Tag Archives: literary fiction

True Story – Kate Reed Petty

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Kate Reed Petty’s debut True Story is the story of a high school junior’s sexual assault in the back of a car. Drunk at a party, Alice Lovett is driven home by two lacrosse players, Max and Richard, and the details of the assault spread throughout their town, destroying several lives in the process.

When the novel opens Alice is living in Barcelona and working as a ghost writer. Someone has asked her to tell the story of what happened all those years ago, but Alice is reluctant to even talk to this person.

The truth is I was embarrassed. You’ve always been the one who was brave – no, the one who was sure. You’ve always been so sure of the story you want me to tell. the story you’ve been asking me for since we were seventeen: the story about the things that happened while I was asleep.

Now, Alice hopes this person will accept the version of the story she is prepared to give.

Petty employs a variety of different formats to tell this story. There are movie scripts, college application drafts (complete with teacher feedback); there’s an account from Nick Brothers, a member of the same lacrosse team who was there when Max and Richard came back to the Denny’s and bragged about what they had done to Alice in the backseat of the car; there’s a whole series of email messages from Alice to Haley (the friend who has been encouraging Alice to tell her story); there’s the transcript of an interview Alice is trying to spin into a book for a client. There is nothing necessarily linear about the narrative and it doesn’t matter one bit.

I couldn’t put this book down.

But besides being a page turner, True Story definitely has something to say about rape culture and the way women’s stories are told. I found Alice’s college application essays a perfect example of this. She is trying to write about something that has had an impact on her life (the assault) and she attempts to get there through several drafts, before eventually landing on a benign story about shoes. Society has made it almost impossible for women to tell their own stories and you barely even know that it is happening.

True Story is a horror story, a mystery, a revenge story: it’s well-written and fast-paced and thoughtful and I highly recommend it.

Sweet Dream Baby – Sterling Watson

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In an effort to do something about my toppling Mount Doom of backlist books, I am going to read one for every newer release I read. Not sure it will help, but maybe I will luck out and the majority of books languishing on my shelves will be as good as Sweet Dream Baby by Sterling Watson.

In this book, 12-year-old Travis Hollister is sent to Widow Rock, Florida to live with his paternal grandparents and 16-year-old aunt, Delia. It is 1958 and Travis’s father can’t cope. Travis’s mother is convalescing because, as Travis explains, “One day, I came home from school and found Mom curled up under the kitchen sink.” This will be the break everyone needs.

Travis’s grandparents are two sides of a coin: his grandmother is an effusive women, given to retreating to her room with headaches; his grandfather, the town sheriff, is a hard man who demands respect. The real surprise for Travis is his father’s much younger sister, Delia, whose smile “is like a sunrise over the wheat fields back in Omaha.”

Delia takes Travis everywhere and Travis is soon privy to things he doesn’t really understand. Ultimately, it makes this novel more than just the story of one boy’s coming of age. I blame Delia. Delia’s super power is her ability to wrap people, particularly men, around her little finger.

When Travis first meets Delia, he can see the effect she has on her father after she speeds into the garage, music blaring.

Grandpa Hollister’s eyes change. They look like I never expected them to. They say he doesn’t care about the loud radio or the reckless driving. Nobody’s gonna get arrested. They say he can’t do nothing about how he feels right now. Nothing at all.

It seems that every male who comes into Delia’s orbit, from Princeton-bound Bick Sifford, to the the local James Dean wannabe Kenny Griner, wants something from Delia. And soon, Travis wants something from her, too.

Sweet Dream Baby captures the innocence of youth, and the sharp tang of sexual longing and sets it all to the soundtrack of the music of the period. The book doesn’t go where you expect it to and ends up being quite a bit darker, too.

I loved every second of it.

Small Things Like These – Claire Keegan

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Irish writer Claire Keegan seems to be having a moment these days, at least in the bookish circles in which I travel. Her novella Small Things Like These was shortlisted for the 2022 Rathbones Folio Prize, awarded for the finest work of literature published in English, and it won several other awards including the Kerry Group Irish Novel of the Year.

