Monthly Archives: July 2025

I Have Some Questions For You – Rebecca Makkai

Posted on by
Reply

It took me forever to read Rebecca Makkai’s novel I Have Some Questions For You, but that does not speak to the book’s subject matter or quality – both of which are terrific, and should have been right up my alley.

Bodie Kane, a film professor and podcaster, is offered the opportunity to teach a mini-semester (two weeks) on podcasting at Granby School, the private New England high school she spent four not altogether happy years of her life. Her feelings about Granby are further complicated by her memories of Thalia Keith, her roommate who was murdered during their senior year. Omar Evans, the school’s athletic trainer, is currently serving life in prison for the crime, despite maintaining his innocence. Bodie is somewhat reluctant to return but, she “wanted to see if I could do it–if, despite my nerves, my almost adolescent panic, I was ready to measure myself against the girl who’d slouched her way through Granby.”

One of the students in her class wants to re-examine the crime, and Bodie finds herself sucked back into the past. As her student, Britt, takes another look at the scant evidence used to convict Omar, Bodie begins to consider the crime and the people involved from the distance of the 23 years which have passed since she graduated.

I Have Some Questions for You is not a thriller in the commercial sense of the word. It is written in the first person, almost like a letter to one of Bodie’s former teachers, a person she becomes increasing suspicious of as time goes on. It’s slow moving, especially in part one. There are also other things going on in Bodie’s life, an ex-husband who is accused of inappropriate sexual advances and the Twitter fallout which wraps its ugly arms around Bodie, Covid, and a stalled relationship with a handsome lawyer. The second half definitely picks up.

I think I found it slow going just because of the way I read it–a pause in the middle while I visited my kids–and so it’s definitely not a question of the book’s pedigree. I finished feeling wholly satisfied. It’s a compelling, well-written mystery with lots to say about our fascination with true crime, the fetishization of victims and how, sometimes, justice just isn’t served.

The Servants – Michael Marshall Smith

Posted on by
Reply

I plucked Michael Marshall Smith’s 2009 novel The Servants off my TBR shelf — where it has been languishing for a long time no doubt– and was rewarded with a lovely, quiet tale about eleven-year-old Mark who has moved to Brighton with his brand-new step-dad, David, and his mom, who appears to be quite ill. The book reminded me of The Book of Lost Things and A Monster Calls , both five star reads for me.

Mark is wholly unhappy about his new circumstances. Although he’d been to Brighton before, back when his parents were still married, then it had been on holiday where his days had been filled with fun activities. It’s winter now, and cold, and he spends his days trying to learn how to ride his new skateboard down by the beach. He doesn’t like David, “who liked to explain everything” in a weird accent because he had spent so much time living in America. Mark also feels that David has some sort of weird control over his mother and was always “hovering in the background doing whatever it was he always did.”

One day, Mark meets the old lady who lives in the basement apartment.

…she was not so much old as very old, and also a little scary-looking. When she blinked, she looked like a bird, the kind you saw on the seafront, stealing bits of other people’s toast

When she invites him for tea and cake, she shows him an astonishing piece of the house’s history, hidden behind a locked door in her apartment. This is the servants’ quarters and, as it turns out, it is haunted.

The Servants is very much a coming-of-age story. It is about Mark trying to navigate his new world, a world where there is never enough diet Coke in the fridge, and where his understanding of the way life works is skewed by his immaturity therefore elevating his father to a position he clearly does not deserve and casting David in the role of evil step dad.

There was one tiny conversation between David and Mark that reduced me to tears and the metaphor of the servants as the beating heart of a home, who have to work together for anything to be accomplished, was apt.

This one is a heartfelt winner.

Mad Honey – Jodi Picoult & Jennifer Finney Boylan

Posted on by
Reply

Although I have read several books by Jodi Picoult (The Pact, Nineteen Minutes, The Tenth Circle, My Sister’s Keeper), I read them pre-2007, which is when I started this blog. I loved The Pact, but I remember feeling manipulated by My Sister’s Keeper, which is probably when I stopped reading her. I had never heard of Jennifer Finney Boylan. I can’t really tell you why I picked up Mad Honey, but I can tell you that I loved it.

This is the story of Olivia, who lives with her teenaged son, Asher, a star hockey player, in the house she grew up in in rural New Hampshire. She’d left her life as the wife of a cardiothoracic surgeon when Asher was six, well, she’d fled her life, really, because her ex was abusive. Now she does what her father did before her: she is a beekeeper. There’s loads of interesting things about beekeeping in this book.

This is also the story of Lily, who has recently moved to this same small town with her single mother, Ava. Lily is beautiful and fragile and shy, but when she and Asher meet, through Asher’s childhood bestie, Maya, something clicks and the two are soon inseparable.

