Tag Archives: page turner

Binding 13 – Chloe Walsh

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Here is something that you may not know about me: I love YA romance way more than I love adult romance. I don’t know why. Maybe it’s because when I was a teenager I was always in love (and out of love and then in love again). Maybe it’s because that’s as far as I ever got on the romantic maturity scale. Whatever the reason, adult romances rarely ever hit for me, but YA often does. (There are exceptions to this rule, of course. I love Talking at Night and The Paper Palace and everything by David Nicholls.)

I am all in for shows like The Summer I Turned Pretty and To All the Boys I Loved Before and Maxton Hall. Books like Perfect Chemistry and Easy and The Do-Over are way more palatable to me than books by Emily Henry (I’ve tried two and DNF either.)

So, that brings me to Binding 13 by Chloe Walsh, a book that I picked up and put down a million times at the bookstore. Then it was recommended by a couple reviewers that I like, and it was on sale, so I bought it. It’s long, just over 600 pages, but I read it in just a couple of days.

Fifteen-year-old Shannon has endured a life time of bullying and not just at school; her father is abusive, too. She lives with her parents, one older brother, Joey, and three younger brothers, on a council estate in Ballylaggin, Ireland. Finally, her mother decides to send her to Tommen, a private school, where she hopes her daughter will be safe from the students who have tormented her her whole life. (She mostly conveniently ignores the fact that her husband is physically abusive, too.)

On the first day of school, while crossing the sports field, Shannon gets hit with a rugby ball, which knocks her down, cracking her head off the ground and causing a mild concussion. This is how she meets Johnny Kavanagh, captain of the rugby team and all around super stud.

Okay, you know how these things go. Girl who doesn’t know how beautiful she is meets boy who totally knows how beautiful he is try to ignore their feelings, can’t, and eventually <<insert 600 pages of Irish slang, rugby talk, longing looks, expletives>>….yeah, apparently I will have to read the gosh darn sequel Keeping 13 to find out what happens – even though, of course, I know what happens.

Although Binding 13 is shelved in the YA section at my local Indigo and even though the main characters are all teenagers, I wouldn’t actually consider this to be YA. And neither, apparently, would the author. On her website, Walsh says “Please note that all of Chloe’s books are intended for mature readers of 18 years and above. Chloe’s self-published work has always been categorized as new adult and contemporary. The topics of conversation in these stories are NOT suitable for younger audiences. The first four books in the Boys of Tommen series were self-published and marketed for adult readership only.”

I don’t believe in censorship, but I probably wouldn’t put this book in my classroom library. To be fair, though, I would be happier with my students reading this than I would be if they were reading Colleen Hoover. That’s saying something.

There’s lots to like about Binding 13. I really grew to love both Shannon and Johnny. There are a lot of great secondary characters, too. The book is often laugh-out-loud funny. I wouldn’t say that there is swoon-level romance, but Johnny proves himself early on to be protective and not above throwing a fist if he needs to. I was definitely invested in these characters and their individual struggles: Shannon’s safety and the pressure Johnny puts on himself to be an elite athlete. How will these crazy kids ever get together?

There are also some things I didn’t like. It is tropey, for sure. Shannon is teeny, child-like and Johnny is a 6’3″ wall of muscle. Shannon falls down a lot – she is constantly running into Johnny’s muscular chest and landing on her ass. I didn’t like the way the boys talked about the girls sexually. Their conversations are far more graphic than anything the characters might have gotten up to. Sometimes the conversations between Johnny and Shannon seem to do a complete 360 out of nowhere, which I guess you can explain away by their ages. And much is made of their ages, although there is really only two years between them: Shannon turns 16 in the book and Johnny will turn 18. They read a lot older, although I guess you could explain that away by their life experiences.

Look, I know that I am certainly not the audience for this sort of book, but I will be purchasing Keeping 13 and reading it straight away and that is something I never do.

There. That’s my endorsement.

Nestlings – Nat Cassidy

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When Reid and Ana win an apartment lottery they are thrilled that they can leave their crappy Brooklyn apartment and their crazy landlord, Frank. The Deptford is a swanky building overlooking Central Park. It’s almost too good to be true, but Ana and Reid could use a break.

They’ve recently had their first baby, Charlie, but the birth wasn’t without its complications and Ana has been left in a wheelchair. She isn’t sure living on the 18th floor of the Deptford is the right decision, but she has to admit that the apartment is fabulous even though her first thought upon viewing the space is “We don’t belong here.”

