, hence why I gave it 3 out of 5 goodreads. 

*The link to the book is an affiliate link with indiebound.com.

Monday Missions #2

Monday Missions is a weekly feature that introduces the books I plan on reading this week. It was created by A Thousand Lives of Daisy.

Happy Monday! How's your reading going this month? I'm pretty happy so far, but this week I'm super busy with work so I'm hoping my books don't fall by the wayside too much. Here are my Monday missions for this week:

1.      
 
The Brief Wondrous Life by Oscar Wao

I'm currently reading this and I'm about 100 pages in. If you'll recall from my June TBR, I'm reading this for the Writer's of Color Book Club Goodreads group. So far, I'm really enjoying it! The footnotes take up some time, but I actually really like reading them, so I don't mind taking the extra time. 

2. 

We Were Liars by E. Lockhart

I decided to join the Booksplosion Goodreads group because I watch all of the moderators' booktube videos and I'd really like to start reading more YA. Because contrary to crazy articles that have been circling the web these last couple days, I'm not ashamed to read YA and I think there are so many enjoyable reads in the genre that I would just like to expose myself to more. (Judging others for what they read is just not cool guys, not cool). This month's pick is We Were Liars and I plan to start that in the middle of the week. I think it will be a nice, fast-paced contrast to Oscar Wao.

3.

50 Fashion Designers You Should Know by Simone Werle

I'm still working on this one from last week. This book will definitely be a month-long read because it's just one of those things where I like to read a couple pages a day. It works out nicely because I read about 1 or 2 designers per day and it's a nice break from the novel I'm currently reading.


So those are the books I plan on reading this week! Have you read any of them? What are your Monday Missions?

*The book links are affiliate links with indiebound.org

Top 5 Wednesday #1

Top 5 Wednesday was created by gingerreadslainey and is a weekly prompt that showcases a different topic each Wednesday. You can join the Goodreads group here.

This week's topic is the Top 5 Characters You Wish You Were More Like. Before even looking at my books for ideas, all I can think of are the characters who I love but are awkward and weird like me, and so maybe I should look for some confident, not-so-awkward characters? Do I even read books with people like that in it?!

Oh well.





1. Elizabeth Gilbert, herself, in Eat, Pray, Love by Elizabeth Gilbert. This woman is a beast. She's so unhappy with her life that instead of settling and ignoring her fears, she stands up and walks out of her old life into a completely new one. She's adventurous in her travels, her food, her spirituality, and she says "screw you" to what society says she should be.

2. Claire Waverley in Garden Spells by Sarah Addison Allen. She's a chef with a magical garden. She has her own business and is very independent. Her food is literally made with magic. I can't stress that enough. Food=Magic.

3. Katey Kontent in The Rules of Civility by Amor Towles. Personally, Katey was one of the best characters in any book to follow throughout the story. She has wit and "her own brand of cool nerve." She wasn't trying to be anything and just went with the flow. Even though she lived in a time when things were not simple, she made it seem simple. She was a solid narrator and if I can't be her then please can I be her bff? like for real. please?






4. Jacquetta in The Lady Of The Rivers by Philippa Gregory. The mother of Elizabeth, The White Queen, and the great-grandmother of Elizabeth I, Jacquetta chose her own life (for the most part) at a time when women had no say in their own lives whatsoever. She married the man she loved even though he was below her and was the most loyal friend. She also wasn't afraid to do what was best for her family and change sides which usually sounds sketchy, but for her, it made perfect sense. She had her own beliefs and thoughts and stuck to them as much as she could. I can barely do that now!





5. Marie-Laure LeBlanc in All The Light We Cannot See by Anthony Doerr. So, yes, she's blind and I don't necessarily want that, but her courageousness and bravery is inspiring. But don't call her brave, because, as she so plainly states: "But it is not bravery; I have no choice. I wake up and live my life."* It's hard to wake up and live life on some days for me and I'm not in the midst of World War II BLIND.  She's just fierce. And she doesn't even mean to be or want to be.
I talk a little bit more about her in my May Wrap-Up.




There you go! I do read about non-awkward characters! They are all weird in their own ways though, but that just makes them even cooler.

Who are the 5 characters you wish you were more like?

*This is a quote from an ARC copy of this book so it may be different in the published copy.

Top Ten Tuesday #1

Top Ten Tuesday is a weekly blog prompt created by The Broke and the Bookish that features a different top ten book list every Tuesday.

