About Christie

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

Hello Beautiful – Ann Napolitano

Posted on September 22, 2023 by Christie

Ann Napolitano’s novel Hello Beautiful is the story of the Padavano sisters: Julia, Sylvie and twins Emeline and Cecelia who live with their parents, Ruth and Charlie in a Chicago suburb. Because she got pregnant with Julia very young, all Rose wants is for her daughters to get college degrees. Charlie, their dreamy, alcoholic, Whitman-quoting father, just wants them to be happy. And it seems they might be because they have each other.

Enter William Waters who ends up at Northwestern University on a basketball scholarship and meets Julia.

…Julia Padavano stood out in his European history seminar because her face appeared to be lit up with indignation and because she drove the professor – an elderly Englishman who held an oversized handkerchief balled in one fist – crazy with her questions.

Julia takes control of their relationship and draws him into her family life, introducing him to her younger sisters. Over the course of several decades, the sisters shift allegiances, but William is in the middle of it all.

Lots and lots of people loved this book, but I found it long and I found the characters sort of one dimensional. It takes a deft hand to traverse a rocky lifetime of family feuds and secrets, break ups and make ups. Ann Patchett always manages it. (Commonwealth, The Dutch House) I just found myself not caring too much about any of these people.

For example, Rose, the mother. After one of her daughters gives birth, she refuses to speak to her or meet the baby. When Julia gives birth, she flies off to Florida and speaks to Julia only rarely. At the novel’s conclusion – it’s happy families again. I just couldn’t quite figure out why her panties were in such a twist to begin with and this is how I felt through most of the story’s twists and turns. Are we really meant to believe that you are going to stop speaking to the people you love the most in the world for years, decades?

The novel is meant to be an homage to Little Women, with each of the sisters as one of Alcott’s famous siblings. I cared about those sisters; I didn’t care one bit about the Padavanos. There’s a lot of characters in this novel and a lot of telling too. It just wasn’t my cup of tea.

Go As A River – Shelley Read

Posted on September 18, 2023 by Christie

While perhaps not as flashy as its set-in-the-natural-world predecessor Where the Crawdads Sing, Shelley Read’s debut Go As A River is start to finish even more satisfying. (I hated the ending of Owens’s book.)

Victoria ‘Torie’ Nash is just seventeen when her story begins. She lives with her mostly silent father, mean-spirited and trouble-making 15-year-old brother, Seth, and Uncle Og, a wheel-chair bound war veteran, on a peach farm in Colorado . Yes, you heard that right: a peach farm in Colorado.

Our farm was nothing special, nor was it very big, just forty-seven acres including the barns and the house and a gravel driveway as long as a wolf’s howl. But from the barn to the back fence line our land produced the only peach grove in all Gunnison County, where the fruit grew fat and rosy and sweet.

Torie has already experienced tragedy and her life is relatively sheltered – consisting of tending to the house and garden, preparing meals for her family and farmhands, and working in the orchard. Then, one day, she meets Wilson Moon and that “was a fateful moment.” Anyone who has ever fallen in love at that age will recognize the signs.

…I knew nothing, especially not of love’s beginnings, of that inexplicable draw to another, why some boys could pass you by without notice but the next has a pull on you as undeniable as gravity, and from that moment forward, longing is all you know.

Soon Torie and Wil are meeting every chance they get and for the first time in her life, Torie feels seen and understood. But, of course, their relationship is not without its difficulties. For one thing – it’s 1948. For another, Wil is Indian and a drifter. But with Wil, Torie feels “beautiful and desirable and even a little dangerous […] a woman making choices and taking risks rather than an obedient and timid girl.”

Torie becomes Victoria through a variety of heartbreaking trials. The novel spans 20 years, but it never feels rushed or over-stuffed. For a quiet novel, I couldn’t turn the pages fast enough. I was so invested in Victoria’s story and her tenacity. She is a fully realized character whose journey is so beautifully rendered -well, I won’t be forgetting her any time soon.

