Combining two months of reading here. I spent a lot of time the last few months getting into a new hobby (surprise), listening to Maintenance Phase (SO GOOD) and spending time with my mom. But there are some good reads in here!
The Secret History of Home Economics by Danielle Dreilinger • ★★★★★
Hot on the heels of January’s The Romanov Sisters, I downloaded another non-fiction audiobook.
I love learning about the history of home ec because this field of study wasn’t always about sewing pillowcases and flipping pancakes. Stuff You Missed in History Class has a great podcast about the Bureau of Home Economics if you don’t want to buckle up for a whole book.
There is so much good information in this book, but here are some of my favorite bits:
- Housework is work. Home economists figured this out right away. They calculated that the average woman put 50+ hours a week into domestic activities like cleaning, personal finance and cooking. And if you layer on child care, it was much more.
- Home economics is about efficiency. At its advent, home economists were looking for ways to make domestic work easier and less time-consuming. They weren’t advocating for everyone to become professional bakers, chefs, cleaners, etc. They wanted average people to find efficient ways of taking care of life’s everyday tasks. If that meant sending your laundry to the cleaner instead of slogging through it at home or picking up a birthday cake at the bakery instead of taking a lot of time in the kitchen, they were all for it! Don’t feel like you have to master everything!
- It’s more than cooking and sewing. You know those tweets and memes you often see saying “oh gosh, high school, thanks for teaching me calculus instead of how to do my taxes.” Um, you all know that these practical skills are taught in school and many of them fall under the home ec/FACE umbrella. Want to learn how to do your taxes, make a budget, cook healthy meals and fix a hole in your jacket? Take home ec.
Payback’s a Witch by Lana Harper • ★★★★☆
Yes, this book has spooky season written all over it, but you cannot control when library holds become available. But reading a book set during my favorite time of year during my least favorite time of year was actually a very nice way to plow through the doldrums of February.
Anyhow, the basics here: Emma returns home for a family witchy ceremony after spending years away. When she gets back, she discovers a few things: 1) her powers are growing stronger, 2) she’s not quite over her ex-boyfriend, and 3) there’s something about the town’s most mysterious and charming witch.
Devil House by John Darnielle • ★★★★☆
Before I even get into this book, let me start by saying that the audiobook version is the way to go. I have the distinct feeling that if I was reading Devil House, I might have had a hard time getting through it. But listening to John Darnielle reading his work was super compelling. I stayed up late listening quite a few nights.
This book is hard to describe, but I’ll give you the gist of part of it: A true-crime author moves into a home where a gruesome murder once took place at the height of the ’80s satanic panic. I think that’s all I want to give you!
The Paris Apartment by Lucy Foley • ★★★☆☆
I’m a big fan of Lucy Foley’s thrillers. The Hunting Party and The Guest List were absolute page-turners for me. Plus they had terrific settings: rural Scotland and a remote Irish island respectively. The Paris Apartment also has a compelling setting, but I didn’t find the story to be quite as engaging.
Here, Jess travels to Paris to meet her half-brother. (Why are writers so obsessed with half-siblings? I have five and they truly feel like regular siblings to me, not some strange hybrid creature.) When she arrives, he’s not at his apartment. The rest of the book trades perspectives from Jess to other residents in the apartment building.
This book is more than decent. It’s compelling and twisty, but just not as good as Foley’s other endeavors. I’d say this is the perfect airport or beach read. It’ll keep you going, but it’s nothing you’ll want to pick up again.
Madam by Phoebe Wynne • ★★☆☆☆
At first glance, this book was made for me: Rose, a young teacher gets recruited to teach Classics at an elite boarding school in Scotland. Soon she discovers not all is as it seems.
Sign me up, right? Wrong. Also, here come the spoilers (though not the entire plot).
So Rose gets to Caldenbrae and the girls are just not that into academics; instead, the school really emphasizes comportment and manners and breeding. Rose tries to dig into why that is, what happened to the last Latin teacher and why one girl was removed from her class.
She discovers that Caldenbrae isn’t a regular snobby boarding school for the elite, it’s pretty much a wife factory. Girls are matched with men and then educated accordingly. And, while I was hoping it wouldn’t come to it I also knew it was coming, that means sexually as well. The scene is brief but still absolutely stomach-churning and totally unnecessary.
My issue with this book is that it could have had a lot of the spooky plot points about the missing teacher, deaths on campus and unseemly history without the really gross stuff.
So why two stars? Maybe because I’ve read worse? Because the ending was satisfying?
The Duchess by Wendy Holden • ★★★☆☆
About halfway through this book, I remembered that Wallis Simpson and the Duke of Windsor were Nazi sympathizers. That’s about the time I stopped really caring about the characters. This being said, there’s lots of historical fiction out there about equally awful people, so it’s not like this is really that unique. Like was Henry VIII a good guy? No. But I also watched all of The Tudors. Whatever.
At any rate, this book was fine. It definitely painted Wallis as being a bit more passive, even hesitant, about her relationship with the Duke of Windsor. From what I understood about her from podcasts, books and documentaries, that wasn’t really the case, but who really knows.
As always, you can follow along with my progress and see what I’ve read over on Goodreads!
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