Tag Archives: 2020

Hello Goodbye – Emily Chenoweth

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helloEmily Chenoweth’s debut novel Hello Goodbye was inspired by the author’s life. Her mother was diagnosed with a brain tumour when Chenoweth was in her first year of college. Instead of writing a memoir, though, the author decided to use her experiences as fodder for a work of fiction because she could “explore the feelings and experiences that I did remember, but I could also craft a story that had a different arc than my own.”

And what a story it is.

The novel begins with Helen Hansen returning from a run and collapsing on the kitchen floor. Fast forward a few months and Elliott has arranged a holiday armed with the knowledge that Helen, due to the “astrocytoma in her frontal lobe”  hasn’t much time left.  Eighteen-year-old Abby has accompanied her parents to The Presidential Hotel (think Dirty Dancing‘s Kellerman’s, complete with dance lessons and liveried staff) in New Hampshire.  Elliott wants to celebrate their twentieth wedding anniversary, but also invites the couples’ dearest friends as a farewell of sorts.

He’s made the decision not to tell Helen because he wants her to keep fighting but has also decided that this holiday will be his opportunity to break the news to his daughter and their oldest friends.

Abby is mildly annoyed by the whole affair, but she is also hoping that this change of scenery will do them all some good.

In a grand place like this, it seemed possible that everything might get a little bit better. She could imagine her father relaxing, her mother feeling stronger, and herself becoming kinder and more attentive,

She is also hoping that she might meet someone…anyone, really and when someone slips a note under her door Abby feels like “there might be something to look forward to.” She does meet two someones: Alex and Vic. Vic, by a strange twist of fate, is from her hometown back in Ohio. He was a student at the school where her father is headmaster, a delinquent plucked from the system by her mother, a counsellor. He also happens to be the first person Abby ever kissed, and it is a moment she remembers vividly.

Elliott is watching his daughter almost as closely as he is watching his wife. Abby is “unfamiliar to him in a new way.” He acknowledges that Abby has always been closer to her mother than she has been to him; “She looked just like her mother — everyone said so.”

Over the course of the week, each of the members of the family grapple with the future and Chenoweth manages to make every single moment ache with …well, life, really. Here are the Hansens remembering all the good times they had with their friends. Here is Helen regarding the body that is now failing her.

Why hadn’t she celebrated those big strong thighs instead of trying all the time to shrink them? Why hadn’t she found her feet beautiful, or her sturdy ankles. Why hadn’t she loved her coarse, graying hair? Why had she not praised every perfect square inch of herself? She feels an almost unbearable ache of longing for all that doesn’t belong to her anymore.

Here is Abby filled with a combination of dread and embarrassment and unarticulated love.  Here is Elliott traveling back and forth over the twenty  years he’s shared with Helen.

I can’t begin to express how moving this novel is. I don’t think it’s necessary to have lost someone in your life to appreciate the journey these characters are on. This is a glorious, beautifully written testament to family, friendship and the inherent joys and sorrows to be found in the minutia of a life. Just glorious.

Highly times a thousand recommended.

 

Freewill – Chris Lynch

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Will, the seventeen-year-old protagonist of Chris Lynch’s YA novel Freewill has suffered freewill-9781442482708_hra horrible tragedy. Now he lives with his grandparents who are “Kind people. They didn’t have to take you in. Or did they? Love? Is it love? Charity.”

That’s the first thing about Freewill: it’s written in the second person. Not many books are and I suspect that many YA readers will wonder what the heck is going on. Once Will’s circumstances reveal themselves, readers will likely be able to figure out why Lynch chose this point of view. At the very least, it would be an interesting conversation to have with students. But second person is a stylistic choice and not everyone grooves to it.

Will, as a character, is frustrating and sympathetic. He spends most of his time in woodshop, where he clearly has some talent. He makes furniture and carves little statues which start showing up in advance of the deaths of local students. He doesn’t have any friends until he meets Angela, another misfit in his woodworking class.

Has she spoken to you before? You know her name, though, don’t you? Haven’t bothered knowing any of the others. What’s the use, after all. But you haven’t been able to not know Angela.

The novel works as a sort of interior monologue as Will comes to grips with the facts of his life. He’s stuck in limbo. He tells his teacher “I’m supposed to be a pilot, Mr. Jacks. How did I wind up in woodshop?”

