Tag Archives: highly recommended

Things Don’t Break on Their Own – Sarah Easter Collins

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Although Things Don’t Break on Their Own is touted as a “miraculous literary thriller”, I think that’s doing Sarah Easter Collins’ debut a disservice. While the book is definitely literary and it’s definitely a page turner, I don’t think I would call it a “thriller”. But maybe that’s nitpicking and it really doesn’t matter.

Robyn and her wife, Cat, have invited some friends and family round for dinner. There’s Robyn’s older brother, Michael, and his girlfriend, Liv. There’s Nate, Cat’s brother, and his new girlfriend, Claudette, and then there’s Willa and her boyfriend, Jamie. Robyn and Willa have history; when they were 17 and in boarding school together they were roommates and then lovers, but it ended badly. That was years ago, now, though and the two women are friends. It wasn’t a particularly happy time for Willa. Her younger sister, Laika, disappeared when she was just 13 and nearly 22 years later, the family still doesn’t know what happened to her.

The story changes perspectives and doesn’t follow a straight line. As Robyn anticipates Willa’s arrival, she remembers the summer she took her back to Tea Mountain, the remote place she calls home. It is a transformative experience for Willa, whose own family is a dysfunctional mess. Robyn’s father is a potter, and as he repairs a broken bowl using the Japanese method of kintsugi, he assures Willa (without even knowing her all that well) that “You can fix anything, given the right tools.”

There is no fixing Willa’s fractured family though. Her father, Bryce, has a successful business, so money is not an issue, but he is a horrible and abusive bully, especially to Willa’s mother and Laika. In fact, Bryce never touched Willa, and perhaps some of her guilt stems from that. About Laika, Robyn says

I tried to keep her safe. I really did. I told her, keep your head down, don’t bring unnecessary attention to yourself, just do what you’re told, all the things that just came naturally to me. But I was so busy keeping her safe from herself that I forgot to warn her about the outside world. I should have told her that there were people out there, men, women even, who could harm her.

So much was my fault.

Robyn and Cat’s dinner party proves to be revelatory, but by the time you get to the “twist” (maybe that’s why they call this book a thriller), you’ll be so invested in these characters that –well, I don’t want to say it hardly matters, but it was honestly the least interesting part of the book.

I really enjoyed Things Don’t Break on Their Own. The writing was great, the characters were compelling, and the mystery surrounding Laika’s disappearance was intriguing. It’s a solid debut and I highly recommend it.

Crux – Gabriel Tallent

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According to Merriam-Webster, crux is “a puzzling or difficult problem: an unsolved question; an essential point requiring resolution or resolving an outcome; a main or central feature”.

Gabriel Tallent’s novel, Crux, comes nine years after his debut, the much lauded My Absolute Darling. Crux landed on the top of my must read pile based on my love for his debut and now that I have read it, it cements Tallent’s place in my auto buy list. (I hope I won’t have to wait another nine years for is next book!)

For Tamma and Dan, seventeen-year-old besties, a crux is a metaphor for the difficulties and decisions they face in their everyday lives, but also the very real problems they encounter every time they head out into the Mojave to climb boulders.

These kids live next door to each other in the middle of nowhere. Their mothers, Alexandra and Kendra, used to be best friends until they had a falling out and now no longer speak. Alexandra wrote a best-selling novel when she was eighteen. She married Lawrence, a construction worker, and had Dan. Kendra is a diner waitress and, besides Tamma, is mother to Sierra (who has three kids of her own) and Colin. She lives with a dirtbag drug dealer ten years younger than her in a ratchety trailer. Neither Dan nor Tamma’s home lives are particular stellar. Dan and his father don’t really have much to say to each other; Alexandra barely comes out of her room. She had heart valve replacement surgery years ago, and the valve is now deteriorating. Although she did write a second novel, she’s been blocked ever since. Kendra is deplorable. Whether it’s the circumstances of her own life or she’s just an awful person, she is not kind to Tamma. On the rare occasions Tamma would be in Dan’s house, Dan would “catch Tamma eating orange peels. Chewing steak bones from the night before. She’d nab butter off the stick. […] “Dude,” he’d whisper, meaning, That bread is moldy, and “Dude,” she’d say back, meaning, Don’t worry, I scraped the mold off.”

