Tag Archives: literary fiction

The Wedding People – Alison Espach

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Beats the alternative.

Await Your Reply – Dan Chaon

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Come With Me – Ronald Malfi

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Moon Road – Sarah Leipciger

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Highly recommended.

The Stopped Heart – Julie Myerson

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Julie Myerson’s novel The Stopped Heart clocks in at 500 pages and so while not especially easy to hold up in bed, which is where I do a lot of my reading, I was wholly invested in the story and its dual timelines.

In the present day, Mary and her husband, Graham, have left their lives in the city and moved to a little cottage in Suffolk. It’s clear that something traumatic has happened in their lives to necessitate this move, but the details of that event will take some time to be revealed. The cottage, filled with what Graham hopes will be “possibilities” freaks Mary out a little bit from the start. She sees things and hears things but the truth is that grief has made her a little punch drunk.

Many decades earlier, Eliza lives with her parents and younger siblings on this very property, which was once a working farm. Her life consists of helping her mother and caring for her brothers and sisters, but everything changes the night of the big storm that topples an old elm beside the cottage. “The night he came, a storm. Just like him, it seemed to come from nowhere,” Eliza recalls.

The tree misses the newcomer by inches and suddenly he’s been invited into the house.

His hair was bright red, the reddest I’d ever seen on any person. Thick on top, but shaved short around the sides and over the ears. His face was rough and bitter. He had the look of someone who’d just walked out of a room where bad things had happened.

His name is James Dix and he will change 13-year-old Eliza’s life.

Myerson’s book runs on these parallel tracks, pulling the reader along to places I definitely did not want to go. For example, I figured out relatively early on what haunted Mary, even without knowing the exact details. Her grief was palpable and exhausting and explained her isolation and her strange friendship with the husband of a neighbour Graham befriends and with whom they occasionally have dinner. Why is Mary telling Eddie these things when she should be sharing them with Graham?

Eliza’s story is even more compelling actually. Although he seems to have cast a spell on everyone, she doesn’t like James. He unnerves her and when he looks at her it’s “into the very center of [her] eyes and he smiled as if he had just turned over a card and found he’d won a great fat prize.” She is right to be wary.

I think this book would fit squarely in the grief horror category. That’s a story that explores themes of grief and loss, and includes supernatural elements. It’s beautifully written, the characters are compelling and there are some very creepy moments. I might have left Eddie out of the whole thing and Graham’s daughter from his first marriage, Ruby, is a distraction, but otherwise, this was a surprisingly great read that I plucked from my tbr shelf where it has been languishing for many years.

Never Change – Elizabeth Berg

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Many years ago, certainly predating this blog, I read Elizabeth Berg’s novel Joy School and found it to be a beautiful and heartbreaking book about a young girl trying to find her place in her family and falling in love with a young mechanic who is, of course, too old for her but who treats her heart like the precious thing that it is.

Never Change is the story of Myra Lipinski, a middle aged unmarried visiting nurse who lives a quiet life with her dog, Frank.

You know people like me. I’m the one who sat on a folding chair out in the hall with a cigar box on my lap, selling tickets to the prom, but never going — even though in the late sixties only nerds went to proms. But I would have gone. I would have happily gone; I would have been so happy.

Myra has always felt like an outsider, even though the pretty girls at school would call her to talk about things that were serious because Myra “knew how to listen.” Even in her own home, Myra felt other. She was not a pretty child, her face “unfortunate, with its too small eyes, its too wide mouth. The hair mousy brown, too thin and straight, greasy after half a day, no matter what.”

Myra is a good nurse though – efficient, kind and well liked by her clients, a motley crew including a teenage mother, a bickering elderly couple, and a man with a gunshot wound who lives in a part of town no one else will visit. Then, a new name is added to her roster: Chip Reardon.

Chip and Myra went to high school together and although they were friendly, they weren’t exactly friends. Chip was “Every girl’s dream boy. The handsome star athlete with a good head on his shoulder’s too. And a genuinely nice guy.” Now he’s back in their home town living with his parents because he has a brain tumour and his clock is running out.

Never Change is the story of how this reunion cracks Myra’s life open in unexpected ways. Opposite to what the title suggests, Myra does change. She opens up to people, including Chip, and allows people to love her, also including Chip.