The how reveals itself – sort of – relatively quickly, but Will’s mental health is clearly in jeopardy and it will take a while before the whole thing plays out.

I didn’t love this book, but that doesn’t mean it’s without merit. Mature, patient reads will likely get something from the reading experience.

Fall For Anything – Courtney Summers

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fallsummersSeventeen-year-old Eddie and her mother have recently suffered a tremendous loss. Eddie’s father, a once-renowned photographer, has taken his own life and neither of the Reeves women are coping very well. Eddie’s mother drifts, ghost-like, around the house wearing her father’s housecoat being fussed over by her best friend, Beth, who drives Eddie “fucking crazy.” Eddie avoids her house as much as possible, choosing instead to hang with her best friend, Milo.

Milo would do almost anything for me. He’s been my best friend since second grade, when a brief but weird obsession with the original Star Trek  got him sort of ostracized at the same time all the girls in our class decided a girl named Eddie must actually really be a boy. By third grade, we weren’t so outcast anymore, but we were beyond needing other people. We still are.

Eddie is trying to make sense of her father’s death, and she is pulled back to the place where he ended his life: Tarver’s Warehouse, an “old and abandoned” building.

I come at night, waiting for some piece of the puzzle to click into place, waiting to understand, and I stay until the living world presses in on me and I have to go back to it…

She is surprised to meet Culler Evans, a protege of her father’s, at Tarver’s. Culler tells Eddie that he knows her father “spent a lot of time here, so I’ve been coming out, just trying to figure it all out, I guess. I mean, to understand why he’d …”

The two instantly bond over their desire to understand this inexplicable suicide. When it appears that Mr. Reeves has left a series of clues that might unravel the ‘mystery’ of his suicide, it sends Culler and Eddie on a road trip.

Canadian YA writer Courtney Summers (Sadie, All the Rage, This is Not a Test, Cracked Up to Be, Some Girls Are)  has created yet another memorable character in Eddie Reeves. This makes the sixth of her books I’ve read and I have not once been disappointed to spend time with her characters. I always find her protagonists to be flawed, tough and vulnerable in ways that make them extremely sympathetic.

Eddie is no different. Her grief is palpable. It manifests itself in her hands, which she claims are dying, and in the ways she pulls people in and pushes them away. Even her escape route at night (she climbs out of her window and jumps to the ground) seems fraught with meaning. “I jump” she says. “It’s effortless. It is so easy.”

Fall For Anything is all the things a great YA book should be (well, all the things any great book should be): well-written, compelling, page-turning and with emotional heft. I held off reading it as long as I could because now I have to wait until February 2021 for The Project, Summers’ next novel. I know it will be worth the wait.

Highly recommended.

The French Girl – Lexie Elliott

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Ten years ago, Kate spent a week in the French countryside with five of her friends fromfrench Oxford. That’s where they meet Severine, the girl next door.

Severine, slim and lithe in a tiny black bikini, her walnut brown skin impossibly smooth in the sun, one hip cocked with the foot pointing away as if ready to saunter off the moment she lost interest. Severine, who introduced herself, without even a hint of a smile to soften her devere beauty, as “the mademoiselle next door,” and who disappeared without a trace after the six of us left for Britain.”

Her disappearance has remained a mystery. Until now.

Lexie Elliott’s novel The French Girl ticks a lot of boxes for me. First of all, I am a sucker for books about groups of friends whose loyalties shift and erode over time. Kate’s circle includes Lara, her bestie; Seb, her beautiful ex-boyfriend; Tom, Seb’s cousin and best friend; Caro, the ice queen of the group and Theo, whose parents owned the French farm where the group stayed. When Tom calls to tell Kate that Severine’s body has been found on the farm property, and that the French police will be wanting to speak to them all again, it exposes the cracks in Kate’s relationships with these people.

Elliott wisely chooses to set her novel in the present and make Kate our first person guide through these events. First, her reunion with Tom – returned from Boston after a break-up with his fiance. Then, more fraught, a reunion with Seb, whom she has not really seen since their break-up at the French farm. Suddenly, the former friends are thrust back into each other’s orbits, trying to align their memories about the last time they saw Severine and speculating about what actually might have happened to her.