At just over 100 pages, the story follows Bill Furlong, “the coal and timber merchant” as he goes about his daily rounds in New Ross. It is 1985, in the weeks leading up to Christmas, and Bill, married father of five daughters, is in an introspective mood. He is aware of his humble beginnings: “Furlong had come from nothing” and he is also aware of his relative success – he owns his business and is able to provide for his family and he feels “a deep, private joy that these children were his own.” He is aware that in some ways he is an outsider: his mother was an unwed teen and he grew up in a large house under the care of his mother’s employer, Mrs. Wilson, a widowed Protestant. He doesn’t know who his father is. He thinks about this sometimes as he also considers the daily grind of life, but ultimately Furlong seems to be a glass half full sort of bloke.

Before long, he caught a hold of himself and concluded that nothing ever did happen again; to each was given days and chances which wouldn’t come back around. And wasn’t it sweet to be where you were and let it remind you of the past for once, despite the upset, instead of always looking on into the mechanics of the days and the trouble ahead, which might never come.

A delivery to the local convent shakes something loose in Furlong, though. He grapples with what makes someone good and how can one be truly good if they turn a blind eye.

Small Things Like These is a essentially about one good man’s defiant act. It is a quiet, beautiful novella.

Girl A – Abigail Dean

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You don’t know me, but you’ll have seen my face.

At just fifteen, Lex Gracie escapes her family home on Moor Woods Road, flags down a car and thus rescues her siblings from what is soon dubbed by the press as the “House of Horrors”. She is named Girl A to keep her identity secret from the world. Her siblings, Ethan, Evie, Gabriel, Delilah and Noah, are similarly named.

Now, years later, Lex, a lawyer based in NYC, is off to the prison where her mother has just died. Lex has been named executor of the estate, which is comprised of the house and a little bit of money. Lex feels the right thing to do is to build a community centre where the house stands, but in order to do that she needs her siblings to sign off. Abigail Dean’s accomplished debut Girl A traces Lex’s journey through the trauma of her past as she locates and visits with her siblings in an effort to secure their signatures.

Wisely, Dean chooses to leave much of what happens in the house to the reader’s imagination. It’s more than enough, trust me.

Sometimes, in my head, I visit our little room. There were two single beds, pressed into opposite corners, as far away from each other as they could be. My bed and Evie’s bed. A bare bulb hung between them and twitched at footsteps in the hallway outside. It was usually dull. but sometimes, if Father decided, it was left on for days. He had sealed a flattened cardboard box against the window, intending to control time, but a dim, brown light seeped through and granted us our days and nights.

The disintegration of the Gracie family doesn’t happen all at once, although the father, Charlie, is definitely volatile. As he becomes more and more evangelical – even going so far as to start his own church – he becomes more rigid and violent. Lex and Evie finds solace in a hidden book of Greek myths and school is a safe place until Charlie forbids them to go. Lex’s mother shrinks into the background, often disappearing for days into her bedroom to care for the newest baby.

Lex unspools the story of her childhood as she visits with each of her siblings, all adopted into different families after the rescue. Thus, this is a story about the aftermath of trauma as much as it is about the trauma itself. What becomes of these children makes for compelling reading.

Highly recommended.

Distant Sons – Tim Johnston

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It was on page 32 of Tim Johnston’s latest novel Distant Sons when I realized that I recognized his main character, Sean Courtland. It wasn’t his name; it was a passing reference to “the high pines of the Rockies, the summer she was eighteen, a track star floating up the mountain on pink Nikes while he, age fifteen, fell increasingly behind on the bike.” Wait a minute! I know that scenario. I raced for my copy of Descent and sure enough there he was. Cool, I thought. I LOVED Descent and I loved Sean, so I was happy to spend more time with him. Then, a while later, when we are introduced to Dan Young, I had the same niggle in the back of my head. Again, it wasn’t the name, it was the fact that he had a twin brother named Marky. Wait a minute! I ran for my copy of The Current. Yep. Tim Johnston is cannibalizing his previous novels and, oh, what a feast it is.

First of all, you don’t need to know anything about Descent or The Current to understand the plot of Distant Sons. This is not the sort of novel where the reader loses out if they are not familiar with the backstories. That said, I highly recommend both of those novels. Descent, in particular, blew me away and made Johnston an auto buy author for me. Nevertheless, you will not suffer for not having read these books before reading this one because Distant Sons isn’t really a sequel.

