It’s starting to feel a teeny bit like spring? Here’s hoping we don’t get a huge late-season temperature drop or snow storm that kills all of the tiny plants that are just starting to poke their heads out of the dirt.
MOVIES & TV
BIRDS OF PREY
I really hoped that Birds of Prey would be good and, phew, I liked it a lot. This candy-coated romp through Gotham City’s very messed-up underworld is hella fun and probably my favorite DC extended universe movie so far (out of the few that I’ve liked). There are laggy bits in the middle and some story lines are stronger than others, but you basically forget all of that by the time you get to the incredibly fun finale.
Birds of Prey is a story by and about women, with great costumes, sets, performances, music, and fight choreography. Director Cathy Yan brings comic-book-style weirdness, energy, and color to this occasionally very dark story. While Margot Robbie’s joyously chaotic Harley Quinn carries the movie and Ewan McGregor’s villainous Roman Sionis chews the scenery to bits (in the best way), I also loved Mary Elizabeth Winstead’s Huntress, who stole every scene she was in. Seriously, at one point her character storms to the rescue on a giant motorcycle and I gasped at the intensity of her coolness. Just be warned, Birds of Prey leans into its R rating with occasional graphic violence and some disturbing, tense scenes involving abuse.
If Harley ends up back with the Joker in the next DC movie, I am going to be so mad.
GAMES
RING FIT ADVENTURE
Ring Fit Adventure on the Nintendo Switch combines a roleplaying game with exercise and apparently having quests, experience points, and boss fights is precisely what my brain needs for work-out motivation. I’ve played it nearly every day for the past two weeks and highly recommend it. There are mini-games, customizable workouts, and other features in addition to the main story so there is always plenty to do. It’s also worth mentioning that most of the enemies you fight are weird mashups of aquatic creatures and exercise equipment, which is adorable. Plus the main bad guy is a super hench purple dragon wearing a wrestling singlet.
BOOKS
GAME CHANGER / HEATED RIVALRY / TOUGH GUY (Rachel Reid)
These books are 100% escapist romance candy and I loved them. I desperately needed something to get my mind off of all the depressing shit going on in the world right now and these books about muscly hockey players falling in love were perfect. Odds are I’m going to need many more books like this to get through 2020. Game Changer is about a star hockey player falling for an adorable smoothie shop employee, Heated Rivalry is a really good enemies-to-lovers scenario, and Tough Guy focuses on a troubled “enforcer” (which in hockey apparently means “he beats people up”?) rekindling a friendship/romance with a musician from his past. The main character in book three deals with a lot of anxiety issues, many of which I deal with myself, so it was really nice to see that represented. And bonus points for most of the protagonists being Canadian, which doesn’t happen often enough.
And yes, all three of these books feature cover art with mostly-naked muscly torsos. I’ve been a huge fan of romance for many years and yet this sort of cover still makes me giggly and embarrassed. 😳
HULL METAL GIRLS (Emily Skrutskie)
Despite getting a little bored in the middle, overall I quite enjoyed this YA space adventure about cyborg teens rebelling against an untrustworthy government. The story takes place in and around a fleet of spaceships that has spent the last 300 years traveling the universe searching for a new habitable planet for what is left of humanity. Our protagonists are four teens who, for varying reasons, have volunteered to undergo a very dangerous procedure to become mechanically enhanced super soldiers and serve as the government’s peacekeepers/enforcers. This being a dystopian YA story, it quickly becomes apparent that things are not what they seem and their leaders are keeping some big secrets.
I like Skrutskie’s inventive approach to cyborgs in this book, which combines physical enhancements with a shared consciousness and an ongoing battle between the characters’ human aspects and the machine that is controlling them. I also enjoyed the diversity and personalities of the main characters and their journey towards understanding each other and working as a team.
AMERICAN DREAMER / AMERICAN FAIRYTALE / AMERICAN LOVE STORY (Adriana Herrera)
I picked up American Love Story after it won one of the Ripped Bodice’s 2019 awards for Excellence in Romantic Fiction, not realizing it was the third book in a series. This meant that I was occasionally missing some backstory, but that was my mistake for starting in the middle and I ended up loving the book so much that it really didn’t matter. American Love Story is one of those romance novels that I genuinely could not put down. It was a reading-at-home, reading-at-work, reading-while-brushing-my-teeth sort of situation.
When Hatian-born economics professor and activist Patrice moves to upstate New York to teach at Cornell, he is thrust back into the path of Assistant District Attorney Easton, who he had a passionate fling with the previous summer. While they have all sorts of intense feelings for each other, Easton’s job and Patrice’s activism keep them at odds.
Adriana Herrera has a strong narrative voice and I really felt the weight of the challenges her characters were facing. American Love Story deals with issues of race, immigration, and privilege, with a major plot point hinging on the dangers people of color face during unwarranted traffic stops. The book also includes the main characters acknowledging the difficulties that exist in their relationship and seeking counseling to make things work. These elements make American Love Story one of the most grounded, timely romances I have read in quite a while.
Since I loved American Love Story so much, I obviously had to read the other two books in Herrera’s Dreamers series (book four comes out later in March). American Dreamer is about Nesto, a Dominican immigrant working his ass off establishing his Afro-Caribbian food truck after moving from Manhattan to Ithaca. During his first day in town, Nesto meets Jude, a soft-spoken librarian who is coping with insecurities stemming from his extremely religious upbringing. There is instant attraction but neither is in a good place to start a relationship, so they decide to just be friends (who occasionally make out). Of course that doesn’t last long and romance ensues.
American Fairytale focuses on Thomas, son to a Dominican mother and an American father, who became a billionaire after selling a very successful financial app. When he decides to make a large donation to a local shelter for abuse victims, the point-person on the project ends up being Camilo, a social worker that Tom hooked-up with at a fundraising gala and hasn’t been able to stop thinking about. It’s the very best sort of romance coincidence.
As you might have picked up on from my descriptions, these books all have a fairly similar plot structure: lust-at-first-sight > slow progress of building a relationship > one large conflict that tears the two apart > a stern talking-to by friends > reconciliation. These similarities could have weakened the series, but Herera does such a great job building these characters and stories that it totally didn’t bother me. I also wanted to mention that all three books feature really strong, interesting mothers, a great network of friends and family that support and love the protagonists, and a wonderful mixture of languages.
ART
I kind of lost track of February and didn’t get as much done as I would have liked. But at least I did finish this set of little backyard friends for a friend of mine.