Ever since the discovery of Severine’s body, Kate has sensed “a presence that rests on my consciousness just out of reach of my field of vision.” Kate sees Severine’s bones “bleached white, and neatly stacked in a pile with the grinning skull atop” and on other occasions  as “a fleshed-out version of walnut-coloured skin, secretive eyes and a superior lack of smile.” As the investigation progresses, Severine insinuates herself more and more into Kate’s life. Is she a manifestation of guilt or memory or something even more sinister?

I really enjoyed The French Girl. Kate is a smart and likable character and even though we only see the other characters through her eyes, I trusted her assessment of them and their shared events because she was constantly readjusting her own perspective as new information revealed itself. This is a clever mystery and would certainly appeal to anyone who enjoys character-driven plots. I look forward to reading more by this author.

 

 

The Perfect Girlfriend – Karen Hamilton

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perfectgfThere’s no nuance in Karen Hamilton’s debut novel The Perfect Girlfriend. The narrator, Juliette (aka Lily. aka Elizabeth) is crazy. For reasons. She’s on a mission: to reclaim Nate, the man who dumped her seven months ago, unceremoniously kicking her out of his swanky Richmond (near London) flat.

Nearly seven months ago, Nate had appeared in a chapter of my life like a scene from a romantic novel. As I’d taken my gaze away from my computer screen at the hotel reception desk – a work smile fixed firmly in place – I’d struggled not to gasp out loud. The man in front of me looked as though he had absorbed the best bits of life and shrugged off anything unpleasant or sad.

A one-night stand turns into co-habitation, but that is short lived and Nate tells Juliette that he needs some space. He finds her a new apartment in Reading, moves her in, pays three months rent for her and bids her adieu. Of course, Juliette isn’t having any of it. She wants Nate and “his family’s welcoming acceptance, the comfortable lifestyle and kids who grow up to be a footballer….”

Juliette has a plan. First, she takes the course to be a flight attendant. (Nate is a pilot.) She makes sure that she doesn’t bump into him, thus providing him with the “space” he claimed to need. She tries to make friends. She tries to “improve” herself in an effort to be, well, the perfect girlfriend.

Perfect psycho girlfriend.

Hamilton pulls out all the stops when it comes to unhinging Juliette. She has keys to Nate’s apartment. She knows all his passwords. She puts spyware on his phone. She knows his work schedule. She sabotages any perceived romantic relationship between Nate and other women. And if you think these psycho ex-girlfriend moves are mere child’s play, just wait.

There is also the problem of Bella. Her identity is revealed slowly, so I won’t spoil it here. She is a thorn in Juliette’s side and as Juliette says herself “Revenge is a dish best served cold, and mine is going to be frozen.”

Look, we’ve all had a relationship that has made us a little bit crazy. I am pretty sure I have done more than one slightly crazy thing to get the desired object of my affection to like me back. The trouble with Juliette is that she has no dimension. I think we’re supposed to feel some sympathy for her because of a childhood trauma, but I didn’t. Another “big” reveal is meant to add fuel to that flame, but it really just seems more convenient than anything.

Still, the unembellished prose races through the crazy landscape of Juliette’s plan to win Nate back and most readers will enjoy the ride.

No Saints in Kansas – Amy Brashear

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A chance encounter with the relative of Bobby Rupp, one of the original suspects in the deaths of the Clutter family, inspired Amy Brashear to write No Saints in Kansas. In this YA novel, Brashear reimagines the murders, made famous in Truman Capote’s masterpiece of non-fiction In Cold Blood, from the point of view of fifteen-year-old Carly Fleming. Although she is a work of fiction, her father, Arthur, is the lawyer who ultimately defends one of the two men convicted of the homicides.

Carly and her younger brother Asher and their parents have relocated to Holcomb, Kansas from New York City after one of Mr. Fleming’s cases goes sideways. Holcomb is a backwater compared to Manhattan, and Carly has a hard time fitting in. She is an “outsider” and no matter what she does, it feels like she always will be. From her point of view, the way “in” is through Nancy Clutter because “Everyone likes – I mean, everyone liked – the Clutter family.” It feels like a dream come true with she is asked to tutor Nancy, although Nancy seems less happy about it. In her imagination, Carly imagines that tutoring Nancy is

…how we became best friends. From that moment on, we were inseparable. We were attached at the hip. At lunch, at 4-H club, at every school event, double dates, sleepovers, I was popular by association.

I wish.

