Business Books

This was a good year for me professionally, and while I must have read more management books this year than I ever have since business school, these are the ones I found most useful.

1. The Making of a Manager by Julie Zhou

Straightforward, accessible, and entertaining, I highly recommend this book for any first-time managers. The illustrations at the beginning of each chapter, featuring anthropomorphic animals navigating various management situations, are particularly helpful, and have earned this a permanent spot on my shelves.

2. Getting Past No by William Ury

Probably a classic by now, this was recommended to me by a lawyer friend, and I found it super helpful. I like how broadly applicable the content is — Ury doesn’t focus on how to get the best business deal, nor on how to build long-term business relationships. Rather, he crafts a modern-day Art of War, with strategies and tactics that can be used in everything from negotiating business deals to navigating everyday conversations.

Romances

3. Hana Khan Carries On by Uzma Jalaluddin

I’ve gushed about this book before, and I’ll continue gushing about it for years to come. Now optioned for film by Mindy Kaling, this laugh-out-loud-hilarious rom com has lots of heart, incredible side characters, and loads of biryani poutine. Its central romance — You’ve Got Mail with competing halal restaurants in Scarborough — sparkles with wit and charm, yet it’s the entirety of Hana’s world that’ll draw you right in. (Full review)

4. Satisfaction Guaranteed by Karelia Stetz-Waters

Opposites attract happens to be one of my favourite romance tropes, and Cade and Selena will have you falling in love from their very first meet-cute. The romance is sexy and feel-good, and I absolutely love how central consent is to their relationship. Personal highlight: Selena convinces a reluctant Cade to take a motorcycle ride with her, and then takes the time to teach Cade non-verbal signals to let her, as the driver, know whether to slow down or speed up. It’s a simple metaphor that carries beautifully into the bedroom, and other aspects of their relationship, and I was just falling in love right alongside them the entire time. (Full review)

5. Mansfield Park by Jane Austen (BBC Audio adaptation with Felicity Jones, Benedict Cumberbatch, and David Tennant)

The story itself is all right, but the voice acting is phenomenal! Listening to Benedict Cumberbatch flirt Austen-style made my walks especially fun, and kicked off a months-long interest in borrowing as many BBC Audio adaptations as I could from my library. A quick note that this is an abridged radio play rather than the full audiobook. I personally liked that it was only 2.5 hours long, as it was the perfect length for a walk and a couple of errands, and, well, Benedict Cumberbatch. But heads up if it’s the full Austen novel you want.

Mysteries

6. The Red Palace by June Hur

A palace nurse and a police inspector team up to solve a series of murders in 1758 Joseon. The mystery is compelling, the romance light and absolutely adorable, and the glimpse into Korean history super fascinating. I hadn’t known of Crown Prince Sado until this book, and reading up on the history gave the events in the story so much more meaning.

7. Arsenic and Adobo by Mia P. Manansala

I love cozy mysteries, cooking, and contemporary Filipino stories, so this book was very much an immediate buy for me. The series lead and the mystery itself are just all right, but the food descriptions are mouthwateringly delicious, and the sexy, super sweet men vying for Lila’s heart make me long for a Netflix adaptation! I also love how steeped the story is in Filipino details, from the group of titas (aunties) to the barrel men figurines in Tita Rosie’s kitchen. One personal snag: we definitely need more of Lila’s dog Longganisa in these stories!

8. The Time for Murder is Meow by T.C. LoTiempo

I love cats, so any mystery that features them (fortunately there are a lot within the cozy genre) immediately catches my eye. This book won my heart partly because of how well it developed its animal characters: Purrday and Kahlua are vivid characters in their own right, and the stuff they do is hilariously relatable. Even better though is that the human characters are also super compelling: I love Shell and Gary, with their complicated backstory and reluctant teamwork, and I can’t wait for more of their adventures! (Full review)

