BookOwl

4/5 stars    *Spoiler alert!*   Mobility was one of those books that’s brutally honest and doesn’t let go of that. Featuring a heroine that was complicated and gray, it tells one woman’s story of her upbringing in a diplomatic family in locations around the world and the consequences of her life choices as a privileged white woman on the world around her. Particularly as it concerns the climate crisis.   “We don’t think in economic cycles, we don’t think in election cycles … in this [oil] industry, we think in earth time. Geologic time. There’s no short-term problem we can’t wait out.”   In 1998, Bunny (real name Elizabeth) Glenn is a teenager celebrating Fourth of July with abandon. Her father, a diplomat, is posted in Azerbaijan, where readers get to see the greed at work after the dissolution of the Soviet Union, greed in particular by American and other Western companies looking at snatching up oil resources. Bunny doesn’t know much about the world...

  4/5 stars    *Spoiler alert!* You’d think that by now, having a good idea of Ali Hazelwood’s romance novel plot lines that I would have gotten sick of it. Well, nope! I’m back again after binging yet another STEM romance by Hazelwood, this time her latest, Love, Theoretically . I’m here for the handsome nerds that are raising women's expectations of men into the stratosphere, I’m here for the protagonist finding her own power, and, of course, the calling out of racist and sexist bullshit in STEM and beyond.   Dr. Elsie Hannaway, a theoretical physicist, is sick of having to commute to multiple colleges and teach multiple courses to graduate students every week. She jumps at the opportunity to interview for a better position that would get her health insurance and pay her enough to afford her insulin—as she’s a Type 1 diabetic—instead of having to ration said insulin. And instead of having to supplement her meager income with a side gig with a fake dating app. T...