Author Archives: Christie

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About Christie

Book lover. Tea Drinker. Teacher. Writer. Mother. Canadian.

You Are Here – David Nicholls

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As I age, my desire to read straight-up frothy romances has waned. Sure, I used to love them: hot boy meets hot girl and sexy fun times ensue. But now? Boring. Give me the characters who have lived a life and are neurotic, flawed, cynical, searching, hopeful…human. Bonus if they’re past 30. (Extra points if they’re past 40.)

I love David Nicholls. His outstanding novel One Day introduces us to Emma and Dexter on the eve of their graduation from university, but then follows them for the next twenty years. (If you have not watched the incredible series on Netflix, I highly recommend it. It’s perfection.) Us follows Douglas and Connie, a couple whose marriage is disintegrating after twenty years, just as they are about to head off on a European vacation with their 17-year-old son. Sweet Sorrow is Charlie and Fran’s story. They meet at sixteen while participating in a production of Romeo and Juliet, but their story is told from a future vantage point complete with the requisite melancholy.

Nicholls’ most recent novel You Are Here is the story of 38-year-old copywriter, Marnie, and a high school geography teacher named Michael who is 42. Marnie is divorced and lives a relatively solitary life in London. She used to have an active social life, was “A nice addition to the group if not the core, well liked if never adored or idolised.” Now all her friends are married and having babies and Marnie feels like “perhaps this was natural, this falling away.” Nevertheless, Marnie does admit that she is lonely. Michael and his wife, Natasha, are separated and Michael resists all efforts to shake off the lethargy. Instead of staying in the house they shared, where she had “left enough of her possessions to keep it comfortable but he could never quite escape a feeling that something had gone missing”, Michael walks. A lot.

Although Michael and Marnie are unknown to each other at the beginning of the book, they do have one common friend, Cleo. When Michael turns down one too many invites because he will be walking, she insists that she’ll come, too and bring other people. Thus, Michael, Marnie, Cleo and company set off to hike from one side of England to the other (well, at least, that’s Michael’s intent; the rest are only going to walk for three days.)

Initially Cleo had thought to match Marnie up with Conrad, “perhaps the most handsome man” Marnie had ever seen. The woman she’d invited for Michael cancelled at the last minute and so you can see where this is going to go from miles away….and miles is just how long it’s going to take for Marnie and Michael to really see each other…to let their guards down and trust themselves and each other.

Trust me, it’s the journey not the destination that matters in this one. It’s filled with flirty banter, heartfelt revelations, and beautiful descriptions of the English countryside. This book will make you want to plan your own ramble and open yourself up to the possibility of love.

Another winner by one of my favourite authors.

Midnight is the Darkest Hour – Ashley Winstead

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I really wish the cover flap hadn’t compared Ashley Winstead’s novel Midnight is the Darkest Hour to Verity because it really does her book a disservice. Winstead’s book is far superior to Hoover’s (but I am not a fan of Hoover at all, so there’s that).

Ruth Cornier lives in Bottom Springs, Louisiana, where her father is the evangelical preacher in charge of Holy Fire Baptist. An only child, Ruth leads a sheltered, friendless life; her only companions are books, in particular, Twilight. She dreams of one day finding her own Edward Cullen.

…in the vampire Edward, I found everything I’d ever wanted in a man. He loved Bella with single-minded devotion, a self-effacing passion beyond anything a human man was capable of. That’s in turn how I loved him.

(I too have loved a taciturn vampire, although mine was a little less sparkly than Edward. LOL)

But anyway.

Everett Duncan also lives in Bottom Springs. An act of violence brings Everett and Ruth together and bonds them when they are seventeen and the story flips between this early period of their relationship and several years later, when they are 23. When a skull is discovered in the swamp, Everett and Ruth work together to uncover Bottom Springs’ dark underbelly.

In the present day, Ruth lives on her own and works at the local library. She has very little to do with her parents, stepping away from the church’s fire and brimstone teachings. Everett has left Bottom Springs, returning “every year on the first true day of summer.” Things are different this year, though, and not only because the discovery of the skull, but because Ruth has a boyfriend, Deputy Barry Holt.

I read Midnight is the Darkest Hour in one sitting. It’s the perfect blend of southern gothic and mystery, plus a dash of angsty romance. (Which, c’mon, if you’re going to love a vampire, you gotta love the angst.) This book has a lot to say about the patriarchy, religion, and family. Ruth has been cowed all her life, but when she decides she’s not going to take it anymore – well, that’s a journey worth taking.

