Best Offer Wins by Marisa Kashino
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Margo is a hard-driving young professional woman who wants the perfect job, perfect baby, perfect husband, and most of all, perfect house. She is deliciously devious and unconstrained by such trifles as morals, friendships, and such. She falls in love with the perfect house that is just barely, maybe, in her and her husband Ian’s price range but knows other bidders will be offering more and all in cash. She can’t let such obstacles stop her. I foresaw one part of her scheme back in Chapter 8, but it unfolded on a grander scale than I imagined.

I found it interesting that the author made Margo Japanese-American, like the author herself, and even has a similar first name (“Mar…”). Margo is sensitive about it, eschewing being “the ethnic friend” and also for being mistaken for Chinese. I can’t help wondering if the author is projecting her inner demon onto Margo, giving her free rein to do all those things real people can’t do in civilized society. I’m partial to Japanese language and culture having spent my college year abroad in Japan, but if the author is anything like Margo, I’ll pass on making her acquaintance. I will gladly recommend her book, however. It didn’t disappoint all the way through. It left me with chills and a grin.

View all my reviews

Poppy Montgomery Gets Even by Gordon Jack
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This cozy mystery stars an octogenarian (Poppy) who takes it upon herself to get even with someone who is scamming the old ladies in her retirement home. The tone is light and often humorous. Poppy and her own daughter have a tenuous relationship. There’s a lot of day-to-day wisdom in the book, and many characters get a life lesson as it goes on. The mystery is a bit farfetched, so hard crime aficionados might not be that charmed with it, but I enjoyed the book. I listened to the audiobook and the reader was excellent, no doubt increasing my enjoyment. It also helped that the story takes place in my home area. In fact the author is a librarian in a local school district in his day job, although he’s written two successful young adult novels. The book is too lightweight to get five stars but not bad for a fun read.

View all my reviews

Lifeguard: A Love Story by Janet Fash
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

This book was very disappointing. From the title, cover picture, and brief library description, I had thought this would be about saving lives, love for the ocean, and things of that nature. There was some of that. But about 80% of the book is about the corruption in New York City Lifeguard program and one man in particular. The union boss for the lifeguards, a man named Stein, ran the whole program like a fiefdom, rewarding his friends and cronies with jobs and promotions and taking vengeance on anyone who crossed him. The author, a thorn in his side but somewhat safe from his wrath since she was the city’s first female chief lifeguard, essentially wrote an exposé. I really wasn’t interested in that and I think there was some misrepresentation as to content by the publisher. It was upsetting to see corruption spelled out. In addition, the writing wasn’t very good. It wasn’t terrible, but the author was fast and loose with grammar at times (“Me and Bob went …”) and she confesses to needing a ghostwriter (or cowriter), Clio Chang, for her “writing abilities.” This is disturbing since the author was a teacher during the off season. I hope she didn’t teach English. But worst of all was her casual attitude toward drinking and drug use. She writes about how much fun it was as a teenage lifeguard to get drunk every night and come in to work hungover. She even seemed to look the other way toward cocaine use by other lifeguards like it was just boys being boys. In my view anyone who gets drunk regularly is not qualified to hold any job that involves the responsibility for the lives of others. This behavior seemed to persist even into her adult years. I finally had to start skipping liberally in the last third of the book.

View all my reviews

We recently sold my wife’s 20-year-old car (2006 Acura TSX) as it was unreliable and we’re shopping for a new EV. I asked four AI sites for recommendations: Claude, Gemini, Perplexity, and Copilot. I gave them all the same criteria: not too huge (small garage, wife’s preference, no need), low tech – more buttons and knobs, fewer screen icons/menus, plug-in EV. After some back and forth and sharing the recommendations of each site with the other sites I winnowed it down to three choices they were all more or less happy with: Ioniq 5, Kona electric, and Polestar 2.

So today we visited the local Hyundai dealer, which sells both the Ioniq and the Kona. It turns out the Kona EV is not available in the U.S., at least not new, due to tariffs. The Ioniq 5 was there and it wasn’t a wasted trip, but still, I had specifically asked the saleslady yesterday if they had the Kona EV and they said yes. They lie to get you in the door. She wasn’t even there today even though she told me to ask for her. Maybe AI learned to lie from humans.

