Tag Archives: page turner

Love the One You’re With – Emily Giffin

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Emily Giffin is really popular, I guess, but I’d never read her. I’m a huge consumer of chick flicks, but not much of a reader of chick lit. I tend to like my fiction a little grittier and heroines in these sorts of books almost always settle – at least in my view.

Not even a full year after she’s married upstanding and handsome lawyer, Andy, (who also happens to be the older brother of her best friend, Margot), Ellen runs into Leo crossing a busy Manhattan street. Leo is “the one who got away” although in this instance, it’s more like the one who fizzled away. Ellen is sent into a tailspin of memories and she indulges every one of them, glossing over how Leo was kind of a schmuck at the end of their relationship.

Okay – so far I’m with you Ellen. I mean, seriously, who hasn’t had the same sort of intense relationship – the one where you’re up all night…um…talking? But Ellen has moved on from all that. Now she’s a successful photographer and Andy, he’s a great guy. She hasn’t settled. At least she doesn’t think she’s settled until Leo comes crashing back into her life.

And that’s when my cell phone rang and I heard his voice. A voice I hadn’t hears in eight years and sixteen days.

“Was that really you? he asked me. His voice was even deeper than I remembered, but otherwise it was like stepping back in time. Like finishing a conversation only hours old.

“Yes,” I said.

Oh, Ellen. Don’t go down that road. But we all do. We all wonder about the might have beens and question the choices we make. Ellen’s marital bliss is about to get bumpy as she hides her reunion from her husband and best friend, and then makes all sorts of minor adjustments to the truth so she can sort through her feelings for Leo.

The truth, it turns out, is more complicated than it appears on the surface. And so is the first year of any marriage. When Ellen and Andy move to Atlanta to be closer to Andy’s family, sister Margot included, Ellen is further tested.

I’ll give Giffin props; Love the One You’re With isn’t sheer fluff because Ellen is a character who is deeply conflicted about her feelings even though she never doubts her love for her husband and the life they’re building together. The new improved Leo is worth a second look, but Ellen is also mature enough to know what the consequences of taking that leap of faith might be.

His Other Lover by Lucy Dawson

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I seem to be on an infidelity kick lately. I read Lucy Dawson’s debut novel, His Other Lover, over two nights, reading until my eyes burned. In all the ways Love and Other Natural Disasters failed, His Other Lover succeeded.

One night, Mia, a 20-something woman who works for a small advertising firm somewhere near London, discovers a text message on her live-in boyfriend’s phone. Mia thought Pete was the one. Turns out he’s someone else’s one, too. That someone else is an actress named Liz.

The discovery of the text message begins a downward spiral of destructive behviour which upends Mia’s life. But hers is not the only life shattered by the discovery.

It’s interesting, but true, I think: women who are cheated on often blame the other woman. Mia pours all her anger and hatred on top of Liz. She almost makes Pete seem like another victim, someone who fell into Liz’s Black Widow trap and was helpless against her sticky charms.

Of course it’s all much more complicated that that. Mia goes completely off the rails, calling in sick for days on end while she tries to track down Liz. She wants her boyfriend back and the only way to do that is annihilate the enemy.

Dawson does a terrific job of getting inside of Mia’s head. The whole range of emotions are there: grief, anger, the hot desire for revenge. Mia is single-minded in her thirst for getting back her man. The thing is: he’s not worth it.

But the book is.

Testimony by Anita Shreve

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Testimony

Explosive… Shreve flawlessly weaves a tale that is mesmerizing, hypnotic and compulsive. No one walks away unscathed, and that includes the reader. Highly recommended. – Betty-Lee Fox, Library Journal

Pretty much everyone has raved about Shreve’s latest novel, Testimony. I’ve been a Shreve fan since Eden Close, so I was looking forward to reading this book. The novel opens when Mike Bordwin, headmaster of Avery Academy, a private New England boarding school, views a tape depicting three of the school’s top basketball players having sex with  a female student who is clearly underage. While the story opens with Mike’s point of view, the novel flips back and forth allowing us to see how this event and its aftermath affects everyone concerned: the so-called victim, the three boys, their families and even members of the press called upon to report the event once the story is leaked from the school’s hallowed halls.

Shreve is  a talented writer and she manages to make individual characters come alive in this novel by employing third, first and even second person points of view. When the young girl speaks, she seems every bit like a fourteen year old, both naive and culpable. One  boy’s mother speaks in the 2nd person – perhaps to distance herself from the news that her son has done something reprehensible, inexplicable.

It may seem odd that the story’s inciting action is revealed in the novel’s opening pages, but as it turns out, the story unravels to reveal another event which contributes to at least one of the boy’s bad decisions. Silas’s story is heartbreaking and, for me at least, he  carried much of the story’s emotional weight on his shoulders.

We had an excellent discussion about this novel at Indigo’s book club. The ripple effect this event sends through the school and community- upsetting lives and relationships- was immensely powerful. In less confident hands, the novel might have slipped into tabloid sensationalism. Not for Shreve; she’s far too good a writer and Testimony is far too good a book.

