Tag Archives: Book Review

Mad Honey – Jodi Picoult & Jennifer Finney Boylan

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Although I have read several books by Jodi Picoult (The Pact, Nineteen Minutes, The Tenth Circle, My Sister’s Keeper), I read them pre-2007, which is when I started this blog. I loved The Pact, but I remember feeling manipulated by My Sister’s Keeper, which is probably when I stopped reading her. I had never heard of Jennifer Finney Boylan. I can’t really tell you why I picked up Mad Honey, but I can tell you that I loved it.

This is the story of Olivia, who lives with her teenaged son, Asher, a star hockey player, in the house she grew up in in rural New Hampshire. She’d left her life as the wife of a cardiothoracic surgeon when Asher was six, well, she’d fled her life, really, because her ex was abusive. Now she does what her father did before her: she is a beekeeper. There’s loads of interesting things about beekeeping in this book.

This is also the story of Lily, who has recently moved to this same small town with her single mother, Ava. Lily is beautiful and fragile and shy, but when she and Asher meet, through Asher’s childhood bestie, Maya, something clicks and the two are soon inseparable.

This novel is told from these two perspectives and it is really a story about love: the love a mother has for their child, romantic love and self love. It is also a story about secrets, the ones we keep from others, but the truths we keep from ourselves, too. It is also a page-turning courtroom drama because– this is not a spoiler; it is revealed in the blurb– at the end of the first chapter we learn that Lily is dead.

The story toggles back and forth to the beginning of Lily and Asher’s relationship, to their growing feelings for each other (as seen through Lily’s eyes, but also what is witnessed by Olivia), but also reaches further back to provide some insight into how Lily and her mother ended up in New Hampshire. Olivia also reflects on her marriage to Braden, the giddy beginning and the incident that finally caused her, after many other incidents, to flee. She and Asher are close, and so when he is charged with Lily’s murder there is no question of believing he is innocent. But then: maybe Asher has something of his father in him after all.

There is a plot twist in this book that I did not see coming — although I probably should have since Picoult is very much known for her topicality. Anyway, it was a surprise and it definitely added a whole new layer to this story. These characters felt real to me and their struggles also felt nuanced and authentic. I was wholly invested in the outcome of the trial and I absolutely could not wait to get back to the book after I set it down. Mad Honey is provocative, thoughtful, and timely.

If you have never read Picoult before this would be a great place to start, and if you’ve read her but, like me, given her a break, I highly recommend this one.

Keeping 13 – Chloe Walsh

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True to my word, after finishing Binding 13 I immediately went out to Indigo and purchased Keeping 13 which continues Johnny and Shannon’s story. I headed for the YA section, only to discover that the books were not there. Someone had moved them to the Romance section, which is absolutely where they should be, despite the ages of the main characters.

Keeping 13 is another brick of a book – 651 pages – but I knew what I had signed up for and I ripped through it in just a couple days. When we left our characters at the end of the first book, Shannon’s brother Joey was asking his mother to make a choice, a choice that she seems incapable of making. I won’t say much more about that here because…spoilers…but let’s just say that Keeping 13 starts extremely dramatically.

The main part of this story concerns Johnny and Shannon’s growing feelings for each other, Johnny’s recovery from an injury that happened before the start of the first book, but which hasn’t healed properly, the domestic abuse that is happening in Shannon’s house and which causes the return of the oldest Lynch sibling, Darren, and the requisite trash talk by Johnny’s BFF, Gibsie. Johnny’s ex-girlfriend Bella is also intent on making Shannon’s life miserable.

I read this because I genuinely cared about Johnny and Shannon and when I got to the end of the first book I had to keep going to find out what happened. Obviously at 600+ pages, there were some instances of repetition: a lot of instances where one character or another needs to be reassured (but for reasons that make obvious sense.) There was also a lot more sex in this one because as Johnny and Shannon grow closer and admit their feelings to each other, clearly they are driven by hormones and want to get nekkid. I actually appreciated how respectful Johnny was about Shannon’s innocence and even when he blabbed to Gibsie, I could sort of forgive him for his lack of discretion because he is, after all, still young. I loved Johnny’s parents a lot and I loved how I could hear the Irish lilt in the character’s voices.

