Menagerie by Rachel Vincent (Menagerie #1)

Synopsis:

When Delilah Marlow visits a famous traveling carnival, Metzger’s Menagerie, she is an ordinary woman in a not-quite-ordinary world. But under the macabre circus big-top, she discovers a fierce, sharp-clawed creature lurking just beneath her human veneer. Captured and put on exhibition, Delilah is stripped of her worldly possessions, including her own name, as she’s forced to “perform” in town after town.

But there is breathtaking beauty behind the seamy and grotesque reality of the carnival. Gallagher, her handler, is as kind as he is cryptic and strong. The other “attractions”—mermaids, minotaurs, gryphons and kelpies—are strange, yes, but they share a bond forged by the brutal realities of captivity. And as Delilah struggles for her freedom, and for her fellow menagerie, she’ll discover a strength and a purpose she never knew existed.

Review:

When I read the cover copy I was like, woo-hoo!  Carnivals are basically circuses, and I like circuses.  Fantasy, otherworldly creatures? I’m there.

But holy cow the first half of this book was hard to get through. Looking back this was probably the most telling thing – I should have finished two or three books in the week plus it took me to read Menagerie.  I had trouble bringing myself to the page.

Delilah is deemed to be a cryptid and therefore not a person.  For over two hundred pages she deals with this.  Vincent is trying to drive home the horror of slavery by having it happen to a white middle class woman but it’s way too heavy and obvious.  At one point she even has a water hose turned on her.

And for these two hundred pages there’s basically no plot other than, “Argh, the injustice!”  At the midpoint the book turns into a more run of the mill fantasy with a story and some action.  Delilah gets a purpose but stinks at planning.  She has plan A, talks with one person and goes, “wait wait, we should do this other plan!”  Then halfway through that plan she goes, “no no no, we should really do this much more dangerous thing that would take a lot of forethought that we don’t have time to do right now!”  So much side eye.

And the ending wasn’t even satisfying.  It’s not a cliffhanger, thank goodness, but I was left thinking, “Oh, that’s one long, boring road you’re headed down”.  I’m afraid I won’t be following.

Thanks to MIRA and Edelweiss for providing a review copy.

If I Only Had a Duke by Lenora Bell (The Disgraceful Dukes #2)

Synopsis:

After four failed seasons and a disastrous jilting, Lady Dorothea Beaumont has had more than enough of her family’s scheming. She won’t domesticate a duke, entangle an earl, or vie for a viscount. She will quietly exit to her aunt’s Irish estate for a life of blissful freedom. Until an arrogant, sinfully handsome duke singles her out for a waltz, making Thea the most popular belle of the season.

The duke ruined her plans and he’ll just have to fix them.

Dalton, Duke of Osborne, is far too heartless for debutantes or marriage—he uses dalliances and public spectacle to distract from his real purpose: finding the man who destroyed his family. When his search leads to Ireland, the last thing he needs is the determined, achingly innocent Thea, who arrives in the dead of night demanding he escort her to her aunt. His foolish agreement may prove his undoing. The road to the Emerald Isle is fraught with unforeseen dangers, but the greatest peril of all might just be discovering that he has a heart…and he’s losing it to Thea.

Review:

There’s plenty to like here but… it’s complicated.

The good:

• Like the first book of the series this is a fun, low-angst romance.  While the stakes in the blurb above seem weighty they never feel that heavy.
• Thea and the heroine from the previous book are connected in an interesting, satisfying way.
• The respect that the hero and heroine have for each other is palpable and wonderful.
• While the hero and heroine are titled there are fleshed out characters from up and down the social strata.
• There is a gender-bending secondary character, and I love them.  I hope they get their own book, maybe in a spin-off series taking place a dozen years later or something.
• While not epistolary some nice (and funny!) letters start things off.

