I’ve read a couple books recently that employ a podcast/documentary element (None of This is True,Listen for the Lie, The Favorites) and it’s definitely something that can add a little something something to a novel. In Charlie Donlea’s novel Don’t Believe It, Sidney Ryan is a documentary filmmaker whose last three projects have ended up exonerating people and Grace Sebold is hoping that Sidney can help overturn her conviction.
A decade before Grace and a group of friends arrived at Sugar Beach, St. Lucia, to celebrate the wedding of Daniel and Charlotte. It should have been a sun soaked holiday, but then Julian is found dead and just days later Grace is arrested for the crime. Incarcerated in a St. Lucian prison for the past ten years, her letters to Sidney have finally yielded the desired result and Sidney has agreed to take a look at the evidence.
Sidney decides to investigate and reveal what she finds week by week. Grace assures Sidney that is she is innocent, that the facts will bear that out. Circumstantially at least, it appears that all the signs point to Grace being the culprit, but there are some questions and soon Sidney begins to believe in Grace’s story. Forensics seem to agree.
Sidney talks to police, friends and family. She pores over evidence and consults experts. There’s an eleventh hour twist and all the requisite red herrings just to keep you guessing.
All of this should have been page turning stuff, but it really wasn’t. The ending introduces the idea of a secondary character investigating something else that is introduced in the the book, so I am not sure if this is meant to be the beginning of a new series, but I won’t be carrying on.
In 1998, Canadian ice dancers Shae-Lynn Bourne and Victor Kraatz competed in the Nagano Olympics, finishing just off the podium in fourth place. I was wholly invested in them at the time; they were innovative and fun to watch.
Flash forward to 2018 and Tessa Virtue and Scott Moir at the PyeongChang Olympics, where they capped off a long career with another Olympic gold. Even people who didn’t know anything about the sport rooted for this Canadian pair, and if you want to see why – just watch the video. It’s also interesting to watch the two videos back to back to see how far the sport has come.
So, that brings me to Layne Fargo’s novel The Favorites, a novel which drops the reader into the competitive, cutthroat world of competitive ice dancing. I have seen this book all over the place and so I bought it and read it and it was a ride.
Katarina “Kat” Shaw has only ever wanted one thing in her life – to be like two-time Olympian Sheila Lin. Well, she wants one other thing, actually: Heath Rocha. Kat and Heath have known each other since they were kids, when Heath, a foster child, came to live with the Shaws.
When the novel opens, they are sixteen and just about to head off to the National Championships. Kat’s parents are dead and she’s been left in the care of her older brother, Lee. I use the word ‘care’ loosely because Lee only really cares about getting high.
Anyway, Kat is a talented skater and Heath is a good partner because he won’t get in the way of what she really wants – which is to skate in the Olympics. The problem is they live in Illinois, have no money and little access to professional coaching, meaning that they don’t have the support necessary to make it all the way to the top. But then, they meet Sheila Lin and that changes the trajectory of their whole lives.
The Favorites draws some of its inspiration from Wuthering Heights, a novel I read a million years ago but which I credit for kick starting my love of stories featuring characters who shouldn’t necessarily be together but desperately belong together. I mean, I am not sure Kat and Heath deserve to be in the same company as Catherine and Heathcliff, but this book wants you to believe they do.
Look, I’m going to be straight up. I devoured this book. I couldn’t wait to come home and pick it back up at the end of the day. It’s an unapologetic soap opera covering many, many years and many, many skating competitions. Part of the narrative takes the form of clips from people talking about Kat and Heath and some of the events that happened to them as they chase their Olympic dream a la Daisy Jones and the Six; the rest of the book is Kat’s first person narration.
Objectively, it’s not a great book, in the sense that it’s not great literature. I felt like I was being told things to get me from one moment to the next and I never really felt the great passion between the two main characters because their love story was PG13, even as adults. The characters got older, but they didn’t act any different really. The book reads very YA, although it’s not. There’s lots of backstabbing and crying and miscommunication and gossip. The whole thing wraps up pretty tidily. It’s not unsatisfying, it’s just neat.
We stared at each other in the shadows, so close we were sharing breath. Later, we’d become world famous for that: stretching out the moment before a kiss until it was almost unbearable, until every member of the audience felt the quickening of our pulses, the pure want reflected in our eyes.
But that was choreography. This was real.
I might not have believed it by the end, but I skated along with them quite happily until their final bow. If there’s a limited series coming, I’m all in.
