Tag Archives: 2018

Tiger, Tiger – Margaux Fragoso

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Margaux Fragoso’s memoir Tiger, Tiger will probably make most readers 44A45046-AC95-4857-AB12-A10A60BD3D53uncomfortable. It’s the story of her sexual relationship with Peter, a man she met when she was seven and he was – wait for it – fifty-one.  In the preface, Fragoso tells readers

I started writing this book the summer after the death of Peter Curran, whom I met when I was seven and had a relationship with for fifteen years, right up until he committed suicide at the age of sixty-six.

Fragoso’s relationship with Peter began at a neighbourhood pool, in Union City, New Jersey. She is the only child of Louie, an immigrant from Puerto Rico, and Cassandra, her mentally ill mother. Life at home is volatile, and Fragoso, despite her youth, longs for a sense of family. When she sees one at the local pool, she is immediately drawn to them.

Their father had bowl-cut sandy-silver hair with sixties bangs like a Beatle. He had full lips, a long, pointy nose that might have looked unattractive on someone else, but not on him, and a strong pert chin. When he looked in my direction, I saw that his eyes were vigorously aquamarine.

It isn’t just Peter that Fragoso is drawn to. There are a couple young boys with him and a woman named Ines. When Peter calls to invite Fragoso and her mother over the visit, it’s the beginning of a time that seems magical at first (Peter’s house is filled with birds and turtles and iguanas), but soon morphs into something else entirely.

It’s hard to read Tiger, Tiger without wanting to scream. Like – where are the adults in this scenario. Even though we understand that Fragoso’s mother is unwell, it is still difficult to comprehend how she so willingly hands over the care of her daughter to a virtual stranger. The other adults in Fragoso’s life seem equally inattentive. Cassandra calls Ines “a dreamer.” Louie is angry most of the time and even when he questions the closeness he sees between Peter and his daughter, he doesn’t really act on it.

Peter is a master manipulator. At first he introduces Fragoso to games like “Danger Tiger”, Mad Scientist and Mad Gardener, but it doesn’t take long before he’s rewarding her with a “quick kiss on the lips” for finding jigsaw puzzle pieces or telling her that she’d make “a perfect wife.” Of course, he’s grooming her, but she doesn’t know it.

One of the fascinating things about Fragoso’s story is that this ‘relationship’ carried on for so long. At some points, it almost seems as though Fragoso is manipulating Peter, until you remember that he has had a hand in creating the person she’s become.

In her prologue, Fragoso writes:

…spending time with pedophile can be like a drug high…and when it’s over, for people who’ve been through this, it’s like coming off heroin, and for years, they can’t stop chasing the ghost of how it felt

Tiger, Tiger is not an enjoyable read. It is, however, a brave book. I would like to think the experience of writing it was cathartic for Fragoso and that when she was done, she was able to turn a new, fresh page in her life. Somehow, though, I doubt that this is the case.

Diablerie – Walter Mosley

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5BFAE846-1C5C-4C6F-88E7-2D73D1804D5C
Yeah, so Diablerie was a weird one for me. I haven’t read anything else by acclaimed writer Walter Mosley and I am not sure that I will be rushing out to purchase any more of his work, but all that said, he can definitely write. This book, though, is just odd.

Ben Dibbuk is a successful computer programmer with a beautiful wife and a college-age daughter. He’s 47 and, on the surface at least, has it all together. What he doesn’t get from his wife, Mona, he gets from Svetlana, his 21-year-old Russian grad student girlfriend.

Then at the launch of a new magazine, Diablerie, his wife will be working on, Ben meets a woman, Star, who claims to have known him back in the day. When Ben claims he can’t remember who she is, she replies “Come on, Ben. You can’t forget me, us, that day…not something like that.”

Whatever this something is, it drives Ben batshit crazy trying to remember.  Star tells him that they “spent almost twenty-four hours living on whiskey and sex.”  As Ben tries to recall this former life, his current life starts to unravel.

Readers will have to decide for themselves whether you care about any of it. I didn’t, but I kept reading anyway.

Jar of Hearts – Jennifer Hillier

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So a few years back I read and hated Jennifer Hillier’s novel Creep  and so I am DDEC3EB9-C1E8-4BA6-A35F-B2150CAEAEBDactually a bit surprised that I even picked up Jar of Hearts. I guess I didn’t put two and two together before I forked over my money. I am happy to report that Hillier has redeemed herself a little in my eyes because Jar of Hearts wasn’t nearly as cringeworthy as Creep. In face, I liked it quite a bit until the end.

