Tag Archives: literary fiction

The Things We Never Say – Elizabeth Strout

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Like Olive Kitteridge and My Name is Lucy Barton, Elizabeth Strout’s newest novel The Things We Never Say is a character study more than it’s a story driven by plot.

Artie Dam is a high school history teacher in Revere, Massachusetts. He’s been married to Evie for over thirty years and they share a son, Rob, who is in his late 20s.

Lately, Artie has been thinking a lot about dying.

For more than two months, he had been thinking about how to kill himself without his wife or son (or students) knowing that he had done so. It was a great deal more complicated than he had originally thought. And this frightened him, to think it could not be done swiftly.

Artie is feeling isolated. He is a beloved and respected teacher, has a solid relationship with his son and wife, and has good friends but he doesn’t know how to talk to them, to share his unsettling feelings of hopelessness (the novel is set very much in the here and now, so Artie is especially concerned about the state of the world and his own country under its current administration). He also has no real understanding of how he is viewed by the people closest to him because

All of us live with a huge blind spot before our eyes, meaning that no matter what we think we know we can never fully understand how we appear to others. This was true for Artie Dam.

To Evie, Artie “appeared the most considerate man she had ever known, though irritating in his way.” The fact that he wears white socks, for example, drives her nuts. Although one senses that Artie and Evie have had a good marriage, and love each other, there is also a sense that they don’t really talk to each other any more and when Artie gets a shocking piece of news he does not share the knowledge with his wife.

Nothing much happens in this novel but honestly I could have cared less because Artie was such a recognizable character. Maybe it’s because he’s a teacher and so am I; maybe it’s because he is of a similar vintage; maybe it’s because his concerns about what is happening in the world mirror my own. As he tries to make sense of his life, and as he encounters moments of decency and kindness, I found him to be wholly sympathetic and human.

Ultimately, Artie comes to the conclusion that real connection is extremely difficult and rare.

And now he knew why. Because to say anything real was to say things that nobody wanted to know. Or if they wanted to know, they would not care in the right way. Or even understand.

It was a private thing, to be alive. He understood this now.

Five stars. No Notes. Highly recommend.

The Lamb – Lucy Rose

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“On my fourth birthday, I plucked six severed fingers from the shower drain.”

Margot lives with her mother, Ruth, down a country lane somewhere in England. From a very young age, Margot knows that her world is different. Well, different is putting it mildly. Ruth is a cannibal (and, by default, so is Margot.)

Nestled between the groves, we spent our days waiting for strangers to find us.

[…]

We’d had all sorts of strays here. Some of them had come away from car crashes, but what they didn’t know was that Mam had a little habit of leaving nails and glass on the back roads when she left the house. Some of the strays were lost, trying to hike across the fells without knowing that this gloom was where they’d spend the rest of their short lives.

[…]

That night, they didn’t scream much. It must have been quick.

If you are at all squeamish, Lucy Rose’s debut The Lamb might not be the book for you. I knew from the very first couple of pages that I was going to be icked out and I absolutely was. There’s lots of talk of turning body parts into pies and bones into broth and how delicious a crispy finger is.

But, this is also a story about a mother and daughter whose lives are changed when a stray arrives at their door who Ruth decides to keep because, as it turns out, she (Eden) is one of them. And Eden fundamentally changes the dynamic in the household which leaves Margot on the outside looking in.

Margot is used to making herself small so as not to draw attention. But she makes a friend at school, Abbie, and her bus driver, Steve, also seems to sense something is not quite right. The danger doesn’t come from the outside world, though. Her mother tells her

“I didn’t want to carry a child!” […] I never wanted to be a mama. I just wanted to be a person. None of this was supposed to happen. […] You make me hate myself.”

The Rose is a fairy tale and a story about female rage and motherhood. Do women cannibalize themselves in order to do what is expected of them? Does the hunger for more ever go away? What sacrifices must be made in order to live a fulfilling life?

If you have a strong stomach, The Lamb is a terrific read.

Slanting Towards the Sea – Lidija Hilje

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Lidija Hilje’s debut Slanting Towards the Sea was recommended to me by a friend on Litsy because I loved The Paper Palace. I can sort of see the similarities, but Hilje’s novel will not be replacing Cowley’s book in my heart.

Ivona lives with her elderly father in Croatia. She’s working a dead-end job at a stationery store and spending her free time stalking her ex-husband, Vlaho, on social media. She doesn’t really have to stalk him; she is friends with Vlaho and his new wife Mariana and godmother to one of Vlaho’s two kids. In fact, she is the one who introduced Mariana and Vlaho.