Nat Cassidy’s novel Nestlings is very much a riff on Rosemary’s Baby with less devil worshippers and more…well, I’ll leave that for you to figure out. Reid settles into the space relatively easily, but Ana is trapped in the apartment with Charlie, who never seems to stop crying.

Things are weird in the apartment almost immediately: goopy stuff around the window in her daughter’s bedroom, the sounds of crying from the apartment next door, the strange concierge and even stranger elevator operator, staircases that go nowhere. No one will actually come into the building to deliver food; Reid has to run across the street to collect it when the delivery guy shows up. But, yeah, sure, small price to pay for living in a place that under other circumstances they could never afford.

As the story moves along and as Ana (and the reader) begin to understand just what this building and the assortment of eccentric people who live in it are all about, the stakes get a little higher. This couple is dealing with a whole lot–post partum depression, grief, marital discord, a disability. It makes them sort of the perfect victims but, of course, a mother’s love should not be underestimated.

Lots of creepy (and a few campy) moments in Nestlings. It wasn’t outright scary, though. The first two thirds were pretty slow moving, then things ramped up towards the end. If horror’s your cup of tea, I think you will probably enjoy this one.

Await Your Reply – Dan Chaon

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Moon Road – Sarah Leipciger

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Highly recommended.

Just Like Home – Sarah Gailey

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Despite the fact that they have been estranged for several years, when 30-something Vera Crowder’s mother, Daphne, asks her to come home because she is dying, Vera packs up her less-than-stellar life and heads home to the house that was both heaven and hell.

Her father, Francis Crowder, had built the house long before she was born, back when his marriage to Vera’s mother was new. Back before everything else happened, before everyone knew his name. He’d built it with his two strong hands, built it right in the middle of his square patch of green land, built two stories above the ground and dug one below.

It is really Vera’s complicated feelings for her father that drive her back home, “that, and the impossible reality of her mother’s voice on the phone, rippling with sickness.”

Home is now a bit of a circus. In order to make ends meet, Daphne has been renting out the garden shed to artists, writers, and lookie-loos hoping to be inspired by Francis Crowder’s madness. The latest inhabitant is James Duvall, an artist who feels he has a special right to be there because his father had written the definitive book about Francis’s crimes. Vera hates him on sight.

As a child, Vera was convinced that something nefarious was happening in Crowder house, particular in the basement where she was often awoken by “wet slapping noises” coming from down there. Francis kept the basement locked and Vera was given strict instructions to never go down there.

Generally speaking, her relationship with her father is easier than her relationship with her mother.

He’s a big wall of clean soap with curly brown hair that’s thinning in back, a crooked smile with a chipped tooth in front, big ropy muscles in his arms from cutting lumber all day. He’ll scoop Vera up close into a hug after he’s checked the bed and the closet and the curtains and the corners. He’ll tell her that no monsters are there. He’ll check twice.

Just Like Home is a novel about family as much as it’s about anything. And I was wholly invested in watching the family dynamics play out; Vera’s growing understanding (but strangely not horror) of what her father was up to, the erosion of her relationship with her mother. It also examines the weird cult of leeches who feed off the misfortune of others. Vera isn’t particularly likeable, although she is somehow sympathetic.

Then there’s that ending. I was all in until that. Still, worth a read.

Believe Me – JP Delaney

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Claire Wright wants to be an actress and that’s why she’s moved from the UK to NYC where she makes ends meet by working for a lawyer who is trying to catch husbands who cheat on their wives. Claire is the lure and she’s damn good at it; she can be whoever you want her to be.

Then she is tasked to entrap Patrick Fogler. His wife, Stella, seems overly concerned for Claire’s safety, telling Claire that Patrick “Is like no man you’ve ever met.”

Claire’s not worried though. When she “bumps” into Patrick at a bar she describes him as “Good looking, in a quiet, intellectual way.” He doesn’t seem to be the kind of guy who would cheat, but Claire acknowledges that the likable, charming guys “tend to be the ones who cheat most.”

Patrick, though, doesn’t take the bait. And that might have been the end of it, except that Stella turns up dead and Claire finds herself a suspect, which is how she comes to be in the crosshairs of Detective Frank Durban and Forensic Psychologist Kathryn Latham. They have a very special job for her. They think Patrick is responsible for Stella’s death, and perhaps a string of other murders, too, and they want Claire to infiltrate his life.