Georgina (Geo) Shaw’s perfect life (rich fiancé, six-figure career) comes crashing down around her when the mutilated body of her best friend Angela Wong is found fourteen years after she disappeared. For her part in the murder, Geo will spend five years in the Hazelwood Correctional Institute. Calvin James, her boyfriend at the time, is connected to three other murders and will likely serve consecutive life sentences. This is the first time Geo has seen him in a very long time and

When their eyes meet, a tingle goes through her. That goddamned tingle, even now, even after everything. From the first day they met to the last day she saw him, that tingle has never gone away. She’s never felt anything like it before, or since.

Who doesn’t love a bad boy, eh?

Jar of Hearts follows Geo through her stint in prison, where she’s savvy enough to make friends with the right people. When she is released, she returns to her childhood home. She’s not particularly welcome in Sweetbay (a suburb of Seattle), but she has no place else to go. She reconnects with her childhood friend, Kaiser Brody, who is now a cop. And then new bodies start to show up.

I liked this novel so, so much better than Creep. While not flawless, Geo was a likeable character. I understood her attraction to Calvin (who was not straight-up evil) especially at the beginning when she was only sixteen and living in Angela’s considerable shadow.  Hillier does a good job of capturing those heady teenage years when you make dumb choices and hurt the people you love. The flashbacks allow us to see what happened to Angela and why.

Some readers will likely like the novel’s ending twist. I wasn’t a big fan, but it didn’t ruin my overall enjoyment. Jar of Hearts was fun to read.

 

The Daughter – Jane Shemilt

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732E19BC-CA2D-4623-B4E1-EA31B053BDE9It’s probably every parent’s worst nightmare: your child just doesn’t come home one day. That’s the premise of Jane Shemilt’s debut The Daughter.

Jenny is a successful family doctor in Bristol. She’s married to Ted, also a physician. Together they parent twins, Ed and Theo, 17, and Naomi, 15.  Life is busy for the family, which means that sometimes things slip through the cracks. Pretty much every parent  can relate to that. Things are particularly hectic right now because Naomi is starring in her school’s production of  West Side Story, and she is always dashing off.

But on the night before the last performance, Naomi doesn’t come home. She doesn’t respond to her mother’s frantic phone calls. She’s not at the theatre or the place she’d told her mother she’d be. She’s not with her friends.

The Daughter is a page-turner, for sure, but it is also a meditation on modern marriage, parenting, and the fine balancing act of having a career and a family. Jenny is so convinced that she understands her daughter, her sons, her marriage, but it turns out there are cracks everywhere.  Jenny feels blindsided by her daughter’s disappearance and by the fissures which suddenly appear in her domestic life.

If I was asked, I would say she was happy, that Ted and I were as well. I would say we were all perfectly happy.

The novel’s narrative isn’t straight forward. We are given glimpses into Jenny’s life just before Naomi leaves, and then several months later when she has taken herself to Dorset, to the family’s cottage. In these passages, we see how Naomi’s disappearance has affected Jenny and those around her. It’s not that Jenny’s life has come to a complete standstill, but certain aspects of her life have been derailed. She has not given up all hope that Naomi will be found and her grief is palpable.

But it not only Jenny’s grief that drives the narrative. Her husband also suffers. “I look for her everywhere I go,” he tells Jenny months after Naomi’s disappearance. “Don’t give up,” he tells her. “Don’t ever give up. I still think we’ll find her.” Jenny’s sons also suffer under the horrible weight of this loss.

Shemilt handles all their grief and a plot that might have proved unwieldy with a great deal of finesse. I raced to the end, which was both heartbreaking and unexpected.

 

 

When We Collided – Emery Lord

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Vivi and Jonah, the narrators of Emery Lord’s YA novel When We Collided, are damaged collidedseventeen-year-olds, but that doesn’t mean that they’ve given up on living. Their singular voices will likely strike a nerve with many young readers.

Jonah lives in Verona Cove, a small coastal town in California. He’s smack in the middle of six kids and is often tasked with looking after his younger siblings because his older sister has been away at college and his brother is working. His father recently died and his mother can’t seem to get out of bed.