It’s ten years past the events of Descent (not totally sure what that means for the timeline of The Current.) Sean Courtland, now 26, has landed in small town Wisconsin and isn’t able to go much farther because his car has broken down. He finds a job doing some carpentry work for Marion Deveraux, an elderly reclusive oddball. The townspeople have long been suspicious of Devereaux because of three boys who’d gone missing thirty-odd years ago.

Not long after he arrives in town, he finds himself in trouble with the local police for getting into a bar fight, where he was defending the honour of local waitress Denise Givens against jack off Blaine Mattis. Then, he crosses paths with Dan Young, who has also run into some of his own bad luck with a vehicle. Sean offers him some work because, as luck would have it, Dan has plumbing experience and the job at Devereaux’s needs plumbing work done.

These are the main characters in Johnston’s story. Their intertwining lives, the stuff of chance, has a profound impact on each of them. As much as I loved Sean when I first met him, I love him just as much – or more – in this book. I feel as though he has been punishing himself for a decade and I wanted him to be able to let the past go and find something good to hold on to. His new relationships with Dan, Denise and Denise’s father are thoughtful and it is refreshing to see male relationships in particular that are not merely posturing. Sean’s interactions with other people errs on the side of kindness always. Although Dan and Sean are reluctant to reveal too much about themselves, I felt as though I was watching an authentic relationship unfold.

There is a mystery at the core of this novel, and Johnston certainly has a few surprises in store for the reader, but this is a novel about people – some of whom who are just trying to do the right thing. Slow burn, for sure, but 100% worth the effort. I gasped. I teared up. I loved every second of this book.

If you haven’t ever read this author, I beg you to give him a try. He’s fantastic.

You Are Here – David Nicholls

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As I age, my desire to read straight-up frothy romances has waned. Sure, I used to love them: hot boy meets hot girl and sexy fun times ensue. But now? Boring. Give me the characters who have lived a life and are neurotic, flawed, cynical, searching, hopeful…human. Bonus if they’re past 30. (Extra points if they’re past 40.)

I love David Nicholls. His outstanding novel One Day introduces us to Emma and Dexter on the eve of their graduation from university, but then follows them for the next twenty years. (If you have not watched the incredible series on Netflix, I highly recommend it. It’s perfection.) Us follows Douglas and Connie, a couple whose marriage is disintegrating after twenty years, just as they are about to head off on a European vacation with their 17-year-old son. Sweet Sorrow is Charlie and Fran’s story. They meet at sixteen while participating in a production of Romeo and Juliet, but their story is told from a future vantage point complete with the requisite melancholy.

Nicholls’ most recent novel You Are Here is the story of 38-year-old copywriter, Marnie, and a high school geography teacher named Michael who is 42. Marnie is divorced and lives a relatively solitary life in London. She used to have an active social life, was “A nice addition to the group if not the core, well liked if never adored or idolised.” Now all her friends are married and having babies and Marnie feels like “perhaps this was natural, this falling away.” Nevertheless, Marnie does admit that she is lonely. Michael and his wife, Natasha, are separated and Michael resists all efforts to shake off the lethargy. Instead of staying in the house they shared, where she had “left enough of her possessions to keep it comfortable but he could never quite escape a feeling that something had gone missing”, Michael walks. A lot.

Although Michael and Marnie are unknown to each other at the beginning of the book, they do have one common friend, Cleo. When Michael turns down one too many invites because he will be walking, she insists that she’ll come, too and bring other people. Thus, Michael, Marnie, Cleo and company set off to hike from one side of England to the other (well, at least, that’s Michael’s intent; the rest are only going to walk for three days.)

Initially Cleo had thought to match Marnie up with Conrad, “perhaps the most handsome man” Marnie had ever seen. The woman she’d invited for Michael cancelled at the last minute and so you can see where this is going to go from miles away….and miles is just how long it’s going to take for Marnie and Michael to really see each other…to let their guards down and trust themselves and each other.

Trust me, it’s the journey not the destination that matters in this one. It’s filled with flirty banter, heartfelt revelations, and beautiful descriptions of the English countryside. This book will make you want to plan your own ramble and open yourself up to the possibility of love.