The Kindness of Strangers by Katrina Kittle

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Man, this was a hard book to read and, strangely enough, a hard book to put down. Katrina Kittle’s novel tells the story of widowed, Sarah, and her two sons, Danny, 10, and Nate, 16. Like many other novels these days, Kittle employs alternating viewpoints, allowing the story to be told (mainly) from Sarah and Nate’s points of view. And Jordan’s.

In fact, this is Jordan’s story. He’s a classmate of Danny’s. One day Sarah sees him walking along the road in the pouring rain and she stops to pick him up. He seems ill, more than ill and when he asks to stop at a service station port-a-potty to be sick, she does. Her mother senses are jangling like crazy and when she goes to check on him, she discovers that he’s collapsed with a hypodermic needle jabbed in his neck.

Jordan’s mother, Courtney, is Sarah’s best friend, but Jordan’s desperate act opens a dark door into his life and this story asks Sarah and the reader to step through it. The Kindness of Strangers is about the worst kind of abuse and it doesn’t shy away from the topic.  Sarah and her sons are barely recovered from the death of their husband and father when they are called upon to help Jordan. In some ways the social network depicted in this novel seems like a best-case scenario; Jordan has some caring adults in his corner, but to live in today’s world is to know that that is often just fiction.

Kittle does a terrific job of getting us into Sarah’s headspace: her horror over what her best friend has been accused of, her horror over what Jordan has suffered, her struggle to balance her own issues with the day to day business of running a house and business and looking after two sons.  She was equally adept at letting us see what motivates Nate, a character who is both flippant and incredibly mature. Finally, Jordan’s voice is heartbreaking; the mother in me nearly wept every time he spoke.

The main story of The Kindness of Strangers is bracketed with chapters from Danny.  I think I understand why his is the first and last voices we hear, but I don’t think losing those two chapters would have harmed the book in anyway.

Not everyone will be able to stomach this novel’s subject matter, but if you think you can, it’s a fantastic book about a very serious topic.

Standing Still by Kelly Simmons

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I loved pretty much everything about Kelly Simmons’  novel Standing Still. It’s always a relief to read something you can be excited about after a couple of mediocre books. Standing Still is just a terrific book: part page-turner (there’s an intriguing mystery at this book’s core) and part meditation on marriage and family and the lives women leave behind in order to have those things.

Claire Cooper, mother of three young daughters, spends a lot of time alone because her husband, Sam, travels for business. One night someone breaks into her house and Claire finds him about to make off with one of her daughters. “Take me,” she tells the man. “Take me instead.”

The man does take Claire and over the week of her captivity the reader has access to   Claire’s thoughts about her children and husband, as well as to her growing relationship with her captor, a relationship that proves to be far more profound and moving than you might expect. Their relationship becomes one of intimacy and, dare I say it, friendship and I know there is probably some psychological explanation for what happens between kidnap victims and their abductors, but I don’t think that explanation would actually suffice in this case. Claire is carrying a lot of emotional baggage and for the first time in her life she is forced to confront some of it. It is her time with this unlikely ‘therapist’ that makes healing possible.

On top of all this human drama, Simmons is a beautiful writer. Claire is a fully realized character, fragile and brave. Her unnamed captor is equally interesting –  a scene towards the novel’s conclusion where Claire makes the observation that, sleeping next to him will be the last time she’ll ever feel this safe (232) is both ironic and heartbreaking.

I also really loved that Claire is a woman who is trying to reconcile motherhood and marriage with the fact that she was, once, a very successful career woman. I loved her wild past, her ability to fall in love with a man based on a single characteristic, her yearning for that simple pleasure once again.

This was a book I couldn’t wait to get to at the end of the day…and one I was sorry to finish even as I was racing to the end.

Beautiful Lies by Lisa Unger

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Beautiful Lies is a silly book. Silly in the sense that the plot is mostly ridiculously contrived and way more convoluted than it needed to be. But who cares? When you read suspense thrillers only a couple things really matter. First of all- can we get behind the main character? Do we like her/him? Do we care what happens to them? Secondly,  is there enough  mystery/action/suspense/sex to keep the pages turning?

Beautiful Lies concerns the life of Ridley Jones, a successful, single freelance writer living in New York City. One day, on her way to meet her ex-boyfriend for breakfast, she saves a life and is thrust into the spotlight.  Soon after,  she gets a letter in the mail and everything she ever thought she knew about herself and her life is suddenly suspect.

There’s a lot of stuff going on in Unger’s book: doting parents who have pat answers for all Ridley’s questions, a junkie brother, a cloying ex-boyfriend, and a new love interest cut from romance 101 fabric.

Yet even as I questioned some of Ridley’s choices, even as I tried to piece together things that didn’t make a lick of sense, I kept turning those pages.

Perhaps it was Unger’s conversational style. Ridley tells the story herself and in some ways as a reader I felt as though she was telling me her story over a pot of tea on a  long afternoon. That intense focus, though, also means as a reader you get to be more critical of the character and I have to admit that sometimes I did want to shake her.