The not-so-good:

• Like the first book in the series the historical feel is weird in places.  At one point Thea is openly invited to speak at a meeting for the British Institution of the Fine Arts and she accepts on the spot.  In the Regency women generally weren’t allowed to attend those kids of events, period, let alone present at one.  Most of the book stays away from the ballroom so it’s not awful awful, but it’s there.
• The plotting feels scattershot, and one subplot could have been done away with completely.  The middle has a good pace but in the last few chapters it’s like, ‘we must tie all these ends neatly and quickly! Hurry, now!’ I would have been happy with a couple of things left until the next book.
• I have read two new releases that were probably written after Hamilton hit and I catch hints of lyrics in places. Both have punny lines about “demanding satisfaction”, and this book adds, “We have this moment. And it’s more than enough.” I may just be hyper aware, though.
• The point of view changes were jarring at times.  We would be in Thea’s head as she danced with Dalton, worried about making a scene or finding the right words.  But then we’d switch into his head, where every little thing was seen as seductive or cloying.  I get that he was seeing what he wanted to see, but it was too extreme a change for me.
• The title of the book doesn’t match the story at all – Thea is more than happy to be a spinster and live her own life, gosh darn it.  She isn’t yearning for a Duke at all.

I liked the first book of the series better than this one, but I’d be happy to chalk it up to a sophomore slump.  I’ll be keeping my eye out for the next volume, for sure.

Generation Chef by Karen Stabiner

Synopsis:

The heart of Generation Chef is the story of Jonah Miller, who at age twenty-four attempts to fulfill a lifelong dream by opening the Basque restaurant Huertas in New York City, still the high-stakes center of the restaurant business for an ambitious young chef. Miller, a rising star who has been named to the 30-Under-30 list of both Forbes and Zagat, quits his job as a sous chef, creates a business plan, lines up investors, leases a space, hires a staff, and gets ready to put his reputation and his future on the line.

Journalist and food writer Karen Stabiner takes us inside Huertas’s roller-coaster first year, but also provides insight into the challenging world a young chef faces today—the intense financial pressures, the overcrowded field of aspiring cooks, and the impact of reviews and social media, which can dictate who survives.

Review:

I dived in hoping for a business-leaning chef book written by a journalist, and I enjoyed watching Jonah’s dream about his restaurant and work to get it off the ground.  There was a lot of talk about location and start-up costs, but I was sure the narrative would turn to food once things got rolling.

It did, but only tangentially.  The importance of keeping food costs down is discussed, as well as the benefit of fixed-price menus, raising the average ticket, and making “cocktails” when you can only serve wine and beer. But cooking itself isn’t celebrated.  I had a hard time picturing any of the dishes, and knew more about their price than how they tasted.  Food descriptions rarely go over one sentence:

The pintxo list led off with the gilda, named for Rita Hayworth’s character in the 1946 film Gilda, a skewered white anchovy curved around a manzanilla green olive at one end and a guindilla pepper at the other.

…that’s it.  I was disappointed.

Everything is looked at through a business and career-focused lens.  We learn about several cooks on the line – not what kind of food they like to make or why they became a chef, but how much debt cooking school put them in.  How they anticipate moving up the brigade ladder.  Where they’d like to be in five years.  Exactly how much they make, and how and why raises and promotions are doled out.  People become a collection of numbers.

The writing style didn’t agree with me, either.  The whole book feels like a long newspaper article complete with quotes, reactions, and lots of figures.  There were sections that went: ‘Person A was thinking this.  Person B was thinking that.  Person A was really worried about what person B was thinking.  So they had a meeting.  After discussing X and Y, they decided on Z.  But then Q happened, so they decided to go back to the drawing board.’  It was a lot of narrative work for nothing.

I would have loved it if Stabiner pulled the story together around more cohesive themes.  Instead of following a strict timeline the scope could have been widened out between major events, talking about how Jonah’s leadership style evolved over time, say, or consolidating young Alberto’s story into bigger blocks.  That way there could be deep look at how Jonah’s ethos compares to and evolved from his previous jobs, and Alberto’s rise could be more effectively linked to that of his boss.  While these themes are touched on they’re split up to avoid muddying the timeline, losing any insight that may have been there.

Also, Stabiner’s daughter worked at Huertas during the reporting that led to this book.  The daughter was working front of house while Stabiner was observing the back so she claims no conflict of interest.  I’m very glad it’s mentioned in the acknowledgements but find it sketchy at best, and even if there was no conflict it does deprive us of any server or bartender stories that may have added to the narrative.

If you’re interested in the money behind restaurants and the investing/business side of the industry you’ll find Generation Chef informative.  But if you’re a foodie like me and prefer cooking in restaurant books you will be let down.

Thanks to Penguin and NetGalley for providing a review copy.

