Evvie Drake Starts Over by Linda Holmes

Evvie Drake Starts Over

4/5. Former MLB pitcher temporarily rents a room from a recently-widowed (recently-liberated, really) woman in charming tiny town Maine.

Linda Holmes (NPR Linda Holmes) wrote a book, and it is exactly the book Linda Holmes would write: warm and sharp-eyed and kind and deeply satisfying. This is somewhere on the spectrum between contemporary fiction and romance, if you want to classify it (you can tell they're marketing on the fiction end since they slapped "a novel" on it). It meets in the middle in a story about getting up again when you've been knocked down really hard in the most unfair and inexplicable of ways, and doing the hard work of friendship, and mental illness, and baseball, and tiny town life, and all sorts of things. It has some first novel wobbles – the charmingness is a little bit manufactured, to start – but it gains confidence and poise until it made me genuinely sniffle in the end.

Content notes: Recollections of an abusive relationship.

At War: The Rise of the Military-Internet Complex by Shane Harris

At War: The Rise of the Military-Internet Complex

3/5. What it says on the tin, except with more diversions into corporate cybersecurity and the private side of the counter espionage industry than I was expecting. Fun background reading for me (I'm sort of orthogonal to the industry, long story), punctuated by "oh hey, it's that guy," and an occasional whistle at something particularly clever. E.g. the hacker who figured out how to pinpoint a server by remotely overclocking it to raise its temperature, which would imperceptibly change its timekeeping because physics, and then finding that clock that was the right microscopic amount off. Yikes.