The Way I Used to Be – Amber Smith

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Eden McCrorey is just fourteen when her older brother Caelin’s bestie, Kevin slips into her room one night and rapes her.

I don’t know a lot of things. I don’t know why I didn’t hear the door click shut. Why I didn’t lock the damn door to begin with. Or why it didn’t register that something was wrong–so mercilessly wrong–when I felt the mattress shift under his weight. Why I didn’t scream when I opened my eyes and saw him crawling between my sheets. Or why I didn’t try to fight him when I still stood a chance.

Kevin has been an extended part of the family as long as she can remember and although Caelin is already in college, brother and sister have always been close. But she can’t tell Caelin what happened; she can’t tell anyone. Instead, she buries the trauma deep and tries to protect herself by becoming a different person. By sophomore year she has quit band, replaced her gasses with contacts and taken up smoking.

She also meets Josh, a popular and attractive athlete senior. For reasons that don’t quite make sense, Josh takes a sincere interest in her. Before he can say “Do you want to be my girlfriend?” they’re having sex. He doesn’t know she’s only 14 (about to be 15) because she has lied to him. And she keeps lying, to herself too. When their relationship goes belly-up, Eden continues to pursue mindless and meaningless sexual encounters, often fueled by alcohol and weed.

Amber Smith’s debut The Way I Used to Be follows Eden through her four years of high school. She’s a train wreck of a person, but no one seems to notice. Not her parents who are virtually absent and when they are in the picture they don’t seem to acknowledge that their sweet, pliable and kind daughter has disappeared. Eden’s best friend, Mara, also doesn’t seem to notice that things are not quite right, but she is a teenager, too, so I think that could be forgiven. Watching Eden self destruct (and be smart enough to know that is exactly what is happening) is painful. Each bad decision leads to another bad decision.

This book could certainly be triggering for some readers, and healing for others, but it is not without its issues. My main problem was the relationship with Josh. She is so odd when he first meets her, so hot and cold, I couldn’t really understand what drew him to her. But he stays in her corner until she makes it impossible.

The opening chapter of this book is so compelling and horrifying and Eden’s journey to healing so self-destructive that this book probably won’t be for everyone, but it’s definitely worth a read.

We Have Always Lived in the Castle – Shirley Jackson

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Published in 1962, We Have Always Lived in the Castle is Shirley Jackson’s sixth and final novel. Jackson died three years after its publication, at the age for 48. I am, of course, aware of some of Jackson’s work. We always teach her short story “The Lottery” at school and I watched the creepy adaptation of her novel The Haunting of Hill House on Netflix when it came out a few years ago. I have always wanted to read We Have Always Lived in the Castle, but somehow I never got around to it. Until now.

Mary Katherine, or Merricat, our narrator, lives with her older-by-ten-years sister, Constance, and wheel-chair bound uncle, Julian, at the Blackwood estate. “Everyone else in my family is dead,” she tells us. Their life is very isolated and part of that has to do with the fact that Constance was accused of (and acquitted) poisoning the rest of her family. The people in the village regard them with hostility and suspicion. In fact, Constance has become a bit of a recluse, meaning that it falls to 18-year-old Merricat, to run the errands.

Fridays and Tuesdays were terrible days, because I had to go into the village. Someone had to go to the library, and the grocery; Constance never went past her own garden, and Uncle Julian could not. Therefore it was not pride that took me into the village twice a week, or even stubbornness, but only the simple need for books and food.

It is obvious that this is not a normal household, but it is also clear that Merricat and Constance love each other. Merricat has taken it upon herself to protect her significantly depleted family. She buries precious objects in the woods surrounding the property and casts spells, but things change when their cousin Charles arrives. It is clear that he is a charming grifter and starved for attention, Constance falls under his spell. Merricat is not so easily persuaded and she does whatever she can to make him go away.

If you are looking for a book with an unreliable narrator, this one will definitely do the trick. This house is full of secrets, and not all of them will be answered–but that’s part of the book’s charms. The climax of the story is unexpected and dramatic and the family dynamics are unsettling. It’s a short book, but it packs a punch.

Fake Skating – Lynn Painter

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A couple years ago I read Lynn Painter’s YA novel The Do-Over and I really enjoyed it. I bought Fake Skating on a whim but, sadly, I didn’t have the same reading experience this time around.