There were some truly pulse-pounding moments in this book, too. I read one scene in particular with my heart in my throat. And, of course, lots of swoony moments as these two crazy kids try to figure out themselves, their lives, and their feelings for each other.

I was all in, but with the same caveats: a lot of swearing and a lot of sexist comments made about the girls in the book, still tropey (helpless, fragile girl saved by massive, hulking dreamboat), just way longer than it needed to be.

Now, there are more books in this Boys of Tommen series, but I won’t be carrying on. Nothing against the other characters (all of whom I have met in these first two books, I am guessing), but I feel like I would just be getting more of the same and I am pretty happy with what I got.

If there was a series, though, I would 100% watch it.

Binding 13 – Chloe Walsh

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Here is something that you may not know about me: I love YA romance way more than I love adult romance. I don’t know why. Maybe it’s because when I was a teenager I was always in love (and out of love and then in love again). Maybe it’s because that’s as far as I ever got on the romantic maturity scale. Whatever the reason, adult romances rarely ever hit for me, but YA often does. (There are exceptions to this rule, of course. I love Talking at Night and The Paper Palace and everything by David Nicholls.)

I am all in for shows like The Summer I Turned Pretty and To All the Boys I Loved Before and Maxton Hall. Books like Perfect Chemistry and Easy and The Do-Over are way more palatable to me than books by Emily Henry (I’ve tried two and DNF either.)

So, that brings me to Binding 13 by Chloe Walsh, a book that I picked up and put down a million times at the bookstore. Then it was recommended by a couple reviewers that I like, and it was on sale, so I bought it. It’s long, just over 600 pages, but I read it in just a couple of days.

Fifteen-year-old Shannon has endured a life time of bullying and not just at school; her father is abusive, too. She lives with her parents, one older brother, Joey, and three younger brothers, on a council estate in Ballylaggin, Ireland. Finally, her mother decides to send her to Tommen, a private school, where she hopes her daughter will be safe from the students who have tormented her her whole life. (She mostly conveniently ignores the fact that her husband is physically abusive, too.)

On the first day of school, while crossing the sports field, Shannon gets hit with a rugby ball, which knocks her down, cracking her head off the ground and causing a mild concussion. This is how she meets Johnny Kavanagh, captain of the rugby team and all around super stud.

Okay, you know how these things go. Girl who doesn’t know how beautiful she is meets boy who totally knows how beautiful he is try to ignore their feelings, can’t, and eventually <<insert 600 pages of Irish slang, rugby talk, longing looks, expletives>>….yeah, apparently I will have to read the gosh darn sequel Keeping 13 to find out what happens – even though, of course, I know what happens.

Although Binding 13 is shelved in the YA section at my local Indigo and even though the main characters are all teenagers, I wouldn’t actually consider this to be YA. And neither, apparently, would the author. On her website, Walsh says “Please note that all of Chloe’s books are intended for mature readers of 18 years and above. Chloe’s self-published work has always been categorized as new adult and contemporary. The topics of conversation in these stories are NOT suitable for younger audiences. The first four books in the Boys of Tommen series were self-published and marketed for adult readership only.”

I don’t believe in censorship, but I probably wouldn’t put this book in my classroom library. To be fair, though, I would be happier with my students reading this than I would be if they were reading Colleen Hoover. That’s saying something.

There’s lots to like about Binding 13. I really grew to love both Shannon and Johnny. There are a lot of great secondary characters, too. The book is often laugh-out-loud funny. I wouldn’t say that there is swoon-level romance, but Johnny proves himself early on to be protective and not above throwing a fist if he needs to. I was definitely invested in these characters and their individual struggles: Shannon’s safety and the pressure Johnny puts on himself to be an elite athlete. How will these crazy kids ever get together?

There are also some things I didn’t like. It is tropey, for sure. Shannon is teeny, child-like and Johnny is a 6’3″ wall of muscle. Shannon falls down a lot – she is constantly running into Johnny’s muscular chest and landing on her ass. I didn’t like the way the boys talked about the girls sexually. Their conversations are far more graphic than anything the characters might have gotten up to. Sometimes the conversations between Johnny and Shannon seem to do a complete 360 out of nowhere, which I guess you can explain away by their ages. And much is made of their ages, although there is really only two years between them: Shannon turns 16 in the book and Johnny will turn 18. They read a lot older, although I guess you could explain that away by their life experiences.