Ivona and Vlaho met as students in Zagreb.

I was only nineteen, yet the country I had been born in had dissolved, the state I was born in had fought its way back to independence through a bloody war. The currency had changed three times before I turned eleven. […] I had been born into socialism and autocracy and was now living under democracy and capitalism, or as close to it as the transitional economy could get.

It is this changing world that helps shape their relationship. They meet at a bar, where they bond over their shared love of music and Vlaho tells her “You may have just become my favourite girl.” They are — bar a couple minor hiccups — pretty much inseparable from that point on.

Predictably, the course of true love never runs smoothly, and their relationship is complicated by a lack of financial stability (post graduation, Vlaho lands a job at a bank, but Ivona has difficulty finding a job in her field) and other issues that cut a little closer to the bone. Eventually, Ivona leaves Vlaho, but not because she doesn’t love him, thus the Internet stalking and attending child-related events. Seems like unnecessary torture to me, but the heart wants what the heart wants. And it seems like Vlaho feels the same way, especially when a new guy enters Ivona’s orbit.

Slanting Towards the Sea is not a straight up romance. The book has things to say about family relationships and obligation, heritage, and history. This is a book that very much made me want to visit Croatia some say; it sounded beautiful. Hilje is writing in her second language, English, so sometimes the writing did feel a little stilted to me, but there were also some lovely moments.

Much like in The Paper Palace, there’s a significant event that tears our lovers apart. I can’t say that the event in Slanting Towards the Sea, while certainly difficult, comes close to matching what the lovers in The Paper Palace had to endure, but the characters sure do make a lot of it – to the point of Ivona sabotaging her own happiness. There were some other things that didn’t really work for me, either, the truth about Vlaho’s marriage to Marina for example.

So, while this book didn’t quite land for me, it certainly has lots to recommend it: a stunning setting, lots of angst and an ending that, while contrived on one level, mostly stuck the landing.

Martyr! – Kaveh Akbar

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Kaveh Akbar’s fiction debut, Martyr! would likely not have made it onto my tbr list if it weren’t for my #bookclubof3. Last year my friends Luke (former student and voracious reader) and Lauren (his wife and voracious reader) and I discussed John Williams’ novel Stoner and when they made plans to come home for a visit this summer we decided to talk about Martyr!. So, I have them to thank for this reading experience, which I thoroughly enjoyed.

Maybe it was that Cyrus had done the wrong drugs in the right order, or the right drugs in the wrong order, but when God finally spoke back to him after twenty-seven years of silence, what Cyrus wanted more than anything was a do-over.

A recovering alcoholic (and aspiring writer), Cyrus Shams is crushed by the debilitating knowledge that he is not making anything of his life. Cyrus “told his AA sponsor Gabe that he believed himself to be a fundamentally bad person. Selfish, self-seeking. Cruel, even.”

Life hasn’t been easy for Cyrus. Born in Iran, his father Ali immigrated to the US after his wife, Roya, was killed when the U.S. Navy mistook the passenger jet she was on for something else and shot it out of the sky. (True event.) It was 1988, at the tail end of the conflict between Iran and Iraq. Cyrus was only an infant and has no memory of his mother.

Although Cyrus is essentially an American kid, he carries with him the trauma of his mother’s death and the stories his father has told him about Iran. After his father dies, Cyrus starts to consider – well, all the things you start to think about at a certain point in your life: your mortality and your purpose on earth chief among them.

Cyrus decides he wants to write a book about martyrs. According to the Cambridge dictionary, a martyr is “a person who suffers very much or is killed because of their religious or political beliefs and is often admired because of it.” I don’t think Cyrus has a particular religious belief he wants to die for. I think, in fact, this second definition is more appropriate: “someone who tries to get sympathy from others when he or she has a problem or too much work, usually when that person caused the problem or chose to do the work himself or herself.”

Like many 20-somethings, Cyrus is a bit of a navel-gazer. He admits that he wants his “little life to have something of scale. For the stakes to matter. […] For [his] having lived to matter.” To be fair, I think most humans would probably like that to be true, right? But it sucks Cyrus down a deep dark well as he searches for something meaningful in his life.

Then he stumbles on Marina Abramović-esque performance artist Orkideh, an Iran-born NYC-based woman who is spending her final days living (she’s dying of cancer) at the Brooklyn Museum where she will talk to anyone about anything. No appointment necessary. Who could possible know more about Cyrus’ quandary than her?