Read captures the landscape, small-town life, first love, and what it is to be misunderstood and ‘other’ with a deft hand. It is clear she has a deep and abiding love for the natural world: I could smell and taste those peaches. The story was inspired, in part, by a true event – the flooding of a town in the 1960s to facilitate the building of a dam. (Another great book – and one that takes place in my neck of the woods – that turns on an event like this is The Town That Drowned by Riel Nason).

I highly recommend this book; it’s definitely in my Top 5 reads of the year.

The Song of Achilles – Madeline Miller

Posted on September 14, 2023 by Christie

Madeline Miller’s Orange Prize winning debut The Song of Achilles is one of those books that, for a while at least, everyone was talking about. I watched a student in my Young Adult Literature class gasp and weep while reading the book. I just knew that I had to get to it over the summer.

Miller reimagines Achilles’ story through the eyes of Patroclus, a son of King Menoetius. In telling the story of his birth and younger years, Patroclus says

Quickly, I became a disappointment: small, slight. I was not fast. I was not strong. I could not sing. The best that could be said of me was that I was not sickly.

When Patroclus is nine, he commits an act of violence that exiles him to Phthia, and the care of King Peleus who was “one of those men whom the gods love: not divine himself, but clever, brave, handsome, and excelling all his peers in piety.” Peleus is father to Achilles. Even if you know nothing about Greek mythology, you’ll likely know Achilles.

Despite Patroclus’s dim view of himself, Achilles finds Patroclus “surprising” and the two become fast friends.

Our friendship came all at once after that, like spring floods from the mountains. Before, the boys and I had imagined that his days were filled with princely instruction, statecraft and spear. […] One day we might go swimming, another we might climb trees. We made up games for ourselves, or racing and tumbling. We would lie on the warm sand and say, “Guess what I’m thinking about.”

It’s not long before Achilles is all that Patroclus is thinking about, and then the two become lovers – which was not a big deal during the time and may or may not be historically accurate. According to Wikipedia, “The relationship between Achilles and Patroclus is a key element of the stories associated with the Trojan War. In the Iliad, Homer describes a deep and meaningful relationship between Achilles and Patroclus, where Achilles is tender toward Patroclus, but callous and arrogant toward others. Its exact nature—whether homosexual, a non-sexual deep friendship, or something else entirely—has been a subject of dispute in both the Classical period and modern times. Homer never explicitly casts the two as lovers,^[1][2] but they were depicted as lovers in the archaic and classical periods of Greek literature, particularly in the works of Aeschylus, Aeschines and Plato.”

Miller’s story follows the two men as they go off to the Trojan war, where Achilles grows into the revered warrior it is prophesized he would become.

Of course, there’s a tragic ending for our characters – as we know going in there will be. How emotional you feel about what happens will depend on how much you care about these characters and how invested you are in their love story. I felt sort of ‘meh’ about the whole thing, to be honest.

This is a book for die-hard fans of re-tellings and Greek mythology, but I think for anyone who is looking to dip their toe into the incredibly rich water of the Greek myths, this is as good a place to start as any. Just not my thing.

Where the Forest Meets the Stars – Glendy Vanderah

Posted on September 10, 2023 by Christie

Glendy Vanderah’s debut Where the Forest Meets the Stars has its positives and its negatives. On the plus side, the premise of this story is interesting. On the negative side, it’s almost entirely dialogue with very little character development and a denouement which doesn’t quite fit the book’s quiet tone.

Joanna Teale is recovering from a preventative double mastectomy and the death of her mother who recently died from breast cancer. Joanna carries the gene mutation which makes the disease likely for her, too. She is spending her summer doing graduate research on the nesting habits of indigo buntings in rural Illinois.

Out of the woods, a little shoeless girl appears. She tells Jo that she doesn’t have a home because she’s not from Earth. She only looks like a human because she has taken over the body of a dead girl, and she’s been sent to Earth to witness five miracles.