Look, I know that I am certainly not the audience for this sort of book, but I will be purchasing Keeping 13 and reading it straight away and that is something I never do.

There. That’s my endorsement.

The Wedding People – Alison Espach

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Phoebe’s life has fallen apart and one last kick to her heart is the final straw, so she books a one way flight to Newport, Rhode Island and makes a reservation to stay at Cornwall Inn. Just a one night stay because Phoebe intends on killing herself.

Phoebe and her husband Matt had always intended to shake up their vacations and come to this amazing hotel, but they always ended up defaulting to the same old same old, and then one day he just up and left her.

But now Phoebe stands before a nineteenth-century Newport hotel in an emerald silk dress, the only item in her closet she can honestly say she still loves, probably because it was the one thing she had never worn.

Phoebe isn’t expecting the hotel to be full, but it is. There’s a wedding and all the wedding people are here for the entire week leading up to the nuptials. When Phoebe meets the bride, Lila, in the elevator, she blurts out that she intends to kill herself in an attempt to explain to Lila that she is not, in fact, one of the guests.

Alison Espach’s novel The Wedding People is really a book about connections and how sometimes a random and seemingly inconsequential meeting can change the trajectory of your life. Although Phoebe is clearly in emotional pain, she recognizes it in others.

…Phoebe is starting to understand that on some nights, Lila is probably the loneliest girl in the world, just like Phoebe. And maybe they are all lonely. Maybe this is just what it means to be a person

It will be no surprise that Phoebe does not, in fact, kill herself. Instead she finds herself embroiled in the wedding drama, propositioning the wrong man, standing in as the maid of honour, and working through her own trauma. The book is funny, sentimental, and life-affirming because as Phoebe starts to remind herself “I am here.”

Beats the alternative.

Nestlings – Nat Cassidy

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When Reid and Ana win an apartment lottery they are thrilled that they can leave their crappy Brooklyn apartment and their crazy landlord, Frank. The Deptford is a swanky building overlooking Central Park. It’s almost too good to be true, but Ana and Reid could use a break.

They’ve recently had their first baby, Charlie, but the birth wasn’t without its complications and Ana has been left in a wheelchair. She isn’t sure living on the 18th floor of the Deptford is the right decision, but she has to admit that the apartment is fabulous even though her first thought upon viewing the space is “We don’t belong here.”

Nat Cassidy’s novel Nestlings is very much a riff on Rosemary’s Baby with less devil worshippers and more…well, I’ll leave that for you to figure out. Reid settles into the space relatively easily, but Ana is trapped in the apartment with Charlie, who never seems to stop crying.

Things are weird in the apartment almost immediately: goopy stuff around the window in her daughter’s bedroom, the sounds of crying from the apartment next door, the strange concierge and even stranger elevator operator, staircases that go nowhere. No one will actually come into the building to deliver food; Reid has to run across the street to collect it when the delivery guy shows up. But, yeah, sure, small price to pay for living in a place that under other circumstances they could never afford.

As the story moves along and as Ana (and the reader) begin to understand just what this building and the assortment of eccentric people who live in it are all about, the stakes get a little higher. This couple is dealing with a whole lot–post partum depression, grief, marital discord, a disability. It makes them sort of the perfect victims but, of course, a mother’s love should not be underestimated.

Lots of creepy (and a few campy) moments in Nestlings. It wasn’t outright scary, though. The first two thirds were pretty slow moving, then things ramped up towards the end. If horror’s your cup of tea, I think you will probably enjoy this one.

Await Your Reply – Dan Chaon

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Here’s a weird reading situation: I started and finished Dan Chaon’s novel Await Your Reply without really understanding what I was reading. The novel follows three different stories, all of them compelling enough to keep me reading but when I turned the last page my reaction was “huh?”

In one story, recent high school graduate, Lucy, runs off with her handsome history teacher, George Orson. It makes sense for her to go; her parents are dead and she isn’t close to her older sister, Patricia. “And so: why not? They would make a clean break.” George has promised her a remarkable life, but first a stop in Nebraska, where George becomes secretive and evasive.

In another story, Miles is on the hunt for his twin brother, Hayden, who has been missing for a decade. Hayden’s most recent letter to Miles is filled with dire warnings about “the police, and any government official, FBI, CIA, even local government.” Miles knows his brother has had some mental health problems, and he could just ignore the letter when it comes, but he can’t do that, especially when Hayden tells him that he “may never hear from [him] again.”

