a most uncommon degree of popularity (by Kathleen Gilles Seidel)

I will not read soccer-mom novels for at least a few months. I’m just tired of them. They scare me of being a mom in the US and annoy me in their predictable targeting of people very similar to me (aaaaah, I don’t want to be one of them!). So I closed this one at page 37 with a sigh of relief. Yes, I am allowed to not finish books.

The English Harem by Anthony McCarten

The lady in the bookstore highly recomended it… so I won’t recomend her… The story goes step by step, then he did this and then she did that and it was because she felt this. Maybe the translation into German killed some of the beauty of the original. Or maybe it’s just boring if every protagonist has a cliche instead of a character. Even the “unusual” ‘Persian or white trash girl are so typical unusual that there are few surprises. I finished it because I started.