I think Winstead’s only gotten better. I wasn’t a huge fan of In My Dreams I Hold a Knife (although there were some parts of it I really did enjoy), but I LOVED The Last Housewife. Midnight is the Darkest Hour is another winner and I can’t wait to see what she writes next.

Theme Music – T. Marie Vandelly

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T. Marie Vandelly’s debut Theme Music promises a lot with its prologue. At just eighteen months, Dixie Wheeler is the only member of her family to survive a chilling event in the family home. One day at breakfast, her father left the kitchen, went to his shed and returned with an axe.

He rentered the kitchen, extra warm and cozy thanks to a turkey in the oven, looked upon the bewildered faces of his adoring family, and butchered them all. Well, not all, of course. I lived.

After he was done, her father slit his own throat.

Now, twenty-five years later, Dixie happens upon an advertisement announcing the sale of her family home – not that she has any real memories of it. After the death of her family, Dixie lived with her father’s sister, Celia, and her uncle, Ford, and her cousin, Leah. Now, as an adult, she cohabitates with her boyfriend, Garrett. What can it hurt to go check out the house, she wonders.

The house is “charming” in fact, despite its horrific history. Garrett falls in love with it, too, although he isn’t aware of what happened there. In fact, Dixie hasn’t been forthcoming with the details of her past at all. That’s bound to cause some friction and it does which ultimately means that Dixie moves into the house solo. Not only does she move in, but she brings with her all the household belongings that her father’s brother Davis had stored in his own basement. This includes, unfortunately, a file folder filled with crime scene photos. Davis, it seems, always believed his brother was innocent and until his death was working to prove it.

Theme Music isn’t quite sure whether it wants to be a thriller or a horror novel. Dixie’s house is haunted because of course it is, but most of the book is concerned with Dixie picking up the threads of her uncle’s investigation, and trying to figure out what really happened that day.

Books of this type depend on a likable main character, which I am sad to say, Dixie was not. Was there peril? Yes. Did she do some stupid things? Yes. Were there some twists and suspense? Also yes. But I also often found the tone uneven, sarcasm when it was uncalled for and a fair number of unbelievable plot machinations that caused a little bit of eye rolling.

All that said, Theme Music is a promising debut even if it wasn’t quite sure what kind of book it wanted to be.

Mayflies – Andrew O’Hagan

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I had no real expectations going into Andrew O’Hagan’s 2020 novel Mayflies, but even if I had know what I was getting myself into, my reading experience would have exceeded all of them.

The novel opens in 1986 and the narrator, James, and his best friend, Tully, are just finished secondary school. They live in Glasgow and things aren’t easy for them. James’ father “wandered off in search of himself” and his mother “decided that the life of a single mother was not for her, and flitted to Arran.” He spends a lot of time at Tully’s house.

James admires Tully.

Other guys were funny and brilliant and better at this and that, but Tully loved you. He had the leader thing, when he was young, the guts of the classic frontman, and if any of us got together we instantly wanted to know where he was.

The first part of the novel focuses on one weekend when James, Tully and some of their other friends, travel down to Manchester to a music festival. It’s a weekend of total debauchery, as you might imagine when a group of young lads get together. I was in my 20s in the 1980s – and big into British music because I had a boyfriend from England – and so I loved all the pop culture references. The bands playing the festival included Orchestral Maneuvers in the Dark (which they trash, but which I recall liking) and The Smith (whom I didn’t appreciate then, but do now).

What we had that day was our story. We didn’t have the other bit, the future, and we had no way of knowing what that would be like. Perhaps it would change our memory of all this, or perhaps it would draw from it, nobody knew. But I’m sure I felt the story of that hall and how we reached it would never vanish.

Tully and James also quote movies back and forth at each other and engage in the silly banter you might expect from boys their age, but they also talk meaningfully about James’ missing parents, Tully’s strained relationship with his father, and the politics of the day. Theirs is a true and profound relationship, which makes the second part of this novel even more poignant.

Flash forward to 2017, when James receives a call from Tully. I’ll leave it at that. The second half of the book is a love letter to the friendship and shared memories between the two men and it is utterly beautiful. In fact, I found the whole book just, well, truly heartbreaking.