Dani’s an army brat and has never lived anywhere for more than a couple of years, but now her parents are getting a divorce so she and her mom have moved back Southview, a small town in Minnesota where her mother, Hannah, grew up.

Alec and Dani were childhood besties. They really only saw each other once a year when Dani’s mother, Hannah, brought her back to Southview to visit her grandparents and best friend Sarah, Alec’s mom. For that month they were inseparable, but it’s been five years since they’ve seen each other or communicated in any way and both of these teens have feelings about that.

Neither Alec or Dani are the 12-year-olds they once were. Dani suffers from social anxiety and just wants to put her head down (although this will be difficult because she is so beautiful) and get through her senior year so she can graduate and go off to Harvard. Alec is no longer the awkward kid Dani once knew; he’s Southview’s star hockey player ‘Zeus’ so named, I guess, because he is huge. And hot.

Southview is a big hockey town. In fact, Dani’s grandfather is a bit of a hockey legend, even though he isn’t the grandfather Dani remembers. Anyway, Alec is sort of passive-aggressively mean to Dani and their initial interactions are awkward until Alec finds that he needs Dani’s help: in fact, he needs her to be his fake girlfriend.

Look fake dating and childhood besties to enemies to lovers are tropes that you either like or don’t. I personally don’t care about this sort of stuff when I read YA because I am mostly reading it so I can talk about it with students. My issues with this book have more to do with the length of it. At 432 pages it was about 200 pages too long because it’s really repetitive. I also hate when I have to hear about what song a character is listening to, which I did a lot every time Alec put his earbuds in. Also, there was an extraordinary amount of swearing in this book and I am no prude. It just seemed unnecessary and when expletives are overused, I find it really distracting.

Dani and Alec are sort of one dimensional characters — more outlines than people. Of course you know where a story like this is going, but it took way too long to get there and, ultimately, I just didn’t care about either of them.

Colton Gentry’s Third Act – Jeff Zentner

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My love affair with Jeff Zentner began a couple years ago when I read The Serpent King. I read a couple more of his YA books in quick succession: Goodbye Days and In the Wild Light. All three of these were five star books for me and made Jeff Zentner an auto buy author.

Colton Gentry’s Third Act is Zenter’s first foray into adult fiction and it’s also a winner. This is the story of up-and-coming country music star Colton Gentry who at 38 finds himself in a peck of trouble when he gets drunk and speaks his mind about assault rifles at a music festival. Almost immediately, he’s cut from the tour he and his band were on, fired from his record label, and separated from his wife, superstar pop sensation Maisie Martin.

Colton knows that his life is a mess and that he has to get a handle on things. One of those things is his drinking. First there’s rehab.

The news cycle moves on while he’s cloistered away in the monastic rehab program. He has no internet. No cell phone. Little contact of any sort with the outside world. Lots of time to walk in the desert and let the scorching sun burn him clean. Time to perform a self-inventory and work on his recovery. Time to consider the new life he’s going to lead when he gets out.

What’s that new life supposed to look like? He doesn’t have an education; he doesn’t have any friends (most of his friendships had been “seeded with mostly with professional colleagues — who were no longer his professional colleagues.” ) And he’s broke. He has no choice but to retreat to his hometown of Venice, Kentucky. He moves in with his widowed mom and spends his time avoiding reality by watching reruns of Grey’s Anatomy with her.

Zentner’s novel allows us to see teenaged Colton, so we see him before he thought music was a viable career choice. He was going to be going to college on a football scholarship. He had good friends and a high school girlfriend, Luann, who meant everything to him. What happened to those relationships? Coming back to Venice means that he is definitely going to encounter some old ghosts.

Colton Gentry is a character readers can root for even though, as an adult, he makes some lamebrained decisions. Zentner himself was a working musician before he began writing fiction, so that aspect of this novel feels authentic. There’s also a lot of mouth watering descriptions of food in this book so maybe he is a competent chef, too? (Geesh, is there anything this guy can’t do?)

While Colton Gentry’s Third Act is not a straight up romance (there’s so much more to it than that), it’s still swoon-worthy. As Colton finds his footing, learns to trust himself, and embarks on his third act, readers are treated to some fabulous banter and some romantic gestures that defy cynicism.

What can I say? I love this author and I will read whatever he writes.