When the Clutters are found dead in their home, and Carly learns that Nancy’s boyfriend Bobby is a suspect, she is determined to clear his name. She snoops in ways that are, truthfully, wholly unbelievable including a visit to the Clutter farm post-murders and stealing documents from the courthouse.

Although the real-life Clutter murders are the backdrop for Carly’s story, this is just as much about what it is to not fit in. Holcomb is a tight-knit community where everyone knows everyone. Some of the teens in Carly’s orbit are downright mean to her. Her one “friend”, Mary Claire, runs hot and cold. No Saints in Kansas is as much about navigating an awkward adolescence as it is about the Clutter crime.

For anyone who has read In Cold Blood this book will obviously pale in comparison. Capote’s book, which I read many, many years ago, is meticulously researched (interestingly, Harper Lee spent time in Holcomb acting as Capote’s researcher), but still reads like fiction. Capote reconstructs the Clutter’s last day, follows the investigation and also paints a picture of their murderers that is often quite sympathetic, particularly towards Perry Smith, with whom Capote had a close relationship.

None of this is to say that Brashear’s  book is without merit. I think most younger readers would find it compelling enough and reading it  might encourage them to tackle Capote’s book, too.

 

Topping From Below – Laura Reese

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In the world of BDSM, topping from below means that the submissive partner is actually toppingtrying to control the scene, aka control the top (dominant person). That’s exactly what Nora Tibbs is attempting when she pursues a relationship with Michael (referred to as M.) the music professor she’s convinced murdered her younger sister, Franny,  in Laura Reese’s novel Topping From Below.

It’s reasonable that a reader’s first question might be why in the hell she would get involved with the dude she thinks tortured and killed her sister. Is it because “He is swarthy, good-looking, if you like that type, slimly muscled and dark-complected, with an angular face that could have been sculpted….”  Or is it because Nora feels like she can control any situation?

Whatever the case, the cunning M. knows who Nora is from their meet cute and, says the spider to the fly, come on over and I’ll make you dinner and tell you stories about how I degraded your sister, but whom I most certainly did not kill, and in exchange, you’ll let me tie you up, and abuse your body in numerous other ways and trust me, you’ll like it.

The thing is, Nora does  like it.  She likes it even when M. hurts her, which I suppose is one of the tenets of BDSM: pain and pleasure combined under controlled circumstances. She tries to make sense of it but “My feelings are paradoxical: I hate him, fear him, yet at the same time his dominion over me, however brief, is intoxicating.”

She likes it so much that she no longer feels anything remotely like sexual desire towards her bland, blond, dependable boyfriend, Ian. M. sucks her further and further into his world and reveals to Nora, bit by by, her sister Franny. He also encourages Nora to reveal parts of her own life that she’s kept buried for many years, to try to get to the underlying reasons for why she seems to lack the ability to get truly close to anyone. Despite the fact that there’s a ten-year age gap between Franny and Nora, they are similar on that front.

Obviously, readers will have to suspend disbelief to reconcile how a seemingly intelligent woman (she’s a bloody science journalist, for goodness sake) would allow herself to pursue the guy she thinks killed her sister. It’s not the kinky sex that’s at issue here, really, because you’ll find no judgement from me on that front.  There are some instances of “Really? Um, a world of no,” but Reese writes it all like she means it and I have to admire that. Lots of people would find the sex in this book unpalatable.  Let me put it this way; Topping from Below is NOT your garden-variety Fifty Shades of Grey

 

Olive Kitteridge – Elizabeth Strout

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shoppingbuzz1I don’t know how much readers actually care about the awards books win, but Elizabeth Strout’s novel Olive Kitteridge won the Pulitzer in 2009 and the book has been languishing on my tbr shelf since about then. It was June’s #bookspin choice on Litsy and I just managed to get it finished. Well, I shouldn’t say “managed” – that sounds like it was a book I had to force myself to read and it most certainly was not.

Truthfully, though, I wasn’t quite sure what to make of the titular character or the novel’s structure when I first started reading. The novel is written as a collection of short stories in which Olive Kitteridge often figures only peripherally. In the first story “Pharmacy” we meet her husband, Henry, a kind and patient man who owns the pharmacy of the title. He seems quite capable of managing Olive’s prickly personality.  When he suggests they invite his new employee Denise to dinner Olive responds that she is “Not keen on it.”