The set up for this book was terrific. I was wholly invested in Claire and the seedy world of depravity she suddenly finds herself in (although that doesn’t really go anywhere.) Somewhere in the middle of the book, though, things started to fall apart a little bit for me. And, then, I guess the ship rights itself towards the end. It’s not an altogether satisfying thriller because of all the red herrings and characters air dropped into the narrative to aid with the plot.

The novel seems to want the reader to “believe” and then spends all its effort in misdirecting us. I read a lot of thrillers, and this was okay.

A Step Past Darkness – Vera Kurian

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It’s 1995 in the small Pennsylvania town of Wesley Falls when six classmates (but not friends) are grouped together for a summer Capstone project. There’s Jia Kwon, whose mother owns the local gem and astrology store and who has the gift of sight; Padma Subramanian, the only other Asian in the small town; Maddy Wesley, beautiful, popular and mean; Kelly Boyle, relatively new at the school and trying to fit in; James Curry, Kelly’s childhood bestie and perpetual outsider, and Casey Cooper, superstar football player.

While there are some alliances in the group, there are also some animosities. Nevertheless, they decide to head to the long abandoned Devil’s Peak coal mine for a school-wide party. James has been in the boarded-up mine several times and when there’s a cave-in, he tries to lead them to safety. But on the way to the Heart of the mine, the group witnesses something horrific – something horrific enough that they swear each other to secrecy and which, in fact, causes them to go their separate ways. They don’t see each for twenty years, when a murder in Wesley Falls reunites them.

Vera Kurian’s novel A Step Past Darkness is, in the author’s own words “an homage to Stephen King’s IT— I have always been taken with its focus on friendship, kids being in over their heads, and the return to a place that both is and isn’t home.” Before I read this in the acknowledgments, I was certainly getting those Derry, Maine vibes. There’s no Pennywise in Kurian’s book, but there is the creepy Pastor Jim Preiss of Golden Praise, the town’s mega church.

Priess is a much beloved figure in the church, an enigmatic character who worked his flock into a lather when he delivered his sermons. From Casey’s point of view, he was the only thing worth paying attention to during the church services. “On more than one occasion, Casey had seen someone pass out. He had to admit, that was kind of badass.”

Golden Praise is a strange place, though. Cult-like. Maddy belongs to the group Circle Girls, “An elite corps of girls who floated through the halls of school, each wearing a small silver circular pin inset with a gem. […]Being a Circle Girl had to do with some combination of popularity in Golden Praise’s Youth Fellowship and a purity promise.” Certain members of the Wesley Falls community are elders at the church. And the church has eyes everywhere.

I was wholly invested in these characters (and some, but not all, parts of their story.) It’s a long book, but I eagerly returned to Wesley Falls and had no trouble turning the pages. It’s not IT, a book I read when it first came out and which holds a special place in my heart, but it’s definitely worth the investment of time and I would certainly read more from this author.

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.

Nightwatching – Tracy Sierra

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When you read as many thrillers as I do, it’s hard to be not to feel as though you’ve read it already. Tracy Sierra’s debut Nightwatching definitely offers a few surprises for discerning readers.

Our unnamed narrator wakes up in the middle of the night to the realization that “There was someone in the house.”

It’s a terrifying notion because she is alone with her two young children and a snowstorm is raging outside. When she steps out of her room to investigate, she sees him at the end of the hall.

He was tall. His arms hung loose and long. His presence had the distantly familiar rancidness of something wrong and rotten she’d tasted before but couldn’t quite place.

All this woman knows is that she needs to keep her children safe. And thus begins a very long night of cat and mouse. The woman knows something about the house that she is quite certain the intruder does not know, and that’s the existence of a secret room. But even that will not guarantee long-term safety, so there are hard decisions to be made.

As they hide, the woman mulls over the details of her marriage, past trauma, and her acrimonious relationship with her father-in-law. These sections were perhaps not as exciting as other parts of the book. This book also has some interesting things to say about trauma and whether or not women are believed. I don’t want to say too much about that, but I have to admit to feeling like I was being gaslit. Is the woman a reliable narrator? Could I trust what I was being told?

While some parts of the book were a tad slow, there were lots of moments when the pages turned themselves and, at the end of the day, I felt like the book really delivered on its promise. Sierra is definitely a writer to keep your eye on.