Today, for my first Top Ten Tuesday post, the theme is The Top Ten Books That Should Be In Your Beach Bag This Summer. Most of these books I own and have read with a couple that I have sitting in my TBR pile. I definitely think summer is a time for lighter reading, and by that I mean lighter topics and/or smaller books. Then again, a little Harry Potter anytime of the year never hurt anyone. 

1. Maine by J. Courtney Sullivan. This takes place during the summer in Maine and we get into the nitty-gritty of the Kelleher family. Amazing book that will make you want to travel to Maine.

2. Birds of a Lesser Paradise by Megan Mayhew Bergman. I think summer is the perfect time for short stories and when they're about nature, it's just a solid reading match. One of my favorite books.

3. The Summer Everything Changed by Holly Chamberlin. I haven't read this one, but anything with summer in the title is a score in my book. Family relationships in Ogunquit, Maine. Because Maine is the summer standard in books.

4. Garden Spells by Sarah Addison Allen. One of my absolute favorite books. Gardens, magic, family. Oh man, it's perfect for summer.

5. Eat, Pray, Love by Elizabeth Gilbert. Another one of my favorite books, this isn't as light of read as the others, but I think travel/adventure books are great summer reads. Also, personal growth is at its best in summer, I think. 

6. The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants by Ann Brashares. Obviously. I haven't read this one yet, but I  plan to this summer. I love the movie so I think it's pretty solid to give this as a recommendation.

7. The Atlas of Love by Laurie Frankel. I love love love this book. This isn't based in the summer and the main characters are actually student teachers in college, but I read this many summers ago on the beach and it just seemed the perfect place to read it. And it's based in Washington so they talk about how it's still sunny out at like 9:00 at night. Jealous? Me too.

8. Is Everyone Haning Out Without Me? (And Other Concerns) by Mindy Kaling. So much fun. There's literally nothing else I can say. It's just so. much. fun.

9. The Book of Summers by Emylia Hall. I haven't read this one yet and I recently just picked it up because of the cover only. The story is based in Hungary during the summer every year which definitely sounds great as a summer read, but this cover. Come on.

10. Lost Lake by Sarah Addison Allen. This is the only one I don't own and haven't read but you'll recognize my girl from #4 as the author so I know it's going to be magnificent. I'm waiting for the paperback release to read it, but there was a little companion/prequel novella ebook (did I just use all the book-vocabulary that I know?) that I read and I just know it's going to be THE summer book. I mean it's based at a lake house. Obviously, we've got a good one here. 

There you go! My top ten books for summer that I recommend for your beach bag. Have you read any of these? Agree or disagree? What are your beach book recommendations?

Monday Missions #1

Monday Missions is a weekly feature that introduces the books I plan on reading this week. It was created by A Thousand Lives of Daisy.

Starting off the week with some Monday Missions! This week I hope to make it through 3 books.

 I have an ARC of The Unexpected Waltz by Kim Wright. It's a novel about a widow who takes ballroom dance classes to try and move on with her life after her significantly older husband dies. She also forms a bond with a hospice patient and leans on her free-spirited best friend to rebuild her life. It looks like a light read that will hopefully take me out of my heavier reading coma.

I'm also going to try and read a non-fiction book about fashion designers, 50 Fashion Designers You Should Know by Simone Werle. I have so many non-fiction books in my TBR that I'd really like to try and read a fiction and a non-fiction each week. There are beautiful pictures in here as well so I'm excited. I'm a sucker for fashion books, what can I say.

Lastly, I'm going to try and listen to Dad Is Fat by Jim Gaffigan on audiobook. C got me into Jim Gaffigan and I love him. He's hilarious and this book is him talking about his life with 5 kids. I love autobiographies on Audio when they're read by the author. 

We'll see how far I get by Friday!

Books! And My May Wrap-Up.

I've recently discovered book blogging. It's awesome. Booktube (book videos on youtube) takes up chunks of my time now, as I watch people, young and old, male and female, talk about books they want to read, books they like to read, books they're not too crazy about, and anything book-related you could imagine. I've found my people. Now, I tried the booktube thing. I made two videos but only posted one because I realized 1. I'm not a great speaker, hence why I've never wanted a career where I do a lot of presenting or talking. It's not awful, but it's not fun enough to warrant the stress of talking for ten minutes. 2. It's much easier for me to write things out because I can take my time with what I want to say.

So I'd like to use this space as my personal book blog in a sense. Posts will mostly be about books right now and we'll see where it goes from there.

Onto my May Wrap-Up!

This month I read three books. Two of them were over 500 pages so they took me lots of time to get through.

