Tag Archives: literary fiction

Kala – Colin Walsh

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Colin Walsh’s debut, Kala, is an example of a book I started, didn’t get very far, abandoned, and then picked up again a few weeks later and fell into without trouble. It’s been called everything from “A thriller–and a lot more” (Roddy Doyle) and “A masterclass in building suspense” (The Washington Post). I think the book falls somewhere in the middle.

Helen, Mush, and Joe are childhood friends who grew up in Kinlough, Ireland. Helen, a journalist who has been living in Canada, and Joe, a big-time musician, don’t make it home very much, but Mush has never left. He works at his mother’s cafe and spends his time alone or with his teenage cousins, Donna and Marie. There used to be three other members of their circle of friends: Aidan, Aoife, and Kala.

We’re fifteen and it’s the summer of our lives–the whole town’s pure responsive to our energies.

At the end of that summer, though, Kala disappears. Now, fifteen years later, Joe and Helen end up back in Kinlough and their return coincides with the discovery of human remains.

The story is told from Helen, Joe and Mush’s perspectives as they recount that final fifteenth summer (Kala was Helen’s best friend and Joe’s girlfriend) and also examines who they are now. They have all been traumatized by that long ago event. When Helen starts to poke around, asking questions she wouldn’t haven’t known to ask at the time, it stirs up some long-buried secrets.

There are some scary people in Kinlough, including Aiden’s own father, Ger, and his gang. Everyone in town knows they are up to no good, including Joe’s father, Dudley, a member of the local Guarda. If you are going to poke a wasp’s nest, you’re bound to get stung. But Ger is not the only bad element in Kinlough; the rot goes deep.

Kala is not a page-turner, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t riveting. Each of the main characters have demons in their pasts, and Joe and Helen in particular have a fractious relationship. They were such interesting characters, never mind their connection to Kala and the town.

The writing itself is also really compelling. They sounded Irish, at least to me; the musical cadence and the vocabulary is really specific. Here’s Mush describing hanging with Kala and the other girls:

Kala and me were friendly from the get-go, like. Even when Joe wasn’t around I’d call over to hers to hang out, watch films. Girls were pure different from fellas. They lit the room with candles, got extra pillows and cushions from upstairs. Big bags of M & M’s and Maltesers. Popcorn with lashings of butter.

The book did have some real moments of suspense, and the pace picks up especially towards the end, but I think the book is mostly about family, loyalty, friendship, memory and love. It took a while to read, but I felt like it was worth the effort.

Thirst for Salt – Madelaine Lucas

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The twenty-four-year-old unnamed narrator of Madelaine Lucas’s debut novel Thirst for Salt is on holiday with her mother at a remote location, Sailors Beach, somewhere in southern Australia when she meets Jude, a man 18 years her senior.

When we met, Jude and I had marveled at the symmetry of our ages. Written down in my diary–24 42–they looked like a palindrome or a post code from an outer Sydney suburb. It’s hard to remember now that I was once that girl, lying in the sand in my red swimsuit and swimming late into the day.

The girl is adrift. She’s graduated from university, lives in a dumpy apartment with a couple roommates and has to travel across the city to work in a bookstore. Jude offers her something she didn’t even know she was looking for, but soon utterly consumes her.

Who is to say what love is or what it wants to be, the shape it takes, or how quickly it comes on. Love has always made a fool of time.

Soon enough, the girl is living with Jude and imagining a future with him, a life that eventually includes a stray dog they find. There’s talk of a baby. It seems that Jude offers a strange sort of stability for her, even though he actually seems sort of flaky.

We know from the beginning of the novel that the narrator and Jude are not together and that she is telling this story of this one very particular time in her life from some years in the future. She is back in Australia after some time in the States and sees Jude’s picture in a magazine. He is holding “a dark-haired little girl. Three or four years old. […] Jude’s lips. […] It was something in the way he held her–that’s how I knew she was his.”

The narrator’s predicament will be relatable to anyone who has ever loved someone deeply, and then lost them. Not acrimoniously, just a drifting away despite the love. Looking back, the narrator is able to see her youthfulness and immaturity, but also Jude’s flaws.

Nothing much happens in the book. It’s not that kind of book. It’s a book about not only “the reasons that love ends but the way it endures.” I thought it was beautiful.

We Have Always Lived in the Castle – Shirley Jackson

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Published in 1962, We Have Always Lived in the Castle is Shirley Jackson’s sixth and final novel. Jackson died three years after its publication, at the age for 48. I am, of course, aware of some of Jackson’s work. We always teach her short story “The Lottery” at school and I watched the creepy adaptation of her novel The Haunting of Hill House on Netflix when it came out a few years ago. I have always wanted to read We Have Always Lived in the Castle, but somehow I never got around to it. Until now.

Mary Katherine, or Merricat, our narrator, lives with her older-by-ten-years sister, Constance, and wheel-chair bound uncle, Julian, at the Blackwood estate. “Everyone else in my family is dead,” she tells us. Their life is very isolated and part of that has to do with the fact that Constance was accused of (and acquitted) poisoning the rest of her family. The people in the village regard them with hostility and suspicion. In fact, Constance has become a bit of a recluse, meaning that it falls to 18-year-old Merricat, to run the errands.