Another winner by one of my favourite authors.

Mayflies – Andrew O’Hagan

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I had no real expectations going into Andrew O’Hagan’s 2020 novel Mayflies, but even if I had know what I was getting myself into, my reading experience would have exceeded all of them.

The novel opens in 1986 and the narrator, James, and his best friend, Tully, are just finished secondary school. They live in Glasgow and things aren’t easy for them. James’ father “wandered off in search of himself” and his mother “decided that the life of a single mother was not for her, and flitted to Arran.” He spends a lot of time at Tully’s house.

James admires Tully.

Other guys were funny and brilliant and better at this and that, but Tully loved you. He had the leader thing, when he was young, the guts of the classic frontman, and if any of us got together we instantly wanted to know where he was.

The first part of the novel focuses on one weekend when James, Tully and some of their other friends, travel down to Manchester to a music festival. It’s a weekend of total debauchery, as you might imagine when a group of young lads get together. I was in my 20s in the 1980s – and big into British music because I had a boyfriend from England – and so I loved all the pop culture references. The bands playing the festival included Orchestral Maneuvers in the Dark (which they trash, but which I recall liking) and The Smith (whom I didn’t appreciate then, but do now).

What we had that day was our story. We didn’t have the other bit, the future, and we had no way of knowing what that would be like. Perhaps it would change our memory of all this, or perhaps it would draw from it, nobody knew. But I’m sure I felt the story of that hall and how we reached it would never vanish.

Tully and James also quote movies back and forth at each other and engage in the silly banter you might expect from boys their age, but they also talk meaningfully about James’ missing parents, Tully’s strained relationship with his father, and the politics of the day. Theirs is a true and profound relationship, which makes the second part of this novel even more poignant.

Flash forward to 2017, when James receives a call from Tully. I’ll leave it at that. The second half of the book is a love letter to the friendship and shared memories between the two men and it is utterly beautiful. In fact, I found the whole book just, well, truly heartbreaking.

They say you know nothing at eighteen. But there are things you know at eighteen that you will never know again. Morrissey would lose his youth, and not just his youth, but the gusto that took him across the stage with a banner saying ‘The Queen Is Dead’ is a thing of permanence. We didn’t know it at the time, but it was also, for all of us, a tender goodbye, and we would never be those people again.

For anyone who has more behind them than ahead of them, this book will certainly speak to the person you were, the memories and the people you shared the journey with. But even for a young person, this book will surely resonate. I found it deeply moving and cried on more than one occasion.

Highly recommended.

Demon Copperhead – Barbara Kingsolver

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I might have never gotten around to reading Barbara Kingsolver’s Pulitzer Prize winning novel Demon Copperhead if it hadn’t been chosen for our book club. Like A Little Life , the book seems to be pretty divisive. I hated that book; I did not hate this one.

“First, I got myself born,” says Demon, mimicking Charles Dickens’ classic David Copperfield in which the titular narrator says “To begin my life with the beginning of my life, I record that I was born…” in the book’s opening paragraph. Kingsolver thanks Dickens in her acknowledgement and her novel definitely owes a debt to him.

Born Damon Fields to a teenage mother with few prospects, Demon survives poverty, his mother’s addictions, and physical abuse at the hands of her boyfriend, Stoner, mostly because he lives next door to the Peggots and their grandson, Demon’s best friend, Maggot. (Yes, there are a lot of weird names in this book, but they correspond to names from Dickens’ novel.) The Peggots’ home in rural Virginia was “a place where things got put where they went.” The Peggots were de facto grandparents to Demon, Mrs. Peggot making sure that “she played no favorites: same Hostess cakes, same cowboy shirts she made for both of us with the fringe on the sleeves. Same little smack on the shoulder with her knuckles if you cussed or wore your ball cap to her table.” For this reason, with the exception of his mother having difficulty staying sober, Demon would probably say that he had a wonderful childhood, until he didn’t.

Forced into the foster system at age 11, Demon’s life deteriorates and I won’t spoil the ups and downs of his journey to adulthood because those details are the meat and potatoes of his story. Let’s just say that I was wholly invested until about the midpoint of the story (which clocks in at 546 pages).