1. The first book I actually started in April but read most of in May. It was The Steady Running of the Hour by Justin Go. It is an historical fiction based in present day and World War I and takes the reader all over Europe. Mountain climbing is a prominent part of the story with Mt. Everest at the center. We follow the main character as he traces his possible ancestors' pasts to find enough evidence to prove a large fortune is his. But as we read, we get the sense that he's searching not so much for the money, but to find out what truly happened in these two people's lives.

This book looked so, so good. And I feel like I should have thoroughly enjoyed it because the idea is right up my alley. But I really didn't enjoy it. It was slow, a lot of lines were in French with no subtitles of any kind, I didn't feel connected to the characters at all, IT WAS SLOW, and the end was not what I had pushed through the book to get to. It was disappointing to say the least. I gave it a 2 out of 5 on Goodreads.

2. The second book I read was All The Light We Cannot See by Anthony Doerr. This was another historical fiction, this time based in World War II with chapters at the end moving ahead to 1974 and 2014. It took place in both France and Germany, and specifically in Saint-Malo, a French city off the coast of Brittany. We follow the two main characters as they alternate their point of view every other chapter or so. Marie-Laure is blind and lives with her father in France who works at the National Museum of History in Paris, where a valuable, legendary stone supposedly is held called The Sea of Flames. They have to flee Paris when Germany invades and go to Saint-Malo where her great-uncle lives. Werner is an orphan who lives in Germany with his sister Jutta and is gifted in the sciences, specifically physics. He easily repairs radios and finds them magical. He is sent to a Hitler youth school and is eventually a part of the army, using his radio transmission knowledge to find illegal uses of radios. He ends up in Saint-Malo when Marie-Laure is there and in 1944, the city is bombed my American bombers and most of the buildings are destroyed. 

This was a wonderful, wonderful book. The chapters had subchapters that were a page or two which I loved and the writing was beautiful. There was a lot of detail but it wasn't slow or boring or dragged on. I loved the characters, including the minor characters who were just as integral to the story as Marie-Laure and Werner. It showed both perspectives of the war and I thought Werner's perspective was absolutely necessary to show how much things were not black and white and not what people assumed. Marie-Laure was an inspiring female character. Her disability didn't make me pity her, and her attitude was incredible to experience. I gave this book a 5 out of 5 on Goodreads and I recommend it to historical fiction lovers, war story enthusiasts, and character development fiends. 

3. The third and final book I read in May was Into the Wild by Jon Krakauer. This is the true story of Chris McCandless, a young man who had just graduated college, gave all of his savings to charity and gave away most of his possessions, and set off on travels throughout the country, ending in the wilderness north of Mt. Mckinley in Alaska. SPOILER After changing his name and not speaking to his family for two years, he tried leaving Alaska and perhaps starting over, but ran into two main instances of horrible luck, which lead to his death by starvation in August of 1992. This was made into a movie which I recently just saw for the first time.

This was a very interesting book. I knew what happened going into it because of the movie so there wasn't a driving force to find out what happened for me, but I think that helped me appreciate the details of the book. The descriptions of Chris' environments were very cool and although there were a lot of terms I wasn't familiar with, I could still get the idea of what things looked like and what Chris encountered. I also enjoyed Krakauer's personal account of climbing in Alaska as well as the stories of people who were very similar to Chris in their beliefs and their travels. I felt like I understood Chris more after reading this book. He had a lot of lofty ideas that, I think, were at the heart of them good, but he portrayed them sometimes in very negative ways. I can understand his frustrations with the world and how people can be, so I really connected to him at times throughout this story. Krakauer definitely portrayed him in a more positive way then negative but I think that was the best thing to do. A lot of the time, his portrayal of Chris came from Chris' own journal entries or memories people had of him. My biggest fascination was the effect he had on people. One person in the whole book seemed to have a negative take on him, but even that is a bit far-reaching. Everyone who he met on the road seemed to really like him, found a connection with him, and just overall enjoyed his company. He had a charm that I don't think was intentional, but very real and natural. Even his father, who had a troubled relationship with his son, said he thoroughly enjoyed being in his company. The story is tragic, there is no other way to put it. But the book really makes it accessible to readers and I think brings up some controversial but important topics. I gave this book a 3 out of 5 on Goodreads. It's a little low because while I did enjoy it, it's not my normal type of book and so I felt comfortable only saying I liked it, rather than I really liked it or it was amazing.

That was my May! Hopefully more will be read in June.