So I asked Google (AI mode) for the nearest Polestar dealer and it gave me the info for Volvo Palo Alto. I had seen a Polestar dealership there in the past. I called there to confirm they had the Polestar 2 in stock. The answer is no. They only service Polestar; they aren’t a dealer and in fact, there are no longer any U.S. Polestar dealers because of the tariffs. They all closed. Polestar has left the US market permanently after 2026. They did have a low-mileage used Polestar 2 and the sales guy sent me a video. It actually looks darn good for what my wife wants and needs, but I’d be nervous, as she is, about a used car that doesn’t have a dealership nearby. How long will the Volvo guys have any knowledge or interest in maintaining it?

So I went back to all the AI sites and pointed out that two of the cars they recommend are no longer available in the U.S. They all “apologized” but I don’t blame them despite the fact that I had said we were shopping for a new EV. I hadn’t specified that we wanted something to buy right now in the U.S. They were giving feedback based only on the criteria I gave it and online reviews, dealers’ specs, etc. So now I have a new set of cars to research, but I’m going to resort to an old-fashioned technique and ask my friendship circle for recommendations. You have the criteria above, and in addition I’ll mention that my wife is (somewhat reluctantly) driving/sharing my 2021 Volvo XC40 EV (which I love) and we have a level 2 charging station in our garage. An EV is an absolute. My wife and I hate gas stations and oil changes, etc.

Let me have your recommendations!

We Were the Lucky Ones by Georgia Hunter
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This is a semi-biographical novel of a Jewish family in Poland during World War II. The hardships and cruelty they endured are incredible, yet real. It is a large family, and as the title implies, they are the survivors, the lucky ones. Most of their fellow Polish Jews did not. Some were living in eastern Poland when Hitler and Stalin divided the country. They ended up in Soviet labor camps, not much better than Hitler’s camps. Others ended up in the walled-in ghettos the Germans created. One brother, Addy (we later learn short for Adolf) is in Paris at the outbreak of war and is inducted into the French army. Others at various times end up in Italy or Persia or Brazil.

The book is well-written although I thought it was going to be a slog at first. It was a book club choice, so obligatory, but it didn’t take long for me to become engrossed in the story. I’d give it a higher rating if it weren’t for the depressing nature of the story itself. It is unpleasant to yet again read of the atrocities the Germans (and the Russians and Christian Poles, too) committed against the Jews, against anyone. I couldn’t take more than an hour or so of reading when I had to switch to something else.

View all my reviews

Good People by Patmeena Sabit
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

The central figures in this novel are the Sharafs, an Afghan immigrant family. There is a death, but we don’t know at first who died or whether it was an accident or a murder. Although fiction, the author says it was inspired by a real case. The story is told in a piecemeal way modeled after a typical crime documentary where snippets of many interviews are interleaved to tell the story in chronological order, but from multiple different views and experiences. The Afghans surrounding the main characters look at all the facts from the standpoint of their traditional culture and the Islam religion, while neighbors, teachers, reporters, police, and other non-Afghans see things a different, traditional American way. Interestingly, the author does not tell what happened by any purported statement of the main characters, only surrounding characters, friends, witnesses, reporters, etc., except for an attorney representing the accused at the end. Thus there is a lot of rumor and speculation with people accusing and others defending. Some Afghans say the family was too American while others say the family hadn’t assimilated and were actually anti-American and too Afghan. It does a good job of portraying racism, culture clash, and generation clash.

Some people may be put off by the unusual format, with some “chapters” being only one sentence, and even the longer ones usually only three or four pages. It also suffers a little from hyperbole and repetition. The purported newspaper coverage is completely tabloidy, hearsay, and gossip, not credible reporting. We get four, five or more people making accusations or providing evidence or theories that suggest someone is guilty, followed by the same number of others explaining away that so-called evidence and coming to their defense. You only need one or two of each, not five. In short the book is somewhat overdone and overlong, but still a worthwhile read.

View all my reviews