Tag Archives: literary fiction

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.

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”.

Her 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.

Serious Girls – Maxine Swann

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Maya and Roe, the central characters of Maxine Swann’s 2003 novel Serious Girls meet at boarding school their junior year. Maya’s grandmother had insisted she attend the school, partly to get her away from her hippie mother, insisting that Maya would be “stunted[…]living out there in the boondocks.”

Maya feels like an outsider until she meets Roe, who comes from a nothing town in Georgia. The two girls find that they have a lot in common, a love for thrifting and literature and a desire to figure out who they are and who they might become. Roe asks “if the whole aim in life is to become as distinctly yourself as you can?”

The two girls begin a year long-long journey to figure themselves and their world out and it’s a strange journey, indeed. What Roe wants is “to feel alive, the whole way through.”

As you might expect, part of this journey has to do with boys. For Maya, who is our first person narrator, it’s Arthur, a young man she sees at a diner on a trip into New York City. For Roe, it’s Jesse, who lives in the town where they go to school. There is also drinking and smoking, which feels like a costume the girls put on in order to feel older. (It’s hard to say when this story takes place. The 60s? 70s?) There are no adults to guide them; Maya’s grandmother who invites the girls to spend Christmas with her, feeds them martinis and doesn’t seem to mind when they flirt with much older men.

I kept turning the pages as Maya and Roe try to determine “What makes a person a person?” the prose was spare and the plot non-existent, but somehow I found it sort of intriguing, even though I wasn’t really sure there was a point. Well, maybe that’s the point. Your adolescence is just a series of missteps and ultimately, for better or worse, you step over the line from innocence to experience.

Heatwave – Victor Jestin

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French writer Victor Jestin’s debut novella, Heatwave, was published to much acclaim when he was just twenty six. Translated by Sam Taylor, this is the story of an introverted and angsty 17-year-old called Leo who is on the last day of a camping holiday with his parents and younger siblings. The opening of the novel is definitely punchy.

Oscar is dead because I watched him die and did nothing. He was strangled by the ropes of a swing, like one of those children you read about in the newspapers. But Oscar was not a child. At seventeen, you don’t die like that by accident. You tie the rope around your neck because you want to feel something. Maybe he was trying to find a new form of pleasure. After all, that was what we were here for: the pleasure. Anyway, I did nothing. Everything stemmed from that.

Heatwave captures the last 36 hours or so of Leo’s holiday at “the Landes, in the southwest corner of France. Three stars. Surrounded by pine forest. Close to the ocean. Swimming pool with slide. Children’s playground. Karaoke, gym, special events every night.” For the other teenagers on site, it’s endless partying and hookups, but Leo is quiet and awkward. The only friend Leo has made in his two weeks at the campsite is Louis, who “didn’t have any other friends, so he put up with [Leo].”

After the novel’s inciting incident, and the decision Leo makes afterwards, the novel just follows Leo around “annoyed with everyone on the beach–for failing to hear [his] silent screams, for failing to guess.” He considers telling various people about what he knows, his parents, Oscar’s mother, Luce, the girl he wants to hook up with, but he is never quite able to say the words.

I think Jestin’s novel is trying to capture the claustrophobic, confusing business of being a teenager on the cusp pf adulthood. Pettiness, a failure to communicate, poor decision making, and a longing to shed our own skins, to be someone cooler and more in control, are feelings everyone can relate to (or remember). I think this book would likely be more meaningful to a younger reader, but it was easy to turn the pages and even though I didn’t really understand Leo’s brain and felt sort of disconnected from the story, it was an interesting and disconcerting read.