This is a lovely, albeit sad, story of how sometimes our blinders prevent letting people into our lives in a meaningful way. We don’t always see ourselves as others see us. This is a quiet book and I very much enjoyed my time with these characters.

Such a Pretty Girl – T. Greenwood

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Although T. Greenwood is a prolific writer, Such a Pretty Girl is the first of her books I have read. It’s one of those books where nothing happens–I mean this is a book driven by character, not plot–and yet it is absolutely riveting.

When the novel opens, Ryan Flannigan is counting down the last few days before her daughter, Sasha, heads to the West coast to start college. Ryan’s childhood bestie, Gilly, keeps sending her urgent texts before finally just sending her a link to a story from the Times. Ryan is shocked to discover that the story is about her mother, Fiona, from whom Ryan is mostly estranged. Worse, the story is about the discovery of a very personal photo of Ryan when she was just a girl that was found in the possession of Zev Brenner, a billionaire who has been charged with sex trafficking and pedophilia a la Jeffrey Epstein. This news is followed by even more shocking news and Gilly begs Ryan to come back to New York City.

Such a Pretty Girl bounces between the 1970s and present day 2019. As a child, Ryan lived with her mother, Fiona, in Lost River, Vermont, home to the Lost River Playhouse where Fiona was an aspiring actress. Lost River was meant to be a “summer respite for actors who worked in the city and a place for aspiring actors to apprentice themselves.” Fiona had been there since 1965 and she and Ryan lived there full time. Gilly and his family also live at Lost River, but only in the summer. Gilly’s father is a working actor and his mother an artist in New York.

Fiona decides to leave Lost River and go into the city to give acting a more serious try, but in the end it is Ryan, who is just ten, who is discovered–first as a model and then as an actress. This strains the relationship between mother and daughter. The time the novel spends in NYC

After Gilly gives Ryan the news about the discovery of the photograph, he begs Ryan to come back to Westbeth, an apartment building populated by dancers and actors and artists and, famously, Jackie O. It’s a real place, actually. It’s worth reading about its interesting history and it is definitely a character in Greenwood’s book. So, in the present day Ryan and her daughter head back to the city and to the place that she, for a very important time in her life at least, called home. There are matters to attend to, and ghosts to exorcise.

This book is very evocative of a time and place and as someone who loves New York and grew up in the 1970s, I found that very compelling. I also loved Ryan’s recollection of her childhood, the perspective skewed through the lens of adulthood. When she recalls her first major ad campaign (for Love’s Baby Soft, a mainstay of every teenage girl in the 1970s) she says

I am wearing fake eyelashes, pink rouge on my cheeks, and lip gloss so thick and shiny you can almost see your reflection in my pout. I am holding a pale pink stuffed bunny. But you can’t tell if I am a child made up to look like an adult, or an adult made to look like a child. When I found the ad years later, it felt like someone had punched me in my throat.

And if you are wondering where Ryan’s mother was in all this, yeah, that’s kind of the point.

This is a terrific, well-written book. Highly recommended.

Dark Horses – Susan Mihalic

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By page fifteen of Susan Mihalic’s novel Dark Horses, I knew that I was in for a ride – and not just because this is the story of fifteen-year-old equestrian Roan Montgomery. This early into the story I’d learned that Roan is a skilled rider and shares a special bond with her horse, Jasper, that her relationship with her mother is tenuous partly because she’s having an affair with a teacher at Roan’s school, and that her relationship with her father, Monty, is close. And when I say close I mean he enters the bathroom while Roan is in the tub and kisses her, “his mouth gentle and persuasive.”

Roan only cares about riding and her life revolves around training. Her father was an Olympic medal winner and now trains Roan. She goes to school because she has to, but what she really wants is to do well at competitions so that she can earn a spot on an Olympic team.

Roan’s life is pretty insular. Although their farm, Rosemount, employs a handful and people, including Gertrude and Eddie who have been there since before Roan was born, Roan is isolated. She doesn’t have friends or a cell phone; her life is strictly controlled by her father. That is until she starts getting to know Will Howard, a guy at school.