Tamma and Dan spend as much time out in the desert as they can. They don’t have the right gear, but they climb anyway, spotting each other and egging each other on and challenging each other to climb more difficult rocks. “On the ground, Tamma was the clumsiest person he had ever met, but on the wall, she was breathtaking. […] Everyone he knew seemed to think Tamma was trash, but he thought she was some kind of genius.”

The teens have a dream, and that is to graduate from high school (although it is highly unlikely Tamma will graduate, Dan is a whipsmart scholar) and head to Indian Creek, “the last place on earth you can still dirtbag, the way the old-school climbers did.” The friends dream about perhaps going pro, making a living doing the thing that they love the best of all.

But life seems to have other plans for them.

Dan’s mother has a life-threatening medical issue. Tamma’s baby nephew, River, has a traumatic brain injury. Suddenly the pair find themselves having to reassess their lives and priorities. Their choices will have a profound impact on their lives.

Tamma couldn’t say that she’d never despair. All she could do was think, Not today. All her hope felt terribly insecure. And she could get to where she had this feeling of rage. I don’t want to be strong. I don’t want to have to try and find joy when it all feels so scary. And then she’d think: You can do this. You are a rad climber and people like you. You can show up every day and be an indomitable force for joy and hope and you can let everyone else fall apart without falling apart yourself.

Dan has his own struggles, but he knows that his parents “believed that it was possible for [him] to go out into the world and succeed. That belief was built into [his] worldview. No one had ever believed that about Tamma.”

Boulders aren’t the only things Tamma and Dan have to climb; life is going to shoot the motherlode of obstacles their way. How they ultimately handle these trials is what makes these characters people you want to root for. Their friendship is genuine and refreshing; their conversations often laugh-out-loud funny; their love and admiration for each other is real and beautiful.

There is a lot of climbing jargon in this book and that might not be to everyone’s taste. I don’t know a dang thing about climbing, but by the end of it I was invested in their pursuit of “sending” each climb they attempted. I loved Crux. It’s my first five star read of 2026.

Highly recommended.

Stoner – John Williams

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John Williams’ 1965 novel Stoner probably would not have been on my reading radar without booktube. It seemed as though many young readers (people in their 20s and 30s – and yes, those are young people to me now) were reading it and talking about it and so I added it to my physical tbr pile, figuring that I would get to it eventually.

Back in November when my friend (and former student) Luke and his wife, Lauren, were making their plans to come home for a visit over the holidays, they suggested a book club of three. Whenever we see each other, we always spend a lot of time talking about books and so this seemed like a good idea. I perused my shelves and suggested five titles, Stoner among them, and so that is where we landed.

Stoner is the story of William Stoner, son of impoverished Missouri farmers, who goes off to college ostensibly to take an agriculture degree, but who ends up taking a different path altogether. When the professor, Sloan, reads a sonnet and says “Mr. Shakespeare speaks to you across three hundred years, Mr. Stoner; do you hear him?”, Stoner falls in love. I also fell in love… with this book.

The novel follows Stoner through his undergraduate degree, his post graduate work, his early marriage to Edith, academic politics, the birth of his daughter, his affair. Williams doesn’t spend an inordinate amount of time at any of these road stops in Stoner’s life and yet somehow we come to know him very well.

Anybody who loves literature would find touchstones in this book and, indeed, in Stoner’s own life.

Sometimes, immersed in his books, there would come to him an awareness of all that he did not know, of all that he had not read; and the serenity for which he labored was shattered as he realized the little time he had in life to read so much, to learn what he had to know.

Luke, Lauren, and I could all relate to the feeling of anxiety at how little we will actually be able to read over the course of our lives, and Williams managed to capture that exact feeling. I think Luke and Lauren read far more deeply that I ever did at their age. (Luke is enrolled in a PhD of Philosophy and is currently reading Proust; Lauren is a research scientist at Harvard, about to start her own PhD. You might wonder what they are doing giving up precious family time to hang out with me; I wonder the same thing myself. :-)) Even if I have read upwards of 2000 books over the course of my life, lots of them were crap.

