The Family Remains – Lisa Jewell

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Lisa Jewell has always been a dependable writer for me. I know I am going to get a well-written, page-turning, thrill of a book, usually with multiple narratives that somehow all dovetail together in a satisfying way.

The Family Remains is a stand-alone sequel to The Family Upstairs, a book that I absolutely flew through when I read it during the height of Covid. I honestly do not think that you could read this one without having read its predecessor, though, and truthfully I don’t think this one is necessary.

Siblings Henry and Lucy Lamb are the adult survivors of a traumatic childhood — their parents, Henry and Martina, fell under the spell of a con man, David Thomsen and a woman called Birdie Dunlop-Evers. I won’t say much more about that because that’s the story you really want to read. Lucy is the mother of three children, Libby, whom she had when she was a kid, Marco and Stella. Currently they live with Henry until they can move into the huge new house she’s recently purchased with her share of a giant windfall. Libby is about to head to Botswana to meet, for the first time, her father Phin (who just happens to be David Thomsen’s son and also lived in the house when all the shit went down in the first book.) Henry has always been obsessed with Phin, but hasn’t seen him in years, so he decides to tag along. Except Phin leaves Botswana and heads stateside, so Henry drops everything to chase after him. Honestly, it’s all sort of unbelievable and ridiculous. (And I hate to say that because I really do love this author.)

Seemingly unconnected to that narrative is another character called Rachel, a struggling jewelry designer who meets, randomly, Michael. After a whirlwind romance, the two marry and then that all goes to hell in a handbasket. Could not have cared less about her.

Finally, there’s Detective Inspector Samuel Owusu, the man tasked with finding the identity of a human skeleton which washes up onto the banks of the Thames. This discovery is the catalyst that is meant to kickstart this new chapter in the lives of these characters.

This story depends, I think, on an understanding of what came first because without it, this all feels like telling. In her acknowledgments, Jewell thanks the readers who begged her to write a sequel to The Family Upstairs. Perhaps some people felt like they needed to know what happened after the final pages of that book, but I was not one of them. I mean, I never feel like I waste my time when I read this author because I do really like her, but this book just didn’t work for me.

Try these ones instead: The Night She Disappeared, Invisible Girl, Watching You, I Found You, The Girls in the Garden

We Spread – Iain Reid

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Canadian novelist Iain Reid is an auto-buy author for me. A few years back I read and loved his debut I’m Thinking of Ending Things. Then I read his equally compelling novel, Foe.

Oh, Iain – your mind is a strange and wonderful place.

In We Spread, readers are introduced to Penny, a woman left alone after the death of her long term partner.

I am near the end now, and I am alone. Very old and very much alone. I have been both for some time. surrounded by the listless stacks and heavy piles of a life already lived: vinyl records, empty flowerpots, clothing, dishes, photo albums, magazines about art, drawings, letters from friends, the library of paperback books lining my shelves. It’s no wonder I’m stuck in the past, thinking about him, our days together, how our relationship started, and how it ended.

Penny leads an insular life. She has no children or extended family. She has lived in the same apartment for over fifty years, surrounded by the detritus of a life that is winding down, things that at one time “wasn’t just stuff. It all meant so much to [her]. All of it. Marrow that has turned to fat.”

After a fall, Penny is taken — by a pre-arrangement she and her partner made but that she does not remember — to Six Cedars Residence, a special care home out in the country. There are only three other residents, Pete, Ruth and Hilbert, and — as far as Penny can tell — two employees, Shelley and Jack. Shelley tells her that she will “feel at home in no time.”

And, at first, it is nice. Her room is beautiful.

I can almost feel a weight lifted off my shoulders, not having to think about objects. No debris. All that stuff that comes with obligation and duty. It hits me that I won’t be the responsible one here. No upkeep or cleaning. No laundry. No shopping. No bills or light-bulbs to change. No decision-making.

But then things start to get weird. When she has a shower, Shelley gets in the stall with her. There’s a weird rule about not being allowed outside. She starts losing time. The story’s structure, and the way the words appear on the page – short paragraphs with big gaps between – add to the breathlessness of Penny’s narrative and contribute, I think, to the reader’s own sense of unease. Holy unreliable narrator, Batman!

I read We Spread in just a few hours. I vacillated between theories about what the heck was going on, but at the end of the day, it doesn’t really matter. Reid seems to love ambiguity and I am there for it. He’s way smarter than me and that’s okay by me.

Great read.

