The Serpent King – Jeff Zentner

Posted on September 27, 2024 by Christie

The Serpent King by Jeff Zentner has been in my classroom library for ages, but a friend on Litsy recommended I read it based on some other recent books I have read and enjoyed (Shiner, Midnight is the Darkest Hour).

No question – The Serpent King will be in my Top Ten books of the year. It’s a five-star read.

Dill, Travis and Lydia live in Forrestville, Tennessee – a backwater, Bible belt town near Nashville. In their senior year of high school, the three are each other’s besties. Actually, they are each other’s only friends.

Dill Early is the son of a disgraced preacher, currently serving time for possessing child pornography. He and his mother live in abject poverty, buried under the weight of the debts which have piled up due to the senior Early’s incarceration and a car accident which has left Dill’s mother suffering from chronic pain. Dill worries constantly about his faith, his future, and his unrequited feelings for Lydia.

Travis Bohannon is a 6’6″ dork. He “wore a necklace with a chintzy pewter dragon gripping a purple crystal ball” and often carried a staff and a battered copy of a book from the Bloodfall series. He belonged to the same church as Dill – back before Early sr. was arrested – and that’s where the two became friends. Travis’s older brother Matthew had been killed in the Middle East and the loss of his older brother had soured Travis’s father even more towards Travis. He is a truly odious human.

Lydia Blankenship runs a successful fashion blog called Dollywould, named after one of her sheroes, Dolly Parton. She takes crap from no one, but she is often the target of the school bullies, who poke at her for everything from her appearance to her Internet success. Every time she claps back against the asshats in her school, I just wanted to high-five her. Lydia is different from Dill and Travis though in that she lives in a nice house (her father is the town dentist) and her parents support her dreams. Her parents are also two of the only adults in this novel I actually didn’t want to run over with my car. Lydia speaks her mind and she wants more for her friends, particularly Dill.

So, it’s their last year of high school. Time to start thinking about the future. Lydia’s life is planned. She has a list of schools she’s gunning for; NYU at the top of the list. Travis intends to stay in Forrestville and work at the family lumber yard. Dill’s mother wants him to work full time at the grocery store and help pay off the family debt. In fact, she’d be just as happy if he quit school now and went straight to work.

I cannot tell you how much I loved these three teenagers. Their dreams (or lack thereof), their insecurities, their successes, their complicated family dynamics and, most of all, their love for each other. These characters are so heartbreakingly human that when tragedy strikes, it rips your heart out.

When I think about the qualities of a five star book, I am looking for a great story, great writing, realistic characters. Icing on the cake is a book that makes me laugh – which I did. Sometimes these characters, particularly Lydia, say amusing, quippy things. The needle goes up a notch – don’t ask me why – if a book makes me cry. The Serpent King definitely made me cry.

Growing up is hard enough without having all the cards stacked against you. I have never hoped for the wellbeing of characters, particularly Dill and Travis, more than I did in this book. That this is Zentner’s debut is astounding. It’s a knockout.

Highly times a thousand recommended.

Brother – David Chariandy

Posted on September 23, 2024 by Christie

New-to-me Canadian writer David Chariandy’s novel Brother is an elegy to family. Published in 2017, this novel topped all the Best Of lists and won a Writers’ Trust of Canada award, as well as being nominated for the Giller. I have had it on my TBR shelf for several years, and in an attempt to tackle some of my backlist, I finally read it.

Michael and his older brother Francis live with their Trinidadian mother in The Park, a “cluster of low-rises and townhomes and leaning concrete apartment towers” – a not-so-nice suburb of Toronto. Their father is long gone.

When the novel opens, Michael is meeting with his friend, Aisha. They haven’t seen or spoken to each other in a decade and her arrival opens Michael up to the trauma of an event that transpired many years ago – one that he and his mother have never gotten over. This tragedy is alluded to early on in the book, but I’ll be vague about it here.

Brother toggles back and forth between Aisha’s return – which dredges up the past – and the past itself.

Francis was my older brother. His was a name a toughened kid might boast of knowing, or a name a parent might pronounce in warning. But before all of this, he was the shoulder pressed against me bare and warm, that body always just a skin away.

Francis and Michael are close, especially as young boys when they are often left to fend for themselves as they are left alone while their mother works. Their mother worked as a cleaner, and often took on extra work to try to make ends meet.