Although everyone and their octopus was talking about this book for a while, I probably would never have read it. Then, it was chosen for my IRL book club so…
Sowell Bay is a small community in the Pacific Northwest and it is here that we meet a group of characters including Tova Sullivan, a 70-year-old widow who works as a cleaner at the local aquarium; Ethan, the town gossip and owner of the local grocery store; and Cameron, who is not a native, but who arrives in Sowell Bay to locate the father he has never known. They are not the most interesting characters though; that honour belongs to Marcellus.
Who am I, you ask? My name is Marcellus, but most humans do not call me that. Typically, they call me that guy. For example, Look at that guy–there he is–you can just see his tentacles behind the rock.
I am a giant Pacific octopus. I know this from the plaque on the wall beside my enclosure.
I know what you are thinking. Yes, I can read. I can do many things you would not expect.
Yep, one of the characters in Shelby Van Pelt’s novel Remarkably Bright Creatures is a sentient octopus, and he is actually the most interesting character in the whole book. I wish we had way more of him and way less of some of the other stuff in this book.
This is a novel about people in transition. Cameron is a 30-year-old man, but he acts like he’s a kid. He plays in a rock band with one of his best friends, he keeps getting fired from jobs, his girlfriend has finally had enough of him, his Aunt Jeanne is supportive, but frustrated by his lack of resilience. Sure, his mother abandoned him when he was nine and sure he doesn’t know who his father is but, c’mon. When Jeanne gives him a box of stuff his mom left behind, Cameron uses a clue in the box and sets out for Sowell Bay.
Tova is a taciturn Swede who lives in the house her father built. She has been grieving the loss of her son, Erik, for 38 years. She has never understood what happened to him; he was just about to go off to college; he was happy. Then, one night, he just didn’t come home.
Marcellus, watching from his tank, sees what other people don’t see. His perspective was my favourite and I wish there had been more of it. Known to be highly intelligent in the real world, Marcellus, the character in the book, sees what others do not. He calls humans “remarkably bright creatures”, but I think he is being generous.
I suspect that many readers would love this book. It gave me Bear Town vibes and I didn’t like that book at all. Remarkably Bright Creatures is a little too sweet and the characters’ manufactured quirkiness just wasn’t my cup of tea.
It takes a lot to really surprise me when it comes to thrillers. Amy Tintera’s novel Listen for the Lie did not surprise me, but it was an okay diversion from the shitstorm of the world in which we are currently living.
Lucy Chase returns to Plumpton, Texas for her grandmother’s– the feisty Beverly– 80th birthday. Lucy hasn’t been home in five years. Lucy’s life is pretty much off the rails: she’s just been fired and her boyfriend, Nathan, is on the precipice of kicking her to the curb. (Literally, since they live together.) Lucy really, really doesn’t want to go home.
When she left Texas for L.A., it was to escape the side-eye she was getting from everyone after the death of her best friend Savvy. Why all the suspicion? Well, no one knows quite how Savvy died, but what everyone does know is that she and Lucy were seen fighting and then Lucy was found covered in blood with no memory of what happened. No charges were ever brought against her, but that doesn’t really matter. Everyone thinks she killed Savvy. Geesh, even Lucy herself isn’t convinced that she’s not guilty.
Enter Ben Owens, host of the popular true crime podcast Listen for the Lie.
Is it true that no one believes Lucy Chase? Is she hiding something, or have the people of Plumpton accused an innocent woman of murder for five years?
Let’s find out.
Ben sets about interviewing all the people who know Lucy: her mother, her high school besties Maya and Emmett, Savvy’s ‘boyfriend’ du jour Colin, Savvy’s family and Lucy’s ex-husband, Matt. Eventually, Lucy agrees to talk on the record. I am sure that if you’d listened to this novel on audio you would have had an interesting reading experience, but I am not an audio reader.
It’s hard to say why this book wasn’t a winner for me. Maybe it was because I didn’t really like any of these characters, including Lucy herself (who spends a lot of time fantasizing about how to kill the various people she encounters.) The podcast scripts in novels has certainly been done before (Sadie, None of This is True) and here it is used to offer up potential explanations, and perhaps to incriminate other people.
When Lucy does finally start to remember what happened, it’s just a bit over-the-top. For me, I would slot Listen for the Lie in the okay category. The writing, the mystery, the reading experience were all okay.
I suspect others will like like it a lot more than I did.
The Ludic Reader 