Author Archives: Christie

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About Christie

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

The Inheritance – Joanna Goodman

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Arden Moore’s life was perfect. She lives in a too-big, slightly run down “Depression-era Tudor Revival built in 1931.” Her husband, Scott, “was infatuated with it, from its steeply pitched, twin triangular gables and multipaned windows to the arched front door with the wrought-iron knocker.” Better yet, it was in the right part of town, and such things mattered to Scott. But now Scott is dead, and Arden is left with a too-big house she can’t afford to renovate let alone pay the mortgage on.

Joanna Goodman’s (The Finishing School) novel The Inheritance examines the aftermath of the death of a spouse, sibling relationships, (Arden has an older sister, Tate, who is “the glamorous, successful sister”) and mother/daughter relationships. It also looks at aging, as Virginia Bunt, Arden and Tate’s mother, is trying to come to terms with, and self-harm. Actually, there’s A LOT going on in this book. Some might say too much, but I actually think that Goodman did a good job of keeping all the spinning plates in the air. As a woman of a certain age, I related to Virginia’s story; as the mother of a daughter – albeit, no longer a teenaged one – I related to Arden and 13-year-old Ivey’s acrimony (Arden has six-year-old-twins besides).

And then, there’s the inheritance. Virginia had tried many years ago, after the death of Arden’s father, Wallace, to claim her share of Wallace’s money for Arden. In fact, the fight had consumed her life and ended her marriage with Hal. Now, the death of Arden’s half brother (if her mother is to be believed) and advances in DNA testing means that Arden might actually get what is rightfully hers. Thirty million dollars worth.

The Inheritance was a page-turner, for sure, but also a thoughtful examination of grief, moving on and all the complicated relationships that exist in our lives. I enjoyed the read.

Shiner – Amy Jo Burns

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Amy Jo Burns’ debut novel Shiner is my first five-star read of the year. It is the story of Wren Bird who lives with her parents Briar and Ruby in West Virginia outside of the aptly named no-where town of Trap. Wren tells us

The story of a snake handler’s daughter began when I’d just turned fifteen. I knew little then of the outside world my father kept from me. Ours is an oral civilization, I used to hear him say, and it’s dying. He blamed coal, he blamed heroin. He never blamed himself.

Briar is a preacher. As a young man, so the story goes, he’d been struck by lightning, causing one of his irises to go milky white and apparently giving him the power to heal and handle venomous snakes.

My father obeyed the rituals of snake-handling law, which meant he pretended we still lived in the 1940s instead of the age of the internet and all the things people did on their cell phones that I couldn’t understand. […] Daily my father lifted his serpents to the sky and uttered a prayer in tongues that no one could interpret.

Wren has never known any other life. Briar has kept her and her mother isolated on the “mountain’s western ridge.” Their only visitor is Ivy, Ruby’s childhood best friend, and her sons. When they visit, Briar hides in his snake shed because “He couldn’t bear to share my mother mother with anyone – not with Ivy, not even with me.”

A terrible accident sets off a summer of discovery for Wren and it is a breathtaking journey, where secrets are revealed and new relationships are forged.

There are so many things to admire about Shiner, not the least of which is the writing. But you can have great writing that is somehow distancing and impedes the plot. I loved the way this book was written, but I also loved the characters, particularly Wren and Flynn, the local ‘shiner’ (someone who makes moonshine) who is connected to Wren in a meaningful way, although she doesn’t know it.

Shiner is about the way “mountain men steered their own stories, and women were their oars.” It’s about finding your voice and making choices. It is about family. I loved every single second of it.

Highly recommended.

Chasing the Boogeyman – Richard Chizmar

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I have been suffering from the slump of all slumps over the past few weeks. I haven’t been able to concentrate on a single book, and have abandoned more than a few. For anyone who has suffered from a book slump, you’ll understand how frustrating it is to want to read without actually being able to settle into a book.

