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First of all, I want to go all fangirl on you because you had Ruta Sepetys in the CBC studio last week and I went with a couple teachers and some students from HVHS to hear her speak at the library on Thursday night. Writers are rock stars in my book and any personal interaction you get to have with them is so squee-worthy.

I haven’t read her other books, but I did read Between Shades of Gray with my grade nine class this year and I have to say it was a remarkable experience. Even students – mostly boys – who weren’t readers enjoyed that book and in fact read way ahead of the class. So, you know there’s something good going on when that happens. I know, too, that one of my colleagues at St. Mac’s said they’d walk through the halls during the 20 minutes they’d set aside for the school to read and there was silence…and they mentioned how gratifying it was to hear students talking about the book in the halls at lunch and break. That is solid-gold to teachers. Her talk at the library was lovely and she is so warm. She took pics with our kids (in the photo below she is on the far left), selfies even, and answered their questions. She was terrific.

Okay – with that out of the way, let’s talk about the books.

I want to talk about books of a type – you know how a book will hit it big and then all of a sudden there are a bunch of similar books on the market. So, for example, everyone was talking about The Girl on the Train by Paula Hawkins and I jumped on that bandwagon and I liked the book – didn’t LOVE the book. But then all of a sudden there were all these books with unreliable narrators and so I thought I would talk about a couple of those today.

Still Mine – Amy Stuart

Stuart is a Canadian writer and this is her first book. It’s the story of Clare O’Dey, a woman on the run from her abusive husband, Jason, who ends up making a deal with the man he’s sent to find her. In exchange for her freedom, she has to go to this tiny mining town – I’m going to say it’s Northern BC or Alberta – and find a woman called Shayna who has gone missing. Clare finds herself wholly invested in the search for Shayna and it makes a weird sort of sense because Shayna’s past is as messed up as Jason’s. The town, Blackmore, is peopled with all sorts of damaged and dangerous characters including Shayna’s ex-husband, the town’s drug dealer and even Shayna’s parents.
The Widow – Fiona Barton

It’s the story of Glen and Jean Taylor, a pretty average 30-something couple in England whose lives are totally upended when Glenn is accused of kidnapping a little girl named Bella. When the novel opens Glenn is dead – hit by a car – and Jean has decided to tell her story to the press. Although we also spend a little time with Bella’s mother and the police detectives who are investigating the case and the reporter, it’s really Jean’s story – whether you believe her or not – that ties everything together. I should warn listeners that the subject matter of The Widow might be objectionable to some – it deals with online pornography. However, there is nothing graphic here – I promise. Just a lot of skeezy characters.

Finally, just to balance it out a YA book with a character you can trust.

And We Stay by Jenny Hubbard

This is a beautiful novel that marries prose and poetry – a technique Hubbard used in her novel Paper Cover Rock, which I also highly recommend. In this book, sixteen-year-old Emily Beam has been whisked away from her home to attend The Amherst School for Girls. The reasons for this abrupt change have to do with a tragedy which occurred back home and that tragedy is revealed through flashbacks and through the poems Emily writes. Ad We Stay won quite a few awards and is, imho, deserving of them. This is a quiet novel that treats its subject matter and its characters with care and respect. Plus – there’s Emily Dickinson, so come on.

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So usually when I am preparing for a visit to Info AM, I try to think of a theme – something to hold all my bookish thoughts together. That’s probably the teacher in me – trying to make connections. Not going to happen today – today I just want to talk about some books I’ve read recently that I’ve really loved.

Everything I Never Told You – Celeste Ng

So this was my book club pick this year. I had such a hard time picking because I left it really late. This book was on my tbr shelf already and there were loads of copies at the book store and it had received copious praise, so it met all the requirements. It was an amazing book.

The book opens “Lydia is dead” and then it unspools the story of Lydia Lee, her younger sister, Hannah, and older brother Nathan and their parents Marilyn and James. It’s 1970s Ohio. Lydia’s story can’t be told without understanding Marilyn and James’ story…so we hear about Marilyn who is brilliant and won a scholarship to Radcliff. She’s on her way to becoming a doctor when she meets James, a fourth year graduate student in history. He’s Chinese. They fall in love, in part, because they recognize the “otherness” in each other. It’s the 50s, remember. So, Marilyn’s dreams have been deferred and she hoists all her failed ambition on Lydia. This is a tremendously powerful novel about family – and the things that we keep from the people we love the most. You know, we often talk about the transformative power of fiction – the ability of a story to just get under your skin and shake something loose and this book certainly did that for me. I came of age in the 70s, so I recognized the pop culture references and the whole book just felt familiar to me. But beyond that, it’s a mystery – like, what happened to Lydia – but it’s also about our need to follow our own path, which is sometimes very difficult to do. I felt this book in my heart and my gut. So good.

Forgive Me, Leonard Peacock – Matthew Quick

Quick might be better known for his novel (and the subsequent film) Silver Linings Playbook. This is a YA novel about a tricky subject – a book that, I think, has the potential to articulate something many of its readers might not be able to talk about. What do I do when life it just utterly miserable and I no longer have the will to go on?

Well, the answer to that question for 18-year-old Leonard Peacock is to pack his grandfather’s P38 WW2 handgun in his bookbag and head to school where he first intends to kill his former best friend, Asher, and then take his own life.

You know sometimes you start reading a book and you just fall in love with a character – yep, I loved Leonard from the start. He’s wry and self-deprecating and brutally honest. He’s also in terrible emotional distress. His mother has virtually abandoned him to pursue a career in fashion design; his father – a former rock star – is on the lam from the IRS. Leonard, although he is 18, is pretty much left to his own devices. So, on the day he decides to end it, he wraps some gifts and sets off to first visit the handful of people who have made a difference in his life including the old man who lives next door with whom he watches classic films and the one teacher at his school who actually looks him in the eye. Think about that – going through your whole day without anyone really looking at you.