All the Sinners Bleed – S.A. Cosby

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I am not really a reader that jumps on the hype train and I think at least 75% of my time is spent reading backlist books. Even when I do buy a popular title when it comes out, there’s no guarantee that I am going to read it straight away.

S.A. Cosby has been on my reading radar for a while and I own a copy of his novel Blacktop Wasteland, but it’s been languishing on my tbr pile for months despite its rave reviews. His newest book All the Sinners Bleed is all over the place and lots of people are talking about it, so on my most recent visit to the bookstore, I picked it up. Then I read it…in about 48 hours and when I wasn’t reading it, I was thinking about when I could get back to it.

Titus Crown is Charon County’s first Black sheriff. He’s recently returned to his hometown after some time in the FBI and he’s going to need those skills to uncover the identity of a serial killer.

When the novel opens, Titus is called to the local high school where there is an active shooter. The shooter is the son of one of his friends from high school and one of the victims is a beloved teacher, Mr. Spearman. It’s hard to make sense of the crime, but as it turns out it’s just the beginning of the horror that will grip Charon.

I love a good thriller/mystery. And I love a main character who can look after himself. Titus is 6’2″ and a former football player, so I am guessing he cuts a pretty imposing figure. He’s a no-nonsense, take-charge kind of guy, but he also has some demons of his own. There’s an incident from his days with the FBI that he alludes to, there’s a strained relationship with his younger brother, Marquis, and then there’s his love life. It’s complicated.

What makes All the Sinners Bleed so propulsive is its straight-forward plot. Cosby doesn’t waste any time igniting the powder keg, but there are other interesting things going on too. There’s the white supremacists who want to march during a town festival and the Black leader of one of the local churches who wants to prevent that march. Small town politics means that the white chairman of the board, Scott Cunningham, thinks Titus answers to him. There’s religious fanaticism and confederate apologists. And bonus: the writing is really solid. It doesn’t get in the way of the plot; it’s muscular when it needs to be but also, at times, poetic.

But there were moments like today when the true nature of existence was revealed to him. Moments when the ephemeral curtain of divine composition was pulled away and entropy strode across the stage. For all his attempts at control, days like today, when he’d seen a boy he’d known since infancy get his chest cratered, reminded him that chaos was the true nature of things.

All the Sinners Bleed is a well-written, violent, dark novel and I loved every minute of it.

Zennor in Darkness – Helen Dunmore

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In 1915, D.H. Lawrence and his wife, Frieda, moved to the Cornish coast and spent two years living in a cottage in Zennor. (You can read a little bit more about that here and see pictures of the cottage where they stayed here.)

In her debut novel, Zennor in Darkness, Helen Dunmore imagines a friendship between the Lawrences and a local girl, Clare Coyne. It is the nearing the end of World War 1, 1917, when the story takes place and suspicion and paranoia are rampant, so the fact that Lawrence’s wife is German and Lawrence himself is vehemently opposed to the war is the cause of much consternation and rumour mongering among the locals.

This is also a novel about Clare, who lives with her widowed father, and spends time with her extended family, particularly her cousins Hannah and John William. When John William returns from France, it is easy to see that the war has changed him, and the easy relationship between the cousins is forever altered.

He is lost to her. He is a thousand miles away, hearing the guns, seeing the ring of faces round him and knowing their chances.

Nothing much happens in this novel, yet it does capture a real sense of a specific time and place. I have been to St. Ives and so it was easy to imagine the windswept cliffs and natural beauty of the places Dunmore describes.

It is a landscape of irregular small fields shaped by Celtic farmers two thousand years ago. Lichened granite boulders are lodged into the hedges. They stand upright in the fields, a crop of stone. Lanes run tunnel-like between the furze down to the farms. Here, by the cottage, the lane dips and dampens and is lines with foxglove and hart’s tongue fern and slow drops of oozing water. It is so quiet here.

Like with her other works of fiction, Zennor in Darkness has a thread of the gothic and the forbidden running though it and this book is particularly melancholy because of the setting. Modern readers will have had no experience with the horrors of WW1 and what it did to communities and individuals, and although this book doesn’t take place in the trenches the book captures so much of that horrible period in history.

I am a long-time fan of Dunmore and have read several of her novels including The Greatcoat, A Spell of Winter, Talking to the Dead, Your Blue-Eyed Boy, and With Your Crooked Heart (which predates this blog and was the first book I read by her) and one collection of short stories, Ice Cream. All her work has something in common: the writing is beautiful. Dunmore began her career as a poet and it shows, but not at the expense of plot. Her work is not a case of style over substance.