Then, along comes Richard Chizmar’s novel Chasing the Boogeyman. Although I was familiar with Chizmar’s name (he has co-authored three books with Stephen King), this was the first time I have ever read anything by him and it was a thoroughly enjoyable experience. I started and finished the book in a couple of sittings. #slumpbuster

Chasing the Boogeyman is a novel, but it reads like true crime. That’s because Chizmar himself is purportedly telling the story of the summer after college when he returns home to Edgewood, Maryland to write, assemble his horror magazine, Cemetery Dance – a publication that actually does exist – and save money before he gets married.

Just before Chizmar arrives back home in 1988, a young girl was taken from her bedroom in the middle of the night, her savaged body discovered in the woods the next day. Over the coming weeks, more girls end up dead.

I can’t explain how or why it happened the way it did, the timing of me being back there on Hudson Road when the murders occurred. […] I was there. I was a witness. And, somehow, the monster’s story became my own.

With the help of a high school friend who works at the local newspaper, Chizmar begins to try to piece together what happened to the victims. Although Edgewood wasn’t crime-free before these horrific murders, “no one could remember anything remotely this violent or depraved. It was almost as an invisible switch had been thrown….”

Chasing the Boogeyman is a clever and compelling (fake) true crime book complete with photos, that is also a nostalgic look at coming home again. It is clear that Chizmar is a fan of the genre and he certainly does it justice here. I really enjoyed my read and I would definitely read more by this author.

The Berry Pickers – Amanda Peters

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If you looked at my reading habits the last few weeks, you wouldn’t say I was much of a reader. I’ve been suffering from the slump of all slumps: hashtag the struggle is real! I started Amanda Peters’ debut The Berry Pickers but, sadly, it was not the book to kickstart my reading mojo.

Joe and his family, older siblings Ben, Charlie, Mae and younger sister, Ruthie, always travel from their home in Nova Scotia to Maine to pick blueberries at the Ellis farm. They are Mi’kmaw and this is their summer ritual, gathering with many other Indigenous pickers from New Brunswick and Nova Scotia. It is 1962. This is the summer that Ruthie, 4, disappears.

The Berry Pickers is told from Joe’s perspective. It is years later, and he is dying. From his death bed, he recounts the summer Ruthie went missing and the guilt that has plagued him his whole life.

There is another narrator, too. Her name is Norma and she lives with her parents, a quiet father and an overbearing mother. As a young girl, she’d had bad dreams that she couldn’t understand. In one she was in a fast moving car, and she “turned to see the face of a woman who wasn’t my mother but had my mother’s face.” It won’t take much effort for readers to figure out that Norma is Ruthie. I figured it out in the first paragraph.

The Berry Pickers covers a lot of ground and some readers might not mind that too much but, for me, it was a lot of life lived in just 300 pages. That said, the inevitable reconciliation did offer some poignant moments and having recently lost a very important family member, I did find it moving. I also enjoyed the fact that the story takes place close to home.

I think this was a good book, perhaps if I had read it at a different time, I would have motored through it.

A Little Princess -Frances Hodgson Burnett

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This month’s theme for our school’s student book club was childhood classics and students were invited to read or re-read a beloved story. I chose Frances Hodgson Burnett’s A Little Princess, a story I have read several times over the course of my life, but not for at least twenty years.

This is the story of Sara Crewe. At seven, she and her father leave their lives in India and head to London, England, where Sara is to become a pupil at Miss Minchin’s Select Seminary for Young Ladies. Sara’s mother is dead and she and her father share a close bond and “They had always played together and been fond of each other.”

Sara is a curious, self-possessed child, with “a queer old-fashioned thoughtfulness in her big eyes.” She seems to draw the ire of Miss Minchin almost immediately, but she befriends several of her classmates, and the housemaid, Becky, by telling them imaginative stories.

When something horrible happens to change Sara’s financial position, Miss Minchin send her to the attic to live with Becky and mistreats her horribly. Plucky Sara never complains, though. She has her imagination to keep her company, and soon enough, she draws the attention of the Indian gentleman that lives next door and the family across the square.

I loved A Little Princess when I first read it as a kid and I still love it now. Sara is so determined to see the good in everyone and her intelligence and kindness are admirable traits.