Jo is, rightfully, suspicious, but the little girl — who says her name is Ursa — has a clever answer for all of Jo’s questions. Too clever, really, for a nine year old. When Jo calls the local police, the deputy who shows up is reluctant to get involved suggesting that whatever has caused the girl to run away can’t be any worse than what might happen to her if she’s placed in the foster care system. Jo trolls the missing children pages of the Internet, but no one appears to be looking for Ursa.

Gabe Nash — the hunky guy who sells eggs at the edge of the property next door to where Jo is staying — soon gets involved with the situation. He’s hiding out from the world disguised as helping his mother who has been diagnosed with Parkinson’s. The trio form the beginnings of a #foundfamily.

The story is driven by the mystery of who this little girl is and how her arrival changes the lives of Gabe and Jo, both of whom have been closed off from the world — and themselves — in their own way. The story, as such, is readable and Jo and Gabe’s developing feelings for each other is believable — even if they, as people, are little more than caricatures.

That’s essentially my main problem with this book: everyone is one note. The tale is mostly told in dialogue. When the big turning point happens, it’s sort of violent and unbelievable in a book that has mostly been about toasting marshmallows and fluffy kittens. The requisite happy ending seems like a given and any loose ends are tied up with exposition.

This book was gifted to me by a student who said that this is her favourite book of all time, which makes it hard for me to say anything too harsh about it. I wouldn’t have picked it up on my own and I am not sure I would have read the whole thing if the book hadn’t been a gift.

True Crime Story – Joseph Knox

Posted on September 6, 2023 by Christie

Joseph Knox’s novel True Crime Story capitalizes on the public’s insatiable appetite for, well, true crime stories. I have to admit, I can never scroll past any of the true crime videos that pop up on my social media feed.

For a hot minute, I thought True Crime Story was actually true. The novel opens with a note from the publisher claiming that this second edition “includes wider context on the previously undisclosed role of Joseph Knox in the narrative.” Knox inserts himself into the narrative based on his relationship with Evelyn Mitchell, a writer who reaches out to Knox to ask for advice on this story she is writing about the disappearance of Zoe Nolan, a nineteen-year-old University of Manchester student who leaves a party and is never seen again. In his note at the beginning of the book, Knox references his previously published novel Sirens – which, in fact, is a real book – thus my initial confusion.

True Crime Story is not based on a real person or crime. “I don’t think I used any one young woman as inspiration–if only because I was more interested in the milieu of a murder/missing person,” Knox said. “The press–good and bad–the grieving families and friends, and the ones who clearly see it as the start of their 15 minutes. There’s a lot of opportunity attached to tragedy–a grotesque kind of fame–and I think that’s what I was more interested in than anything.” (Shelf Awareness for Readers)

This novel is structured as a series of statements made by Zoe’s friends, family and other people associated with the case. Think Daisy Jones but more stabby. There is also an exchange of emails between Mitchell and Knox and a limited amount of multi-media posts and photos. Sometimes events are recollected differently by various people; therefore, we are reading the observations and memories of a group of unreliable narrators. It makes for interesting reading as you try to untangle an individual character’s motivation and perspective.

Zoe also has a twin sister, Kim, who is – by her own account – the polar opposite of Zoe.

She was the most invincible of us all, everything-proof and stunning, wearing this luminescent red jacket, ultrahot red all over. Matching red lipstick and a slightly visible red bra. Zoe was busy being noticed.

Everyone has secrets in True Crime Story. I found this novel thoroughly engaging even though the ending isn’t necessarily 100% satisfying.

The Last House on Needless Street – Catriona Ward

Posted on September 2, 2023 by Christie

Catriona Ward’s novel The Last House on Needless Street is a Russian doll of a novel and if you haven’t read it yet, you should do your very best not to be spoiled before you start.