Thrillers

9. Dial A for Aunties by Jesse Q. Sutanto

We all know Asian aunties are awesome, but would yours cover up a(n accidental) murder for you? More madcap comedy than nail-biting thriller, this was an absolute delight, from page one all the way to the very end. It’s absolutely, ridiculously absurd, so leave your disbelief at the door, and turn yourself over completely to enjoying the ride. More importantly, beyond the humour, this novel is also very much full of heart. Meddy Chan and her aunties are all ride-or-die for each other, and as odd as it may be to think about a book with a murderous cover-up, this is a really sweet and heartwarming family novel. (Full review)

10. The Wife Upstairs by Rachel Hawkins

It’s hard to make a Jane Eyre retelling stand out, but with this book, Hawkins succeeds in creating a truly contemporary thriller that stands on its own while still managing to incorporate multiple shout-outs to the original. This re-telling leans into the class divide amongst the characters, setting the tale in a wealthy gated community where residents “slum it” in a coffeeshop mere blocks away, but clutch their pearls when they see Jane taking their dogs so far from home. Both Jane and Bea (nee Bertha) are clever, calculating schemers, and Eddie (Rochester) is a worthy opponent, with a subtle but definite undertone of darkness beneath his genteel demeanour. It’s sheer fun watching the players as they circle each other’s orbits, and plot out their next moves.

I was looking to expand my tarot card collection with a deck that’ll be easy to carry around for whenever I’m suddenly in the mood for a reading. I came across the Everyday Witch Tarot mini deck on the publisher website, and as you can see in the photo, it’s small enough to fit perfectly in my hand. The size does make it a bit of a challenge to shuffle the cards — to be fair, this is the first mini deck I’ve tried, so I can’t compare — but the convenience is well worth it.

I absolutely love Elisabeth Alba’s artwork. The deck does not come with a guidebook, so heads up for folks who are new to tarot, but the images themselves are so beautifully evocative that you can almost come up with a full reading even without being familiar with tarot interpretations. (That being said, I find that looking up the various meanings of each card does help deepen the reading, and I personally love the Biddy Tarot website for that.)

The cards feature illustrations of witches, and the images do indeed convey a sense of magic, but overall, I also found the images very grounded in reality. While there is the presence of the esoteric, Alba’s illustrations depict the magic of everyday life, with the witches enjoying non-magical activities like doing yoga or enjoying a day at the beach. This enhanced my emotional connection to the cards, and help make the spreads come to life for me. 

Below, I display some of my personal favourites from the deck: 

First, as a cat lover, how gorgeous is the back of these cards (middle image in the above)?! The black cat is adorable, the witch hat and broomstick heightens the magical mood, and starry night sky in the background adds a lovely touch of whimsy.

Vibrant Emotions

The Three of Cups and The World caught my eye because of the sheer exuberance in the illustrations. I love that the Three of Cups features a trio of older women celebrating life and friendship. And The World conveys such a feeling of peace and joy. I love how the witch welcomes the breeze as the wind lifts the hat off her head; her billowing hair and carefree smile reflect pure joy, maybe even triumph, as she takes a moment for herself on the sandy shore.

Animal Companions

I love that all the cards feature cats joining the witches. There’s a gorgeous card where a witch and her cat are both surrounded by enemies wielding wands, and the image just emphasizes how much these cats aren’t just animals randomly in the shots, but also the witches’ familiars.

I selected these four cards (Judgement, Page of Wands, Eight of Cups, and Strength) in particular because of how they depict that witch-familiar bond. In Judgement, a witch plays a jaunty tune while the cat beside her happily chases a butterfly. In Page of Wands, an orange cat beckons the witch to follow them down a winding path. In Eight of Cups, a witch walks away from a table stacked with cups, and her cat faithfully follows by her side. And how beautiful is the image depicting strength? A witch has clearly gained a lion’s trust and affection — he calmly licks her hand while a black cat watches with pride.