Finally, there’s Ryan and his father, Jay. The novel opens with the two of them traveling to the hospital.

On the seat beside him, in between him and his father, Ryan’s severed hand is resting on a bed of ice in an eight-quart Styrofoam cooler.

Ryan has only recently been reunited with his father and that reunion caused Ryan to give up the life and parents he once had. Jay is kind of a dope-smoking deadbeat who makes his living by stealing people’s identities and drags Ryan into this life, too.

So, what do these stories have to do with each other? It feels like absolutely nothing, yet my brain kept trying to fit the pieces together. The book’s unique structure makes it almost impossible to discern whether or not these narratives are running concurrently or one after the other. The book has a lot to say about identity and whether or not we should be content to live just one version of ourselves. I dunno. I found this book flummoxing, but I kept reading and I would still say I enjoyed the read even if most of it flew over my head.

Come With Me – Ronald Malfi

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Part ghost story, part serial killer story and part story about grief, new-to-me author Ronald Malfi’s novel Come With Me reminded me of the work of authors like Peter Straub and Thomas H. Cook, both fine authors imho.

Aaron Decker, a translator, and his wife, Allison, a reporter for a community newspaper, are happily married. They live a quiet life, but their happiness is upended when Allison is tragically killed. It is only after she is gone that Aaron discovers a receipt from a motel stay that Allison hadn’t told him about. Was she having an affair?

I’m of the opinion that when it comes to secrets, there is no end to what we don’t know about a person. Even the person who sleeps next to us and shares our lives.

Aaron can’t help himself; he has to go looking and what he discovers takes him on a journey through the back roads of his wife’s childhood and towards a serial killer.

Come With Me is written as though Aaron is talking to Allison and it appears Allison is communicating with Aaron from beyond the grave. Lights flick on. Songs offer clues. Fragments of conversations that previously made no sense click into place. Aaron discovers surprising secrets about his wife and soon he finds that he has no choice but to finish what she had started before her death,

I really enjoyed this book. It isn’t horror, and it isn’t a straight up thriller, either. It’s not a page turner, although I did very much look forward to diving into it every chance I could. There’s definitely some creepy moments and definitely some suspense, but I compared Malfi to Straub and Cook because both of those writers penned literary mysteries/ghost stories. Thoughtful and slow moving. I hope the comparison is understood as the compliment I intend it to be.

I will definitely be checking out more work by this author.

Moon Road – Sarah Leipciger

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Kathleen and Yannick, the protagonists in Sarah Leipciger’s 2024 novel Moon Road, haven’t spoken to each other in almost twenty years. Their marriage

lasted only a few years, but they remained good friends over two decades because of Una, their daughter. And because they never stopped being fond of each other. So, a lasting friendship, but then one day, they had an argument. The argument was bad enough that they didn’t speak for nineteen years. Not a card, not a text message, not an email.

Another momentous thing happened all those years ago, too: Una, who had left Ontario and moved to the West Coast, disappeared. In the intervening years, Kathleen keeps track of how long Una has been missing by marking the days in a notebook (over 7000 of them by the time the novel starts) and hosting an annual party in her honour. Now 65, she grows flowers to sell to local businesses. Yannick, 73, is on wife number four and has three sons and a daughter. Now Yannick is back in Birchfield because he has “received some unexpected news” and “it’s about time they saw each other again.”

The news concerns Una, of course. It is her disappearance that has driven Kathleen and Yannick apart, as grief sometimes does, but it is also the thing that pulls them back together. Yannick has decided that he will drive to Tofino and he wants Kathleen to come.

This is a road trip novel, but only marginally. As Yannick and Kathleen set off on their cross-country drive, they talk and bicker and reminisce, weaving together the past and the present. They’ve both dealt with their grief and their guilt separately and neither knows for sure what they are going to find when the arrive on Vancouver Island.

The novel also provides a glimpse of Una and her time in BC, living rough, working odd jobs and trying to figure out what her life is meant to be. These sections are strung out throughout the novel and it isn’t until the very end that we learn what actually happened to her. The mystery of her fate, the subsequent searches, and the leads that go nowhere definitely keep the pages turning.