Ted lives with his sentient cat, Olivia, on a dead end street near the woods. Sometimes his daughter, Lauren, also lives with them. The house is boarded up and triple locked and Ted rarely leaves. Certainly he has no visitors. Ted was implicated in the disappearance of a six-year-old girl eleven years ago. He calls her Little Girl With Popsicle. In the end though, he wasn’t charged because on the day she went missing he “was at the 7-Eleven all afternoon and everyone says so.”

Dee moves in next door. Her sister, Lulu, went missing at a nearby lake, and she was never found. She is convinced that Ted is responsible for her disappearance and she is determined to prove it.

Based on this rather cursory synopsis, you might be inclined to think that Ward’s book is a rather straightforward thriller, but you’d be wrong. And not just because Olivia the cat is one of the book’s narrators.

I was busy with my tongue doing the itchy part of my leg when Ted called for me. I thought, Darn it, this is not a good time. But I heard that note in his voice, so I stopped and went to find him. All I had to do was follow the cord, which is a rich shining gold today.

There is nothing straightforward about this narrative. It flips back and forth through time, revealing its secrets slowly, which makes it almost impossible to put down. Just when you think you might have things figured out, well, you won’t. Okay, maybe you will. I didn’t.

Ted is a complicated character. He says “When I have a bad day, now and then get slippery.” He sometimes records his memories with a cassette player so “they won’t disappear, even if I do.” Even though his parents have been dead for years, he often feels his mother in the room with him, her hand “cool on [his] neck.”

Maybe she is spending a while in one of the memories that lie around the house, in drifts as deep as snow. Maybe she is curled up in the cupboard beneath the sink, where we keep the gallon jug of vinegar. I hate it when I find it there, grinning in the dark, blue organza floating around her face.

The Last House on Needless Street is a beautiful puzzle of a book that is confounding and creepy, but also – strangely – heartwarming. I could not put it down and highly recommend it.

The Little Italian Hotel – Phaedra Patrick

Posted on August 29, 2023 by Christie

Although on the surface Phaedra Patrick’s novel The Little Italian Hotel might seem like the perfect book for me — someone who adores everything about Italy — I doubt I would have picked this book up on my own. It’s only because it was chosen as this month’s book club pick that I read it.

Ginny Splinter, 49, is the host of well-known radio show called Just Ask Ginny. She offers people advice on a wide variety of problems and “Throughout her fifteen years on the air, there wasn’t a problem Ginny hadn’t tried to fix….”

It’s easy for her to look at the messy lives of other people because her life is, well, perfect. She’s soon to be celebrating her 25th wedding anniversary with her husband, Adrian. Her daughter, Phoebe, is out of the house and planning her own wedding. As a surprise, Ginny has splurged and purchased a three week stay at a fancy hotel in Bologna where she and Adrian can “renew their vows…reaffirm their love and commitment to each other and…have some fun, too.”

But things don’t quite work out that way. Adrian tells her that he can’t take three weeks off and then, worse, he tells her that he needs a break from her and their marriage.

Ginny isn’t able to cancel the trip. The best she can manage is to use the credit to move to a smaller hotel and take other people. She makes a spur of the moment decision to talk about what’s happened on the air and that’s how she ends up at Hotel Splendido with Heather, 43, a school teacher; Eric, 28, a carpenter; 80-year-old Edna; and Curtis, 38, a property developer. What do these five people have in common? Heartache.

Nico and his 18-year-old daughter, Loretta, run Hotel Splendido and the arrival of five guests for three weeks is a minor miracle. “His little Italian hotel had been struggling since the pandemic, but now his five guest rooms were going to be fully occupied for three weeks in June.” Nico is the heart and soul of Splendido and while it may not be as flashy as his friend Gianfranco’s Grand Hotel Castello Bella Vista (Ginny’s original destination), it is charming and comfortable.