A beautiful read.

Edited to add: I was delighted to talk to Shawn (of Shawn the Book Maniac) about this book. My segment starts at about 7:22.

Yellowface – R.F. Kuang

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R. F. Kuang’s novel Yellowface — a book about as buzzy as its possible to be right now — is the story of June Hayward, a struggling writer with one mediocre published novel under her belt. June is “friends” with Athena Liu, a celebrated Chinese-American novelist, who shot to fame after her debut novel was published and has since gone on to further acclaim and a Netflix deal. (Here’s how readers will know that this book is very much of the moment; it’s not enough to be published — you want to be nominated for awards, Internet famous, and optioned for a streaming service adaptation.)

The truth of the matter is, June doesn’t really like Athena all that much. Athena doesn’t have any friends and June is convinced that people find her as “unbearable” as she does.

She’s unbelievable. She’s literally unbelievable.

So of course Athena gets every good thing, because that’s how this industry works. Publishing picks a winner – someone attractive enough, someone cool and young and, oh, we’re all thinking it, let’s just say it, “diverse” enough – and lavishes all its money and resources on them.

June is not without some talent, but she’s just “brown-eyed, brown-haired June Hayward, from Philly.” No one is interested in stories by white female writers. When Athena dies accidentally (not a spoiler — the novel’s first line tells us this happens), June does the unthinkable: she steals an unfinished manuscript from Athena’s desk. The manuscript needs some work, but June can see that it is a “masterpiece.” The problem is that it’s the story of the “unsung contributions and experiences of the Chinese Labor Corps”, a subject about which June knows nothing. It’s barely even a draft, but June acknowledges that she can “see where it’s all going and it’s gorgeous.” It’s so gorgeous, that June feels that she should finish it.

I know you won’t believe me, but there was never a moment when I thought to myself, I’m going to take this and make it mine. It’s not like I sat down and hatched up some evil plan to profit off my dear friend’s work. No, seriously – it felt natural, like this was my calling, like it was divinely ordained.

This is a novel that is tuned into the publishing world, the social-media-famous landscape, and online bullies. When June/Athena’s novel is published to critical acclaim, June feels validated and deserving. There’s no imposter syndrome here because she feels as though she worked every bit as hard on the novel as Athena did. So what if she’s not Chinese (as some of the critics says). She did her research. When there is any criticism of the book, June can chalk it up to Athena’s contribution: she always knew Athena was a fraud. The only thing she had going for her was the fact that she wasn’t white.

This novel seems very timely given the trouble other writers have faced because they were writing from a point of view that was clearly not part of their experience. (American Dirt springs to mind.) If you are a voracious reader and pay attention to things that happen on social media, you’ll certainly get some of the references Kuang makes.

June isn’t a particularly likeable character– neither is Athena for that matter. June isn’t trying to hide her theft from herself or the reader, but she does spend a lot of time justifying it. I ripped through this book waiting for the other shoe to drop and loved every minute of it.

Hang the Moon – Jeannette Walls

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I wouldn’t have read past page 10 if not for the fact that Hang the Moonwas this month’s book club read. Although I read and enjoyed Jeannette Walls’ memoir The Glass Castle years ago, this is the only other book I have read by her and I certainly won’t be reading anything else. In fact, since this is a Heather’s Pick – it will be going back to the bookstore for a refund.

Sallie Kincaid is the daughter of Duke Kincaid, a larger-than-life figure in a small town in the 1920s. Sallie admires her father even though, as it turns out, he’s not really worthy of that admiration. When she is eight, she causes an accident that injures her step-bother Eddie and she is sent away to live with her Aunt Faye. When she returns to the Big House, she is 17. Do we really know what happens during that time? How she is molded by this experience? How it shapes her opinion of her father and the other members of her family? Nope.

Back at the Big House, Duke gives Sallie a job collecting the rents from all the farmers who live on his land. She’s really good at it…because she just is. She can drive a car, and shoot a gun, and also talk to people. Sallie says “it is a horrible job, grueling and dusty, grimy and greasy, thankless and endless. And I love it.” Sallie is determined to carve her own way in the world, and to win her much-adored (but undeserving) father’s approval.

Despite the accolades this book received – including a starred review from Kirkus – I thought this book was just awful. I didn’t believe any of the characters. It was an eye-rolling, over-the-top series of “shocking” deaths and familial reveals that just strained credulity.

