Tag Archives: literary fiction

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.

Those Across the River -Christopher Buehlman

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Those Across the River is my second novel by Christopher Buehlman (The Lesser Dead) and he now joins the ranks of my auto buy authors.

Frank Nichols and his soon-to-be-wife Eudora have just landed in Whitbrow, a backwater town in Georgia. Their life is a little bit in flux. Frank was essentially chased out of Chicago, where he’d worked at a college, because Eudora had been married to a colleague. The two meet at a faculty luncheon.

She was twenty, wearing a sweater the color of an Anjou pear. I was still built like the St. Ignatius basketball center I had been fifteen years before.

We were in love before the salads came.

It is 1935 and Frank is a WW1 veteran, prone to night terrors; Dora is a school teacher. They land in Whitbrow because Frank has inherited a property. The letter that tells him about this inheritance also cautions him to sell the property, that there is “bad blood” there, but with limited options, they decide to move. Frank is going to write the history of Savoyard Plantation, a derelict property owned by his ancestors.

As Frank and Dora settle into their new lives, they find it to be both secretive and charming. For one thing, the townspeople gather once a year to release pigs into the woods as a sort of sacrifice. But to what? Then there’s the plantation, which is located somewhere across the river, but Frank finds that no one is interested in taking him there. One of the locals tells him “Them woods is deep and mean.”

Just how mean? Well, it takes a while for Frank (and the reader) to figure out just what the heck is going on. Some readers might get frustrated with the slow pace at which the story unfolds, but I liked it. I really enjoy the way the Buehlman writes; he’s also a poet and it shows in his prose. One reviewer suggested that the main characters are wooden and the plot not that compelling, but I disagree. I was wholly invested in this story.

I won’t spoil the reveal. I did figure it out before the end, and while it isn’t a scary horror novel, it is atmospheric and a compelling read.

My Brilliant Friend -Elena Ferrante

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A former student, someone for whom I have a lot of respect and admiration, encouraged (aka begged) me to read Elena Ferrante’s novel My Brilliant Friend, a book that was recently named #1 Book of the Century by the New York Times. I didn’t own the book and I don’t know whether I would have ever gotten around to reading the book given the state of my physical TBR pile, but I was next up for book club and so I chose this one, mostly in deference to Luke. Despite the fact that it was published in 2012 and is relatively popular (and has its own series on Prime), none of the members of my book club had ever read it.

This novel is the first of a quartet by the famously private Ferrante. Apparently, no one actually knows who she is, so the author’s name is actually a pseudonym, and since we don’t know very much about her, claims that My Brilliant Friend is autofiction is also an unfair characterization. How can we say the events of the novel are drawn from the author’s own life if we don’t know anything about her? Or him? Whether or not who the author is makes any real difference is beside the point at any rate.

Luke loved it. Two of the women in my book club of eight didn’t finish it. Three women loved it. (My best friend, Michelle, is on book three and has already watched the entire series.) Two women hated it (one of these is one of the DNFers). And two of us (myself included) felt just meh about it.

In a nutshell, the novel opens when 60-something Elena (also known as Lenu) receives a phone call from Rino, the adult son of her oldest friend, Lila (also known as Raffaella or Lina). Lila is missing. Poof. Vanished. This news seems unsurprising to Elena even though “it’s been three decades since [Lila] told [her] that she wanted to disappear without leaving a trace.”

Elena seems annoyed by the news and she doesn’t offer Rino much in the way of comfort. Instead she thinks

I was really angry.

We’ll see who wins this time, I said to myself. I turned the computer on and began to write– all the details of our story, everything that still remained in my memory.

And that’s essentially what My Brilliant Friend is, the written account of the friendship/rivalry love/hate relationship between these two girls beginning in the 1950s, in a neighbourhood outside of Naples, Italy. It’s the story of poverty, crime, the power of education, loyalty, family and friendship.

This is what Luke said:

“I loved the portrayal of friendship and how central it was to forming them into who they are. I loved the background setting of Naples and how poverty is corrupting everyone’s life. All of the characters come alive for me and I find her such an incredibly powerful writer. I was so invested in Lila and Elena’s relationship. […] I think she’s a beautiful writer telling a wonderful story…”

Luke and I talk about books whenever we have the chance. When he was in my Young Adult Lit class he read more than anyone and he read widely. If I talked about a book I really loved, chances were pretty high that he would read it. So it hurt me a little bit not to love this book as much as he loved this book. For me, I found it sort of slow and dry and although the friendship between the two characters was well-drawn, I didn’t especially care about either of them. I certainly feel no compulsion to carry on with the books, although I may watch the series this winter.