Luke, Lauren and I all agreed that Martyr! was a great read. Luke said he originally thought it might even be a five-star read for him, but as he gained a little distance from the book, he thought it was probably more of a four star read. That’s probably where I would land, too. I agreed with Lauren that the book had perhaps too many ideas to land all of them successfully. At least one of the reveals felt a bit contrived to me. There wasn’t a sucker punch of an ending which is something I look for in a five star read.

I wondered how Luke and Lauren might feel about Cyrus as they are far closer to his age than I am. Although some of the time his angst felt a bit circular, I still found him relatively sympathetic. I didn’t want to shake him at any rate.

Minor complaints aside, this is a beautifully written – and often original – book that asks (but doesn’t always answer) some of life’s big questions and tries to figure out exactly what it is to live a meaningful life.

The Comfort of Monsters – Willa C. Richards

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Hot on the heels of my last novel about sisters, False Witness, comes another book about sisters: The Comfort of Monsters by Willa C. Richards.

In this story, Peg McBride recalls the summer of 1991 when her younger sister, Dee, disappears. Dee’s disappearance barely causes a ripple in the crime landscape because she goes missing in Milwaukee in 1991, the same time as Jeffrey Dahmer was arrested.

Peg narrates the story of her relationship with her sister as children and young adults up until Dee’s disappearance, and then thirty years in the future when her ailing mother hires an internet-famous psychic in a last-ditch effort to find out what happened to Dee. It’s this development that causes Peg to reminisce about her sister, although I think Dee has informed every single decision Peg has made over the past 30 years.

Peg has always been convinced that Dee’s much older boyfriend, Frank, was responsible for Dee’s disappearance. She hadn’t liked him pretty much on sight.

Frank hugged me when we met. I didn’t like the feeling of his body against mine. I kept my arms awkwardly by my sides. When he pulled away, I felt like he was looking through my clothes. Some men seem to be able to do that–to make you feel totally naked.

After Dee’s disappearance, Frank vanishes into the ether and the case languishes. But despite being billed as a crime novel, the mystery of what happens to Dee isn’t really what this book is about. Sure, it informs Peg’s character (which isn’t particularly likable), but readers looking for a fast-paced mystery are not going to find that in The Comfort of Monsters.

Instead, the novel is a slow-moving, meandering character study of family dynamics, romantic entanglements, our fascination with true crime, race and memory.

Memory, of course, is also a story. It feels like the truth, especially when there is no one to dispute your recollection of events. But it is a story nonetheless–some moments have been elided, and others have been emphasized and made either luminous or horrific or both. […] And because now, more than ever, my sister’s case depends on these memories, I am terrified that crucial pieces of evidence have been lost along the way.

I liked it, but didn’t love it.

Carmilla – Sheridan Le Fanu

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According to Encyclopedia Britannica, “Jure Grando Alilović or Giure Grando (1578–1656) was a villager from the region of Istria (in modern-day Croatia) who may have been the first real person described as a vampire in historical records.” John Polidori’s 1918 short story The Vampyre is the first modern literature to feature the bloodsucking creature of the night, Lord Ruthven, who was famously inspired by Polidori’s employer, Lord Byron.

Sheridan Le Fanu’s 1872 novella Carmilla predates Bram Stoker’s far more famous Dracula by 25 years. Le Fanu was a well-known writer of horror and mystery fiction during the Victorian period, and the author of fourteen novels and many short stories. And yet, he’s not nearly so well known as Bram Stoker, who is often credited with creating the archetypical vampiric character. (I don’t mean to say that Le Fanu is not well known, but I read Dracula as a teenager and I only heard of Carmilla a decade or so ago.)

Carmilla is the first person account of Laura who lives with her widowed father in Styria, Austria. The pair and their servants live in an isolated schloss (castle), the nearest village seven miles away. Laura is telling the story of what happened to her when she was nineteen from a point eight years in the future.

I am now going to tell you something so strange that it will require all your faith in my veracity to believe my story. It is not only true, nevertheless, but truth of which I have been an eyewitness.

A chance carriage accident brings a young lady, Carmilla, to the schloss. Her mother must attend to urgent business, but Carmilla must rest after this accident, and Laura’s father graciously agrees to welcome her into his home. After all, Laura could use a companion. Soon, though, Laura begins to feel unwell.

I felt myself a changed girl. A strange melancholy was stealing over me, a melancholy that I would not have interrupted. Dim thoughts of death began to open, and an idea that I was sinking took gentle, and, somehow, not unwelcome possession of me.