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The Underground Railroad by Colson Whitehead

Synopsis:

Cora is a slave on a cotton plantation in Georgia. Life is hellish for all slaves, but Cora is an outcast even among her fellow Africans, and she is coming into womanhood; even greater pain awaits. Caesar, a recent arrival from Virginia, tells her of the Underground Railroad and they plot their escape. Like Gulliver, Cora encounters different worlds on each leg of her journey.

Whitehead brilliantly recreates the unique terrors of black life in pre-Civil War America. The Underground Railroad is at once a kinetic adventure tale of one woman’s ferocious will to escape the horrors of bondage and a shattering, powerful meditation on the history we all share.

Review:

I wanted to love this book. I was expecting to dive deep, fall in love with the writing and the story, and pop up my head 24 or 48 hours later ready to sing its praises like an odd literary siren. Instead I’m here almost two weeks later, throat sore from swallowing water, wondering where things went wrong.

The narrative itself is epic. We follow Cora as she navigates her way North, using a literal underground railroad to run towards freedom. The device is great. I love all the research that Whitehead did – he shows that there wasn’t a simple progression of free states and slave states, but entirely different sets of rules dependent on location that had to be negotiated. We even see these rules change over time in particular places. When I studied history in school slavery was reduced to, “man, that was awful and wrong, good thing we stopped doing it”. The Underground Railroad filled in gaps, showing just how senseless and violent and unforgiving the system was – all the nasty details that were missing from my textbooks.

I love learning, so in that sense I’m glad I read it. I’m a more well-rounded human now. That’s good.

But as for the craft of the novel I have some issues. First, I was never drawn into the story. I would put the book down after a chapter and leave it for a day or two, and might have forgotten about it if not for a looming library due date. Some people have suggested making at least Cora’s point of view first person to get closer to the story, which makes sense, but I’m not sure it would have worked considering Whitehead’s more clinical style.

He’s a good writer and there are passages that sing, but there are also sections that are choppy and confusing. This is the kind of book that would be great to study in a literature course, to pick and pull apart and debate. Why did the chapters jump to minor story lines, and did it serve the narrative? What makes this particular sentence special, and how did the word choice foreshadow later events? There’s more here, but I’d have to sit down and ferret it out.

And that’s the thing – I analyze (medical) texts for work. The last thing I want to do is slog through a novel only to find that to get enjoyment out of it I would have to go back and analyze it, too. Don’t get me wrong, I love novels with depth. I like the idea of returning to a book in a year or three to peel back more layers of the onion. But it has to be an enjoyable, interesting read in the first place. Signs Preceding the End of the World fell into this category for me – gripping and thought provoking on first read, with the promise of giving up more secrets when I meet it again. Sadly The Underground Railroad wasn’t a fulfilling read the first time through.

Don’t let my dithering stop you from reading this book. It’s important, and a lot of people disagree with me so who knows, you may end up loving it. No matter what you’ll be smarter and more well-rounded on the other side, and that’s never a bad thing.

It Had to Be You by Susan Elizabeth Phillips (Chicago Stars #1)

Synopsis:

The Windy City isn’t quite ready for Phoebe Somerville—the outrageous, curvaceous New York knockout who has just inherited the Chicago Stars football team. And Phoebe is definitely not ready for the Stars’ head coach, former gridiron legend Dan Calebow, a sexist jock taskmaster with a one-track mind. Calebow is everything Phoebe abhors. And the sexy new boss is everything Dan despises—a meddling bimbo who doesn’t know a pigskin from a pitcher’s mound.

So why is Dan drawn to the shameless sexpot like a heat-seeking missile? And why does the coach’s good ol’ boy charm leave cosmopolitan Phoebe feeling awkward, tongue-tied…and ready to fight?

Review:

I can see why many people like this book but I have to wonder if it’s a generational thing. Is this one of those pre-enlightenment books I’ve heard about where the guy is an asshole, the girl is a pushover, and the plot is maddening?

Phoebe, a girl abused in her youth that has no real connections to her family, was left her father’s football team in his will. She gets to keep the team if, and only if, the league basement Chicago Stars make the AFC championships this year.

She decides the best thing to do is ignore the team completely as she knows nothing about football. Contracts need signing and she’s the only one with any legal authority, but hey, not her problem.

She finally comes around and decides to go to work. In the process she falls in love with the coach, Dan, for no reason I can possibly see. He’s quick to anger, crap at apologies, and seems to think fleeting good intentions make up for all his faults. The only person he is consistently nice to is Molly, Phoebe’s teenaged half sister, as he demands admiration above all else and she readily provides it.