Vivi and her mother are summering in Verona Cove. They needed an escape and Vivi has already decided that she loves Verona Cove, but she “waited until the seventh day to commit.” When she meets Jonah and his youngest sister, Leah, 5, she’s immediately smitten. Vivi falls fast and hard for a lot of things. Listening to her is sort of like watching the ball in a pinball machine bing off all the obstacles. It’s tiring to try to keep up, but she is utterly charming and Jonah has never met anyone like her.

The girl looking down at us has white-blond hair, and her lips are the color of maraschino cherries. She doesn’t look like any girl in my school. She doesn’t look like any girl I’ve ever seen in real life.

Vivi and Jonah hit it off and before you can say “summer romance”, the two are inseparable. For Jonah, Vivi is like a breath of fresh air. She makes him feel special. She listens to him as he tries to navigate the loss of his father and his new situation at home. He doesn’t understand what is happening with his mother and he doesn’t know how to help her. Like his older siblings, he’s just trying to keep his head above water and keep “the littles” (the family name for the younger kids) healthy and whole.

Things seem to be going fine between the two, until they’re not…and they’re not because Vivi starts to act increasingly more bizarre. I think Lord does an exceptional job of tracking the course of Vivi’s mental illness – the erratic and increasingly manic behaviour that finally comes to a head.

Teenage romance has the potential to be a messy business, no question, and the stakes are high for Vivi and Jonah who realize they need each other and also realize that their relationship is problematic (for a variety of reasons.) I appreciate that Lord didn’t try to tidy things up for these two extremely likable characters. You’ll root for them. Your heart will break for them. Your life will be better for having known them.

 

Girl in Snow – Danya Kukafka

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5919CB39-1143-49E3-BCAE-98D1717F025EDanya Kukafka’s debut novel, Girl in Snow, earned copious praise from anybody who’s anybody in the book world and it’s easy to see why everyone was hyped up.

When they told him Lucinda Hayes was dead, Cameron thought of her shoulder blades and how they framed her naked spine, like a pair of static lungs.

Kukafka’s novel is a sort of mystery, but not in the traditional sense. Lucinda, a popular 15- year-old, is discovered  in the playground of the elementary school. She’s been murdered.  Lucinda’s death is certain in the incident that kicks the novel off, but it’s the three-person narrative that keeps its motor running.

First there’s Cameron, the boy who loved Lucinda from afar. Perhaps saying Cameron ‘loved’ her isn’t quite the right word. He watched her obsessively.  He drew her.  He feels like he knew her better than anyone, “The way her legs flew out when she ran…How her hair got frizzy at the front when she walked home from school in the heat….the way she squinted when she couldn’t see the board.”  When Lucinda’s body is found, Cameron is one of the first suspects because a classmate had once told a teacher that Cameron “was the sort of kid who would bring a gun to school.”

Then there’s Jade. When she hears the news of Lucinda’s death she says that “faking shock is easier than faking sadness.”  Jade lives with her mother and sister and I wouldn’t characterize her life as necessarily happy. She resented Lucinda, and so her classmate’s death inspires little more than antipathy.

Finally, there’s Russ, a local cop who used to be Cameron’s father’s partner before he did a runner, leaving his wife and son behind.  He feels protective towards Cameron and his feelings are further complicated by the feelings he had for Cameron’s father, Lee.  He is also suspicious of his wife, Ines’, ex-con brother, Ivan, who just happens to be the person who discovered Lucinda’s body.

It is through the lens of these characters that we see Lucinda. I wouldn’t say that Girl in Snow is a page-turner, but that’s because these are complicated people with complicated feelings and Kukafka cares about every word she writes. This is a book to be savoured and these are characters you won’t soon forget.

Orchestra in My Garden – Linda Brooks

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It probably would have made more sense to talk about Linda Brooks’ beautiful 953A7BC0-3D92-49DF-B19E-85D966DCF6A4coffee table book Orchestra in My Garden back in the spring, which is when I purchased my copy.  But spring is always a busy time at school, and then I went away, and then school  started again…you know how it goes. Now that the days are getting darker and colder, I feel like Linda’s book is the perfect antidote.  Plus,  Orchestra in My Garden would make a fabulous gift for the gardeners, wannabe gardeners and musicians on your list this holiday season.

Linda and I are cousins, although I wouldn’t say that we know each other particularly well. She is the second youngest of five and I am the oldest of four, so on the few occasions when our families would get together,  we would have been of little interest to each other. My dad and Linda’s dad are first cousins. I do have childhood memories of going to the farm where Linda grew up. It was always a lot of fun. My parents loved her parents, Jack and Margie, and I remember loving them, too.  It was probably a lot of fun for the adults to get together and let the nine of us run wild.