She was never happy about abandoning us, and if she learned the evening before of an impending night shift, she would spend precious sleep time cooking and worrying over the details of meals and activities for the following day.

Chariandy captures the poverty, violence, and hopelessness of the lives of the people who live in The Park, but he also captures the sibling bond, the friendships and the hope for a better future. I particularly admired the subtlety of Francis’s relationship with Jelly, a wannabe DJ.

When Aisha arrives back at The Park, she tries to unclog the grief Michael and his mother have been stifled by for many years. And by allowing Michael to finally tell his story, perhaps she has succeeded.

Beautiful writing and a timely story about police violence and the immigrant experience make Brother worth checking out.

The Offing – Roz Nay

Posted on September 19, 2024 by Christie

I have had good luck and so-so luck with Canadian writer Roz Nay. I LOVED Our Little Secret and I enjoyed reading The Hunted, although it was a little bit less successful overall. Her latest novel, The Offing swings more to the so-so side of the scale. It was certainly an easy book to read and it definitely had its heart-pounding moments, but it was also slightly unbelievable – especially the big reveal.

So, Ivy and her bestie, a beautiful model named Regan, have escaped their lives in New York and are currently backpacking in Australia. Ivy, especially, had a need to get out of NYC. Her elicit relationship with one of her professors has imploded and now he seems to be stalking her. She needs to get off the grid, so she convinces Regan to take a job crewing on a sail boat bound for Darwin. The boat’s owner, Christopher, and his eleven-year-old daughter, Lila are on a Christmas Break adventure. The only other passenger will be Desh, the boat’s cook (and also a new hire.)

Christopher gives off total Dad vibes, and the fact that his daughter (and her cat) is with him, makes him seem even more harmless, so the girls sign on and off they go. Of course, nothing is ever that simple in this type of novel, right?

First of all, Ivy’s creepy ex-lover seems to have made his way to Australia. Secondly, Lila suffers from night terrors. Christopher seems indecisive and odd. Desh is friendly and hot and Ivy is drawn to him, but her insecurities over Regan’s physical appearance – what dude wouldn’t find her more attractive? – causes a strain in the girls’ relationship. Then there’s Blake Coleman, skipper of The Salty Dog, a boat that keeps showing up.

As is the way with these books, you are supposed to be thrown off by everyone’s shady behaviour – and there is certainly plenty of it in this book. There are some truly tense moments and some instances where I turned the pages super fast because…what’s going to happen?! But…

That denouement just didn’t totally work for me.

That said, The Offing is a twisty, fun and entertaining book. It’s perfect if you are looking for something fast-paced and not too difficult to read…which, as I was returning to another school year when I picked it up, made it the perfect book for me.

Little Eve – Catriona Ward

Posted on September 15, 2024 by Christie

Catriona Ward’s novel The Last House on Needless Street was fabulous, so I snapped up a couple more of her novels for my tbr shelf and Little Eve was the first to be read.

This is the story of Evelyn, Little Eve, who lives with her “family” on Altnaharra, an island off the coast of Scotland. This family consists of her “Uncle”, two adult women, Nora and Alice, and her “siblings” Dinah, Abel and Baby Elizabeth – who is actually eleven. This de facto family is hunkered down on Altnaharra waiting for the arrival of the Adder. Power is transferred from one person to another by way of Hercules, a snake, that will choose one of them to “see with his eyes”.

Yeah – it’s a cult.

When the novel opens, James MacRaith, town butcher, has been called to deliver a side of beef to Altnaharra – a rather unusual request, but everyone in Loyal knows that what happens on the island is unusual anyway. When he arrives, he finds the gate at the end of the causeway open and Jamie enters, eventually making his way up to the house where he follows the “trail of mud and blood” to a ghastly scene.

How these events come to happen and the aftermath that follows is the plot of Little Eve.

Did you think you had heard the last from me? No, I have more gifts for you; more days I do not need. It has been ten years but the memories are still bright.

This is a book that I wish I had read in one or two settings because at some points I sort of got lost in its labyrinth. I enjoyed the writing and subject matter (I am a big fan of books about cults) but I have to admit that I didn’t always catch how I got to where I ended up. That’s on me, not on the author. This book is atmospheric and compelling.

Real Americans – Rachel Khong

Posted on September 11, 2024 by Christie

Rachel Khong’s novel Real Americans spans many years (1966-2030) and is told from the point of view of three characters: Lily, Nick, and May.