This novel is told from these two perspectives and it is really a story about love: the love a mother has for their child, romantic love and self love. It is also a story about secrets, the ones we keep from others, but the truths we keep from ourselves, too. It is also a page-turning courtroom drama because– this is not a spoiler; it is revealed in the blurb– at the end of the first chapter we learn that Lily is dead.

The story toggles back and forth to the beginning of Lily and Asher’s relationship, to their growing feelings for each other (as seen through Lily’s eyes, but also what is witnessed by Olivia), but also reaches further back to provide some insight into how Lily and her mother ended up in New Hampshire. Olivia also reflects on her marriage to Braden, the giddy beginning and the incident that finally caused her, after many other incidents, to flee. She and Asher are close, and so when he is charged with Lily’s murder there is no question of believing he is innocent. But then: maybe Asher has something of his father in him after all.

There is a plot twist in this book that I did not see coming — although I probably should have since Picoult is very much known for her topicality. Anyway, it was a surprise and it definitely added a whole new layer to this story. These characters felt real to me and their struggles also felt nuanced and authentic. I was wholly invested in the outcome of the trial and I absolutely could not wait to get back to the book after I set it down. Mad Honey is provocative, thoughtful, and timely.

If you have never read Picoult before this would be a great place to start, and if you’ve read her but, like me, given her a break, I highly recommend this one.

Keeping 13 – Chloe Walsh

Posted on by
Reply

True to my word, after finishing Binding 13 I immediately went out to Indigo and purchased Keeping 13 which continues Johnny and Shannon’s story. I headed for the YA section, only to discover that the books were not there. Someone had moved them to the Romance section, which is absolutely where they should be, despite the ages of the main characters.

Keeping 13 is another brick of a book – 651 pages – but I knew what I had signed up for and I ripped through it in just a couple days. When we left our characters at the end of the first book, Shannon’s brother Joey was asking his mother to make a choice, a choice that she seems incapable of making. I won’t say much more about that here because…spoilers…but let’s just say that Keeping 13 starts extremely dramatically.

The main part of this story concerns Johnny and Shannon’s growing feelings for each other, Johnny’s recovery from an injury that happened before the start of the first book, but which hasn’t healed properly, the domestic abuse that is happening in Shannon’s house and which causes the return of the oldest Lynch sibling, Darren, and the requisite trash talk by Johnny’s BFF, Gibsie. Johnny’s ex-girlfriend Bella is also intent on making Shannon’s life miserable.

I read this because I genuinely cared about Johnny and Shannon and when I got to the end of the first book I had to keep going to find out what happened. Obviously at 600+ pages, there were some instances of repetition: a lot of instances where one character or another needs to be reassured (but for reasons that make obvious sense.) There was also a lot more sex in this one because as Johnny and Shannon grow closer and admit their feelings to each other, clearly they are driven by hormones and want to get nekkid. I actually appreciated how respectful Johnny was about Shannon’s innocence and even when he blabbed to Gibsie, I could sort of forgive him for his lack of discretion because he is, after all, still young. I loved Johnny’s parents a lot and I loved how I could hear the Irish lilt in the character’s voices.

There were some truly pulse-pounding moments in this book, too. I read one scene in particular with my heart in my throat. And, of course, lots of swoony moments as these two crazy kids try to figure out themselves, their lives, and their feelings for each other.

I was all in, but with the same caveats: a lot of swearing and a lot of sexist comments made about the girls in the book, still tropey (helpless, fragile girl saved by massive, hulking dreamboat), just way longer than it needed to be.

Now, there are more books in this Boys of Tommen series, but I won’t be carrying on. Nothing against the other characters (all of whom I have met in these first two books, I am guessing), but I feel like I would just be getting more of the same and I am pretty happy with what I got.

If there was a series, though, I would 100% watch it.

Binding 13 – Chloe Walsh

Posted on by
Reply

Here is something that you may not know about me: I love YA romance way more than I love adult romance. I don’t know why. Maybe it’s because when I was a teenager I was always in love (and out of love and then in love again). Maybe it’s because that’s as far as I ever got on the romantic maturity scale. Whatever the reason, adult romances rarely ever hit for me, but YA often does. (There are exceptions to this rule, of course. I love Talking at Night and The Paper Palace and everything by David Nicholls.)

I am all in for shows like The Summer I Turned Pretty and To All the Boys I Loved Before and Maxton Hall. Books like Perfect Chemistry and Easy and The Do-Over are way more palatable to me than books by Emily Henry (I’ve tried two and DNF either.)