I was happy to spend time with Demon. I enjoyed his ‘voice’ and admired his resilience in the face of tremendous adversity. I shared his minor victories and bemoaned his poor choices and bad luck. I didn’t 100% believe all of it. He was lucky and unlucky in equal measure and despite having a really solid supporting cast, he still didn’t always make the best choices. That’s probably to be expected, though, as he’s young and young people do stupid things even when they acknowledge that they are stupid.

Kingsolver has lots of opinions on capitalism, pharmaceutical companies, education, the foster system, rural life and readers will certainly be aware when didactics trickle into fiction. It doesn’t interfere, per se, although sometimes it’s pretty obvious when her point of view wants to take center stage.

I am not sure when I stopped being 100% invested in his story. I will say that I really didn’t like the ending of the book. I will also say that I had zero trouble turning the pages even though Demon’s story was generally grim. He is a memorable character and I was invested in his survival.

Sisters – Daisy Johnson

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Sisters is a fever dream of a novel. It is the story of siblings July and August who have left Oxford with their mother, Sheela, to escape something horrible that has happened there. They’ve gone to the crumbling Settle House, a dwelling owned by their deceased father’s sister.

The house is here, squatting like a child by the small slate wall, the empty sheep field behind pitted with old excrement, thornbushes tall as a person. […] The white walls of the house are streaked with mud handprints and sag from their wrinkled middles, the top floor sunk down onto the bottom like a hand curved over a fist.

July, the younger of the two sisters, is the main narrator of this story. Their mother, a children’s book author and illustrator, rarely says anything, although one part of the novel does provide us a glimpse into her life with the girls’ father. Mostly, though, she “has been this way, taciturn or silent, ever since what happened at school.”

The “what happened” at school is the “mystery” – I did guess one thing, although not the specifics. What separates Daisy Johnson’s novels from other stories is the writing, which is innovative and compelling. It’s a gauzy, disconcerting narrative and it is almost impossible to feel as though your feet are on firm ground.

This the year we are houses, lights on in every window, doors that won’t quite shut. When one of us speaks we both feel the words moving on our tongues. When one of us eats we both feel the food slipping down our gullets. It would have surprised neither of us to have found, slit open, that we shared organs, that one’s lungs breathed for the both, that a single heart beat a doubling, feverish pulse.

Sisters is a gripping book and reminded me a little of I’m Thinking of Ending Things.

The Butterfly Garden – Dot Hutchison

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Dot Hutchison’s novel The Butterfly Garden requires some suspension of disbelief. It is the story of Maya, one of several young girls who have been rescued from a horrifying situation. FBI agents Victor Hanoverian and Brandon Eddison are tasked with questioning Maya about what happened, but she is a bit reticent to reveal many details.

After a night working at a restaurant, Maya wakes up in a strange place with “a splitting headache.” She is being cared for by a woman who calls herself Lyonette who tells her “Don’t bother telling me your name because I won’t be able to use it.” Where is Maya? She’s in The Garden.

Lyonette led me out from behind the curtain of water into a garden so beautiful it nearly hurt to look at it. Brilliant flowers of every conceivable color bloomed in a riotous profusion of leaves and trees, clouds of butterflies drifting through them. A man-made cliff rose above us, more greenery and trees alive on its flat top, and the trees on the edges just brushed the sides of the glass roof that loomed impossibly far away.

Maya is a prisoner. And she is not alone. She is one of many “butterflies” being held captive in this garden, young women who must submit to having intricate butterfly wings tattooed on their backs, and worse, must endure being raped by The Gardener and his sadistic son.

Just how Maya and the rest of the ‘butterflies’ come to be rescued makes up the main part of the story. We also get a little bit of insight into her troubling childhood. What we don’t really get is why The Gardener, a man who seems devoted to his frail, clearly out-to-lunch wife, would go to the lengths he has to hold these girls captive.

It’s hard to imagine this place he has built. It’s even harder to imagine that he hasn’t been found out. And when his younger son, Desmond, is introduced to this creepy garden, it’s hard to imagine him not ratting his father out, especially when he seems to develop feelings for Maya.

Still, The Butterfly Garden is oddly compelling. It’s not nearly as graphic as you might imagine it to be, but is still potentially triggering. It was an easy read.