Such a Pretty Girl – T. Greenwood

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Although T. Greenwood is a prolific writer, Such a Pretty Girl is the first of her books I have read. It’s one of those books where nothing happens–I mean this is a book driven by character, not plot–and yet it is absolutely riveting.

When the novel opens, Ryan Flannigan is counting down the last few days before her daughter, Sasha, heads to the West coast to start college. Ryan’s childhood bestie, Gilly, keeps sending her urgent texts before finally just sending her a link to a story from the Times. Ryan is shocked to discover that the story is about her mother, Fiona, from whom Ryan is mostly estranged. Worse, the story is about the discovery of a very personal photo of Ryan when she was just a girl that was found in the possession of Zev Brenner, a billionaire who has been charged with sex trafficking and pedophilia a la Jeffrey Epstein. This news is followed by even more shocking news and Gilly begs Ryan to come back to New York City.

Such a Pretty Girl bounces between the 1970s and present day 2019. As a child, Ryan lived with her mother, Fiona, in Lost River, Vermont, home to the Lost River Playhouse where Fiona was an aspiring actress. Lost River was meant to be a “summer respite for actors who worked in the city and a place for aspiring actors to apprentice themselves.” Fiona had been there since 1965 and she and Ryan lived there full time. Gilly and his family also live at Lost River, but only in the summer. Gilly’s father is a working actor and his mother an artist in New York.

Fiona decides to leave Lost River and go into the city to give acting a more serious try, but in the end it is Ryan, who is just ten, who is discovered–first as a model and then as an actress. This strains the relationship between mother and daughter. The time the novel spends in NYC

After Gilly gives Ryan the news about the discovery of the photograph, he begs Ryan to come back to Westbeth, an apartment building populated by dancers and actors and artists and, famously, Jackie O. It’s a real place, actually. It’s worth reading about its interesting history and it is definitely a character in Greenwood’s book. So, in the present day Ryan and her daughter head back to the city and to the place that she, for a very important time in her life at least, called home. There are matters to attend to, and ghosts to exorcise.

This book is very evocative of a time and place and as someone who loves New York and grew up in the 1970s, I found that very compelling. I also loved Ryan’s recollection of her childhood, the perspective skewed through the lens of adulthood. When she recalls her first major ad campaign (for Love’s Baby Soft, a mainstay of every teenage girl in the 1970s) she says

I am wearing fake eyelashes, pink rouge on my cheeks, and lip gloss so thick and shiny you can almost see your reflection in my pout. I am holding a pale pink stuffed bunny. But you can’t tell if I am a child made up to look like an adult, or an adult made to look like a child. When I found the ad years later, it felt like someone had punched me in my throat.

And if you are wondering where Ryan’s mother was in all this, yeah, that’s kind of the point.

This is a terrific, well-written book. Highly recommended.

Broken Country – Clare Leslie Hall

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I am clearly more of a sucker for the hype than I originally thought. I watch a decent amount of BookTube and follow a few bookish accounts on Insta. (I ditched Facebook a few months ago, but haven’t abandoned this Meta dumpster fire product yet – mostly because I have found it less dominated by advertising.) I have been seeing Clare Leslie Hall’s book Broken Country lauded all over the place and, of course, it’s a Reese’s Book Club pick. (I love that Reese is such a bookworm and that she is turning these books into movies and series.) The clincher for me was the book had been compared to The Paper Palace and regular readers of this blog will know that that was my favourite book of 2021. (Miranda Cowley Heller, author of The Paper Palace, even blurbed Broken Country.)

It is 1968 and Frank and Beth are happily married, living a quiet but busy life on their farm in North Dorset. They have had some recent heartbreak, the loss of their son, Bobby, but they’re healing and they have each other and Frank’s younger brother, Jimmy, who is like a little brother to Beth.

In all the fantasies over the years of meeting Gabriel Wolfe again, driving his child and his dead dog home was never one of them.

So, who is this man who upsets the apple cart of Beth’s life? They’d met thirteen years before, when they were teenagers and Beth was out walking and ended up on private land owned by Gabriel’s wealthy family. Beth has heard of him through the small-town grapevine. He was “the famously handsome boy from the big house.” Of course he’s beautiful (they always are), but Beth also remarks that “He’s not my type at all.” (Yeah, totally believable.)

Their relationship is swift and intense and all-consuming, until it isn’t (for reasons I will let you discover on your own, but it’s pretty standard Romance 101 fare). After things end with Gabriel, Beth returns home and into the waiting arms of Frank, who has been carrying a torch for her since they were kids. They build a life together and it’s a life that Beth loves. Until Gabriel resurfaces at his family home, Meadowlands.