Time spent with Sara Crewe is always well spent.

The Darkest Corners – Kara Thomas

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Eighteen-year-old Tessa is returning to her childhood hometown of Fayette, Pennsylvania to visit her incarcerated father who is dying of cancer. This isn’t the only reunion she’s facing. When she moved to Florida to live with her grandmother, she left behind her best friend Callie and the trauma of having to testify in a murder trial. She and Callie are estranged now, which makes the fact that she is going to be staying with Callie and her parents slightly uncomfortable.

Home is both different and the same. There’s a reminder around every corner of the summer when she was nine and Callie’s cousin Lori was murdered. She and Callie were material witnesses in the trial that put Wyatt Stokes behind bars, not only for Lori’s murder but for a string of other homicides. Not long after she lands back in Fayette, another girl is killed and it’s impossible not to see the similarities between this girl and all those who came before. But how is it possible, when Wyatt Stokes is behind bars? Things just don’t add up and so Tessa (and eventually Callie) start to dig into their memories of what happened that long ago summer.

The Darkest Corners is a fun read, but it’s definitely better if you read it in one or two sittings because there is a lot going on and a lot of character names to keep track of. Some of these characters have very little to do and are not much more than names on a page. They drive a certain part of the plot and are dropped like hot potatoes. Other characters, like Tessa and Callie, are more rounded. The last fifty pages – although perhaps not all that believable – flew by.

Mostly though, it was a good time.

When I Was Ten – Fiona Cummins

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Something horrible happened at Hilltop House.

Fiona Cummins’ thriller When I Was Ten travels back in forth between then (the immediate aftermath of the crime and then even further back to the time leading up to it) and now, twenty years later.

After Brinley, one of two main characters, reveals that she was struck by lightning when she was twelve, she also tells us that the parents of her childhood friends, Sara and Shannon, were “Stabbed fourteen times with a pair of scissors in a frenzied and brutal attack.”

Catherine Allen, the other protagonist, lives a quiet life with her husband, Edward, and twelve-year-old daughter, Honor. She “only wants to be ordinary” but the truth is that her story is anything but.

How are these two women connected? That part of the mystery is easily solved, but there is so much more to come in Cummins’ novel about childhood friendship, family relationships, and abuse. As Brinley, a journalist, starts to revisit her part in what happened at Hilltop House, the book picks up steam and the last half was pretty much unputdownable. Cummins was a journalist, so she has some interesting observations about the parasitic nature of true crime journalism.

Overall, I really enjoyed this book.

In the Path of Falling Objects -Andrew Smith

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Jonah, 16, and Simon, 14, have left their home and are heading to Arizona to find their older brother, Matt, whom they hope will have returned from the Vietnam War and will be waiting for them. They’ve got nothing but the clothes on their backs, a crumpled ten dollar bill, Matt’s letters to Jonah, Jonah’s notebook, and a loaded pistol.

The brothers are at odds with each other, but that’s because Jonah is trying to honour Matt’s wishes that he look after Simon and Simon clearly doesn’t want to be looked after. They have a brother’s code though and it turns out, they’re going to need it.

When the1940 black Lincoln Cabriolet passes them, Jonah knew “It was as out of place in the dessert as a sailboat would have been, and it was the kind of car you knew had to carry stories with it, but I had no intention of finding out what those stories told.”

The driver, Mitch, and his passenger, Lilly, stop for the boys and thus begins their nightmare.

I felt like I was being swept along by something that had already gone too far. I knew I didn’t like Mitch from the moment I saw him, but there was something about that girl…

From the moment the boys get in the car, it is clear that Mitch is nuts. (Well, readers will know that from the book’s very first page.) The novel is almost unbearably suspenseful as we are swept along across the desert. Is Lilly Mitch’s girlfriend? Prisoner? Is she manipulating Mitch or the boys? I was so concerned for their safety.

Interspersed with their “adventure”, we read Matt’s letters to Jonah, which are filled with the horrors he is experiencing in Vietnam, a notoriously brutal and unforgiving conflict.

