Author: Morgan Rogers
Year Published: 2021
Category: Adult fiction (LGBTQIA+)
Pages: 304
Rating: 4.5 out of 5
Location (my 2021 Google Reading map): USA (OR, NY, FL)
Summary (from the inside flap of the book): With her newly completed PhD in astronomy in hand, twenty-eight-year-old Grace Porter goes on a girls’ trip to Vegas to celebrate. She’s a straight A, work-through-the-summer certified high achiever. She is not the kind of person who goes to Vegas and gets drunkenly married to a woman whose name she doesn’t know…until she does exactly that.
Summary (from the inside flap of the book): With her newly completed PhD in astronomy in hand, twenty-eight-year-old Grace Porter goes on a girls’ trip to Vegas to celebrate. She’s a straight A, work-through-the-summer certified high achiever. She is not the kind of person who goes to Vegas and gets drunkenly married to a woman whose name she doesn’t know…until she does exactly that.
This one moment of departure from her stern ex-military father’s plans for her life has Grace wondering why she doesn’t feel more fulfilled from completing her degree. Staggering under the weight of her parent’s expectations, a struggling job market and feelings of burnout, Grace flees her home in Portland for a summer in New York with the wife she barely knows.
In New York, she’s able to ignore all the constant questions about her future plans and falls hard for her creative and beautiful wife, Yuki Yamamoto. But when reality comes crashing in, Grace must face what she’s been running from all along—the fears that make us human, the family scars that need to heal and the longing for connection, especially when navigating the messiness of adulthood.
Review: I love the cover for this book and will be honest that it played a large role in me ordering it from Book of the Month. Shallow, I know, but publishers should know that a cover can kill or extend the life of a book.
I can totally relate to Grace Porter: working all the time, striving for her goals, not giving herself a break. It's exhausting and sometimes, we just need a break, but don't really know how to take one. Add in pressure from a parent and voila! STRESS! I also think I read this book at exactly the right time as someone close to me is going through similar emotions. I found myself taking screenshots of a number of pages toward the end to share with that person and hope it helps them get some perspective.
Luckily Grace has an amazing set of friends (and a new wife!) to see her through. I loved the way she and her friends interacted, their support of one another, and the way they are brutally honest with her. The portrayal of her family dynamics is also very real, painful at times, and well done.
This book was just the right book for me at just the right time.
Challenges for which this counts:
- A to Z (title)--"H"
- Literary Escapes--Oregon
- Popsugar--
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