After a short intro about an event in 1966, the novel fast forwards to 1999, where we are introduced to Lily, who works as an unpaid intern for an online travel magazine. At the company’s holiday party, she meets Matthew, who, despite being “distractingly hot – athletic but not vacant, a muscular nerd” is not her type.

Matthew, it turns out, is actually a great guy and the first part of the novel follows their relationship, break up and make up. Despite the fact that his family is insanely rich and her parents came to America from China with little more than the clothes on their backs (and jobs as research scientists), Matthew and Lily marry and have a son, Nico/Nick.

In Nick’s section, he and his mother are living on a small island off the coast of Washington. Nick is now fifteen and has no idea who his father is. Nick also doesn’t look even remotely Chinese, having inherited none of his mother’s traits. Instead, he is blonde-haired and blue-eyed and tall. Nick can’t figure his physical appearance out, other than to assume it as “some bizarre accident of genetics.”

The story Lily has always told him is that his father wanted nothing to do with them, but when Nick’s best friend Timothy suggests they do DNA tests, he is reunited with Matthew. Matthew has a different version of what happened than he had been told by his mother and Nick “found himself trusting him over [his] mom. Hs face was so like [his] own the [he] believed, correctly or not, [he] knew it.” Thus begins a complicated relationship between father and son.

Finally, we have May’s story. She is Lily’s mother. Her story takes us back to Mao Zedong’s China. The May readers are introduced to in Lily’s part of the book seems cold and distant, unloving even. This section of the book allows us to see how she grew up and ultimately escaped Communist China. It certainly paints her in a much more sympathetic light.

Real Americans is quite a long book, almost 400 pages, but I enjoyed my read. Although the story didn’t quite land for me and I often felt that I didn’t understand the characters or their motivations enough to be fully invested in them, I still enjoyed my reading experience overall.

Not in Love – Ali Hazelwood

Posted on September 7, 2024 by Christie

Not in Love is my first book by the prolific smut-for-science-geeks writer Ali Hazelwood. Traditionally, this would not at all be the sort of book I would gravitate towards for a variety of reasons (age of the protagonists being the main one), but someone on Litsy mentioned that this book was angsty, so I thought I would give it a go. Not angsty, but not the worst book of this type I have read.

Rue Siebert, a hot scientist – biotech engineer to be perfectly accurate – works for a kick-ass female CEO at Kline, a company devoted to food science. Rue doesn’t have time for relationships, so she uses a dating app to find men to have sex with (well, not intercourse, but everything else; she doesn’t enjoy intercourse).

She meets Eli Killgore, also smokin’ hot, for one of these mutually beneficial no-strings hook-ups, but before they can take their instant attraction upstairs, Vincent – Rue’s unstable brother – ambushes Rue in the hotel bar and Eli has to white knight him off the premises. Nothing kills a pre-sex buzz like a sibling. Eli and Rue part ways without even so much as a kiss.

Of course, that’s not the last these two will see of each other. When Rue arrives at work the next day, she finds out that Kline is under the threat of a hostile take-over and who is part of the team trying to do this? Yep – Eli Killgore (and what is with that surname?)

Anyway, Not in Love is relatively plotless (unless you count some buzz words and science jargon as plot). This is really about two people who are falling in love despite all the obstacles in their way (fraternizing with the enemy being top of the list). What saves this book for me is that both Rue and Eli were actually likeable characters and their sexcapades weren’t totally cringe-y.

Would I read another book by this author? Probably not. But if banter, sex, science and two hot people are your poison, you could certainly do a lot worse.

Books and Backroads

Posted on September 3, 2024 by Christie

During the summer, CBC’s Information Morning, which is hosted separately in Fredericton, Moncton and Saint John, collapses into one provincial show. One of the segments, Books and Backroads, heads out to smaller New Brunswick communities to talk to readers about books that have either been written by NB authors, or take place in New Brunswick.

This summer I was invited to write stories to accompany the segments that aired throughout the summer. Now that the show is returning to business as usually, I thought I’d give these New Brunswick books/authors and the segment itself one more look.

I’ve linked to the stories I wrote, plus the segment as it aired on the radio. I have also provided other pertinent info about the books, in case you want to check them out yourself.

Enjoy!

The first story, which is an overview of the segment, was not written by me. Here it is.

From Hillsborough, N.B.