Many passages made me downright mad.  Shall we have a sample?

A sprinkling of African-Americans, Hispanics, and Asians, all well-dressed and prosperous looking, mingled with the crowd.

You know, instead of the shabby, poor looking minorities you’re used to. ~fume~

And in the waaaah? department:

He grinned as he pulled away from the curb. If the Russians had been smart, they’d have taken Phoebe’s radioactive body into account before they’d signed off on that nuclear proliferation agreement with the United States.

Does. not. compute.

So getting to the end of the novel was hard. While Phillips’ writing style is technically solid she leaves little for the reader to figure out herself. Even with all this explaining I find Phoebe’s emotional journey unrealistic.

Is this Old Skool?  Am I just missing something? If I didn’t need this book for a challenge I would have never made it to the end. GRAH.

Hidden Figures by Margot Lee Shetterly

Synopsis:

Before John Glenn orbited the Earth or Neil Armstrong walked on the moon, a group of professionals worked as “Human Computers,” calculating the flight paths that would enable these historic achievements. Among these were a coterie of bright, talented African-American women. Segregated from their white counterparts by Jim Crow laws, these “colored computers,” as they were known, used slide rules, adding machines, and pencil and paper to support America’s fledgling aeronautics industry, and helped write the equations that would launch rockets, and astronauts, into space.

Drawing on the oral histories of scores of these “computers,” personal recollections, interviews with NASA executives and engineers, archival documents, correspondence, and reporting from the era, Hidden Figures recalls America’s greatest adventure and NASA’s groundbreaking successes through the experiences of five spunky, courageous, intelligent, determined, and patriotic women: Dorothy Vaughan, Mary Jackson, Katherine Johnson, Christine Darden, and Gloria Champine.

Moving from World War II through NASA’s golden age, touching on the civil rights era, the Space Race, the Cold War, and the women’s rights movement, Hidden Figures interweaves a rich history of scientific achievement and technological innovation with the intimate stories of five women whose work forever changed the world—and whose lives show how out of one of America’s most painful histories came one of its proudest moments.

Review:

There is so much history that we don’t know about.  Some of it is hinted at in textbooks – conversations that may have taken place in closed rooms, people who may have helped behind the scenes.  These are things we can imagine not knowing.  But that there was a group of African-American women that worked as mathematicians at NASA, plotting our course to the stars?  It’s an unknown unknown – in media depictions I don’t think I’ve seen any people of color at all.

Mission Control packed with white guys in the movie Apollo 13

All too often women and people of color are left out of our histories.  Hidden Figures works to fix that.

There is way too much I didn’t know about the Jim Crow South.  I mean, I knew Virginia was segregated, but I had no idea of the crazy stuff they did to keep it that way:

In 1936 a black student from Richmond named Alice Jackson Houston applied to the University of Virginia to study French but was denied admission.  The NAACP sued on her her behalf, and in response the state of Virginia set up a tuition reimbursement fund, subsidizing the graduate educations of black students in any place but Virginia.

I didn’t know that executive orders slowly desegregated the military and government jobs over time, providing an opening for all black people to get into more skilled professions.  Other things that I already knew – minorities being shut out of the housing market, women not being promoted as quickly or paid on par with men – came to life.

Shettley focuses the the story through many lenses.  What was it like to be a woman at Langley?  How about a black man?  How were those issues compounded in the case of the black women “computers”?  And what additional difficulties did the world outside of work present?  Intersectionality, I love thee.

I’m having a hard time coming up with more to say because I just want to press Hidden Figures into your hands and say, “read this.”  Learning about Dorothy Vaughan, who moved away from her family for a chance at a job that would fulfill her while providing for her children, inspires me.  I want my 10 year old niece to read about Katherine Johnson, a natural mathematician that took every opportunity that presented itself, along with a bunch that didn’t.  All the women in this book smashed ceilings, and “the best thing about breaking a barrier was that it would never have to be broken again.”

So the content gets high marks from me.  The writing is good, more journalistic than narrative non-fiction-y.  So if you like your fact to read like a thriller this may not be the best choice for you.  In fact you may just want to wait for the movie. Yes, movie!  I’m so excited, because everyone will see that NASA also looked like this:

Scene from Hidden Figures, forthcoming

Shetterly has done us all a service by researching and speaking with these amazing women while they’re still here to tell their stories.  A must read for NASA history buffs, and highly recommended to anyone with an interest in the space program, civil rights, or pioneering women.