But what I loved about this novel was Yannick and Kathleen and how connected they were despite the intervening years. Their marriage didn’t work, but they have a child and that is a bond that sticks. (Unless it doesn’t and I have first-hand knowledge of that scenario.) It was wonderful to read a book featuring mature characters who have lived a life, suffered a terrible loss, and then made an effort to keep moving forward.

The book is also beautifully written – not quite a travelogue, despite the road trip, but Canada is a gorgeous country, and anyone who has even driven from coast to coast (I have!) will likely recognize some of the descriptions of the vastness of the prairies and the majesty of the mountains.

Highly recommended.

The Paris Apartment – Lucy Foley

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Jess needs to get out of Dodge (Dodge being London) and so she reaches out to her older half-brother Ben to see if she can come stay with him in Paris. But when she arrives in Paris, he’s not responding to her buzzing up to his flat, nor is he answering her calls. Jess is desperate because she’s broke, doesn’t speak the language, and doesn’t know anyone in Paris.

Lucy Foley’s novel The Paris Apartment has a similar structure to the only other Foley novel I’ve read The Guest List. In both novels, multiple characters have an opportunity to share their insight or, as is often the case, misdirect the reader. In The Paris Apartment, Jess encounters Sophie and her husband Jacques, the owners of the building who live in the penthouse. Then, there’s Nick, Ben’s university friend and the reason Ben was able to land such swanky digs. Mimi, an artist, lives with her roommate Camille; Antoine lives with his wife, Dominique, on the first floor. And then there’s the Concierge, an older woman who lives in a tiny cabin in the corner of the courtyard, tasked with keeping an eye on the building, and its inhabitants.

It becomes clear to Jess that these people are hiding something and her determination to find out what happened to Ben outweighs any fear she has for her safety. Ben is the only family she has and although a part of her resents his success (they share a mother, who died when they were quite young and both children were fostered out; Ben fared a little bit better than Jess and has had a more successful life), she also loves him.

There’s lots of misdirection and red herrings in Foley’s book and your level of enjoyment will depend on how much you care for Jess and finding out what exactly happened in the Paris apartment. The story is okay, albeit a little slow, particularly at the beginning. If you haven’t read a lot of this type of story before, this would be an okay place to start. Otherwise, I wouldn’t bother.

Just Like Home – Sarah Gailey

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Despite the fact that they have been estranged for several years, when 30-something Vera Crowder’s mother, Daphne, asks her to come home because she is dying, Vera packs up her less-than-stellar life and heads home to the house that was both heaven and hell.

Her father, Francis Crowder, had built the house long before she was born, back when his marriage to Vera’s mother was new. Back before everything else happened, before everyone knew his name. He’d built it with his two strong hands, built it right in the middle of his square patch of green land, built two stories above the ground and dug one below.

It is really Vera’s complicated feelings for her father that drive her back home, “that, and the impossible reality of her mother’s voice on the phone, rippling with sickness.”

Home is now a bit of a circus. In order to make ends meet, Daphne has been renting out the garden shed to artists, writers, and lookie-loos hoping to be inspired by Francis Crowder’s madness. The latest inhabitant is James Duvall, an artist who feels he has a special right to be there because his father had written the definitive book about Francis’s crimes. Vera hates him on sight.

As a child, Vera was convinced that something nefarious was happening in Crowder house, particular in the basement where she was often awoken by “wet slapping noises” coming from down there. Francis kept the basement locked and Vera was given strict instructions to never go down there.

Generally speaking, her relationship with her father is easier than her relationship with her mother.

He’s a big wall of clean soap with curly brown hair that’s thinning in back, a crooked smile with a chipped tooth in front, big ropy muscles in his arms from cutting lumber all day. He’ll scoop Vera up close into a hug after he’s checked the bed and the closet and the curtains and the corners. He’ll tell her that no monsters are there. He’ll check twice.

Just Like Home is a novel about family as much as it’s about anything. And I was wholly invested in watching the family dynamics play out; Vera’s growing understanding (but strangely not horror) of what her father was up to, the erosion of her relationship with her mother. It also examines the weird cult of leeches who feed off the misfortune of others. Vera isn’t particularly likeable, although she is somehow sympathetic.

Then there’s that ending. I was all in until that. Still, worth a read.