I also had another point of intersection with Stoner, and that was his feelings about teaching.

Always, from the time he had fumbled through his first classes of freshman English, he had been aware of the gulf that lay between what he felt for his subject and what he delivered in the classroom.

Sometimes Stoner feels like he is doing a great job and sometimes he feels like everything he does is crap and that is a feeling I have experienced over the course of my career. Of course, he is teaching at university and I am a high school teacher, so there’s that.

We had quite a lively discussion about Edith’s role in Stoner’s life, too. Lauren was a lot more sympathetic about her; Luke and I hated her. She never seemed like the right person for Stoner, and she did a lot of damage to his relationship with his daughter. It was hard to see anything positive about her at all. Did she redeem herself at all in the end? Not in my opinion.

Stoner is a book that gets you thinking about so many things, ‘what makes a life?’ chief among them. In the end, all three of us agreed that it was a fantastic book and a made for a great first book club of three discussion.

Highly recommended.

In the Wild Light – Jeff Zentner

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Well, that’s three 5 star books for Jeff Zentner. There’s just something about the way he writes characters that breaks my heart and Cash Pruitt, the sixteen-year-old protagonist of In the Wild Light now joins the ranks of Dill (The Serpent King) and Carver (Goodbye Days) as one of my all-time favourites.

Cash lives with his Papaw and Mamaw in Sawyer, Tennessee. It’s a backwater town and Cash doesn’t imagine much of a future for himself even though it is a place he loves. His mother died of a drug overdose; he never knew his father, but his grandparents are just salt of the earth people.

Cash’s best friend is Delaney Doyle. They met at a support group for people with family members who are addicts. Delaney is a genius, and that’s not an overstatement. For Cash, trying to understand how her mind works “is like trying to form a coherent thought in a dream.”

When Delaney makes an important scientific discovery, it earns her a full ride at Middleford Academy, a fancy private school in Connecticut. Delaney has no reason to stay in Sawyer – and every reason to go – but she isn’t going without Cash. Cash isn’t sure he wants to leave his grandfather who has end stage emphysema.

Cash agrees to go with Delaney and it is a decision that changes his life. First of all, he makes friends with a Alex, a boy he meets on the rowing team. He develops a crush on Delaney’s roommate, Vi, and he takes a poetry class, and this experience (and the teacher, Dr. Adkins) blow his world wide open. She tells him:

“I have two intuitions about you. The first is that you’ve got in your hear that poetry has to be elaborate, and that’s what’s fueling your hesitancy.

[…]

Number two: that you’re someone who pays attention to the world around him.”

Dr. Adkins is not wrong. Cash notices everything: the way people smell, the way Delaney worries the skin on her thumbs, the way water looks. “Ever since I first became aware that the world contains mysteries and incomprehensible wonders, I’ve tried to live as a witness to them.”

In the Wild Light is a coming-of-age story about a kid who has had to grow up way too fast, who feels out of his depth, but who learns to trust himself. Like every Zentner book I’ve read, this one made me cry on more than one occasion.

Highly recommended.

The Spirit Bares Its Teeth – Andrew Joseph White

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Andrew Joseph White (Hell Followed With Us) has written another amazing YA novel that feels especially timely given what is currently happening in the USA.

Sixteen-year-old Silas Bell, the protagonist in The Spirit Bares Its Teeth, wants to escape his future. In this version of 1883 London, the Speakers take what they want and what they want is to be married to violet-eyed girls. Except Silas isn’t a girl. That’s just biology. What he wants is to find a way to trick the system into giving him a spirit-work seal and then he hopes to slink off, and find a way to study medicine and become a doctor like his older brother, George.

But it all goes horribly wrong, and Silas is taken to Braxton’s Finishing School and Sanitorium, where the Headmaster and his wife turn young girls with “veil sickness” into women men will want to marry. Think conversion therapy, with ghosts. Because Braxton is haunted and as girls born with violet eyes have the ability to reach through the veil, it isn’t long before Silas realizes that something really horrible has been happening at the school.