Thanks to William Morrow and Edelweiss for providing a review copy.

The Ballroom by Anna Hope

Synopsis:

Yorkshire, England, 1911: After a moment of defiance at the factory where she has worked since she was a child, Ella Fay finds herself an unwilling patient at the Sharston Asylum. Ella knows she is not mad, but she might have to learn to play the game before she can make a true bid for freedom. John Mulligan is a chronic patient, frozen with grief since the death of his child, but when Ella runs towards him one morning in an attempt to escape the place where he has found refuge, everything changes. It is in the ornate ballroom at the centre of the asylum, where the male and female patients are allowed to gather every Friday evening to dance, that Ella and John begin a tentative, secret correspondence that will have shattering consequences, as love and the possibility of redemption are set against one ambitious doctor’s eagerness to make his mark in the burgeoning field of eugenics, at all costs.

Set over the heatwave summer of 1911, at a time when England was at the point of revolt, The Ballroom is a tale of unlikely love and dangerous obsession, of madness and sanity, and of who gets to decide which is which.

Review:

Asylums are scary, and they get more frightening the further back in history you go.  What’s this, you broke a window in a fit of pique?  Must be mentally ill, off to the asylum you go.  Depressed after losing a loved one?  The asylum will fix you up.  Not listening to the men in your life and reading too many novels?  You’re headed to the asylum too, lady.

As Charles read, he felt the pleasurable sensation of pieces of a puzzle slotting into place.  So the neuropathic taint had passed down the female line, the mother the transmitter of infection.

It makes you shiver.

I can’t quite make up my mind about this book, though.  I mean, it’s good.  Very good.  The writing is wonderful, it’s plotted well, and the characters are deep and nuanced.  I believe their inner lives.  The point of view rotates among Ella, John, and Charles, and each has a different feel despite being told in the third person.  The switch between one section and the next isn’t jarring, and I never thought “go back to her!” or “not him again”.  That’s hard to do, so major props to Hope.

While most of the book takes place at the asylum it only feels as claustrophobic as it needs to.  You know when the patients are under a less watchful eye and can breathe a little easier, yourself.

The ending though… I can’t say I like it.  It’s not the romantic happy ending, which is fine.  And it does have closure to it.  But in spite of that it left me unsettled and unsatisfied.  It also had me thinking, what was the point?  Which may be the point after all.  Check out this line from midway through the novel:

She stared at the book in her hands.  “When I go to university,” she said, “if I write an essay about it, then I’ll talk about the ending.  How I want it to be different.  But how it’s still the right ending after all.”

I reread this quote after finishing and thought “well-played, author, well played”.  I’m still not happy or satisfied, but I guess Hope didn’t want me to feel happy or satisfied, so…

~sigh~

All that being said I still give the book four stars.  The writing, atmosphere, characterization, and plot come together for an engrossing read, especially in the second half.  When you read it come back and tell me what you think about that ending because I’ll still be agonizing, I’m sure.  But that’s a sign of a good book in and of itself, right?

Thanks to Random House and NetGalley for providing a review copy.

Dark Prince by Christine Feehan (Dark #1)

Synopsis:

Carpathians are an immortal race of beings with animal instincts. Every Carpathian male is drawn to his life mate: a Carpathian or human female able to provide the light to his darkness. Without her, the beast within slowly consumes the man until turning vampire is the only option.

Raven Whitney is a psychic who has used her gift to help the police track down a serial killer. Now she is determined to escape the glare of recent publicity for the peace and quiet of the Carpathian Mountains. Prince Mikhail Dubrinsky is the leader of his people but, as his ancient Carpathian race grows ever closer to extinction, he is close to giving in to the heavy weight of loneliness and despair. From the moment their minds touch, Raven and Mikhail form a connection. But there are those who incorrectly view all Carpathians as vampires, and are determined to give their extinction a helping hand.

Review:

I really looked forward to getting this book – I was on a long wait list at the library for it, and if the series is 30 volumes strong it must be good. Right?

…well.

Some parts were good. I like that the vampires are more “traditional”, needing earth and blood and not daring to go out in the sun. The plot is okay. The characters are okay.