They say you know nothing at eighteen. But there are things you know at eighteen that you will never know again. Morrissey would lose his youth, and not just his youth, but the gusto that took him across the stage with a banner saying ‘The Queen Is Dead’ is a thing of permanence. We didn’t know it at the time, but it was also, for all of us, a tender goodbye, and we would never be those people again.

For anyone who has more behind them than ahead of them, this book will certainly speak to the person you were, the memories and the people you shared the journey with. But even for a young person, this book will surely resonate. I found it deeply moving and cried on more than one occasion.

Highly recommended.

Demon Copperhead – Barbara Kingsolver

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I might have never gotten around to reading Barbara Kingsolver’s Pulitzer Prize winning novel Demon Copperhead if it hadn’t been chosen for our book club. Like A Little Life , the book seems to be pretty divisive. I hated that book; I did not hate this one.

“First, I got myself born,” says Demon, mimicking Charles Dickens’ classic David Copperfield in which the titular narrator says “To begin my life with the beginning of my life, I record that I was born…” in the book’s opening paragraph. Kingsolver thanks Dickens in her acknowledgement and her novel definitely owes a debt to him.

Born Damon Fields to a teenage mother with few prospects, Demon survives poverty, his mother’s addictions, and physical abuse at the hands of her boyfriend, Stoner, mostly because he lives next door to the Peggots and their grandson, Demon’s best friend, Maggot. (Yes, there are a lot of weird names in this book, but they correspond to names from Dickens’ novel.) The Peggots’ home in rural Virginia was “a place where things got put where they went.” The Peggots were de facto grandparents to Demon, Mrs. Peggot making sure that “she played no favorites: same Hostess cakes, same cowboy shirts she made for both of us with the fringe on the sleeves. Same little smack on the shoulder with her knuckles if you cussed or wore your ball cap to her table.” For this reason, with the exception of his mother having difficulty staying sober, Demon would probably say that he had a wonderful childhood, until he didn’t.

Forced into the foster system at age 11, Demon’s life deteriorates and I won’t spoil the ups and downs of his journey to adulthood because those details are the meat and potatoes of his story. Let’s just say that I was wholly invested until about the midpoint of the story (which clocks in at 546 pages).

I was happy to spend time with Demon. I enjoyed his ‘voice’ and admired his resilience in the face of tremendous adversity. I shared his minor victories and bemoaned his poor choices and bad luck. I didn’t 100% believe all of it. He was lucky and unlucky in equal measure and despite having a really solid supporting cast, he still didn’t always make the best choices. That’s probably to be expected, though, as he’s young and young people do stupid things even when they acknowledge that they are stupid.

Kingsolver has lots of opinions on capitalism, pharmaceutical companies, education, the foster system, rural life and readers will certainly be aware when didactics trickle into fiction. It doesn’t interfere, per se, although sometimes it’s pretty obvious when her point of view wants to take center stage.

I am not sure when I stopped being 100% invested in his story. I will say that I really didn’t like the ending of the book. I will also say that I had zero trouble turning the pages even though Demon’s story was generally grim. He is a memorable character and I was invested in his survival.

All the Colors of the Dark – Chris Whitaker

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Chris Whitaker’s novel We Begin at the End is one of the best books I’ve read in the last few years and so when I heard that he had a new book coming out I purchased it as soon as it was available. (Sadly, it’s a flimsy paperback with a stupid unremovable “Read with Jenna” sticker on it. ) Not only did I race out to purchase All the Colors of the Dark, but I started reading it almost immediately. The weather cooperated, too; I got a rainy Saturday with nothing much to do and so I didn’t stop reading until just after 2 a.m. when I turned the final page (595 of them!)

Patch and Saint meet as kids. They’re both outsiders in their small town of Monta Clare, Missouri. Patch lives with his single mother, Ivy, who has barely been able to keep it together; Saint lives with her grandmother, Norma. Their friendship sustains them for many years and is the central relationship in the novel.

At the beginning of the story, Patch rescues another local girl, Misty, from a man who clearly intends to do her harm. He has admired Misty from afar and when he encounters them in the woods, he recognizes that something is not right.

Patch desperately looked around for anyone at all. Anyone who could handle this, who could ease the responsibility, the acute burden of seeing a girl in trouble.

He has no choice but to act, and he does, and it changes the trajectory of his life.

When Patch disappears, Saint lets nothing stand in her way until she finds him. But he is not the same person he was and as the details of what happened to him emerge, it also reveals a dogged determination to get to the truth.