Silas doesn’t have anyone to trust at Braxton’s, until she gets to know Edward Luckenbill, the young man to whom she is engaged. Is it just possible that Edward is not like the other men Silas has encountered?

You really only come to understand yourself by comparing other’s stories to yours; you find where things are the same, and where they’re not. … Its difficult when the story isn’t one the world wants to hear.

Silas is determined to find out what happened to some of the students that have gone missing, but it isn’t going to be easy and it’s definitely going to get bloody.

White has a remarkable imagination, but this book feels especially timely given the way the rights of marginalized people are being eroded. As Silas seeks to learn the truth about Braxton, he also comes into his own power and it is impossible not to root for him. If you haven’t yet discovered this author, I can highly recommend. You won’t read anything else like it.

The Names – Florence Knapp

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Cora has never liked the name Gordon. The way it starts with a splintering sound that makes her think of cracked boiled sweets, and then ends with a thud like someone slamming down a sports bag. Gordon. Bu what disturbs her more is that she must now pour the goodness of her son into its mold, hoping he’ll be strong enough to find his own shape within it.

This is Cora’s dilemma after the birth of her second child. She doesn’t want to name the baby after his father, a prominent, beloved doctor who is also a physically and mentally abusive husband. So, on the day that Cora and her daughter Maia, 9, walk to the registry office to officially register the baby’s name, they imagine other names instead of Gordon. Maia is fond of Bear because “It sounds all soft and cuddling and kind.” Cora is partial to Julian, which means “sky father.”

Florence Knapp’s novel The Names imagines the lives of these characters if the baby had been named Bear, Julian or Gordon – skipping forward at seven year intervals for thirty-five years. Who dos this little boy become and how does his name affect the people in his life?

I loved everything about this book, honestly. Although the author has written books previously, The Names is her debut novel and it’s a corker. I loved the glimpses into Bear/Julian/Gordon’s life, loved seeing what things were similar in each iteration an what things were vastly different.

But the novel is not just concerned with his life. We are also privy to Cora’s story, her early courtship with Gordon, her upbringing in Ireland, and what becomes of her in each of these scenarios. Maia, too, gets her story.

What’s in a name? Turns out, quite a lot. Highly recommended.

The Servants – Michael Marshall Smith

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I plucked Michael Marshall Smith’s 2009 novel The Servants off my TBR shelf — where it has been languishing for a long time no doubt– and was rewarded with a lovely, quiet tale about eleven-year-old Mark who has moved to Brighton with his brand-new step-dad, David, and his mom, who appears to be quite ill. The book reminded me of The Book of Lost Things and A Monster Calls , both five star reads for me.

Mark is wholly unhappy about his new circumstances. Although he’d been to Brighton before, back when his parents were still married, then it had been on holiday where his days had been filled with fun activities. It’s winter now, and cold, and he spends his days trying to learn how to ride his new skateboard down by the beach. He doesn’t like David, “who liked to explain everything” in a weird accent because he had spent so much time living in America. Mark also feels that David has some sort of weird control over his mother and was always “hovering in the background doing whatever it was he always did.”

One day, Mark meets the old lady who lives in the basement apartment.

…she was not so much old as very old, and also a little scary-looking. When she blinked, she looked like a bird, the kind you saw on the seafront, stealing bits of other people’s toast

When she invites him for tea and cake, she shows him an astonishing piece of the house’s history, hidden behind a locked door in her apartment. This is the servants’ quarters and, as it turns out, it is haunted.

The Servants is very much a coming-of-age story. It is about Mark trying to navigate his new world, a world where there is never enough diet Coke in the fridge, and where his understanding of the way life works is skewed by his immaturity therefore elevating his father to a position he clearly does not deserve and casting David in the role of evil step dad.

There was one tiny conversation between David and Mark that reduced me to tears and the metaphor of the servants as the beating heart of a home, who have to work together for anything to be accomplished, was apt.

This one is a heartfelt winner.

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.

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.