New Leaf Vote for June • Chasing Rainbows, The World of Colour

[CRussel]

It's time to select the book that the New Leaf Book Club will read in June, 2020. The theme is Chasing Rainbows , The World of Colour..

We love new participants. We're happy for you to vote, but in the interest of a vibrant conversation, we'd like to request that you please not vote unless you plan to join the discussion whatever the selection. So if you haven't posted in a book club thread yet, do please say a quick hello here or in the Welcome thread.

This is a poll. Vote for as many books as you'd like. Questions? FAQs | Guidelines Or just ask!

Choices:

• This is How You Lose the Time War by Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone
  Spoiler:

  This epistolatory novel written across time between two female agents in warring factions is possibly one of the most engaging stories I have read in a long time. My wife enjoyed it so much that we actually went out and bought the hardcover for our paper library.
  

  Originally Posted by Goodreads

  Among the ashes of a dying world, an agent of the Commandant finds a letter. It reads: Burn before reading. . Thus begins an unlikely correspondence between two rival agents hellbent on securing the best possible future for their warring factions. Now, what began as a taunt, a battlefield boast, grows into something more. Something epic. Something romantic. Something that could change the past and the future.
  
  Except the discovery of their bond would mean death for each of them. There’s still a war going on, after all. And someone has to win that war.

  
  
• The World Unseen by Shamim Sarif
  Spoiler:

  I have been wanting to read this author for a while. This book was also made into a movie directed by the author. Only $2.99 at Amazon US and similarly priced in other countries (even Australia - shocking!). This book won the Pendleton May First Novel Award and a Betty Trask Award.
  

  Originally Posted by Amazon

  In 1950's South Africa, free-spirited Amina has broken all the rules of her own conventional Indian community, and the new apartheid-led government, by running a café with Jacob her “coloured” business partner. When she meets Miriam, a young wife and mother, their unexpected attraction pushes Miriam to question the rules that bind her. When Amina helps Miriam’s sister-in-law to hide from the police, a chain of events is set in motion that changes both women forever.
  
  The World Unseen transports us to a vibrant, colourful world, a world that divides white from black and women from men, but one that might just allow an unexpected love to survive.

  
  
• Passing Strange by Ellen Klages
  Spoiler:

  This is a short book that is reasonably priced and readily available pretty much everywhere, and is DRM-free. I recently read it, and quite enjoyed it, as one of four LGBTQ books in a free Tor omnibus, but it's also available standalone.
  

  Originally Posted by Goodreads

  San Francisco in 1940 is a haven for the unconventional. Tourists flock to the cities within the city: the Magic City of the World’s Fair on an island created of artifice and illusion; the forbidden city of Chinatown, a separate, alien world of exotic food and nightclubs that offer “authentic” experiences, straight from the pages of the pulps; and the twilight world of forbidden love, where outcasts from conventional society can meet.
  
  Six women find their lives as tangled with each other’s as they are with the city they call home. They discover love and danger on the borders where magic, science, and art intersect.
  
  Inspired by the pulps, film noir, and screwball comedy, Passing Strange is a story as unusual and complex as San Francisco itself from World Fantasy Award winning author Ellen Klages.
  
  At the Publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied.

  
  
• The Not So Secret Emails of Coco Pinchard by Robert Bryndza
  Spoiler:

  
  An epistolary contemporary comedy with some romance. It is a bit of a stretch for this theme as the main romance is heterosexual, but there are a few gay characters, and the cover is very colourful ... and it feels like a great big colourful mess, sort of like real life. (Any excuse to mention this fun story is good enough.)

  Originally Posted by Goodreads

  Coco Pinchard always dreamed of being a successful writer, but then life got in the way. She married young, had a son, and put her dreams on hold. But now she's 40, and her first novel is about to be published! Her husband Daniel has greyed nicely into a silver fox, and her son Rosencrantz is all grown up. Shouldn't it be time to enjoy life?
  
  That is, until the annual family Christmas when her hideous in-laws come to stay, and Coco opens her gift from Daniel. It's not the jewelry she chose, but an iPhone. This marks the start of Daniel's mid-life crisis and Coco catches him in bed with a younger woman.
  
  The iPhone becomes a confessional, and as Coco's life unravels, she documents her seemingly endless (and often entertaining) run of bad luck through emails to loyal friends Christopher, an ageing trustafarian, and Marika, a slightly alcoholic schoolteacher.
  
  Then Coco meets the hunky Adam and she's back in the world of dating as a single 40-something. Listen to the heart warming and often hilarious tale of Coco picking up the pieces, in this fun, feel-good romantic comedy.

  
  
• Kingsblood Royal by Sinclair Lewis
  Spoiler:

  Originally Posted by Goodreads

  A neglected tour de force by the first American to win the Nobel Prize in literature, Kingsblood Royal is a stirring and wickedly funny portrait of a man who resigns from the white race. When Neil Kingsblood, a typical middle-American banker with a comfortable life, makes the shocking discovery that he has African blood, the odyssey that ensues creates an unforgettable portrayal of two Americas, one black, one white.
  
