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This was a sweet little small-town romance set in an actual small town some 15 minutes away from me; I frequent New Hope and Lambertville often, and it was fun being able to perfectly imagine the real-world locations where specific scenes took place. And even though some individual shop names were changed, I'm pretty sure I know exactly where they were meant to be.

This is a very earnest book that is campy in an endearing way and isn't afraid to wear its heart on its sleeve. The central romance developed a little faster than I was expecting and some side characters seemed a little too enthusiastic to play matchmaker to be believable, but in a story as low-stakes as this I don't mind too much. The plot did feel a touch hokey to me though, very, "we gotta put on the best talent show this town's ever seen to save the community center!"

One thing I will say as a positive is that I enjoyed that our two leads are fully out, adult gay men that come into this story with dating history. There's no "what are these ~new feelings~?!" or inner turmoil about how to come out that you often see in the genre, and two literal business owners have a lot more agency than you'd get with say a YA queer romance. Also appreciated how the two leads weren't the sole queer people in the book, and there was a genuine sense of community that mirrors my own personal experience. And we sidestep homophobia altogether by 1) placing it in New Hope but also 2) making the main antagonist... another gay man! Diversity win!

(Unrelated, Prescott is described as being in his early thirties in this story presumably set in 2021, which places him squarely as a millennial. You mean to tell me this guy grew up in America the same time I did and doesn't know what Smurfs are or what Star Wars is? That's about the furthest suspension of disbelief this book asked of me, but it still stuck out.)

This is gonna be a hard one to review without spoiling because I was mostly checked out on this story until around the 85% mark, where something happened that finally made me sit forward with attention. But lets get the early stuff out of the way first.

In theory I don't need my science fiction to have really elaborate worldbuilding and spaceships and aliens and whatnot. I'll concede that it is possible to tell a compelling story in a contemporary setting that has just one or two elements that give it that ~sci-fi~ spin on it, which is what we get here and we figure that out pretty early on. But when you start playing around with infinities and infinitesimally small chances for certain events to happen, it's gonna feel cheap and unearned when those best-case scenarios... happen.

We have in Jason Dessen what I found to be a fundamentally unlikable protagonist, and I don't know that the author intended for him to come off that way. He's a chauvinist who has an almost possessive relationship towards his wife that goes beyond mere affection that made me uncomfortable, and for all of his academic accolades (of which we're reminded of frequently), he makes frustrating decisions and just kind of fails upwards and into the right trajectory because why wouldn't he?

This story had the potential for some truly Shakespearean levels of tragedy and copped out for an ambiguous but mostly feel-good ending that felt undeserved. Call me a psychopath, but I just feel that these characters did not suffer enough for my enjoyment to get the wrap-up that they did (holy shit, that sounds insane now that I'm reading that). Anyway, if you want to read something else that also tackles themes of regret and "what ifs", read Militia House by John Milas.

It's still wild to read books that talk about COVID as a pivotal historical event from a detached big-picture perspective when it's like... 1) wasn't that long ago, and 2) something I and everyone else I know has direct personal memories about. Maybe it'll feel less weird in time, but usually I'm used to reading nonfiction about stuff that happened before my own living memory.

This book makes the argument that it turns out the pandemic was even worse than we thought it was, which is a pretty tough sell considering how much we all agree it already sucked. But this is peeking under some un-turned stones I had not considered, and likely would not have given much thought to otherwise. I'm speaking specifically about modern journalism and how it came under unique pressure from multiple fronts in the 2020-2021 period. This book presented a thorough look at how whether you lived in a top-down authoritarian society or an open, democratic country, your overall civil rights likely took a hit for the worse. Rather that positing a "West vs. Everyone Else" dichotomy, it gives poor grades to everyone, but for different reasons.

My two main takeaways from this book that I'll remember going forward will be the interesting framing of "positive freedoms" (the freedom to do something), and "negative freedoms" (the freedom from having something done to you), but also the argument that local press and small journalism is more important than we previously gave it credit for. A Nieman Lab study was quoted as saying "Local newspapers are basically little machines that spit out healthier democracies," which stuck with me. And I buy the line of reasoning that the average person trusts a local news source over a national or international one because it can't afford to be biased; when your target audience is everyone in a small geographic area, you can't risk financially alienating potentially half of them because you want to put a spin on every story.

I'm already on a big sustainability and "buy local" kick already this year, why not continue the trend with shelling a few bucks out for my local rag?

I like to give smaller authors and publishers a shot, but I also buy physical copies of books exclusively from small local bookshops. That doesn't always offer a ton of overlap, as it makes more financial sense for those places to sell the most in-demand titles, but sometimes you get lucky. This was one of those times where I saw this on a shelf somewhere, realized I'd never seen it anywhere else before, and snatched up the one and only copy they had for it.

Every short-story collection is a mixed bag, doubly so when each entry has a different author. I'll admit I had a bit of apprehension going into this because when I scanned the table of contents I realized I didn't recognize any of the contributors' names. But that's also kind of exciting in it's own way: new writers to follow if I like their stuff, right? Here, I found that while there was a central theme loosely tying them all together, the quality of the entries varied greatly. Overall the good ones outweighed the bad ones though. Rather than rattle through each of the eighteen entries, I'll just round off my top three.

3) "Summons (A Transcript)" by Ally Wilkes is presented as a stenographer's courtroom minutes of a social worker taking the stand to explain what happened in the lead-up to a family's disappearance.

2) "Accidents, Of a Sort" by Kurt Fawver: Two insurance auditors - a veteran and a rookie - are taking a break from reviewing footage of a fatal car accident, trying to determine who was at fault. While talking about this stressful career, the older coworker shows the younger one an old dashcam video that was never resolved.

1) "The Novak Roadhouse Massacre" by Alan Baxter is an unofficial police report filed by a local constable. Several distinct murders on a single night in rural Australia are pinned on one man with a spotless criminal record who died fleeing the last scene. One officer doesn't buy the official story, and does some digging around of his own.

For something I picked off a library shelf at random, this was a really interesting read for me. I like to research and come up with potential future vacation itineraries a lot, so travel is something I often think about (more than I actually do it...), but never really considered my impact on the places I've visited.

There are tons of references to specific organizations and companies engaged in sustainable practices in this book that I'd never heard of. So many, that I found myself stopping damn near every other page to whip out my phone and save a link to look at later. Thankfully they're all saved in one place at dummies.com/go/sustainabletravelfd

Some sections were a bit repetitive and there was one paragraph that appeared in two separate chapters almost verbatim, but that makes sense when remembering the disclaimer at the front that the author was expecting a reader to just flip around and read the parts that seemed interesting to them. I guess a reader going through the whole thing sequentially (like I did) wasn't how the author expected most people to engage with this book, but I didn't find anything detrimental about this.

Definitely a surprisingly influential book that is going to have an affect on my future bucket list logistical planning!