The Crime of Julian Wells – Thomas H. Cook

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Of the Thomas H. Cook novels I have read, this one probably sits close to the bottom in terms of how much I enjoyed it. But a book by Cook, even a lower tier book, is still worth the read, imho.

Philip Anders’s best friend Julian Wells has killed himself. He rowed himself out into the pond “Far enough that he will appear small and indistinct in the distance so that his sister cannot tell what he is doing, nor get to him before he can complete the task.”

Julian’s death just doesn’t make any sense to Philip and he is determined to figure out what would have driven him to do it. That means he will have to revisit the past.

Julian wrote true crime stories and was quite successful at it. He’d written about serial killers and war crimes and cases of injustice all around the world. Julian once once wrote that “There is no more haunting story than that of an unsolved crime.” All his books were meticulously researched and

As a result of that research, there’d always been considerable sweep to Julian’s work, as his friendlier reviewers had sometimes pointed out. No crime floated freely. It was always part of a larger disorder, one fiber sprung from a hideous cloth.

Philip’s curiosity leads him from Argentina to France to England as he tries to figure out what his friend was up to. Ultimately, he think’s Julian’s death had to do with the disappearance of a young guide they’d met years before while visiting Buenos Aires. It had never occurred to Philip that Julian might have had some part to play in Marisol’s disappearance; he only knew that his friend had been keen to find her after she’d gone missing.

The story of what happened to Marisol is central to The Crime of Julian Wells, but Cook takes his time unspooling the details. That’s his way and I have always happily gone along with him because I knew there’d be some sort of twist in the gut surprise at the end. Not so much with this one, but no matter. As always, the book is well-written and mines the rich depths of friendship, morality, and family. And for a little extra verisimilitude, the crimes mentioned in the novel are all based on real events.

All the Wicked Girls – Chris Whitaker

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I discovered British author Chris Whitaker five years ago when everyone and their dog was buzzing about We Begin at the End. I love a bandwagon, especially when it comes to books, so I hopped on and thus began my love affair with this author. I tracked down a copy of his debut, Tall Oaks, from the UK and read that. Very different book, but enjoyable. Then when All the Colors of the Dark came out, I bought it and read it and LOVED it. That just left two books, All the Wicked Girls and The Leavers.

Summer and Raine Ryan are sisters growing up in Grace, Alabama, a backwater town where nothing much happens except for that one time when “Chief Black found a penis in the fall of 1985.” Of course, that was around the time of the Satanic Panic and now, in 1995, that’s just a story people tell their kids to keep them out of the woods.

Then Summer disappears. At first it appears that she’s run off of her own volition, but then the rumours start because “the land weren’t safe and hadn’t been for a long time. Not since the first girl was taken.”

Raine doesn’t trust Chief Black to find her sister, so aided by misfits Noah Wild and Purv Bowdoin, she starts an investigation of her own. The three teens fling themselves at danger like it’s an amusement park roller coaster. We are also privy to Summer’s first hand thoughts about her potential to get out of this rinky-dink town because she is a gifted musician. And there’s more to her story because of course there is.

There is a big cast of characters in this book and lots of tangled backstories. For example, Raine’s father, Joe, had spent almost a decade in jail and so none of the Ryans trust Black to do the right thing.

Bobby and Savannah have moved to Grace where Bobby has taken over as preacher from Pastor Lumen and Savannah offers Summer cello lessons. “…if Pastor Lumen was be-angry-and-do-not-sin Jesus, then Pastor Bobby was love-endures Jesus. […] By his second service the church was heavy with sweet perfume and flutterin’ hearts.” Lumen’s son, Samson, is an odd duck who works as a custodian at the church and the school. “Samson was afraid of his daddy, of the damnation the pastor said would visit them if Samson didn’t prove himself worthy.”

Purv’s father, Ray, is a drunken bully with “gold rings jutting from fists so big Purv didn’t ever stand a chance.”

Then there are the kids: Raine, Noah, and Purv. They are as delightful (and tough) a trio as you’d ever want to meet and if, at times, they seem too grown up well, considering the circumstances, it can be forgiven.

All the Wicked Girls is a mystery and it won the CWA John Creasey New Blood Dagger Award and was shortlisted for the CrimeFest Last Laugh Award. Of course I wanted to know what had happened to Summer and the other missing girls. There’s lots of misdirection in the book because people hold onto their secrets in this town. But truthfully, I was just happy to spend time with these characters. Writing characters is Whitaker’s strength as an author, and he does an unbelievable job of making you care about them.