As the five strangers get to know each other, they start to reveal their personal struggles to each other and form a sort of de facto family, offering each other support, encouragement and solace. I mean, it sounds awesome, right?

A little too awesome, really, which I guess is my main issue with the story. Look, there is nothing wrong with this book if you like fairy tales. Like the self-help book about repairing relationships Ginny buys at the airport, The Little Italian Hotel offers trite remedies for its characters. Even Ginny realizes those easy soundbites are hokum in the end.

If I Forget You – Thomas Christopher Greene

Posted on August 25, 2023 by Christie

Coming on the heels of You Made a Fool of Death With Your Beauty, Thomas Christopher Greene’s 2016 novel If I Forget You confirmed what I already knew: I like my romance novels to be a little less fantastical. If I Forget You is my fourth novel by this author (The Perfect Liar, The Headmaster’s Wife and Envious Moon) and I think it is fair to say that he is one of my favourite writers.

This novel introduces us to Henry and Margot. Margot is as WASPish as can be (her father is a soft-drink kingpin; her mother lunches) and Henry is the son of Jewish immigrants. Their paths first cross in 1991at Bannister College, where they are both students. Margot’s father is a college benefactor; there is a building named after him. Henry arrives on a scholarship. The two meet after a poetry reading (Henry is the poet and a talented one) and are immediately smitten. More than smitten.

…she knows that tonight she will kiss him and that soon she will sleep with him and she also knows, more broadly, that if she doesn’t want to fall in love with him, she needs to decide that now.

The novel opens in 2012. Henry, a poet and lecturer at NYU, sees Margot – for the first time in 20 years – on the street in Manhattan. When their eyes meet, “the face Henry sees travels to him from a lifetime ago.” Instead of speaking to him, though, she runs away. It is from this point that their story unspools – toggling between their college days and this point in the present. Lives lived and all that.

Greene’s novel is filled with tenderness. The choices these characters make or, in some instances, are forced to make, inform their lives. Despite how young they are when they first meet, it is clear that Henry and Margot’s feelings for each other are sincere and deep, but as Henry remarks “The more you love someone, the more that person will eventually break your heart.”

Margot is also introspective. She is married to the bland but kind Chad, and has two almost adult children. Her son, Alex, causes her to get “nostalgic for the time of life he is occupying” although “part of her hates herself for this, the always looking back.”

If I Forget You is a quiet novel filled with joy and melancholy and hope. I loved both main characters and how, while their lives were filled with missteps, they managed to find each other again.

Highly recommended.

You Made a Fool of Death with Your Beauty – Akwaeke Emezi

Posted on August 21, 2023 by Christie

Akwaeke Emezi’s novel You Made a Fool of Death with Your Beauty is not the book I thought it was going to be. What did I think it was going to be? Hmmm. Good question. Given the accolades (NYT Notable Book, NCAACP Image Award for Outstanding Literary Work) and positive reviews, I thought I was going to get a relatively serious story about overcoming grief…with a side of romance. What I got was a straight-up romance novel ripped from the Erotica 101 handbook. And there’s nothing wrong with that, if that’s your thing…but it’s not really the sort of book I am interested in reading anymore. That’s on me, not on Emezi.

Twenty-nine year old Brooklyn-based visual artist Feyi Adekola is still grieving the tragic death of her husband, Jonah. It’s not something she likes to talk about; it was “an easy secret for Feyi to keep,” but she’s been stuck in this endless cycle of grief for the last five years. Her BFF Joy thinks it’s time she got back out there, and that’s how she meets Milan and then his friend, Nasir.

There’s an immediate connection between between Feyi and Nasir, and Feyi “felt like she was in the path of something, but she wasn’t sure what.” Still, she’s reluctant to move too quickly, and Nasir suggests that they be friends first, which suits her fine. A few weeks into the relationship, Nasir invites Feyi to fly to his family home in the Caribbean. Through his connections, he’s secured her a spot in a gallery show and besides, his father and sister live there and she could get to know them. It isn’t until they are on the plane that Nasir reveals that his father is Alim Blake, a celebrity chef with two Michelin stars.