The New York Times compiled their Top 100 books by asking 503 literary luminaries to provide their list of all-time best books based on the following criteria: impact, originality and lasting influence. It’s an interesting list which demonstrates just how subjective a ‘best books’ list can be. Number 2 was The Warmth of Other Suns, a book I have never heard of by an author I have never heard of. Kazou Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go barely made the top ten. Atonement by Ian McEwan was #26. 26!!! Both my children would say Atonement is one of the best books ever written…and I would agree. Donna Tartt’s The Goldfinch, which won the Pulitzer (although not without controversy), came in at #46. Station Eleven was #93.

I tasked the ladies in my book club to pick their top three books of all time based on the criteria provided by the Times. We’ll share those Top 3 lists at our next meeting and with their permission, I will share them with you here after we meet.

The fact that no one reads the same book is one of the best things about reading, but I am sad that I didn’t love My Brilliant Friend more than I did. Sorry, Luke.

Talking at Night – Claire Daverley

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If I had read Claire Daverley’s debut Talking at Night a little bit earlier, it would have most certainly made my list of the top twenty books I read this year because I LOVED it! I am always talking about how straight-up romances just don’t float my boat, how I need a little pain with my pleasure. This book delivered and then some.

Rosie and Will meet at a bonfire when she is seventeen and he a little older. Although they go to the same school and share some friends, and Will tutors Rosie’s twin, Josh, in further maths (advanced A level math), these two don’t really know each other until Will suddenly finds himself telling Rosie things he’s never said to anyone.

Will and Rosie could not be more different. Will is “detached and standoffish, despite his popularity and a long list of girlfriends.” Rosie is “a virgin, and she is vanilla.” She also suffers from OCD and is far less outgoing than Josh. It is clear, though, that these two are drawn to each other in ways that neither of them quite understand.

When Rosie tries to pre-emptively end things (because things haven’t really even begun, although they both understand that there is something between them), Will tells her that he thinks about her “On my bike. And in the garage. And when I’m cooking, and running, and trying to sleep.” This is new territory for Will.

Watching these two navigate these feelings over the years – because the novel does span decades – is truly a thing of beauty. There are lots of obstacles preventing them from having the HEA that I wanted for them, but that’s the bit I like best. Where’s the story if they meet, fall in love and suddenly have everything they didn’t even know they wanted?

Will has demons and a past. Rosie has a complicated relationship with her mother and subverts her own desires to make others happy. Tragedy looms around the corner which further complicates things. Rosie goes off to university, but Will stays home in Norfolk. And through it all – Will and Rosie pine and hell yes! so did I.

I loved these two characters. I loved the secondary characters. I loved the unexpected bonds that are forged. I loved the way this book is written. I read it in two sittings, turning the last page way past my bedtime.

If I had my Top Twenty list to do over again, this one would definitely be in the Top 3! Although perhaps not objectively the best book ever…it hit all my sweet spots and so it’s 100% a winner in my book, and that’s the beautiful thing about reading – my opinion is the only one that counts.

Adelaide – Genevieve Wheeler

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Adelaide Williams is drunk when she first meets Rory Hughes.

Late that afternoon, tipsy and tanned, she saw him.

He was wearing a scarf and a blue button-down and Adelaide loved him instantly – all brown curls and razor-sharp jawline. Like a young Colin Firth.

She is compelled to waltz right up to him and tell him that he looks “like a Disney prince.“

Nothing comes of that meet cute, but several months later Rory and Adelaide match on a dating app, something she has been using for casual hook ups. She figures that this night will be no different from the string of other nights she’s recently had. It turns out though that meeting Rory again upends her world.

Genevieve Wheeler’s debut Adelaide tracks the titular character’s time in London where she is first finishing her Master’s and then working. Their first date and first kiss lights a fire inside Adelaide and “in her memory, standing on that street corner, the sky was bright. Birds chirping, clouds parted, sun shining. It’s painfully clichéd, but darkness didn’t exist here, not in this little universe Adelaide entered when she first kissed Rory Hughes.”

At twenty-six, Adelaide is navigating young adulthood. She has her roomies, Celeste and Madison, and her stateside best friend, Eloise. Rory, perfect Rory, is – she is sure – her soul mate. Except, you know, he’s not. He’s got a lot of baggage and it turns out he’s not the best boyfriend. It’s one of those “all that glitters is not gold” situations; when he’s with her, it’s impossible not to feel the heady thrall, but he often disappears or breaks plans; he’s emotionally unavailable.