Look, Broken Country, was easy peasy to read. I finished it in a couple sittings. I am a sucker for anything angsty and when I started this book I was sure it was going to fill my angst cup to overflowing.

You can live a whole lifetime in a final moment. We are that boy and girl again with all of it ahead, a glory-stretch of light and wondrous beauty, of nights beneath the stars.

Broken Country starts with a murder trial, and so that propels the book along because it’s a while before you learn the circumstances of who and why. There are a couple twists you might not see coming. The writing is decent. The characters are all good people trying to make the best choices they can under the circumstances they are presented with. The issue is that I just didn’t understand the insta-love between Gabriel and Beth, like, at all. And truthfully, I wasn’t even really rooting for them. We are shown their relationship in flashbacks, but it wasn’t anything earth shattering. Same with Beth’s relationship with Frank. By all accounts, he’s a top-shelf guy. And he sticks by Beth even when some might say he shouldn’t. And then there’s Jimmy – whose reaction to business that is not his is, imho, over the top.

Lots of people have gushed about the inherent heartbreak in the story of these people, but I wasn’t moved. I could see all the moving parts, I was just never invested. I think loads of people will (and have) love this book. I don’t begrudge the time I spent with it at all. It was just okay for me.

Gone to See the River Man – Kristopher Triana

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Kristopher Triana is a new-to-me author, but I think he is relatively well known in the horror community, particularly for readers of cosmic or extreme horror. To be honest, I don’t think I knew much about what constituted those two subgenres of horror, so I did a little research. According to Wikipedia, cosmic horror (also known as Lovecraftian or eldritch horror) is “is a subgenre of horror, fantasy, or weird fiction that emphasizes the horror of the unknowable and incomprehensible more than gore or other elements of shock.It is named after American author H.P. Lovecraft (1890–1937). His work emphasizes themes of cosmic dread, forbidden and dangerous knowledge, madness, non-human influences on humanity, religion and superstition, fate and inevitability.” Extreme horror didn’t have its own entry on Wiki, but it has been called splatterpunk, which is described as a “literary genre characterised by graphically described scenes of an extremely gory nature.”

So that brings us to Triana’s novel Gone to See the River Man, a book that has been described as both cosmic and extreme. What exactly was I getting myself into? I wondered.

Thirty-nine-year-old Lori lives with her older sister Abby, not necessarily because she wants to but because Abby needs care. Lori doesn’t have much of a life. She works at a diner, has just broken up with her boyfriend, and is obsessed with Edmond Cox, a notoriously violent sexual sadist and serial killer. Cox isn’t the first incarcerated psychopath Lori has corresponded with, but she really feels the two share a special bond. She’s visited him a handful of times at Varden prison and she has just agreed to do Cox a favour.

“You’ll find the key in the chest,” he said, reiterating the letter’s instructions. “You’ll find it deep in the low valley of Killen, along the Hollow River, in the shack I done told you about. The one they never knew about.”

“You can count on me. I’ll bring the key as soon as –“

“Nah. Ya ain’t gonna bring it to me. I ain’t the one the key belongs to no more, see? Ya gotta take it to The River Man.”

So, not really understanding the quest or who The River Man is, Lori and her sister set out on a journey that will change her life forever.

Gone to See the River Man surprised me and I mean that in a good way. I tracked it down (not necessarily easy because it’s not traditionally published) because I had heard a lot of book tubers talk about it and I thought, sure, I’ll give it a go. I thought the writing was terrific. Lori herself was a complex character and certainly not who I expected her to be. As her story unravels (told in flashbacks), we see that she has some darkness in her that makes her attraction to Cox more understandable.

As she and Abby head out into the wilderness, first looking for the shack and the key and then heading down the river to find the River Man, things do get weird. Extreme? I don’t know – maybe I have a high tolerance for squick. There was definitely some of that, but mostly the imagery was nightmarish without being necessarily gratuitously violent.

Not gonna lie: I thought this book was great.

Dark Horses – Susan Mihalic

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By page fifteen of Susan Mihalic’s novel Dark Horses, I knew that I was in for a ride – and not just because this is the story of fifteen-year-old equestrian Roan Montgomery. This early into the story I’d learned that Roan is a skilled rider and shares a special bond with her horse, Jasper, that her relationship with her mother is tenuous partly because she’s having an affair with a teacher at Roan’s school, and that her relationship with her father, Monty, is close. And when I say close I mean he enters the bathroom while Roan is in the tub and kisses her, “his mouth gentle and persuasive.”

