Surprise Me is such a funny, sweet and romantic novel about keeping the romance alive after marriage and sustaining the happily ever after for the rest of a potentially long life. When a doctor tells Dan and Sylvie they could end up living another 68 years, they realize that’s 68 more years of marriage, which in turn sparks an existential crisis that starts of hilariously blooperific and turns out to become the sweetest thing ever.

Sylvie is hilarious is signature Sophie Kinsella style — similar to Becky Bloomwood, she approaches life with balls to the wall over the top emotion, but, also like Becky, with a sense of innocence that makes it all understandable. Unlike Becky, Sylvie has had more life experience and so has a bit of a more measured look at things. I love that I feel like I’ve grown with Kinsella’s books — while Becky’s take-no-prisoners adventures were an utter delight to read in my teens and 20s, I feel like I relate more now with Sylvie’s more career-oriented and domestic-life long-term concerns.

And Dan — OMG, I may be in love with him myself. He’s the sweetest man and Sylvie is lucky to have him. I love his awkward attempts at romantic surprises (his idea of a sexy surprise was definitely more surprise than sexy!), and I especially love all the actual surprises Sylvie learns about him. He has a quiet and steady kindness that pales in comparison to Sylvie’s own strong personality and rosy memories of her rich and powerful father, but that turns out to be a real and lasting treasure in the end.

I also love the subplot about Willoughby House, a heritage site where Sylvie works as a development officer. I love how its traditions and quirks make it a safe and comfortable place for Sylvie, but with the entrance of the kind elderly owner’s nephew, even this safe haven may have to face the harsh reality of impending change.

Finally, I like how Kinsella showed us Sylvie’s utter devotion to her father and her grief over his untimely death, but gave just enough hints about his imperfections. I’ve had an uncomfortable feeling about him and the seemingly perfect veneer of his legacy from the start, and I like how Kinsella gradually unfolds the story to show that while he may have treated his daughter as his princess, not everyone has had such a rosy experience of him.

+

Thank you to Penguin Random House Canada for an advance reading copy of this book in exchange for an honest review.

Peppermint Cocoa Crushes is the cutest, sweetest middle grade romance I’ve read in a long while. The second in the Swirl Books series after Pumpkin Spice Secrets, Peppermint Cocoa Crushes is about Sasha, an ambitious and driven seventh grader, who learns about herself, her friends and family, and how a crush really feels, while preparing for a school variety show competition. Adult readers, and likely many middle grade readers as well, will know how the story will turn out long before Sasha does, but it’s so much fun seeing her figure things out. The family and friendship pieces are moving, and the romance is, as we say in the Philippines, super kilig.

The Holidaze Spectacular is an annual school variety show competition that raises money for a cause in the local community. This year, Sasha has convinced the organizing committee to use the proceeds to support a local seniors program she volunteers for. She and her best friends, twins Karly and Kevin, are also performing a dance routine for the show, and the stakes are incredibly high this year, with the director of a prestigious art high school judging the show and awarding a scholarship to the winner. But Karly is too busy with quiz bowl to attend practices, Kevin is hanging out too much with their toughest competition, and Sasha is becoming overwhelmed with all the organizing duties she volunteered for.

I love how realistic this scenario feels. I can completely understand Sasha’s mom, a divorced single mother who went back to school to get a better paying job, pressuring her daughter to attend a STEM high school in order to get into a college with a strong technology program and launch a stable, high paying career. I can equally understand Sasha’s desire to focus on the arts instead, and pursue her love for dance, no matter how impractical. Karly is probably the character most similar to who I was in seventh grade, and I can relate to the challenge of telling your friends that you’ve developed new interests and may no longer enjoy an activity you’ve shared since you were children.

The romance comes into the story when Karly also confesses to Sasha that she has a crush, and since Sasha can’t relate, she begins confiding in other girls who have crushes too. Wanting her friend back, Sasha decides it makes sense to get a crush herself, and that Kevin is the most logical choice. Ever a planner, Sasha uses internet research to come up with a list to determine whether or not he likes her back. Sure he doesn’t make her knees go wobbly like the internet says crushes do, but how plausible are wobbly knees anyway?

In the meantime, Sasha’s happy to have found a new friend in Pete, a new boy in her math class who works in his grandfather’s market and makes an incredible peppermint cocoa. Oddly, she often exhibits flu-like symptoms around him, but he’s fun to hang out with anyway and he’s always around when she needs him.