Ultimately, though, you don’t read a book like Beautiful Lies for insight into the human condition. You read it for sheer fun and I had a lot of that.

Obedience by Will Lavender

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There’s no lack of praise for Will Lavender’s debut novel, Obedience. It’s a twisty, knot of a book that concerns students in a Logic and Reasoning Class at a small college campus in Indiana. Their only assignment:  find a missing girl, Polly, before the six-week course is up or she will be murdered by her abductors.

Lavender does not  concern himself with all the students in Professor Williams’ class. He focuses his attention on Mary, a slightly fragile and obsessive girl; Brian, a student overcoming the loss of his brother and Dennis, Mary’s ex-boyfriend. As they work alone and then together to solve the mystery of Polly’s disappearance, Lavender strings them (and us) along with enough plot twists and convoluted clues  for three novels. At one point I considered making a chart.

I can’t claim any real expertise when it comes to mystery novels. I read them, I enjoy them. Lavender is working on -at least- a couple levels in Obedience and while the ending is certainly clever and tidy…the final chapter made me question what I thought I knew all over again.

No matter- this is a fast-paced page-turner of a novel, smart and complicated and, yeah, a chart’s not a bad idea.

The Harrowing by Alexandra Sokoloff

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harrowing

It’s been a long time since I’ve read a book this quickly. I started it last night and finally had to turn my light off after 100 pages…my eyes were burning and my heart was pounding.

Alexandra Sokoloff’s background is in theatre and as a script writer and The Harrowing, her first novel, certainly owes a debt to the screen. The prose is straightforward and while I wouldn’t go so far as to say the book is filled with trademark horror-film cliches,  the book’s creepiness (and trust me- the book is creepy) does owe a debt of gratitude to all those scary movies you watched as a teenager.

First of all, the book takes place at a remote college campus- specifically in a dorm filled with dark halls and secret staircases. You know what that means, right? The novel’s protagonist is Robin, a lonely girl who doesn’t quite fit in with the usual suspects (and trust me- all the stereotypes make an appearance: the handsome jock, the emo musician, the Southern belle, the slutty girl, the intellectual.) The book opens on a stormy Thanksgiving weekend. Everyone is heading home except for Robin; she has to spend the weekend all alone in her dorm.  Turns out she’s not alone, though.

The Harrowing benefits from its fast-moving plot and sketchy characterizations, ie it moves along at a breathtaking clip. That’s not to say that you don’t care about the characters, but this is a book with one purpose: to scare the bejebus out of you and it works on many levels.

It’d make a damn fine movie.

Prmoise Not to Tell by Jennifer McMahon

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Jennifer McMahon’s novel Promise Not To Tell is a gem of a story which, as promised on its cover, once I started reading, I couldn’t put down.

Part ghost story, part whodunit, and part coming-of-age tale…[it] takes you through the twisted world of adolescent friendship, betrayal and murder. says author, Pam Lewis. Yeah, I know these little endorsements are meant to entice readers- but Lewis is telling the absolute truth.

Kate Cypher returns to rural Vermont to care for her mother- who is showing the symptoms of Alzheimer’s. Her arrival back home coincides with the murder of a local girl; a murder almost identical to one that took place 30 years ago.

The beautiful thing about Promise Not To Tell is its gorgeous, complicated (but not convoluted) layers. Kate’s visit home forces her to recall her childhood friendship with Del, the victim of that decades old crime. Bullied and mocked by the other children, Del befriends Kate if only because Kate, too, is an outsider. (She and her mother live in a hippie commune.) Theirs is a friendship of necessity- a friendship where secrets are bartered and withheld, but I think it is also a friendship that is poignant and true. It has to be for the book to have the authentic emotional impact it has.

McMahon’s writing is perfectly pitched and the book is alternately spooky and insightful.  The characters are well-drawn, even minor-characters. More importantly, as the story unravels, you don’t feel cheated by the denouement.

I loved every minute of this book.

Your Blue-Eyed Boy by Helen Dunmore

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Your Blue-Eyed Boy is my second novel by Helen Dunmore. I read her book With Your Crooked Heart a couple years back. Dunmore is a poet and although it’s not always the case, her skill with language translates beautifully to prose. She creates captivating and complicated characters, with interior lives that are filled with wreckage and hope.

Your Blue-Eyed Boy is, I think,  about ghosts. Simone is a District Judge, married to an unemployed architect, mother to two young sons. Her story is told by layering all the bits of her life: her childhood, her young adulthood and her married life. When the story starts Simone describes herself as being “in that stage of youngishness which seems as if it’ll go on forever”.

And then, out of the blue, Simone receives a letter from someone from her past. If you were to take the novel’s prologue at face value, you would think that this book was about blackmail. “There are things you should know about blackmail…” Simone says.

But Your Blue-Eyed Boy is not as simple as that. This is a novel about reconciling who you are now with who you were when. It’s easy enough to pretend that each section of your life is complete and separate, but this is a novel that asks us to question our past choices, our past loves and our place in the here and now.

It’s a gorgeous book that reads like a thriller.