As soon as Feyi sees Alim she feels, “a twinge of attraction unfurling in her stomach.” She can barely meet his eyes, let alone be in the same room with him. She and Nasir are not sleeping together, and it’s clear once she meets Alim that they never will.

You Made a Fool of Death with Your Beauty leans into familiar romance conventions. Releasing breaths characters didn’t know they were holding and men commenting on how tight the women are — that sort of thing. There was one scene that actually made me burst out laughing. Feyi apparently didn’t know what julienning meant and…this is where my 24-year-old son said, “No, tell me he didn’t stand behind her and put his hands over hers to guide them!” He’s definitely not a romance reader, but he saw that one coming a mile away. So, yeah, this book is filled with the requisite romance writing quirks. Beautiful people in a beautiful setting eventually having beautiful, mind-blowing sex.

Perhaps I am cynical about romance now, but I am not sure that’s it. Alim and Feyi have a connection because Alim is also widowed, although his wife died 20 years ago. And sure, they talk about their loss and the impact it’s had on their lives, but mostly this is a book about Feyi wondering whether this thing she feels is real. Nasir soon becomes a bit player in the story because the heart wants what it wants.

I guess I like my romances to be a little less ripped from the Romance 101 playbook. More The Paper Palace than well….most of the spicy romance book on BookTok these days. That said, I suspect that loads of people will love this book. It wasn’t my cup of romantic tea, but I doubt I’m the book’s intended audience.

Notes on a Silencing – Lacy Crawford

Posted on August 17, 2023 by Christie

At just 15, Lacy Crawford is sexually assaulted by two older boys at the New England boarding school that she attends. Notes on a Silencing is Crawford’s memoir of how this event impacted her life in the short term, but also how this event was part of a much more insidious instance of coverups at the prestigious school.

…it took a very long time to find the right name for what happened to me. I was too stunned to think rape when I pleaded with them not to have sex with me, though rape, in the traditional sense, was precisely what I meant to avoid. I had been raised to believe that by every metric, the most serious thing a girl could do was have a penis in her vagina. Not even Mary the mother of Jesus had done that. Certainly I had not. It had not occurred to me what else these two boys might do.

The memoir begins with the heinous assault and then invites the reader into Crawford’s life at St. Paul’s before this event. In many ways, Crawford was a typical teenager: studious, athletic, awkward and graceful in equal measure. Like many teenagers, Crawford is looking for a way to belong and longs to be both appealing and invisible to the opposite sex. After the assault, though, an event which she keeps to herself, Crawford is overcome with anxiety. She believes that what happened to her is her fault and many of the decisions she made in the following months lead to more emotional damage.

As much as Notes on a Silencing is about this one event and its aftermath, this is also the story of one girl’s journey through the land-mined path from adolescence to adulthood. It is about the casual cruelty girls often sling at each other, and the small kindnesses people can extend especially when you least expect them to. It is also very much about institutional abuse, even more appalling in this case because St. Paul’s is a well-respected religious school that prides itself on turning out graduates headed for the Ivy League. Crawford was failed over and over.

Twenty-five years after Crawford’s graduation from St. Paul’s, she reads about another assault on campus. There is a plea for information and Crawford tells her story. She is contacted by detectives and her case is added to what turns out to be many cases of sexual assault which were covered up on the campus. I’d love to say that Crawford gets her day in court, but that’s not what happens.

It’s so simple, what happened at St. Paul’s. It happens all the time.

First, they refused to believe me. Then they shamed me. Then they silenced me. On balance, if this is a girl’s trajectory from dignity to disappearance, I say it is better to be a slut than to be silent.

Notes on a Silencing is a powerful, frustrating, devastating and beautifully written story about one girl’s experience which will speak to every single woman out there.