Fridays and Tuesdays were terrible days, because I had to go into the village. Someone had to go to the library, and the grocery; Constance never went past her own garden, and Uncle Julian could not. Therefore it was not pride that took me into the village twice a week, or even stubbornness, but only the simple need for books and food.

It is obvious that this is not a normal household, but it is also clear that Merricat and Constance love each other. Merricat has taken it upon herself to protect her significantly depleted family. She buries precious objects in the woods surrounding the property and casts spells, but things change when their cousin Charles arrives. It is clear that he is a charming grifter and starved for attention, Constance falls under his spell. Merricat is not so easily persuaded and she does whatever she can to make him go away.

If you are looking for a book with an unreliable narrator, this one will definitely do the trick. This house is full of secrets, and not all of them will be answered–but that’s part of the book’s charms. The climax of the story is unexpected and dramatic and the family dynamics are unsettling. It’s a short book, but it packs a punch.

Colton Gentry’s Third Act – Jeff Zentner

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My love affair with Jeff Zentner began a couple years ago when I read The Serpent King. I read a couple more of his YA books in quick succession: Goodbye Days and In the Wild Light. All three of these were five star books for me and made Jeff Zentner an auto buy author.

Colton Gentry’s Third Act is Zenter’s first foray into adult fiction and it’s also a winner. This is the story of up-and-coming country music star Colton Gentry who at 38 finds himself in a peck of trouble when he gets drunk and speaks his mind about assault rifles at a music festival. Almost immediately, he’s cut from the tour he and his band were on, fired from his record label, and separated from his wife, superstar pop sensation Maisie Martin.

Colton knows that his life is a mess and that he has to get a handle on things. One of those things is his drinking. First there’s rehab.

The news cycle moves on while he’s cloistered away in the monastic rehab program. He has no internet. No cell phone. Little contact of any sort with the outside world. Lots of time to walk in the desert and let the scorching sun burn him clean. Time to perform a self-inventory and work on his recovery. Time to consider the new life he’s going to lead when he gets out.

What’s that new life supposed to look like? He doesn’t have an education; he doesn’t have any friends (most of his friendships had been “seeded with mostly with professional colleagues — who were no longer his professional colleagues.” ) And he’s broke. He has no choice but to retreat to his hometown of Venice, Kentucky. He moves in with his widowed mom and spends his time avoiding reality by watching reruns of Grey’s Anatomy with her.

Zentner’s novel allows us to see teenaged Colton, so we see him before he thought music was a viable career choice. He was going to be going to college on a football scholarship. He had good friends and a high school girlfriend, Luann, who meant everything to him. What happened to those relationships? Coming back to Venice means that he is definitely going to encounter some old ghosts.

Colton Gentry is a character readers can root for even though, as an adult, he makes some lamebrained decisions. Zentner himself was a working musician before he began writing fiction, so that aspect of this novel feels authentic. There’s also a lot of mouth watering descriptions of food in this book so maybe he is a competent chef, too? (Geesh, is there anything this guy can’t do?)

While Colton Gentry’s Third Act is not a straight up romance (there’s so much more to it than that), it’s still swoon-worthy. As Colton finds his footing, learns to trust himself, and embarks on his third act, readers are treated to some fabulous banter and some romantic gestures that defy cynicism.

What can I say? I love this author and I will read whatever he writes.

The Crime of Julian Wells – Thomas H. Cook

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Of the Thomas H. Cook novels I have read, this one probably sits close to the bottom in terms of how much I enjoyed it. But a book by Cook, even a lower tier book, is still worth the read, imho.

Philip Anders’s best friend Julian Wells has killed himself. He rowed himself out into the pond “Far enough that he will appear small and indistinct in the distance so that his sister cannot tell what he is doing, nor get to him before he can complete the task.”

Julian’s death just doesn’t make any sense to Philip and he is determined to figure out what would have driven him to do it. That means he will have to revisit the past.

Julian wrote true crime stories and was quite successful at it. He’d written about serial killers and war crimes and cases of injustice all around the world. Julian once once wrote that “There is no more haunting story than that of an unsolved crime.” All his books were meticulously researched and

As a result of that research, there’d always been considerable sweep to Julian’s work, as his friendlier reviewers had sometimes pointed out. No crime floated freely. It was always part of a larger disorder, one fiber sprung from a hideous cloth.

Philip’s curiosity leads him from Argentina to France to England as he tries to figure out what his friend was up to. Ultimately, he think’s Julian’s death had to do with the disappearance of a young guide they’d met years before while visiting Buenos Aires. It had never occurred to Philip that Julian might have had some part to play in Marisol’s disappearance; he only knew that his friend had been keen to find her after she’d gone missing.

The story of what happened to Marisol is central to The Crime of Julian Wells, but Cook takes his time unspooling the details. That’s his way and I have always happily gone along with him because I knew there’d be some sort of twist in the gut surprise at the end. Not so much with this one, but no matter. As always, the book is well-written and mines the rich depths of friendship, morality, and family. And for a little extra verisimilitude, the crimes mentioned in the novel are all based on real events.

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.