Her friendship with Will amps up the tension between Roan and Monty because she has to keep Will a secret. And she has to keep the sexual relationship with her father a secret from Will. Mihalic does an interesting thing with the incestuous relationship. Roan is trapped by her complicated feelings for her father: she loves him and she loathes him, sometimes at the same time. She acknowledges how confusing it is that “I didn’t fight or scream, […] my body responded to his, the ease with which he made me come–the fact that I came at all.” She has spent a long time compartmentalizing all these feelings. She admires her father’s coaching abilities. But she is becoming increasingly uncomfortable with the sexual relationship. There’s no saying no to Monty.

There’s nobody reading this book who is going to think what Monty is doing to Roan is anything but abuse, but Roan is only coming to that realization as her feelings for Will grow. When Monty realizes that Will is a real threat to this prison he has kept Roan in, he tightens the noose. Then there is no question that he is raping his daughter. It’s devastating.

It’s not right to say that I “enjoyed” this book, although I did fly through it, wholly invested in Roan’s story. If I have one complaint it’s that I hated the way the book ended. Well, maybe ‘hate’ is too strong a word. Something big had to happen, for sure, and something big does happen. For me, it just wasn’t big enough. I hated Monty Montgomery and he just didn’t suffer enough.

Dark Horses is an unflinching look at sexual abuse and what it means to be a survivor. It’s graphic and certainly has the potential to be triggering, but I thought it was a compelling read.

The Four – Ellie Keel

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Donna Tartt’s 1992 novel The Secret History is the dark academia novel all others aspire to be. This is a sub-genre of fiction that I really love, so I am drawn to books that feature isolated campuses, academics, and shifting loyalties. Ellie Keel’s debut The Four definitely scratched the itch.

Rose Lawson is one of four scholarship students admitted to the prestigious High Realms school. Telling the story of her time at the school from some years in the future, Rose paints a picture of extreme privilege and cruelty. She is saved from total desolation due to her friendship with the other scholarship students, Lloyd and Sami and her roommate Marta.

The novel opens with Rose’s admission that

It would have made our lives a lot easier if Marta had simply pushed Genevieve out of our bedroom window on our third day at High Realms. Certainly, it would have been tragic. […] She would have died instantly.

Genevieve Locke is a member of the Senior Patrol (aka a prefect), a member of the hockey team (field hockey as the story takes place in England) and she treats Marta and Rose with “lofty derision”. The truth is most of the students the four friends encounter at school are cruel and horrible, but all of the scholarship students count themselves lucky to have been chosen to attend.

Then something horrible happens and three of the friends find themselves desperately working together to protect the fourth member of their group. The Four has all the things I love in a book like this: secrets, unreliable narrators, a labyrinthine school, and surprising twists and turns that will keep you guessing until the very end. Keel is an award-winning theatre producer, but she is also a gifted writer and I will definitely be watching to see what she writes next.

Mercury – Amy Jo Burns

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When 17-year-old Marley West moves to Mercury, Pennsylvania with her single mom, Ruth, she has no idea just how much her life is about to change. At a baseball game she meets Baylor Joseph, oldest of the three Joseph boys, sons of local roofer Mick and his wife, Elise. She is soon pulled into the Josephs’ orbit, into rivalries and old traumas she doesn’t understand. She comes to understand that “The Josephs were the close kind of family that fought in equal measure but didn’t know how to make up.”

Amy Jo Burns’ novel Mercury is a family drama that covers several years in the lives of the complicated Joseph family and how Marley comes to love them. Although she initially meets them because of Baylor, it is her relationship with the middle son, Waylon, that cements her place in the family.

It doesn’t take long before Marley figures out that Baylor is “the flinty kind of young man … whom everyone feared and nobody liked.” Their relationship is short lived. Her friendship with Waylon, though, is worth keeping. Waylon is “easier, kinder, gentler”. This is the relationship that sticks.

Although Mercury opens with the discovery of a dead body in a church attic, and although this mystery is important, it isn’t actually what drives the narrative. The book uses the body as a jumping off point before it circles back to the beginning of the story of Marley’s arrival in Mercury and how her relationship with this insular and complicated family shifts loyalties and both frays and strengthens bonds. It’s a very character-driven novel, and all of the characters are complicated and beautifully rendered. There are no bad guys, just people trying to do their best for reasons that don’t always make sense. I really loved Waylon and Marley in particular, but I also loved the secondary characters including Marley’s best friend, Jade, and the youngest Joseph, Baby Shay.

Mercury is my second book by Burns (Shiner) and she is definitely an autobuy author for me now.

Great book.