Again, all of this is absolutely relatable. I love that Sasha is such a geek she actually writes out a list to prove whether or not Kevin likes her back, and I love how, despite all her logic, she fails to see some really obvious signs about Kevin’s true feelings. I particularly love that Sasha and Pete get along right from the start, and the conflict is mostly in Sasha’s laser focus on only Kevin as a crush prospect rather than in any jerk-like attitude in Pete. While I sometimes enjoy the frenemies-to-lovers trope, it can get tiresome to see a guy act like a total jerk or a girl act like a total drama queen in the beginning only to know they get together in the end. I much prefer having both parties actually like each other from the start, even though thoughts of romance may not develop until later.

Drink Pairing: Chocoholic’s Delight

Nothing makes for a better treat than a cup of hot cocoa and a good book! Check out a fun drink recipe below, treat yourself to a cup with this book and indulge!

+

Thank you to Thomas Allen & Son for a copy of this book in exchange for an honest review. Thank you as well for the card design of my favourite drink recipe!

Brown Girl in the Room is an all too realistic and relatable story of being a woman of colour and building your career. The events and themes in this story will likely feel familiar to anyone who’s dealt with office politics and difficult co-workers, and Ramsingh does a great job of depicting the insidiously subtle form racism can take in the professional world.

Sara Ramnarine is hired as a senior public relations officer for a community non-profit called Albatross. While her name is South Asian in origin, her parents immigrated to Canada from the Caribbean, and Sara herself grew up in Toronto and doesn’t herself have lived experience of being a newcomer to the country. Yet Albatross views her hiring as a highly political act, even though her bosses and co-workers won’t quite admit it. Her bosses are hopeful she will help the company build stronger relationships with the South Asian community they serve, and Sara has an uneasy feeling that their faith in her has less to do with her public relations abilities and more to do with the brownness of her skin. I love how subtle the wrongness in her environment is; Sara herself can’t pinpoint why some of the things they say make her uncomfortable, and often ends up questioning her own discomfort. Early in the novel, she talks about a ‘diversity’ question that came up in her interview, and how worried she is that Albatross expects her to speak a South Asian language, even though she is fluent only in English.

I also love how the author humanizes even the bad characters in the beginning of the novel. Sara’s professional rival Anna is small-minded and mean, constantly criticizing Sara’s performance, but she’s also ultimately an insecure older woman who fears that she’s hit the peak of her own career. Sara’s manager Phillip ends up allowing other employees to infringe on Sara’s authority, but he comes off mostly as well-meaning yet ineffective rather than cruel. I only wish this level of complexity continued for the entire book. As the story started to shift towards Sara’s growing awareness of the injustice in the way she’s treated, Anna and Phillip become more two-dimensional as characters and their actions become outright malicious, which in turn felt repetitive after a while.

I liked the shift in dynamic when Venah joins the company as a ‘diversity expert’, and how her role heightens Sara’s own insecurities about her own relationship to ‘diversity.’ Venah insists on calling Sara by her more South Asian-sounding full birth name Saraswati and single-mindedly views her responsibility as hiring South Asian interpreters and serving South Asian food, regardless of the languages spoken and the cultural backgrounds of the communities attending Albatross events. She felt fairly one-note as a character from the beginning, but I like how she embodies the surface understanding of diversity that Phillip and leadership at Albatross appear to be interested in.

The author also does a great job in portraying how slowly and deliberately Sara’s confidence is chipped away. Ramsingh makes it clear that Sara has talent: board members and managers in other departments, who are either women of colour themselves or at the very least not threatened by Sara’s success, praise her work. Yet whenever Sara accepts the praise, she gets into trouble for not being a team player, and all the while, behind the scenes, Phillip and his boss Mara are making sure the credit is redirected to another employee. It takes Sara a while to realize that she isn’t imagining things nor overreacting when she feels mistreated, and it’s easy to understand why it took her so long.

The ending fell short for me, just because it was so abrupt. I can understand that situations like Sara’s don’t have neat resolutions in real life either, but the final few scenes had such a big build up towards a big event that it was disappointing to have it cut off before that event even started. New elements as well were brought up and new characters were introduced in the last few chapters, but their stories didn’t really go anywhere, and I felt like more closure for that subplot would have been a more fitting end.

Brown Girl in the Room is not an easy read, and I may suggest a trigger warning for anyone who has dealt with workplace harassment and discrimination in their own lives. Sara is bullied throughout the novel, and while the form of the bullying is often subtle, the author’s writing isn’t. The novel is admirable in its realism, and I hesitate to call it heavy-handed, because what Sara goes through doesn’t feel exaggerated in the least. But the book does tackle its subject with utter seriousness, and while I understand it’s a serious subject, the lack of levity is hard to deal with on a sustained basis. I deliberately stayed away from this book over the winter holiday break, because I didn’t want to mar my enjoyment of my days off. Possibly this heaviness is precisely the effect the author is going for, but I don’t think I quite realized what I was getting into when I started.

+

Thank you to Tightrope Books for a copy of this book in exchange for an honest review.