Save your time and money.

Everything We Lost – Valerie Geary

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Valerie Geary (Crooked River) is definitely an auto-buy author for me. Although Everything We Lost wasn’t what I was expecting, I still found the book well-written and thoughtful.

Lucy Durant was just 14 when her older brother, Nolan, 16, disappeared. Although life wasn’t particularly easy for the siblings (their father left and their mother turned to alcohol), they have always been close, that is until Nolan’s former best friend, Patrick, starts paying attention to Lucy and she decides that Nolan and his interest in the stars and UFOs is just too uncool.

After Nolan goes missing, Lucy goes to live with her father and that’s where we find her, ten years later, with a stalled life. Her father, Robert, is about to remarry and he feels that it’s time for Lucy to get on with her own life.

They were kicking her out. She had seen this coming, was surprised it hadn’t happened sooner, like after she dropped out of college her freshman year, but still her eyes blurred with tears that she quickly blinked away. She wasn’t ready. She would never be ready.

At loose ends, Lucy returns to Bishop, the small California town where she grew up. She feels as though she might finally be able to unravel the tangled truth of what happened the night that her brother disappeared. That means she’s going to have to talk to her mother, from whom she’s been estranged for the past decade. It also means that she is going to have to try to remember what happened on that last night she and Nolan were together.

Lucy and Nolan take turns telling the story of what happened leading up to the night Nolan goes missing. Nolan’s narrative illustrates his growing isolation, and fascination with outer space. He is convinced of the existence of life on other planets and extraterrestrials. He spends all his time watching the sky and taking notes about what he sees. When he meets a strange and beautiful girl called Celeste, he is sure that she is from another planet.

Everything We Lost is really a coming-of-age story, even though Nolan’s disappearance is an intriguing mystery. Geary writes Lucy and Nolan’s story as believer and non-believer. From the outside looking in, it is easy to dismiss Nolan’s increasing paranoia as just that: the men in the black cars are watching him; the lights in the sky are from space ships; he imagined Celeste before she miraculously appeared in his life.

Although I have my suspicions about what happened to Nolan — and I think the clues are in the story — Geary doesn’t offer any easy answers, and I am okay with that. Everything We Lost isn’t a quick read, but I enjoyed the book.

Brother – Ania Ahlborn

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Ania Ahlborn’s novel Brother is like getting throat punched. Well, I haven’t actually ever been throat punched, but I can imagine what it’s like.

Michael Morrow is nineteen and lives with his older brother Rebel, younger sister Misty Dawn, and their parents, Wade and Claudine in a remote part of Appalachia. Another sister, Lauralynn, no longer lives at home. It is clear from the book’s opening lines that life at the Morrow house is not normal.

Michael twisted in his bed, the threadbare blanket he’d used all his life tangled around his legs. A girl was screaming bloody murder outside….Those girls usually went quiet fast. They’d yell so hard they ended up making themselves hoarse. Them’s the perks of livin’ in the wilderness, Momma had once said. You scream and scream and ain’t nobody around to hear.

It’s hard to talk about this book without spoiling the dark and sinister things that happen in this house, but I think you’ll get the idea pretty quickly. And trust me when I say – this book goes there, all the way there. And even though Michael is a part of it all, he is also an incredibly sympathetic character. His life cracks open a little bit when he meets Alice, a girl about his age who works at a local record store.

She looked like Snow White from Lauralynn’s old book of fairy tales, except a hundred times more beautiful and wearing all black, looking about as modern as the music sounded.

Meeting Alice gives Michael a sense of hope. She reminds him that the world is big and full of possibility, if he can only find a way to escape his family. But that is easier said than done. The major problem is his brother Reb, a quick-tempered drunk who is impossibly cruel and cunning. Reb easily manipulates Michael and it isn’t until the novel’s unbelievable climax that you realize just how evil he truly is.

There are no moments of levity in Ahlborn’s book; it’s as black as pitch. And that makes it sort of odd to admit that I loved it, but I really did. Despite the atrocious acts committed by Michael, I just wanted him to find a way to escape. I watched him struggle to make sense of his life and if anyone was deserving of a redemptive ending, it was certainly him.

He was starting to see how he could separate himself from the responsibility of the things he’d done in his life. The fear. The manipulation. The sense of duty that had been beaten into him.