I think We Begin at the End is a better book, but it’s a better book because Whitaker wrote this one first. And this one is pretty damn good.

Auto Buy Authors: Helen Dunmore

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British novelist, poet, and essayist Helen Dunmore (who sadly died in 2017) has been part of my reading diet for many years. What I like about her writing is its lyrical quality and also there is often a thread of unease running through her narratives, at least in my favourite books.

Of the thirteen adult novels she wrote before her death (she also wrote many books for children), I have read six plus her collection of short stories, Ice Cream. Thankfully, I have four more of her books on my tbr shelf.

The first book I read by Dunmore, With Your Crooked Heart, predates this blog.

Every day for a month now the sun has shone, and every morning you’ve brought the same things out into the garden.

The Times Literary Supplement said the book is “unites strong characterization and a rip-roaring plot with an archetypal quality somewhere between a fairy story and a Greek tragedy.

Thus began my love affair with Dunmore.

Your Blue-Eyed Boy

This is what I said: This is a novel about reconciling who you are now with who you were when. It’s easy enough to pretend that each section of your life is complete and separate, but this is a novel that asks us to question our past choices, our past loves and our place in the here and now.

A Spell of Winter

This is what I said: A Spell of Winter has many of the gothic hallmarks: the gloomy dwelling, a sense of mystery, a distressed heroine. As long as Cathy and Rob are isolated, they manage to sustain their relationship. But like winter, it can’t last. Eventually, the real world seeps in in ways both expected and unexpected.

The Greatcoat

This is what I said: The Greatcoat was published under the Hammer banner (horror aficionados will recognize Hammer as the British production company behind  films like The Woman in Black and Let Me In.  They’ve entered the world of publishing in partnership with Arrow, a subsidiary of Random House. It’s nice to read a “horror” story that is less about blood and guts and more about the kind of chills which prickle your skin and send a shiver up your back. There are no monsters here, but The Greatcoat is deliciously creepy nonetheless.

Talking to the Dead

This is what I said: …like all of the Dunmore novels I’ve read – as literary as they are – this one has an element of psychological suspense. The pace isn’t fast though; information is revealed slowly, like veils pulled back one at a time.

Zennor in Darkness

This was Dunmore’s first novel. This is what I said: Zennor in Darkness has a thread of the gothic and the forbidden running though it and this book is particularly melancholy because of the setting. Modern readers will have had no experience with the horrors of WW1 and what it did to communities and individuals, and although this book doesn’t take place in the trenches the book captures so much of that horrible period in history.

I had a lovely chat with Shawn Breathes Books about Zennor in Darkness a couple summers ago. You can watch that here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lDu_cUSDY44

My segment starts at about the 7:22 mark

If you have never heard of Helen Dunmore, I can highly recommend her. My favourite book is A Spell of Winter.

The Things We Never Say – Elizabeth Strout

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Like Olive Kitteridge and My Name is Lucy Barton, Elizabeth Strout’s newest novel The Things We Never Say is a character study more than it’s a story driven by plot.

Artie Dam is a high school history teacher in Revere, Massachusetts. He’s been married to Evie for over thirty years and they share a son, Rob, who is in his late 20s.

Lately, Artie has been thinking a lot about dying.

For more than two months, he had been thinking about how to kill himself without his wife or son (or students) knowing that he had done so. It was a great deal more complicated than he had originally thought. And this frightened him, to think it could not be done swiftly.

Artie is feeling isolated. He is a beloved and respected teacher, has a solid relationship with his son and wife, and has good friends but he doesn’t know how to talk to them, to share his unsettling feelings of hopelessness (the novel is set very much in the here and now, so Artie is especially concerned about the state of the world and his own country under its current administration). He also has no real understanding of how he is viewed by the people closest to him because

All of us live with a huge blind spot before our eyes, meaning that no matter what we think we know we can never fully understand how we appear to others. This was true for Artie Dam.

To Evie, Artie “appeared the most considerate man she had ever known, though irritating in his way.” The fact that he wears white socks, for example, drives her nuts. Although one senses that Artie and Evie have had a good marriage, and love each other, there is also a sense that they don’t really talk to each other any more and when Artie gets a shocking piece of news he does not share the knowledge with his wife.