Orchestra in My Garden is a love song, and not just to gardening, although Linda is clearly a talented gardener. (She would say “enthusiast” not “expert”.) Her beautiful Nova Scotia garden, nurtured for over a decade, is simply the backdrop, though, for Linda’s blossoming awareness of a new season in her life. (And look at me, with all these corny gardening metaphors. They just write themselves, people!)

I was between albums with  no immediate pressure to produce more content and no outside expectations. Life was throwing some milestones my way. The approach of a 50th birthday coinciding with a first child heading off to university may have encouraged a greater awareness that my life was taking a new turn.

Linda has lead a creative life. Although she has a BA from Mt. Allison and a Bachelor of Law degree from Dalhousie, I always think of her as a musician. She has recorded several albums, two of them in Nashville, and been nominated for ECMAs.  The essays included in her book are her way of expressing herself “beyond the lyrics of a song.”

The essays in this book tackle a wide range of topics: the joys of digging deep (literally and metaphorically, I think), marriage and motherhood, family, inspiration. There really is something for everyone in Linda’s essays. The nice thing about them is that they really feel like personal reflections, rather than didactic lessons.

Supporting and nurturing and, perhaps especially, challenging each other to bloom means understanding that no one of us has all the answers and there is not only one perspective. When we learn to respect another’s growth, we accelerate our own. That’s what family, friendships, and my garden keep teaching me.

And what would a book about gardens be without pictures. First time garden photographer Mark Maryanovich has taken some truly beautiful photos for this book. This might be his first time snapping pics of flowers, but he comes with an impressive resume and it shows.

If all this weren’t enough, Linda has included a code which allows you to download 22 original songs inspired by four seasons in her garden.

Orchestra in My Garden would be a lovely book for anyone who loves nature, sure, but also for anyone who might appreciate what it means to come to a crossroad in life and consider the paths that lay ahead. Download Linda’s songs, make a cup of tea and enjoy.

 

We All Love the Beautiful Girls – Joanne Proulx

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E1A054FB-47D3-4BF8-93BC-7A8F56A62626The characters in Joanne Proulx’s second novel We All Love the Beautiful Girls are so perfectly imperfect that you can’t help but fall in love with them.

At the centre of this finely crafted family drama is the Slate family, Mia and Michael, and their seventeen-year-old son, Finn. Then there’s Jess, Finn’s former babysitter who now sneaks into his bedroom at night to…you know. Frankie is the daughter of Michael’s business partner, Peter. Peter’s wife, Helen, is Mia’s best friend. Frankie and Finn have grown up together.

Mia and Michael’s perfect life starts to unravel when they get a visit from Stanley, the company accountant (I’m not sure that’s his actual his title, but it doesn’t really matter; he’s only the messenger). He’s discovered that Peter has restructured the company and written Michael out. Michael has, it turns out, been pretty lax about the financials of the company because he and Peter have “known each other since high school.”

On the same night that Michael finds himself screwed out of his own company, Finn finds out that Jess won’t be leaving her boyfriend, Eric, for him. She can’t even though Finn is “So gorgeous and so nice.”  Finn is just a kid. (She’s 23.) Eric’s a total douche and happens to be the older brother of Finn’s best friend, Eli. Finn’s at a party at their house, drunk, and after an encounter with Jess he makes a couple of bad choices. First, he hooks up with Frankie. Second, he passes out in the backyard. It’s  January. In Canada.

These two incidents are game-changers for the Slate family and their repercussions propel Proulx’s story along like a thriller. I literally could not put this book down. I finished it well past my bed-time. On a school night.

The novel flips between characters. We watch Finn’s heart break. We watch Mia and Michael’s marriage topple. We watch friends become enemies. Proulx toggles between these perspectives masterfully, the blame and the shame carefully shared. And if there is redemption or peace to be had, it’s hard won.

No one makes it through life unscathed, but perhaps the key to surviving is understanding. As Finn tells his mother: “I’m not the same as I was….I’m different now….But it’s good, you know? I’m good. Like I understand things I didn’t understand before.”

The boy becomes a man. The parents – well, I guess they do what all parents do. The best they can.

I LOVED this book.