Roan only cares about riding and her life revolves around training. Her father was an Olympic medal winner and now trains Roan. She goes to school because she has to, but what she really wants is to do well at competitions so that she can earn a spot on an Olympic team.

Roan’s life is pretty insular. Although their farm, Rosemount, employs a handful and people, including Gertrude and Eddie who have been there since before Roan was born, Roan is isolated. She doesn’t have friends or a cell phone; her life is strictly controlled by her father. That is until she starts getting to know Will Howard, a guy at school.

Her friendship with Will amps up the tension between Roan and Monty because she has to keep Will a secret. And she has to keep the sexual relationship with her father a secret from Will. Mihalic does an interesting thing with the incestuous relationship. Roan is trapped by her complicated feelings for her father: she loves him and she loathes him, sometimes at the same time. She acknowledges how confusing it is that “I didn’t fight or scream, […] my body responded to his, the ease with which he made me come–the fact that I came at all.” She has spent a long time compartmentalizing all these feelings. She admires her father’s coaching abilities. But she is becoming increasingly uncomfortable with the sexual relationship. There’s no saying no to Monty.

There’s nobody reading this book who is going to think what Monty is doing to Roan is anything but abuse, but Roan is only coming to that realization as her feelings for Will grow. When Monty realizes that Will is a real threat to this prison he has kept Roan in, he tightens the noose. Then there is no question that he is raping his daughter. It’s devastating.

It’s not right to say that I “enjoyed” this book, although I did fly through it, wholly invested in Roan’s story. If I have one complaint it’s that I hated the way the book ended. Well, maybe ‘hate’ is too strong a word. Something big had to happen, for sure, and something big does happen. For me, it just wasn’t big enough. I hated Monty Montgomery and he just didn’t suffer enough.

Dark Horses is an unflinching look at sexual abuse and what it means to be a survivor. It’s graphic and certainly has the potential to be triggering, but I thought it was a compelling read.

The Four – Ellie Keel

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Donna Tartt’s 1992 novel The Secret History is the dark academia novel all others aspire to be. This is a sub-genre of fiction that I really love, so I am drawn to books that feature isolated campuses, academics, and shifting loyalties. Ellie Keel’s debut The Four definitely scratched the itch.

Rose Lawson is one of four scholarship students admitted to the prestigious High Realms school. Telling the story of her time at the school from some years in the future, Rose paints a picture of extreme privilege and cruelty. She is saved from total desolation due to her friendship with the other scholarship students, Lloyd and Sami and her roommate Marta.

The novel opens with Rose’s admission that

It would have made our lives a lot easier if Marta had simply pushed Genevieve out of our bedroom window on our third day at High Realms. Certainly, it would have been tragic. […] She would have died instantly.

Genevieve Locke is a member of the Senior Patrol (aka a prefect), a member of the hockey team (field hockey as the story takes place in England) and she treats Marta and Rose with “lofty derision”. The truth is most of the students the four friends encounter at school are cruel and horrible, but all of the scholarship students count themselves lucky to have been chosen to attend.

Then something horrible happens and three of the friends find themselves desperately working together to protect the fourth member of their group. The Four has all the things I love in a book like this: secrets, unreliable narrators, a labyrinthine school, and surprising twists and turns that will keep you guessing until the very end. Keel is an award-winning theatre producer, but she is also a gifted writer and I will definitely be watching to see what she writes next.

Nightwatching – Tracy Sierra

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When you read as many thrillers as I do, it’s hard to be not to feel as though you’ve read it already. Tracy Sierra’s debut Nightwatching definitely offers a few surprises for discerning readers.

Our unnamed narrator wakes up in the middle of the night to the realization that “There was someone in the house.”

It’s a terrifying notion because she is alone with her two young children and a snowstorm is raging outside. When she steps out of her room to investigate, she sees him at the end of the hall.

He was tall. His arms hung loose and long. His presence had the distantly familiar rancidness of something wrong and rotten she’d tasted before but couldn’t quite place.

All this woman knows is that she needs to keep her children safe. And thus begins a very long night of cat and mouse. The woman knows something about the house that she is quite certain the intruder does not know, and that’s the existence of a secret room. But even that will not guarantee long-term safety, so there are hard decisions to be made.