  As timely as when it was first published in 1947, one need only open today's newspaper to see the same issues passionately being discussed between blacks and whites that we find in Kingsblood Royal, says Charles Johnson. Perhaps only now can we fully appreciate Sinclair Lewis's astonishing achievement.

  
  
• Rainbows End by Vernor Vinge
  Spoiler:

  Four time Hugo Award winner Vernor Vinge has taken readers to the depths of space and into the far future in his bestselling novels A Fire Upon the Deep and A Deepness in the Sky. Now, he has written a science-fiction thriller set in a place and time as exciting and strange as any far-future world: San Diego, California, 2025.
  
  Robert Gu is a recovering Alzheimer's patient. The world that he remembers was much as we know it today. Now, as he regains his faculties through a cure developed during the years of his near-fatal decline, he discovers that the world has changed and so has his place in it. He was a world-renowned poet. Now he is seventy-five years old, though by a medical miracle he looks much younger, and he's starting over, for the first time unsure of his poetic gifts. Living with his son's family, he has no choice but to learn how to cope with a new information age in which the virtual and the real are a seamless continuum, layers of reality built on digital views seen by a single person or millions, depending on your choice. But the consensus reality of the digital world is available only if, like his thirteen-year-old granddaughter Miri, you know how to wear your wireless access—through nodes designed into smart clothes—and to see the digital context—through smart contact lenses.
  
  With knowledge comes risk. When Robert begins to re-train at Fairmont High, learning with other older people what is second nature to Miri and other teens at school, he unwittingly becomes part of a wide-ranging conspiracy to use technology as a tool for world domination.
  
  In a world where every computer chip has Homeland Security built-in, this conspiracy is something that baffles even the most sophisticated security analysts, including Robert's son and daughter-in law, two top people in the U.S. military. And even Miri, in her attempts to protect her grandfather, may be entangled in the plot.
  
  As Robert becomes more deeply involved in conspiracy, he is shocked to learn of a radical change planned for the UCSD Geisel Library; all the books there, and worldwide, would cease to physically exist. He and his fellow re-trainees feel compelled to join protests against the change. With forces around the world converging on San Diego, both the conspiracy and the protest climax in a spectacular moment as unique and satisfying as it is unexpected. This is science fiction at its very best, by a master storyteller at his peak.

[JSWolf]

Just a quick note. kingsblood royal is not available in the UK as an eBook.

[CRussel]

This is going to take some thought. At least one book that I'd normally vote for, and would like to read, is a very, very long wait at my library (>6 months), so I'd need to buy it, and it's at the upper end of my price range. OTOH, I would like to read it. And of the others, I'm having a hard time paring them down to only 1/2. Sigh.

[CRussel]

Originally Posted by JSWolf

Just a quick note. kingsblood royal is not available in the UK as an eBook.

I'm not sure we have any active UK members for whom it will be an issue, but if we do, we'll work something out.

[JSWolf]

Is it possible to change my vote?

[CRussel]

Basically no, Jon. We've never allowed vote changing, and it's a slippery slope I'd prefer not to go down. But PM me if you need to discuss it. (And, FWIW, I don't personally have the power to do any vote manipulation, not being a moderator or admin here. )

[CRussel]

Well, that was tough. To be fair to the other nominations, I could easily have voted for almost any of them, but I forced myself to pick three.

[astrangerhere]

Quietly cheering for my own nom of Time War because I loved it so much. I realize this is risky because my track record with MY loved books hasn't gone amazingly well in book club... but hey, worth a shot.

.

[CRussel]

Yeah, well, we've all had our duds. It sounds interesting, and I voted for it. But I'm really hoping that if it wins, one of my libraries will come through ahead of projections. Meanwhile, all the others are either free, readily available from my libraries, or I already own them.

[gmw]

This is the first time I've not voted for my own nomination, but I wanted to keep my selection down to half and there's (at least) three there I'd rather read (or re-read in one case).

[JSWolf]

Originally Posted by astrangerhere

Quietly cheering for my own nom of Time War because I loved it so much. I realize this is risky because my track record with MY loved books hasn't gone amazingly well in book club... but hey, worth a shot.

.

I voted for your choice among my other votes. So if it wins, it'll be good to read.

[astrangerhere]

Time for someone to break the tie...

[JSWolf]

Originally Posted by astrangerhere

Time for someone to break the tie...

I'm surprised more people didn't vote.

[Catlady]

Neither one appeals to me, so I'll let someone else break the tie.

[JSWolf]

Originally Posted by Catlady

Neither one appeals to me, so I'll let someone else break the tie.

Do any of the choices appeal to you?