I can’t say any more than that.

This is an epic story because it takes place over many years. It is also a story that moves swiftly. There’s a lot of dialogue in this story and so despite its length it almost begs to be read in one sitting. I think Whitaker’s super power is his characters. I loved Saint and Patch, who are revealed to us through their actions and their dialogue. But they are not the only characters to love. There’s Chief Nix, Norma and Sammy, too. I felt like I knew and cared for each and every one of them.

There’s not a lot of exposition here. (Honestly, this would make a terrific series and given the author’s connection to Jordy Moblo, I’ve got my fingers crossed.) But there is a compelling mystery and some heart-stopping moments. In fact, there’s a lot going on in this book and while the conclusion wasn’t as punch-you-in-the-gut as We Begin at the End, I finished feeling very satisfied. And as a person who generally falls asleep relatively early, the fact that I had to stay awake – in fact, couldn’t fall asleep even after I finished – to find out what happened to these people I had fallen in love with should tell you everything you need to know about All the Colors of the Dark.

This Summer Will Be Different – Carley Fortune

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I think at this point it is safe to say that I buy Carley Fortune’s books not because I like them but because I want to support a Canadian writer. This Summer Will Be Different is her latest book, but I had pretty much the same experience reading it as I did reading Every Summer After and Meet Me at the Lake. But, I also think that I am not the right reader for her books. I am too old to buy into the frothy type of romance she is selling.

In this book, Fortune has stepped away from Muskoka and landed in Prince Edward Island. And there’s the first problem, but we’ll get to that later. Lucy (who wears her hair in braids) has left her life in Toronto for a little break in PEI with her best friend, Bridget. Bridget is from PEI and can’t wait to show Lucy the island’s magical wonders. Except Bridget has missed her flight and Lucy has arrived solo. She ends up at Shack Malpeque and it is there that she meets Felix.

His eyes were the most dazzling shade of iceberg blue, striking against his deep tan. A cleft parted the center of his chin. His face hadn’t seen a razor in at least two days, and it was a study in contrasts. Strong jaw. Soft pink lips, the bottom fuller than the top. The bright eyes trimmed in black lashes.

We’re very much in Romance 101 territory and it’s only page 5.

Felix and Lucy experience a connection – as is the way of these things – and before you can say Anne of Green Gables these two crazy kids (Lucy is 24 and Felix, 23) are have mind-blowing sex. Things get complicated because Lucy doesn’t realize that Felix is actually Wolf, Bridget’s younger brother. (How she manages to have a bestie whose younger brother is called Wolf, a name she isn’t curious enough to ask about…I dunno, but there you have it – the meet cute.)

Over the course of five years, Lucy and Felix keep this ‘relationship’ a secret for slightly silly reasons because it would seem that they have undeniable feelings for one another. The novel toggles back and forth from this first meeting to subsequent visits to PEI where Felix and Lucy both keep their distance from each other (because Bridget can’t find out for reasons that make zero sense) and also have hot sex (which is made less hot by the amount of times Lucy asks for “more”).

We are reminded of the location at every opportunity. Like every time someone is buttering toast, it’s with Cows Creamery Churned Butter. And apparently all people eat in PEI is oysters. (I myself have never eaten oysters in PEI, but I am one of those weirdo Maritimers who doesn’t like seafood.) Yes, there is the requisite trip to Green Gables, and the necessary mention of red dirt and ocean vistas etc etc.

The problem isn’t the book per se because I have a feeling that a) I am not the intended audience and b) every single 20-something will be planning a trip to PEI this summer to meet their own version of Felix. For me, all these people were just meh. Bridget is keeping a huge secret days before her wedding and the reveal is anticlimactic. You know Felix and Lucy are going to get their happily-ever-after. At this point in my life, I guess I am looking for characters who have logged a few more miles than these physically perfect twenty-somethings have. So, I really shouldn’t be poo-pooing a book for which I am certainly not the intended audience.

If frothy, sun-kissed, sweet (with a little spice) fiction is your jam, put this in your beach bag and hit the sand. You’ll probably love it.

Sisters – Daisy Johnson

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Sisters is a fever dream of a novel. It is the story of siblings July and August who have left Oxford with their mother, Sheela, to escape something horrible that has happened there. They’ve gone to the crumbling Settle House, a dwelling owned by their deceased father’s sister.