As they hide, the woman mulls over the details of her marriage, past trauma, and her acrimonious relationship with her father-in-law. These sections were perhaps not as exciting as other parts of the book. This book also has some interesting things to say about trauma and whether or not women are believed. I don’t want to say too much about that, but I have to admit to feeling like I was being gaslit. Is the woman a reliable narrator? Could I trust what I was being told?

While some parts of the book were a tad slow, there were lots of moments when the pages turned themselves and, at the end of the day, I felt like the book really delivered on its promise. Sierra is definitely a writer to keep your eye on.

Mercury – Amy Jo Burns

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When 17-year-old Marley West moves to Mercury, Pennsylvania with her single mom, Ruth, she has no idea just how much her life is about to change. At a baseball game she meets Baylor Joseph, oldest of the three Joseph boys, sons of local roofer Mick and his wife, Elise. She is soon pulled into the Josephs’ orbit, into rivalries and old traumas she doesn’t understand. She comes to understand that “The Josephs were the close kind of family that fought in equal measure but didn’t know how to make up.”

Amy Jo Burns’ novel Mercury is a family drama that covers several years in the lives of the complicated Joseph family and how Marley comes to love them. Although she initially meets them because of Baylor, it is her relationship with the middle son, Waylon, that cements her place in the family.

It doesn’t take long before Marley figures out that Baylor is “the flinty kind of young man … whom everyone feared and nobody liked.” Their relationship is short lived. Her friendship with Waylon, though, is worth keeping. Waylon is “easier, kinder, gentler”. This is the relationship that sticks.

Although Mercury opens with the discovery of a dead body in a church attic, and although this mystery is important, it isn’t actually what drives the narrative. The book uses the body as a jumping off point before it circles back to the beginning of the story of Marley’s arrival in Mercury and how her relationship with this insular and complicated family shifts loyalties and both frays and strengthens bonds. It’s a very character-driven novel, and all of the characters are complicated and beautifully rendered. There are no bad guys, just people trying to do their best for reasons that don’t always make sense. I really loved Waylon and Marley in particular, but I also loved the secondary characters including Marley’s best friend, Jade, and the youngest Joseph, Baby Shay.

Mercury is my second book by Burns (Shiner) and she is definitely an autobuy author for me now.

Great book.

Don’t Believe It – Charlie Donlea

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I’ve read a couple books recently that employ a podcast/documentary element (None of This is True, Listen for the Lie, The Favorites) and it’s definitely something that can add a little something something to a novel. In Charlie Donlea’s novel Don’t Believe It, Sidney Ryan is a documentary filmmaker whose last three projects have ended up exonerating people and Grace Sebold is hoping that Sidney can help overturn her conviction.

A decade before Grace and a group of friends arrived at Sugar Beach, St. Lucia, to celebrate the wedding of Daniel and Charlotte. It should have been a sun soaked holiday, but then Julian is found dead and just days later Grace is arrested for the crime. Incarcerated in a St. Lucian prison for the past ten years, her letters to Sidney have finally yielded the desired result and Sidney has agreed to take a look at the evidence.

Sidney decides to investigate and reveal what she finds week by week. Grace assures Sidney that is she is innocent, that the facts will bear that out. Circumstantially at least, it appears that all the signs point to Grace being the culprit, but there are some questions and soon Sidney begins to believe in Grace’s story. Forensics seem to agree.

Sidney talks to police, friends and family. She pores over evidence and consults experts. There’s an eleventh hour twist and all the requisite red herrings just to keep you guessing.

All of this should have been page turning stuff, but it really wasn’t. The ending introduces the idea of a secondary character investigating something else that is introduced in the the book, so I am not sure if this is meant to be the beginning of a new series, but I won’t be carrying on.

The Favorites – Layne Fargo

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In 1998, Canadian ice dancers Shae-Lynn Bourne and Victor Kraatz competed in the Nagano Olympics, finishing just off the podium in fourth place. I was wholly invested in them at the time; they were innovative and fun to watch.

Flash forward to 2018 and Tessa Virtue and Scott Moir at the PyeongChang Olympics, where they capped off a long career with another Olympic gold. Even people who didn’t know anything about the sport rooted for this Canadian pair, and if you want to see why – just watch the video. It’s also interesting to watch the two videos back to back to see how far the sport has come.

So, that brings me to Layne Fargo’s novel The Favorites, a novel which drops the reader into the competitive, cutthroat world of competitive ice dancing. I have seen this book all over the place and so I bought it and read it and it was a ride.