Anyway – this is a fine book, quirky and funny and heart-breaking and hopeful. High school can be really hard for some kids – it seems interminable and pointless and teenagers have interior lives to which adults are not privy. This book would certainly speak to those kids. Loved it.

I ran out of time and therefore couldn’t talk about the next two books:

For my third choice I was torn between two books I read – one YA and one not, so I am going to briefly talk about them both because I couldn’t decide. Of their type they were both really good.

The first one is The Book of You by Claire Kendall.

I started it and finished it pretty much in one sitting. The story is not original – woman has a one night stand with a guy she works with who turns out to be a psychopathic stalker times a million. It’s a really timely story because woven into Clarissa’s narrative is the court case she’s on jury duty for – a woman with a dodgy past who has been raped and the guys who did it are on trial. Kendall has some interesting observations about victim blaming. Not only is Clarissa reluctant to go to the police until she has gathered sufficient evidence against her stalker, we also have to hear the horrific details about the rape-victim…and her past being called into question as a way to dismiss the charges against her attackers. Total page-turner, well-written, I’d warn readers that it is graphic.

Second book is The Replacement by Breanna Yovanoff

This was quite unlike anything I’ve read in the YA genre. Sort of a hybrid horror/fantasy novel. Sixteen year old Mackie is a replacement. He was swapped with the real Mackie when they were infants. He can’t stand blood or metal or go to church. The reason for the swap is a weird bargain the townsfolk have made with the House of Mayhem, a strange underground world ruled by The Morrigan, a child-like creature. In return for human babies, Gentry flourishes. But then when the little sister of a classmate goes missing, Mackie has to decide just how human he really is. It’s a creepy, compelling story that was quite unlike anything else I’ve ever read…which is cool in YA because genres tend to come in waves.

So, that’s what I’ve been reading recently. What’s on your nightstand?

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So, I recently moved. I moved a lot as a kid and a young adult; I probably didn’t appreciate how much work it was for my mom to pack up a whole household, kids and pets and move as much as we did.  I’ve been in the same place for eight years and the amount of crap my kids and I had accumulated was daunting, but I figured that now was the time to divest myself from some of the junk we no longer used or wanted. But I am a terrible hoarder, so how was I ever going to part with some of this stuff.

Enter The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up by Marie Kondo

So Marie Kondo is a Japanese cleaning consultant who claims that if you adopt her “KonMari” method of decluttering, you’ll never be untidy again. Her secret is to discard and then organize and she offers all sorts of tips on everything from how to fold your clothes (apparently we all do it wrong) to organizing your closet to getting rid of ephemera (and don’t we all have way to much paper even in a so-called paperless society)…and then here’s the one I needed help with – books. I guess, to a degree, Marie and I parted company on books.

So, I moved into my new place and pretty much the first thing that had to happen was I needed bookshelves built, which my amazing brother Tom did for me. Now, if I was going to follow Marie’s advice, I’d put all my books on the floor (as it turns out – that’s where they all were – in piles all over the floor) – she’s big on having people put stuff on the floor, spread out so you can see it, but also so you have to pick up the book to put it back on the shelf. Here’s her criteria for making the decision about whether or not the book goes back on the shelf: decide “…whether or not it gives you a thrill of pleasure when you touch it.”

Kondo herself only keeps about 30 books at a time – which is horrifying to me, that’s about the amount I have stacked on my bedside table – but I think her advice is generally sound. She would definitely take issue with my tbr shelf because her take on that is when it comes to the claim that you will get around to reading a book “sometime” is that “sometime” never comes. Kondo and I have differing opinions on that, I guess.

This book would be a great little gift for someone who needs to do some decluttering and she really does make the claim that if you follow her advice, you’ll never be buried under your junk again.

So, once I got all my books on my shelves…they all sparked joy, every one of them, btw…I picked a book from my tbr shelf (I think just to show Ms. Kondo that I actually DID read those books – eventually) and that books was

Reconstructing Amelia by Kimberly McCreight

This is a book about a high-powered lawyer who lives with her daughter Amelia in Brooklyn. She’s a single mom and a bit of a workaholic, but she and her daughter, who is 15, have a great relationship. Her daughter attends a prestigious private school where she’s a top student and athlete.  The book opens with Kate getting a call from the school that Amelia is being suspended for plagiarizing an essay and Kate has to go pick her up from the school. By the time she arrives, Amelia is dead – which, not a spoiler, it’s on the back of the book. McCreight unspools the story, not only from Kate’s point of view, but also through Amelia’s first person narrative and it’s a real page-turner as Kate tries to figure out what happened to her daughter and Amelia tries to navigate the tricky underbelly of teenage cliques.

This book was scary, actually, because it really highlighted how little we know  – as parents – about the lives of our kids, even when we have a good relationship with them…and a lot of that has to do with social media, cell phones…so this is a timely story, a family drama and sort of a thriller all rolled into one.

Then I picked a book off my tbr shelf at school…yes, I have one…it’s a thing

Complicit by Stephanie Kuehn

So I read Kuehn’s book Charm & Strange earlier this year and loved that book and Complicit is pretty dang good, too. Kuehn actually has a doctorate in clinical psychology, which is why I think she manages to create such compelling damaged characters. In this instance, a story about siblings Cate and Jamie, who were placed in foster care s children after the shooting death of their mom. Years later, Cate ends up being sent to juvie after she burns down a neighbour’s barn…and then a couple years after that, she comes back to town and throws her brother’s life into turmoil. It’s a total page turner, with complex characters, excellent writing.

Although I am not completely settled into my new place, my books are in their rightful place and looking at them gives me great joy.