In the sections focused on Reb, we are provided with a glimpse into how his own experiences have shaped him. It doesn’t actually make him any more likeable, though. Claudine, the book’s most reprehensible character, has a horrifying backstory, too, but I really didn’t like her.

Brother is a pulse-pounding, emotionally resonate and horrifying novel and I highly recommend it…if you have a strong stomach and aren’t prone to nightmares.

Lessons in Chemistry – Bonnie Garmus

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I don’t know what it is about hyped books, but I rarely like them as much as everyone else does. It probably says more about me than it does about the book, really. Everyone and their dog loved Bonnie Garmus’s novel Lessons in Chemistry and I was actually looking forward to reading it when it was chosen for my RL book club. Sadly, it just wasn’t for me.

The novel is about Elizabeth Zott, a brilliant woman who is a chemist without the credentials because she was forced to leave her program after being sexually assaulted by a lecherous professor. It’s the sixties and there is no recourse for her. When she files a complaint, the cops ask her if she would “like to make a statement of regret” for defending herself. It’s the 60s and that’s the world Elizabeth is living in.

When the novel opens, Emily Zott is working as the host of a cooking show called Supper at Six. She is not a natural in front of the camera and she certainly won’t play the games demanded of her by the studio execs including smiling a lot and wearing tight fitting clothes. She does, however, tap into something women seem to want: someone who sees them and understands them.

You’d never find Elizabeth Zott explaining how to make tiny cucumber sandwiches or delicate souffles. Her recipes were hearty: stews, casseroles, things made in big metal pans. She stressed the four food groups. She believed in decent portions. And she insisted that any dish worth making was worth making in under an hour.

The novel unravels Elizabeth’s story backwards from this point. We learn how she ended up, a single mother, in front of the camera. We watch as her relationship with Calvin Evans, a brilliant and award-winning chemist unfolds, from its antagonistic meet cute to its tragic ending. We watch as she struggles to be taken seriously in the man’s world of science. We watch her teach her dog, Six-Thirty, to understand human words.

Lessons in Chemistry is a book crammed with characters and ideas and lessons about chemistry equality, but none of it is subtle. The narrative isn’t just Elizabeth’s, either. We get to hear about Calvin and his personal tragedies. We even get to hear from the dog. Yep. This book tried so hard to be funny, but mostly I just rolled my eyes at how unbelievable these characters were. The ideas are sound; the delivery not so much.

I wanted to like it, but I just didn’t.

Only Love Can Break Your Heart – Ed Tarkington

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The whole time I was reading Ed Tarkington’s debut novel Only Love Can Break Your Heart, I was having this weird deja vu. I don’t know whether it was specific plot points – although the story isn’t particularly original – or just the book’s general vibe. In any case, it was very reminiscent of M.O. Walsh’s My Sunshine Away or any number of Thomas H. Cook’s mysteries. This is high praise, trust me.

The narrator of Tarkington’s novel is Richard “Rocky” Askew. He’s telling this story from some distant point in the future, but when the book opens he is seven and lives with his father, “the Old Man”, mother, Alice, and his older-by-eight-years step brother, Paul, who “had a reputation around town as a “bad kid.””

Rocky worships Paul, hangs on his every word, and follows him around like a puppy. He is equally smitten with Leigh, Paul’s girlfriend, daughter of the town’s judge. When the novel opens, Paul suggests a visit to Twin Oaks, the huge unoccupied mansion with a violent history near the Askew’s property. Turns out, someone (Brad and Jane Culver) has purchased the house and Paul is shot on the property. This incident sets off a strange chain reaction of events – perhaps too many for one book – that includes a failed business deal, a romantic tryst between a teenaged Rocky and the Culver’s adult daughter, Patricia, and a double homicide. This murder comes late in the novel and propels the novel’s final chapters forward to its tidy conclusion.

Only Love Can Break Your Heart is not a story which is driven by plot. This is a story about family, love, regret. The novel takes place, for the most part, in the 70s and 80s. Paul introduces to Rocky to music, including Neil Young, whose song “Only Love Can Break Your Heart” provides the title of book. This is a novel that is very much steeped in a time and place. That’s one of the novel’s admirable traits. Actually, there is a lot to like about this book even though sometimes I felt like I wanted more of one thing (why did Paul “kidnap” Rocky; where did Paul disappear to and why?) and less of another (the choice of Equus as the high school play felt a little too on the nose).

Still, I enjoyed my time with Rocky and although there wasn’t a huge emotional payoff at the novel’s conclusion, this was still a great read.