Katarina “Kat” Shaw has only ever wanted one thing in her life – to be like two-time Olympian Sheila Lin. Well, she wants one other thing, actually: Heath Rocha. Kat and Heath have known each other since they were kids, when Heath, a foster child, came to live with the Shaws.

When the novel opens, they are sixteen and just about to head off to the National Championships. Kat’s parents are dead and she’s been left in the care of her older brother, Lee. I use the word ‘care’ loosely because Lee only really cares about getting high.

Anyway, Kat is a talented skater and Heath is a good partner because he won’t get in the way of what she really wants – which is to skate in the Olympics. The problem is they live in Illinois, have no money and little access to professional coaching, meaning that they don’t have the support necessary to make it all the way to the top. But then, they meet Sheila Lin and that changes the trajectory of their whole lives.

The Favorites draws some of its inspiration from Wuthering Heights, a novel I read a million years ago but which I credit for kick starting my love of stories featuring characters who shouldn’t necessarily be together but desperately belong together. I mean, I am not sure Kat and Heath deserve to be in the same company as Catherine and Heathcliff, but this book wants you to believe they do.

Look, I’m going to be straight up. I devoured this book. I couldn’t wait to come home and pick it back up at the end of the day. It’s an unapologetic soap opera covering many, many years and many, many skating competitions. Part of the narrative takes the form of clips from people talking about Kat and Heath and some of the events that happened to them as they chase their Olympic dream a la Daisy Jones and the Six; the rest of the book is Kat’s first person narration.

Objectively, it’s not a great book, in the sense that it’s not great literature. I felt like I was being told things to get me from one moment to the next and I never really felt the great passion between the two main characters because their love story was PG13, even as adults. The characters got older, but they didn’t act any different really. The book reads very YA, although it’s not. There’s lots of backstabbing and crying and miscommunication and gossip. The whole thing wraps up pretty tidily. It’s not unsatisfying, it’s just neat.

We stared at each other in the shadows, so close we were sharing breath. Later, we’d become world famous for that: stretching out the moment before a kiss until it was almost unbearable, until every member of the audience felt the quickening of our pulses, the pure want reflected in our eyes.

But that was choreography. This was real.

I might not have believed it by the end, but I skated along with them quite happily until their final bow. If there’s a limited series coming, I’m all in.

Remarkably Bright Creatures – Shelby Van Pelt

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Although everyone and their octopus was talking about this book for a while, I probably would never have read it. Then, it was chosen for my IRL book club so…

Sowell Bay is a small community in the Pacific Northwest and it is here that we meet a group of characters including Tova Sullivan, a 70-year-old widow who works as a cleaner at the local aquarium; Ethan, the town gossip and owner of the local grocery store; and Cameron, who is not a native, but who arrives in Sowell Bay to locate the father he has never known. They are not the most interesting characters though; that honour belongs to Marcellus.

Who am I, you ask? My name is Marcellus, but most humans do not call me that. Typically, they call me that guy. For example, Look at that guy–there he is–you can just see his tentacles behind the rock.

I am a giant Pacific octopus. I know this from the plaque on the wall beside my enclosure.

I know what you are thinking. Yes, I can read. I can do many things you would not expect.

Yep, one of the characters in Shelby Van Pelt’s novel Remarkably Bright Creatures is a sentient octopus, and he is actually the most interesting character in the whole book. I wish we had way more of him and way less of some of the other stuff in this book.

This is a novel about people in transition. Cameron is a 30-year-old man, but he acts like he’s a kid. He plays in a rock band with one of his best friends, he keeps getting fired from jobs, his girlfriend has finally had enough of him, his Aunt Jeanne is supportive, but frustrated by his lack of resilience. Sure, his mother abandoned him when he was nine and sure he doesn’t know who his father is but, c’mon. When Jeanne gives him a box of stuff his mom left behind, Cameron uses a clue in the box and sets out for Sowell Bay.

Tova is a taciturn Swede who lives in the house her father built. She has been grieving the loss of her son, Erik, for 38 years. She has never understood what happened to him; he was just about to go off to college; he was happy. Then, one night, he just didn’t come home.

Marcellus, watching from his tank, sees what other people don’t see. His perspective was my favourite and I wish there had been more of it. Known to be highly intelligent in the real world, Marcellus, the character in the book, sees what others do not. He calls humans “remarkably bright creatures”, but I think he is being generous.

I suspect that many readers would love this book. It gave me Bear Town vibes and I didn’t like that book at all. Remarkably Bright Creatures is a little too sweet and the characters’ manufactured quirkiness just wasn’t my cup of tea.