Olive’s relationship with her son, Christopher, is also strained.  She loves him, but she is not, it seems, a mother given to the warm fuzzies. When adult Christopher, a podiatrist, marries Suzanne, Olive fights “the sensation of moving underwater – a panicky, dismal feeling…”. When she overhears Suzanne making unkind remarks about her, she exacts a small revenge.

…there is no reason, if Dr. Sue is going to live near Olive, that Olive can’t occasionally take a little of this, a little of that – just to keep the self-doubt alive. Give her a little burst. Because Christopher doesn’t need to be living with a woman who thinks she knows everything.

Olive comes across as rigid and unsympathetic. As a former school teacher she was feared. One of her former students, whom we meet in the story “Incoming Tide”  says that “He’d been scared of her, even while liking her.” It turns out, though, that our initial assessment of Mrs. Kitteridge couldn’t be further from the truth. The humanity bursts out of her in ways that are, quite frankly, breathtaking.

In “Starving” a chance encounter with a young girl suffering from anorexia shows us one of the first cracks in Olive’s steely exterior.

Olive Kitteridge was crying. If there was anyone in town Harmon believed he would never see cry, Olive was that person. But there she sat, large and big-wristed, her mouth quivering, tears coming from her eyes. She shook her head slightly, as though the girl needn’t apologize.

[…]

Olive shook her head again, blew her nose. She looked at Nina, and said quietly, “I don’t know who you are, but young lady, you’re breaking my heart.”

This is just one instance of Olive demonstrating a tremendous amount of compassion and empathy. There are many more in this novel, and the cumulative effect of all these elliptical moments in a life is stunning. Each story is perfection and each character is fully realized. There are moments of tragedy and hope, of humour and despair; that is, there all the moments that make up a life.

Although I am sorry that I waited so long to read this novel, I am also thrilled that I got to discover it for the first time. I loved it and highly recommend it.

I Will Judge You By Your Bookshelf – Grant Snider

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I Will Judge You By Your Bookshelf by Grant Snider was a recent impulse buy because judgeit was too cute to pass up. And, let’s face it, I probably do judge people by their bookshelves – well, I am more likely to judge people who don’t have any.

This book is a collection of comics about books and bookshelves, but also about writing and reading in general. There were several comics that I thought “Hey, I could use this in my writing class.” It’s all very accessible and whimsical and would make a lovely gift for a book-lover.

Snider is a life-long drawer who also happens to be an orthodontist. He can be found at Incidental Comics.

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A Friend of the Family – Lauren Grodstein

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friendfamilyThe Washington Post named Lauren Grodstein’s novel A Friend of the Family one of the best books of 2009. In fact, just about every major media outlet lauded this tale of  Dr. Pete Dizinoff who lives in suburban New Jersey with his wife, Elaine and their son, Alec.

Dr. Pete tells his story  – and I have to admit that it wasn’t at all the story I thought he was going to tell – from some point in the future.  If people ask him how he’s doing these days his reply is “Listen, life goes on.” And I’m not just feeding them formula, pap. Life really does go on. That’s what I’ve learned. It goes. You’d be surprised.”

Dr. Pete’s life is pretty perfect, although he is certainly not immune to life’s trials and tribulations. He loves his wife. He adores and is frustrated by his son in equal measure, especially since Alec recently dropped out of college “after three semesters and almost sixty thousand dollars of tuition, books, board, and other proofs of parental esteem.” Now Alec is living at home and creating art in the studio his parents have built above the garage. Well, that’s not exactly true, since the studio above the garage is where Dr. Pete is currently sleeping. The reasons for this are alluded to but never really revealed until much later in the book.

Pete and Elaine’s best friends Joe (also a doctor) and Iris live in the same neighbourhood, and the two families spend lots of time together. In the past, their close bond is tested when Joe and Iris’s daughter, Laura, commits a horrible crime, and when Laura reappears many years later the residual feelings of horror colour  Pete’s feelings towards her.

I hadn’t seen her since the week they took her to Gateway House thirteen years ago, and Christ, the girl had changed in a million beautiful ways. Back then she had been hollow-eyed, eviscerated by the trial and the confinement and everything that had preceded it. A criminal, a teenager, depressed and hidden in oversized shirts. But now-

For Pete, Laura’s arrival back in their lives reminds him of the latent feelings he has for her mother and also draws his son further away from him. A Friend of the Family is a domestic drama at its finest: well-written, fraught with tension and ultimately devastating.