Tag Archives: highly recommended

What the Birds See – Sonya Hartnett

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Sonya Hartnett’s novel What the Birds See begins with a nod to a real-life mystery. In 1966, siblings Jane, Arnna and Grant Beaumont went to the beach and disappeared without a trace. In Hartnett’s novel, the Metford siblings are heading to the shop for some ice cream. “The route they’d take to the shop would bend around four corners: two right turns, two left.” They never make it to their destination.

In the background of this disappearance, nine-year-old Adrian lives with his grandmother, Beattie, and his uncle Rory. His is a lonely existence. He has ended up here because his mother Sookie can no longer care for him and his father wanted to be free. Beattie is annoyed by her grandson and loves him, although she doesn’t know how to demonstrate that love. Rory, 25, barely comes out of his bedroom. Two years ago, Rory had been in a car accident that had caused much harm and he “had given up much of his vitality […]He has no desire, now, to truly live–none to participate, none to appreciate.”

Adrian is anxious. He “worries about all sorts of things.” The disappearance of the Metfords just gets added to his list of worries: quicksand, his closest door ajar, spontaneous combustion, tidal waves, sea monsters, being locked inside a shopping center, that his grandmother will forget to collect him from school at the end of the day.

Hartnett’s book is about lost children. The Metfords literally disappear; Adrian is lost in a world of adults who pay little attention to him. When siblings move into the house across the road, they are lost children too. Coincidentally, these newcomers are two girls and one boy, similar ages to the Metfords. Their sudden appearance serves as a reminder of the missing children.

All Adrian wants is “a calm and rosy world; he is prepared to accept anything, if anything is what keeps the peace.” The road to adulthood is tricky, littered with landmines and in this version of childhood almost impossible to navigate successfully.

Heartbreaking and highly recommended.

Our Fathers – Rebecca Wait

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I knew from the opening line that I was going to love Rebecca Wait’s novel Our Fathers.

If she had survived, Katrina would have said what people always say: that it had been a day like any other.

Set on the remote Scottish island, Litta, Our Fathers tells the story of Tommy, who has returned home after 20 years to confront the trauma of his past. He arrives on his uncle’s doorstep and the two men settle into an uneasy routine. What happened on the island all those years ago belongs to Malcolm, too.

One day, seemingly out of the blue, Tom’s father, John –this is not a spoiler as it’s mentioned in the blurb–shot his mother, older brother, Nicky, baby sister, Beth and then himself. Tommy hid and was spared. John was Malcolm’s brother. Tommy was eight. Obviously, this horrific crime sent a shock wave through the small close-knit community and Tommy arriving back as an adult stirs things up again.

Both Tom and Malcolm have a difficult time talking. That was always Malcolm’s wife Heather’s domain, but she died six years ago. Now in his early sixties, Malcolm has grown used to his solitary life on the island. With Tom’s unexpected arrival, Malcolm is “so shocked that for a few moments he couldn’t even speak.”

Why has Tommy returned now?

By all accounts, John was a loving husband and a good father, but there is no way around what he did that fateful day. For all these years after, Malcolm has tried to grapple with his brother’s crime but

he knew as well as anyone what a strange darkness the past was, how we plucked pieces from it and refitted them to our own purposes. The past was a story we told ourselves.

We spend a lot of time with uncle and nephew as they tiptoe around their shared history, but it is not the only perspective we get. There is also a section where we meet Katrina, Tommy’s mother, before she ever meets John. It’s interesting to get this view of her, to see how her own upbringing (raised by a narcissistic mother) shaped her. Part of Tommy’s return to Litta, I think, has to do with learning a little about her. We also learn about how she met John and their relationship; we can see what people on Litta never did.

There is also a cast of interesting characters on Litta most especially Fiona, who reluctantly hosts a dinner party for Tommy. It is here that some of the cracks start to appear and, later, when we see that Fiona and Katrina had once been friends. Fiona has her own part to play in Tommy’s story. She muses

What do any of us do in the end except what we believe is right at the time, without having all of the information, without knowing how things will turn out? We leap into the darkness with our only protection our idea of what is right, and who can ask more of us than that? We do our best, Fiona thought. I have always done my best.

I loved this book. It is beautifully written – the landscape is wild and rugged. Tommy and Malcolm are taciturn and unable to say what they desperately need to say. Both men are incredibly sympathetic. There is an element of suspense, although that’s not necessarily what drives the plot. It’s a masterful look at memory, guilt, love and family.

Highly recommended.

The Correspondent – Virginia Evans

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I have been a letter writer my whole life. Perhaps part of it had to do with how much we moved around (and, no, my father was not in the military), but I always wrote letters. For a while in my early teens I had a whole load of pen pals, people you’d meet via ads in teen magazines or through school. One of my oldest pen pals I have known for 52 years. We don’t write letters anymore, which I miss. (Now it’s just the odd message via the internet, which is a poor substitute.) I do not have every letter I have ever received –sadly too many moves– but I do have a handful of special letters. Recently I met an old boyfriend at his father’s funeral and he told me he had saved some of my letters to him…from almost 40 years ago and when I asked if I could have them, he obliged and sent them my way. Talk about an embarrassing blast from the past

So, you see, I was predisposed to love Virginia Evans’s debut The Correspondent and I did.

Sybil Van Antwerp “is a mother and grandmother, divorced from a distinguished career in law” but it is “the correspondence that is her manner of living.”

This is the only exposition we get in the novel, the rest is Sybil’s correspondence with a variety of people including authors (Joan Didion and Ann Patchett); her adult children (Fiona and Bruce); her best friend, Rosalie; her beloved brother, Felix, and Harry, the young son of a former colleague. There is also one letter, never sent, to someone called Colt.

Some of the letters in the novel are from Sybil to the recipient and some letters are to Sybil, but we are able to piece together a variety of different “plots” based on these letters. For example, we know that Sybil has a fraught relationship with her daughter and a close relationship with Felix. Both Sybil and Felix were adopted. At least one of her correspondents seems to hold a grudge:

I imagine you reading my notes standing at the mailbox, heat growing on your neck and the sick feeling in your stomach. […] I hope you have to look twice, and that little fear keeps you from enjoying the life you have left, in the same way that you impeded me.

It is through Sybil’s correspondence that we learn about a tragedy in her past, her disintegrating marriage (30 years prior, because Sybil is now in her 70s), her stubbornness, her kindness, and her desire to make things right when she can. She is a fully realized character without ever saying a word. As Sybil says in one letter: “my letters have been far more meaningful to me than anything I did with the law. The letters are the mainstay of my life”.

er correspondence (both sent and received) is funny, nostalgic, heartbreaking, and mundane, and it accurately captures the minutia of daily life. Just when Sybil thinks there can be no surprises left for her, she discovers that’s not quite true.

I loved every single thing about this book. An easy five stars, no notes, 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.