I am not 26, but I sure understood Adelaide. Her relationship with Rory mimicked many of my own twenty-something relationships which required a lot of work on my behalf, a lot of subjugating my own feelings in service to others, mostly because I was always choosing the wrong others. Adelaide’s fumbling wasn’t frustrating to me; it was relatable.

This is a book about loving someone else fiercely, but ultimately learning that the person most deserving of that sort of care and attention is actually yourself.

Loved it.

Brother – David Chariandy

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New-to-me Canadian writer David Chariandy’s novel Brother is an elegy to family. Published in 2017, this novel topped all the Best Of lists and won a Writers’ Trust of Canada award, as well as being nominated for the Giller. I have had it on my TBR shelf for several years, and in an attempt to tackle some of my backlist, I finally read it.

Michael and his older brother Francis live with their Trinidadian mother in The Park, a “cluster of low-rises and townhomes and leaning concrete apartment towers” – a not-so-nice suburb of Toronto. Their father is long gone.

When the novel opens, Michael is meeting with his friend, Aisha. They haven’t seen or spoken to each other in a decade and her arrival opens Michael up to the trauma of an event that transpired many years ago – one that he and his mother have never gotten over. This tragedy is alluded to early on in the book, but I’ll be vague about it here.

Brother toggles back and forth between Aisha’s return – which dredges up the past – and the past itself.

Francis was my older brother. His was a name a toughened kid might boast of knowing, or a name a parent might pronounce in warning. But before all of this, he was the shoulder pressed against me bare and warm, that body always just a skin away.

Francis and Michael are close, especially as young boys when they are often left to fend for themselves as they are left alone while their mother works. Their mother worked as a cleaner, and often took on extra work to try to make ends meet.

She was never happy about abandoning us, and if she learned the evening before of an impending night shift, she would spend precious sleep time cooking and worrying over the details of meals and activities for the following day.

Chariandy captures the poverty, violence, and hopelessness of the lives of the people who live in The Park, but he also captures the sibling bond, the friendships and the hope for a better future. I particularly admired the subtlety of Francis’s relationship with Jelly, a wannabe DJ.

When Aisha arrives back at The Park, she tries to unclog the grief Michael and his mother have been stifled by for many years. And by allowing Michael to finally tell his story, perhaps she has succeeded.

Beautiful writing and a timely story about police violence and the immigrant experience make Brother worth checking out.

Real Americans – Rachel Khong

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Rachel Khong’s novel Real Americans spans many years (1966-2030) and is told from the point of view of three characters: Lily, Nick, and May.

After a short intro about an event in 1966, the novel fast forwards to 1999, where we are introduced to Lily, who works as an unpaid intern for an online travel magazine. At the company’s holiday party, she meets Matthew, who, despite being “distractingly hot – athletic but not vacant, a muscular nerd” is not her type.

Matthew, it turns out, is actually a great guy and the first part of the novel follows their relationship, break up and make up. Despite the fact that his family is insanely rich and her parents came to America from China with little more than the clothes on their backs (and jobs as research scientists), Matthew and Lily marry and have a son, Nico/Nick.

In Nick’s section, he and his mother are living on a small island off the coast of Washington. Nick is now fifteen and has no idea who his father is. Nick also doesn’t look even remotely Chinese, having inherited none of his mother’s traits. Instead, he is blonde-haired and blue-eyed and tall. Nick can’t figure his physical appearance out, other than to assume it as “some bizarre accident of genetics.”

The story Lily has always told him is that his father wanted nothing to do with them, but when Nick’s best friend Timothy suggests they do DNA tests, he is reunited with Matthew. Matthew has a different version of what happened than he had been told by his mother and Nick “found himself trusting him over [his] mom. Hs face was so like [his] own the [he] believed, correctly or not, [he] knew it.” Thus begins a complicated relationship between father and son.

Finally, we have May’s story. She is Lily’s mother. Her story takes us back to Mao Zedong’s China. The May readers are introduced to in Lily’s part of the book seems cold and distant, unloving even. This section of the book allows us to see how she grew up and ultimately escaped Communist China. It certainly paints her in a much more sympathetic light.

Real Americans is quite a long book, almost 400 pages, but I enjoyed my read. Although the story didn’t quite land for me and I often felt that I didn’t understand the characters or their motivations enough to be fully invested in them, I still enjoyed my reading experience overall.