Of course, modern readers will know immediately what’s happening. Carmilla is SPOILER ALERT the undead. And, of course, the supernatural shenanigans in Le Fanu’s novel will seem pretty tame by modern standards, but I can only imagine that Victorian audiences would have been shaking in their boots to read of some of the images that plagued poor Laura.

For a vampire literature completist, Carmilla is a must read.

Bunny – Mona Awad

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For a while, Bunny was everywhere and so I bought it and shelved it and, finally, I’ve read it. Canadian writer Mona Awad’s story of academia, writing, and mental health (??) is a masterclass of a fever dream and more than once I was scratching my head and asking myself just what in the heck is going on. When I turned the last page, I still can’t say for sure what I read.

Samantha Mackey is in the graduate writing program at an elite New England college, Warren University. In her writing class of five, she is the outlier; the other four women in the class, The Duchess, Cupcake, Creepy Doll, and Vignette, are an insular group who affectionately call each other Bunny. Their affectation drives Samantha crazy and she and her bestie, Ava, spend most of their time mocking the other women.

How fiercely they gripped each other’s pink-and-white bodies. forming a hot little circle of such rib-crushing love and understanding it took my break away.

[…]

I quietly prayed for the hug implosion all last year. That their ardent squeezing might cause the flesh to ooze from the sleeves, neckholes and A-line hems of their cupcake dresses like so much inane frosting.

But then, one day, Samantha gets invited to Smut Salon, a gathering of the bunnies where they share their “Absolute Truth” and drink a “bile-green concoction in which what looks like a small black turd floats.” Suddenly Samantha finds herself one of the members of this strange sisterhood and losing, it seems, her grip on reality.

This is a crazy novel, honestly, but I gobbled it up in a couple sittings without complaint. I think much of what happens is deliberately ambiguous. Is Samantha going crazy? Are the student bunnies really turning actual bunnies into subservient men (although men without penises and who have to wear gloves because their hands are deformed)? Is the whole thing a metaphor for the creative process? Why can’t Samantha write anything? Why does Ava disappear? Who is Max? So many questions and although none of them are answered in a specific way, I think I am satisfied with my own interpretation of the the book. Which I am not going to share here because you’ll want your own.

Definitely worth a read.

Kin – Tayari Jones

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Vernice (Niecy) and Annie are childhood best friends, cradle sisters, growing up in Honeysuckle, Louisiana. Neither has a mother: Annie’s ran off when she was just a baby, left to be raised by her grandmother and Niecy’s mother was shot and killed by her father, who then killed himself. She was raised by her mother’s sister, Irene. Tayari Jones’s novel, Kin, traces the fortunes of these girls over many years in alternating voices.

Each girl has a complicated relationship with their absent mother. Niecy says

While I was tended to, I was never mothered. Many people suffered far more, even people raised at the knees of their actual mothers. Still, the hole in my spirit made me into the girls I was and then the woman that I am.

Annie’s grandmother tells her “”I can’t say what’s a harder cross to bear. Me having Hattie Lee for a daughter or you trying to be her daughter. She was my youngest. Number six. And how she did me when she was being born, she made sure no other baby could come behind her. She’s been like that all her life, salting the fields on her way out.”

The novel follows the girls as they grow up. Then, one day, Annie runs off with Clyde, Bobo and Babydoll. She heads to Memphis where, last she heard, her mother resided. Niecy is heartsick when she loses her best friend, but she is headed for college in Atlanta. Life has different things planned for the girls. Despite the road each girl travels, they are each other’s chosen family, their ‘person’. But the book gives them very separate stories and for much of the novel, those lives are lived apart. I found each girl interesting and their journeys were also interesting, but I wasn’t as invested in either of them as I thought I might be. I couldn’t tell you why.

On the plus side – I enjoyed the writing a lot. The book gave me lots to think about. As a middle aged white woman (it’s probably a stretch to characterize myself as ‘middle aged’, I know!) who grew up in Canada, I know next to nothing about the experiences of Black women in the south in the 1950s. There were some funny moments and some tender moments, too.

The story moves along, but in some cases I think I felt a little short changed. For example, Niecy’s relationship with Joette felt superficial because we didn’t really see how it developed. The ending, purported to be devastating, left me feeling …well, not very much, really. Did I enjoy my read? Sure. It was an easy book to sink into. Would I recommend it? Sure – lots of people would love it. Did I love it? Not really.

Yesteryear – Caro Claire Burke

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It’s been a couple of weeks since I finished Caro Claire Burke’s debut novel, Yesteryear, but life has been very busy as it always is at the end of the school year. Exams are over now, though, and all the marking is done so once prom and grad are over and done with, it’s just a coast to the end of the year and a whole summer of reading on my deck.