Nothing much happens in this novel but honestly I could have cared less because Artie was such a recognizable character. Maybe it’s because he’s a teacher and so am I; maybe it’s because he is of a similar vintage; maybe it’s because his concerns about what is happening in the world mirror my own. As he tries to make sense of his life, and as he encounters moments of decency and kindness, I found him to be wholly sympathetic and human.

Ultimately, Artie comes to the conclusion that real connection is extremely difficult and rare.

And now he knew why. Because to say anything real was to say things that nobody wanted to know. Or if they wanted to know, they would not care in the right way. Or even understand.

It was a private thing, to be alive. He understood this now.

Five stars. No notes. Highly recommend.

Pen Pal – J.T. Geissinger

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I think J. T. Geissinger’s book Pen Pal misrepresents itself. Even the blurb is misleading, promising a story about a a woman who receives a letter from some dude in prison which claims he will “wait forever if I have to.”

I told the mystery man he had the wrong woman. He said he didn’t. I said we’d never met, but he said I was wrong.

We went back and forth, exchanging letters every week that grew increasingly more intimate. Then one day, the letters stopped. When I found out why, it was already too late.

Kayla has just buried her husband, Michael and “Everything is meaningless. There’s a Michael-shaped hole” in her chest. But she has to get on with life.

First up, fixing the leak in her roof. Enter Aidan.

His height and size are immediately intimidating, as is his stony expression. He has dark hair, dark eyes, and a dark beard covering a square jaw. Wearing faded jeans, battered work boots, and a hunter-green button-down shirt rolled up muscular, tattooed forearms, he looks like he just wandered out of the forest after building himself a cabin from trees he cut down with an axe.

Cue banter and before you can say “dead husband” Kayla and Aidan are doing the horizontal mambo and, no surprise to anyone, it is the hottest sex she as ever had in her life.

Pen Pal is not really about pen pals. Someone appears to be stalking Kayla (which is how she ends up at Aidan’s apartment in the first place – don’t bother trying to make sense of that.) Their relationship falls into the insta-love category – pretty much my least favourite trope.

Their sexy fun times are often cringey because she is a rabbit and he is the lion and there is some sort of under explored master/slave dynamic which makes zero sense. And then we come to the twist…which apparently emotionally wrecked readers, but I was just huh?

So, this is not dark romance because Aidan is a good guy. I don’t think spanking = dark romance. Both main characters are under developed. Overall, the book seemed to be trying to be more than the sum of its parts.

I read it in an afternoon, but I won’t be reading anything else by the author.

The Lamb – Lucy Rose

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“On my fourth birthday, I plucked six severed fingers from the shower drain.”

Margot lives with her mother, Ruth, down a country lane somewhere in England. From a very young age, Margot knows that her world is different. Well, different is putting it mildly. Ruth is a cannibal (and, by default, so is Margot.)

Nestled between the groves, we spent our days waiting for strangers to find us.

[…]

We’d had all sorts of strays here. Some of them had come away from car crashes, but what they didn’t know was that Mam had a little habit of leaving nails and glass on the back roads when she left the house. Some of the strays were lost, trying to hike across the fells without knowing that this gloom was where they’d spend the rest of their short lives.

[…]

That night, they didn’t scream much. It must have been quick.

If you are at all squeamish, Lucy Rose’s debut The Lamb might not be the book for you. I knew from the very first couple of pages that I was going to be icked out and I absolutely was. There’s lots of talk of turning body parts into pies and bones into broth and how delicious a crispy finger is.

But, this is also a story about a mother and daughter whose lives are changed when a stray arrives at their door who Ruth decides to keep because, as it turns out, she (Eden) is one of them. And Eden fundamentally changes the dynamic in the household which leaves Margot on the outside looking in.

Margot is used to making herself small so as not to draw attention. But she makes a friend at school, Abbie, and her bus driver, Steve, also seems to sense something is not quite right. The danger doesn’t come from the outside world, though. Her mother tells her

“I didn’t want to carry a child!” […] I never wanted to be a mama. I just wanted to be a person. None of this was supposed to happen. […] You make me hate myself.”

The Rose is a fairy tale and a story about female rage and motherhood. Do women cannibalize themselves in order to do what is expected of them? Does the hunger for more ever go away? What sacrifices must be made in order to live a fulfilling life?

If you have a strong stomach, The Lamb is a terrific read.