The house is here, squatting like a child by the small slate wall, the empty sheep field behind pitted with old excrement, thornbushes tall as a person. […] The white walls of the house are streaked with mud handprints and sag from their wrinkled middles, the top floor sunk down onto the bottom like a hand curved over a fist.

July, the younger of the two sisters, is the main narrator of this story. Their mother, a children’s book author and illustrator, rarely says anything, although one part of the novel does provide us a glimpse into her life with the girls’ father. Mostly, though, she “has been this way, taciturn or silent, ever since what happened at school.”

The “what happened” at school is the “mystery” – I did guess one thing, although not the specifics. What separates Daisy Johnson’s novels from other stories is the writing, which is innovative and compelling. It’s a gauzy, disconcerting narrative and it is almost impossible to feel as though your feet are on firm ground.

This the year we are houses, lights on in every window, doors that won’t quite shut. When one of us speaks we both feel the words moving on our tongues. When one of us eats we both feel the food slipping down our gullets. It would have surprised neither of us to have found, slit open, that we shared organs, that one’s lungs breathed for the both, that a single heart beat a doubling, feverish pulse.

Sisters is a gripping book and reminded me a little of I’m Thinking of Ending Things.

Whisper Down the Lane – Clay McLeod Chapman

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I don’t really have any personal memory the Satanic Panic of the 80s – I was perhaps more concerned with trying to make myself look like a brunette Madonna – but I do find it to be a fascinating subject. A few months ago I read Remembering Satan, which was a true account of one family’s descent into a hellish landscape of satanic rituals and false memories. Clay McLeod Chapman’s novel Whisper Down the Lane leans into these ideas.

Richard teaches art at the hoity toity Danvers School in Virginia. He is newly married to fellow teacher Tamara, and step-father to her young son. He seems like a good guy, although he is prone to drifting off from conversations, a habit that causes him great anxiety but which he seems unable to prevent.

Then there’s Sean, a young boy living with his mother in 1982. Things start to go off the rails in his life when his mother notices bruises on him. His mother asks Sean if Mr. Woodhouse, Sean’s teacher, had given him the bruises. It’s such a strange question because “Of course he hadn’t.[…]He had more energy than any of Sean’s other teachers. Even more than his classmates. To Sean, he was like a clown without makeup.”

Whisper Down the Lane is inspired, in part, by the McMartin Preschool trial of 1987. You can watch a little bit about that here:

As Chapman’s book toggles back and forth between Sean’s story and Richard’s, it won’t take readers very long to figure out the connection. The book has some creepy moments, but I also found it slow moving and not wholly satisfying.

The Butterfly Garden – Dot Hutchison

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Dot Hutchison’s novel The Butterfly Garden requires some suspension of disbelief. It is the story of Maya, one of several young girls who have been rescued from a horrifying situation. FBI agents Victor Hanoverian and Brandon Eddison are tasked with questioning Maya about what happened, but she is a bit reticent to reveal many details.

After a night working at a restaurant, Maya wakes up in a strange place with “a splitting headache.” She is being cared for by a woman who calls herself Lyonette who tells her “Don’t bother telling me your name because I won’t be able to use it.” Where is Maya? She’s in The Garden.

Lyonette led me out from behind the curtain of water into a garden so beautiful it nearly hurt to look at it. Brilliant flowers of every conceivable color bloomed in a riotous profusion of leaves and trees, clouds of butterflies drifting through them. A man-made cliff rose above us, more greenery and trees alive on its flat top, and the trees on the edges just brushed the sides of the glass roof that loomed impossibly far away.

Maya is a prisoner. And she is not alone. She is one of many “butterflies” being held captive in this garden, young women who must submit to having intricate butterfly wings tattooed on their backs, and worse, must endure being raped by The Gardener and his sadistic son.

Just how Maya and the rest of the ‘butterflies’ come to be rescued makes up the main part of the story. We also get a little bit of insight into her troubling childhood. What we don’t really get is why The Gardener, a man who seems devoted to his frail, clearly out-to-lunch wife, would go to the lengths he has to hold these girls captive.

It’s hard to imagine this place he has built. It’s even harder to imagine that he hasn’t been found out. And when his younger son, Desmond, is introduced to this creepy garden, it’s hard to imagine him not ratting his father out, especially when he seems to develop feelings for Maya.

Still, The Butterfly Garden is oddly compelling. It’s not nearly as graphic as you might imagine it to be, but is still potentially triggering. It was an easy read.