Eleanor Oliphant is Completely Fine – Gail Honeyman

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155356C2-E75D-4FCF-8F1B-CEB6EB1DA2B9Eleanor Oliphant, the titular character of Gail Honeyman’s debut novel Eleanor Oliphant is Completely Fine, is not like anyone else you have likely met before. She has worked in the same office for the last nine years, she has no friends and she lives on a diet of vodka and pizza or pasta and pesto. Her life is structured and predictable, right down to her weekly calls from “Mummy.”

It doesn’t take long to figure out that Eleanor is actually not completely fine. She is pretty much the loneliest person I have ever met. She has no aptitude for social niceties; she says whatever pops into her head. It makes it difficult for her co-workers to warm up to her. Her mother is particularly harsh.   When she wins tickets to a concert and asks one of her office mates to accompany her, she becomes the butt of the joke because as everyone knows “she’s mental.”

Enter Raymond. He’s the new office IT guy. When he comes to fix Eleanor’s computer she notes that “he was barely taller than me, and was wearing green training shoes, ill-fitting denim trousers and a T-shirt showing a cartoon dog lying on tops of its kennel. It was stretched taut against a burgeoning belly….All of his visible skin, both face and body, was very pink.”

It’s funny that Eleanor dismisses Raymond as she has, similarly, been dismissed by others. She is aware of her own appearance, her “face a scarred palimpsest of fire. A nose that’s too small and eyes that are too big. Ears: unexceptional.” But Raymond doesn’t seem to see Eleanor’s appearance – or care much either way, at least, and is persistent and the two become unlikely friends.

The stuff that comes out of Eleanor’s mouth is often funny. She has no filter and doesn’t seem to take offence to the things she hears, even when she is the subject of ridicule. When an office mate makes a cruel joke at her expense, Eleanor admits that she “laughed at that one, actually.” Her world is very black and white. When she and Raymond stumble upon an elderly man in distress, Eleanor is tasked with keeping him calm.

…don’t worry, you won’t be lying here in the middle of the street for long. There’s no need to be anxious; medical care is completely free of charge in this country, and the standard is generally considered to be among the best in the world. You’re a fortunate man, I mean, you probably wouldn’t want to fall and bump your head in, say, the new state of South Sudan, given its current political and economic situation.

Oh, Eleanor.

It is Eleanor’s friendship with Raymond that starts to crack open her insular, dysfunctional life. The more we know of her story, the more amazing she becomes. Eleanor Oliphant will stay with you long after you’ve closed the final pages and you will leave her knowing that she will actually be completely (mostly) fine.

 

Cuckoo Song – Frances Hardinge

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cuckoo songI don’t think I have ever read a book quite like Frances Hardinge’s YA novel Cuckoo Song. I am not much of a fantasy fan, you know – word building and that sort of thing, but I was totally enchanted by Hardinge’s story, which is as much about grief and loss, as it is a creepy story about…well, I can’t really tell you.

I can tell you that the story follows 13-year-old Triss, who wakes up after falling into the Grimmer – a pond near the cottage where she is vacationing with her family. Her mother comforts her, telling Triss that she’s “just been ill again, that’s all. You had a fever, so of course you feel rotten and a bit muddled.”

Triss’s younger sister Penny, Pen for short, doesn’t seem all that thrilled with Triss’s recovery. “She’s pretending!” she screams, when she comes to Triss’s bedroom. “It’s fake! Can’t any of you tell the difference?”

Things just get weirder for Triss because even she has to admit that something isn’t quite right. For one thing, she has a voracious appetite – never mind easing herself back into the world of food, as “soon as she saw the first bowl of soup arrive, great crusty rolls on the side of the tray, her hands started to shake.” Triss is horrified to discover that food is not the only thing that will sate her hunger; she’ll willingly eat just about anything and lots of it.

Other strange things begin to happen in Triss’s life.  Dead leaves in her hair when she wakes up. Dolls that move in her hands. Dolls that speak to her. And then what’s with all the letters from her brother, Sebastian? Those letters are impossible because Sebastian was killed in the war.

Hardinge has created a masterful, creepy and mysterious novel that is both exciting and kind of heartbreaking. I don’t want to spoil the novel’s surprises, but I will say this: you won’t forget Triss because she is brave, endearing and clever. Her desire to solve the mystery of what’s happened to her keeps the plot ticking along, but her capacity for self -reflection and self-awareness is what makes her a character who will stay with you long after the last page is turned.

Highly recommended.