But Feehan keeps taking things up to the stratosphere. Instead of talking about the here and now the story goes on about Love and Loyalty and Duty and Honor and other words that feel like they should be capitalized. Here’s the hero while he has his heroine in bed:

He could feel his body relaxing, and peace stole into him, edging out the terrible tension. The beauty of her inner soul washed over him. How could he fault her need to reach out to someone in pain, when it was her very compassion that had drawn him out of the dark shadows and into a world of joy and light?

Looking at the big picture is okay now and then, but it’s constant. ‘That guy was totally trying to kill us. Let’s talk about how Loyal you are and how we consider ourselves Family while we also recognize our own Needs as we plan how to get back at him.’ Grah.

It’s not only that, though. The excess examination of Feelings makes the story suffer. The plot is fine but it’s stretched out over way more pages than necessary – 300-ish pages would have been ideal, but my “author’s cut” edition was over 500. Even the original edition was 450 pages. In the beginning I read every word in good faith that it would get better (ha) but ended up skimming more and more.

I looked ahead at book two to see if Gregori, the heir apparent, would get his mate but no. They apparently stretch his angst out until book four. Sigh.  I was hoping to find a long series to dig into, but instead I found a corner of paranormal that I can safely ignore.  Onward!

Tell Me Exactly What Happened by Caroline Burau

Synopsis:

In her new book, veteran 911 operator Caroline Burau shares her on- the- job experiences at both a single- person call center (complicated by a public walk- up window) and a ground and air ambulance service. Whatever the position, the challenges for a dispatcher never end. Tragedy, boredom, and mind- bending weirdness are constant companions, as her stories- some funny, some odd, some sad- show. A “broken penis,” a case of domestic violence at the walk- up window, a tornado striking a mile away- Caroline Burau handles them all with efficiency, empathy, and humor.

But the job is not an easy one. On top of dealing with life-and-death situations everyday, Burau is shaken by the suicide of a colleague. She battles stress and burnout, knowing that she is truly helping people. She also realizes that no matter how long she is in the hot seat, listening, waiting, and answering 911, she cannot help everyone. Tell Me Exactly What Happened is one woman’s memoir, but it is also a welcome companion for anyone who has needed relief from a stressful job.

Review:

Your job can warp you.  My father was an electrician and is quick to analyze the lighting set up in any restaurant.  I was a tour guide in college and can still walk backwards like a pro. (It’s a great way to freak out a group of friends.)

Imagine being a 911 operator and listening to people have the worst day of their lives, every day.

When [Stella] was in her first year, she took a call of a five-year-old girl choking on a grape. “It was book perfect,” she said, meaning the response was right on.  She acted quickly, her responders were on the scene within minutes, and the patient was whisked to the local ER in record time.  Yet she died anyway.  So until the day her only child went off to college, Stella never let Tristan eat a single grape without first cutting it in half.

Not every call is life and death.  There’s people wondering about power outages, noise complaints, and every brand of wtf-ery you could imagine.  Burau puts snippets of exchanges between chapters to give you a feel for the kinds of people that call.

“Sir, is your friend completely alert?”
“No, but I mean, he’s not the brightest guy normally, anyway.”

It’s a harrowing and interesting job, yet removed from most of the actual life saving.  There is only so much you can do on the other end of a phone line, and this book does a good job showing exactly what it’s like to sit at the console, warts and all.

The writing is basic but mostly effective.  I would have liked the through-line and themes to have been tied together more but it works well enough.  What bothered me the most are the times Burau heedlessly runs head first towards something without thinking about the consequences.  She agrees to go on a national talk show but she’s never watched an episode. This fact is mentioned early and is meant as foreshadowing, I think, but it made me put down the book for a while.  “No way is this going to go well.”  And it didn’t.  Not horrific, but still.  I didn’t care for the dread.

I’m sure the author had no control over the cover but it still bothers me – she works at a call center, not in scrubs.  And no one uses those paddles any more, they have thin pads they stick on you instead.  Burau does spend a lot of time talking people through medical emergencies but it feels a bit dishonest.

If you’re in a medical or medically-adjacent field you’ll appreciate this insight into a dispatcher’s work.  If you’re a dispatcher yourself you’ll enjoy hearing from a sister in arms.  I won’t be pressing this book into everyone’s hands, though.

Thanks to Minnesota Historical Society Press and Edelweiss for providing a review copy.

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