Choices and Possibilities

And finally, how gorgeous are these cards for The Fool and Seven of Cups?! I love all the possibilities illustrated amongst the cups in the Seven of Cups card, and this sense that the witch is exploring all the options before her. And The Fool is just hilariously awesome, of course. With her eyes closed, she seems blissfully oblivious as she steps off the edge of a cliff. Yet you see the broom between her legs, and know she’s not about to fall; rather, she’s going to take a wild flight into the unknown.

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Thank you to Thomas Allen for a copy of this tarot deck in exchange for an honest review. 

I had high hopes for this book. The premise hooked me at once: Wren meets Adam through a dating app, and things are going really well, but then he totally ghosts her. She thinks perhaps it’s because she’s shared too much of her past with him, but then a private investigator, Bailey, shows up, and Wren learns that Adam has ghosted other women before, and that these women went missing shortly after.

And for the first half, I was into it. Unger sets the story in early 2020, just as the COVID-19 pandemic is starting to reach international consciousness. Considering how dramatically the world of dating changed during the pandemic, having it loom over the future of Wren and Adam’s relationship added an exciting bit of tension to the story. I also liked the little hints dropped about Wren’s traumatic past, and how much she’d done to reinvent herself and leave her old self completely behind.

I was a little less into how Wren seems to associate online dating with being lonely and desperate; so many people are dating online now that, especially in early 2020, it seems a rather retrograde stigma, but fine — it wasn’t enough of an annoyance to turn me off. And I did like how it fit thematically with Wren’s character — she works as an advice columnist for folks with rather serious problems, and she says that it’s her own vulnerability and trauma that makes her good at her job, so that ties in really well with the loneliness and desperation that she says got her into online dating.

It was in the second half that the book really began to drag for me. Wren’s search for Adam was interspersed with flashbacks of her childhood — basically, her father was a doomsday conspiracist who forced their family to live in the woods, and his paranoia sometimes turned violent. So, it’s a compelling story, and the guilt Wren carries with her as a result of a traumatic incident is a compelling bit of character building. But there were a LOT of flashbacks, which just bored me after a while. There was a thread about a friend Wren makes in the woods, that I presume was intended to highlight her psychological state, but while it was a significant part of Wren’s character, I thought it was handled confusingly, and ultimately got lost in all the clutter about their lives in the woods.

Wren’s motivations also felt unclear to me. At first, I could see she wanted to find Adam because she wanted to know why he ghosted her, but then her feelings seem to change partway through, as do her reasons for wanting to find Adam. The reasons behind the shift were muddy enough, but mostly, I wasn’t sure what she wanted to achieve anymore. Similarly, she goes from wanting Bailey to leave her alone, to wanting to help with his investigation, and at some point, she decides to go rogue and find Adam on her own. Her motivations have a lot more to do with her desire to find Adam than her desire to help Bailey, so the flip-flopping makes a kind of sense, but I just had to pause reading every so often and ask “Why?”

The book spent so much time building up Wren’s childhood and the events that led to her present, yet, to me, didn’t spend nearly enough effort in developing the present-day narrative. I don’t necessarily mind books with unreliable narrators, but often, those narrators have clearly defined logic for their actions; it’s only the reveal that reframes our understanding of this logic. In this case, Wren seems less an unreliable narrator than a muddled one, as if the author tried to cram so much in, but didn’t quite make all of it fit.

I did finish the book, mostly because I was genuinely curious about what Adam had to do with the missing women, and was hoping that the answer to that question would make everything click together. For that reason, I found the climactic reveal the most frustrating of all. Similar to the flashbacks of Wren’s childhood, the villain’s backstory fits in thematically with the rest of the book, but doesn’t quite provide the “Aha!” moment of clarity I’d hoped for. The villain’s connection to Wren is doled out sparingly over several pages, in a way that felt more frustrating than suspenseful. And then there was a dramatic finish to a confrontation that just honestly took me right out of the book completely. I’m all for suspending disbelief while reading thrillers, but that resolution was just, to me, taking several steps too far in the name of drama.

Overall, this book had a solid start, but a frustrating, disappointing end.

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Thank you to Park Row for an e-galley in exchange for an honest review.