Andrew Smith has written a compelling, brutal, nail-biting story about survival, brothers and the horrors to be found at war and right here at home. I loved it.

The St. Ambrose School For Girls – Jessica Ward

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The St. Ambrose School for Girls by Jessica Ward (perhaps better known as J. R. Ward) has been compared to everything from The Secret History (laughable) to We Were Liars (um, okay maybe in the sense that like Candance, Sarah Taylor is an unreliable narrator). I think I bought the book because I liked the cover and I like dark academia. I still like the cover and I still like dark academia, but this book was…annoying.

Fifteen-year-old Sarah Taylor has won a scholarship to the prestigious St. Ambrose School in Massachusetts. There is NO WAY she’d have been able to attend without the scholarship. Her father is MIA and her mother is a lunch lady who trades in boyfriends as often as one might change their socks.

Sarah, who says she is going to tell people her name is ‘Bo’, but never actually does, is an odd duck.

Unlike the other girls I see walking around campus–who look like they’ve stepped out of the rainbow page of a United Colors of Benetton ad–I’m dressed in black and loose clothing. I’m also not wearing shoes, but lace-up boots with steel toes. My hair is dyed jet black, although my mouse-brown roots are starting to show already, a trail of mud at night.

Things don’t really start smoothly for Sarah. For starters, she finds herself in Greta Stanhope’s crosshairs from day one. When they meet, Sarah notes that Greta “somehow manages to smile wider and narrow her stare at the same time. It’s a cute trick. If you’re Cujo.”

Then the pranks start. They’re minor things, but they are upsetting to Sarah. Her roommate, the star athlete Ellen “Strots” Strotsberry, encourages Sarah to ignore Greta and her minions. “Just don’t give ’em what they’re looking for and they’ll get bored.” Easier said than done, but honestly, the pranks are so benign they’d be easy enough to ignore. And the fact that they make up three quarters of this book is frustrating because nothing happens until about the last fifty pages.

In fact, so much of nothing happens that I started to be distracted by Ward’s weird writing tick of starting multiple sentences with “As.” And when I say multiple, I mean it – sometimes as many as three or four on a single page and it drove me crazy!

The St. Ambrose School For Girls was a long book. The last fifty pages were marginally better, but the truth of the matter is that I didn’t care about any of these characters – even the so-called ‘mean girl’ wasn’t mean enough and the plot was neither “riveting” nor “twisty.”

Not for me.

The History of Jane Doe – Michael Belanger

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Raymond Green and his best friend Simon Blackburn aren’t really part of the in crowd at their Connecticut high school. In fact, they’re not really part of any crowd at all. Ray is a history nerd and Simon’s “not really a nerd at all. […] His nerdiest attribute would have to be his love of vampire fiction.” Ray and Simon have been best friends since middle school and their lives have been pretty closed off from the rest of the world that is until Jane Doe moves to their hometown from Brooklyn.

Michael Belanger’s debut YA novel The History of Jane Doe is Ray’s story of his junior year and how Jane’s arrival changes his life forever.

…I should tell you that everything I am about to write is true. It’s not one of those made-up stories that has morals and plot devices and well-crafted metaphors. History doesn’t have room for all that. Facts are facts, whether you like them or not. I’m only changing one name: hers. It just didn’t feel right to use her real name, so I’m calling her Jane, as in Jane Doe.

Ray’s story focuses on the “Before” and “After” and it won’t be difficult for readers to figure out the event to which the “After” is referring. The joy in this story comes from the characters themselves. Watching Ray try to connect with Jane because he’d “always operated under the assumption that the less [he] spoke, the better” when it came to talking to girls is a delight. In fact, across the board the dialogue in this book is terrific. I often laughed out loud or snickered. The book is reminiscent of John Green’s Paper Towns and Looking for Alaska – and I mean that as a compliment.

This is also a book that tackles some pretty weighty subjects including mental health issues and depression, the breakdown of a family (Ray’s father has buggered off to Florida) and social isolation. Anyone who has ever experienced life’s trials would certainly recognize themselves in these pages.

I loved spending time with these characters and highly recommend this book.