So, that brings me to Binding 13 by Chloe Walsh, a book that I picked up and put down a million times at the bookstore. Then it was recommended by a couple reviewers that I like, and it was on sale, so I bought it. It’s long, just over 600 pages, but I read it in just a couple of days.

Fifteen-year-old Shannon has endured a life time of bullying and not just at school; her father is abusive, too. She lives with her parents, one older brother, Joey, and three younger brothers, on a council estate in Ballylaggin, Ireland. Finally, her mother decides to send her to Tommen, a private school, where she hopes her daughter will be safe from the students who have tormented her her whole life. (She mostly conveniently ignores the fact that her husband is physically abusive, too.)

On the first day of school, while crossing the sports field, Shannon gets hit with a rugby ball, which knocks her down, cracking her head off the ground and causing a mild concussion. This is how she meets Johnny Kavanagh, captain of the rugby team and all around super stud.

Okay, you know how these things go. Girl who doesn’t know how beautiful she is meets boy who totally knows how beautiful he is try to ignore their feelings, can’t, and eventually <<insert 600 pages of Irish slang, rugby talk, longing looks, expletives>>….yeah, apparently I will have to read the gosh darn sequel Keeping 13 to find out what happens – even though, of course, I know what happens.

Although Binding 13 is shelved in the YA section at my local Indigo and even though the main characters are all teenagers, I wouldn’t actually consider this to be YA. And neither, apparently, would the author. On her website, Walsh says “Please note that all of Chloe’s books are intended for mature readers of 18 years and above. Chloe’s self-published work has always been categorized as new adult and contemporary. The topics of conversation in these stories are NOT suitable for younger audiences. The first four books in the Boys of Tommen series were self-published and marketed for adult readership only.”

I don’t believe in censorship, but I probably wouldn’t put this book in my classroom library. To be fair, though, I would be happier with my students reading this than I would be if they were reading Colleen Hoover. That’s saying something.

There’s lots to like about Binding 13. I really grew to love both Shannon and Johnny. There are a lot of great secondary characters, too. The book is often laugh-out-loud funny. I wouldn’t say that there is swoon-level romance, but Johnny proves himself early on to be protective and not above throwing a fist if he needs to. I was definitely invested in these characters and their individual struggles: Shannon’s safety and the pressure Johnny puts on himself to be an elite athlete. How will these crazy kids ever get together?

There are also some things I didn’t like. It is tropey, for sure. Shannon is teeny, child-like and Johnny is a 6’3″ wall of muscle. Shannon falls down a lot – she is constantly running into Johnny’s muscular chest and landing on her ass. I didn’t like the way the boys talked about the girls sexually. Their conversations are far more graphic than anything the characters might have gotten up to. Sometimes the conversations between Johnny and Shannon seem to do a complete 360 out of nowhere, which I guess you can explain away by their ages. And much is made of their ages, although there is really only two years between them: Shannon turns 16 in the book and Johnny will turn 18. They read a lot older, although I guess you could explain that away by their life experiences.

Look, I know that I am certainly not the audience for this sort of book, but I will be purchasing Keeping 13 and reading it straight away and that is something I never do.

There. That’s my endorsement.

The Wedding People – Alison Espach

Posted on by
Reply

Phoebe’s life has fallen apart and one last kick to her heart is the final straw, so she books a one way flight to Newport, Rhode Island and makes a reservation to stay at Cornwall Inn. Just a one night stay because Phoebe intends on killing herself.

Phoebe and her husband Matt had always intended to shake up their vacations and come to this amazing hotel, but they always ended up defaulting to the same old same old, and then one day he just up and left her.

But now Phoebe stands before a nineteenth-century Newport hotel in an emerald silk dress, the only item in her closet she can honestly say she still loves, probably because it was the one thing she had never worn.

Phoebe isn’t expecting the hotel to be full, but it is. There’s a wedding and all the wedding people are here for the entire week leading up to the nuptials. When Phoebe meets the bride, Lila, in the elevator, she blurts out that she intends to kill herself in an attempt to explain to Lila that she is not, in fact, one of the guests.

Alison Espach’s novel The Wedding People is really a book about connections and how sometimes a random and seemingly inconsequential meeting can change the trajectory of your life. Although Phoebe is clearly in emotional pain, she recognizes it in others.

…Phoebe is starting to understand that on some nights, Lila is probably the loneliest girl in the world, just like Phoebe. And maybe they are all lonely. Maybe this is just what it means to be a person

It will be no surprise that Phoebe does not, in fact, kill herself. Instead she finds herself embroiled in the wedding drama, propositioning the wrong man, standing in as the maid of honour, and working through her own trauma. The book is funny, sentimental, and life-affirming because as Phoebe starts to remind herself “I am here.”

Beats the alternative.