I probably needed some time to sit with Yesteryear anyway. A couple of the young teachers that I work with were both raving about it, couldn’t put it down, and so I moved it up the tbr pile. My feelings are more ambivalent than theirs.

Natalie Heller Mills lives in a beautiful restored farmhouse “nestled in the rolling divots between two mountain ranges in Idaho.”

She and her husband, Caleb, are parents to five children and Natalie is pregnant with baby number six. They are living the American Dream. But it’s a curated dream because Natalie is a social media influencer. Her stock and trade is selling her lifestyle to over a million followers. That’s a lifestyle that takes a lot of work.

Through the camera’s discerning eye, the cooking space was perfectly cluttered: a half-filled mason jar of water here, a flour spill there, a few forgotten flower stems strewn across a worn-looking cutting board. It looked like a space where a mother worked; like a kitchen in the real world, only obviously better than anything the real world had to offer.

It takes a lot of effort to sell the dream Natalie is selling. She needs help to do, but she never shows the help because Natalie “wouldn’t be able to forgive [herself] if [her] social media account ended up compromising them in any way.”

Yesteryear is very timely in that it captures the current juggernaut that is tradwives. Natalie is a devout Christian (but is she?) who bakes sourdough bread, homeschools her children and eschews the modern world in favour of the world she has created. She is definitely the brains behind the operation – as readers will come to understand when they read about her upbringing, her time away at college and her decision to marry Caleb, “the youngest of five boys, the runt of the litter in an American dynasty.”

But then one morning Natalie wakes up in an unfamiliar room under an unfamiliar blanket. When she makes her way to the kitchen she discovers her family, her children but not her children “all wearing raggedy-looking clothes that remind [her] of a pioneer reenactment.” Her husband’s “eyes are not [her] husband’s eyes. This man’s eyes are black and cold and dead.” What in the actual heck is going on? Is she on some weird reality television show?Is she actually expected to live the life she sells online?

When I think about trad wives, I think about Nara Smith.

Back when I used to have Instagram I would sometimes watch her videos and laugh – her voice, the ridiculous outfits, making Froot Loops and Fruit Rollups from scratch because her kids wanted to eat them. But, she’s coining it and is clearly not a dumb woman. She has at least four kids and is 25, so she definitely fits the mold. She and her husband, Lucky Blue, are both models and Mormon. I suspect Natalie isn’t quite as glamorous as Nara, but you get the idea.

I find trad wives fascinating and terrifying, but they aren’t a new phenomenon. Remember The Stepford Wives?

Yesteryear has a great premise and it’s a timely novel and it’s well written. Natalie is a character you will love to hate because she is self-involved and fake. But I also felt some sympathy for her, although maybe I wasn’t supposed to. But I didn’t love the book. I found it too long and the reveal was sort of unbelievable for a variety of reasons that would be spoilery to talk about. I think the book does offer some pointed commentary about motherhood, fame, the patriarchy, misogyny, influencer culture and so there’s certainly lots to talk about. It was just okay for me.

Pick a Colour – Souvankham Thammavongsa

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Pick a Colour by Souvankham Thammavongsa was our April book club pick and it made for an interesting discussion even if not everyone liked it.

Pick a Colour is the story of Ning, an ex-boxer who now owns a nail salon. She is single, in her early forties, lives above the salon and keeps things to herself. She is observant, though: “You look at something long enough and you begin to see everything in its details.”

Everyone who works for her is called Susan because “So many girls come and go. I don’t want to bother getting new name tags each time.” Everyone in Ning’s salon is replaceable and interchangeable. “We all have black shoulder-length hair and wear black T-shirts and black pants. We are, more or less, the same height, too.”

Thammavongsa’s follows a day in the life of a salon. Mia, Ning’s employee and possibly her only friend, spend time talking about the clients as they go about their tasks: manicures and pedicures, facials and threading. Ning is slow to reveal anything personal about herself. “I don’t like to talk to people,” she says “The other girls are better at it than I am, and I don’t mind nodding along. If I had a signature move, the nod is mine.”

But over the course of the day, Ning does drop little hints about her time as a boxer and her regrets. For example, when one of her clients laments her fifth miscarriage, Ning thinks

…suddenly I felt a sadness. That we get one life and sometimes in that life we’re just not going to get to do everything. And in this life, I understood, that was something I wasn’t going to get to do. It’s a grief, but for something you never even had or even loved.

Pick a Colour is a quiet novel that is more character study than plot, but Ning is an interesting character to spend time with. It won the 2025 Giller Prize.