Tag Archives: popular fiction

Yesteryear – Caro Claire Burke

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It’s been a couple of weeks since I finished Caro Claire Burke’s debut novel, Yesteryear, but life has been very busy as it always is at the end of the school year. Exams are over now, though, and all the marking is done so once prom and grad are over and done with, it’s just a coast to the end of the year and a whole summer of reading on my deck.

I probably needed some time to sit with Yesteryear anyway. A couple of the young teachers that I work with were both raving about it, couldn’t put it down, and so I moved it up the tbr pile. My feelings are more ambivalent than theirs.

Natalie Heller Mills lives in a beautiful restored farmhouse “nestled in the rolling divots between two mountain ranges in Idaho.”

She and her husband, Caleb, are parents to five children and Natalie is pregnant with baby number six. They are living the American Dream. But it’s a curated dream because Natalie is a social media influencer. Her stock and trade is selling her lifestyle to over a million followers. That’s a lifestyle that takes a lot of work.

Through the camera’s discerning eye, the cooking space was perfectly cluttered: a half-filled mason jar of water here, a flour spill there, a few forgotten flower stems strewn across a worn-looking cutting board. It looked like a space where a mother worked; like a kitchen in the real world, only obviously better than anything the real world had to offer.

It takes a lot of effort to sell the dream Natalie is selling. She needs help to do, but she never shows the help because Natalie “wouldn’t be able to forgive [herself] if [her] social media account ended up compromising them in any way.”

Yesteryear is very timely in that it captures the current juggernaut that is tradwives. Natalie is a devout Christian (but is she?) who bakes sourdough bread, homeschools her children and eschews the modern world in favour of the world she has created. She is definitely the brains behind the operation – as readers will come to understand when they read about her upbringing, her time away at college and her decision to marry Caleb, “the youngest of five boys, the runt of the litter in an American dynasty.”

But then one morning Natalie wakes up in an unfamiliar room under an unfamiliar blanket. When she makes her way to the kitchen she discovers her family, her children but not her children “all wearing raggedy-looking clothes that remind [her] of a pioneer reenactment.” Her husband’s “eyes are not [her] husband’s eyes. This man’s eyes are black and cold and dead.” What in the actual heck is going on? Is she on some weird reality television show?Is she actually expected to live the life she sells online?

When I think about trad wives, I think about Nara Smith.

Back when I used to have Instagram I would sometimes watch her videos and laugh – her voice, the ridiculous outfits, making Froot Loops and Fruit Rollups from scratch because her kids wanted to eat them. But, she’s coining it and is clearly not a dumb woman. She has at least four kids and is 25, so she definitely fits the mold. She and her husband, Lucky Blue, are both models and Mormon. I suspect Natalie isn’t quite as glamorous as Nara, but you get the idea.

I find trad wives fascinating and terrifying, but they aren’t a new phenomenon. Remember The Stepford Wives?

Yesteryear has a great premise and it’s a timely novel and it’s well written. Natalie is a character you will love to hate because she is self-involved and fake. But I also felt some sympathy for her, although maybe I wasn’t supposed to. But I didn’t love the book. I found it too long and the reveal was sort of unbelievable for a variety of reasons that would be spoilery to talk about. I think the book does offer some pointed commentary about motherhood, fame, the patriarchy, misogyny, influencer culture and so there’s certainly lots to talk about. It was just okay for me.

White Lies – Lucy Dawson

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Many years ago I read Lucy Dawson’s novel His Other Lover which I remember really enjoying. That’s probably why I picked up White Lies, but I am sorry to report that it didn’t land quite the same.

Alexandra Inglis is a family doctor at a group practice somewhere in England. She is married to Rob and mother to two little girls, Maisie and Tilly. Her life is blissfully happy until, in retaliation for Rob’s indiscretion, she gets blinding drunk while on a girls’ weekend and sleeps with a complete stranger.

He straightened up, and I realized he was tall. I drank in a tight T-shirt, gym-honed arms, beautiful eyes–and didn’t stop staring. He looked confused at my brazenness, but then came a shy smile.

I saw how it was going to go immediately.

What Alex fails to realize in her inebriated state is this hot guy is actually a seventeen-year-old patient and sleeping with him opens up a whole world of complications.

White Lies offers more than one perspective for although Alex insists that she was too drunk to know she was crossing the line because she absolutely 100% did not know who this guy (kid?) was, he has a completely different story.

So, what we end up with is a he said/she said narrative with two wholly unreliable narrators and a a cast of secondary characters who have a vested interest in the truth.

This book was easy enough to read, but truthfully, not actually all that plausible and the ending felt like it belonged in a completely different story.

Mileage will vary.

American Fantasy – Emma Straub

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I was in my later 30s before I discovered what fandom was, although in retrospect, I have always been a fan girl. I was the teenager who bought Tigerbeat magazine and spent hours making scrapbooks featuring whatever celebrity I thought was cute at the time: Davy Jones, David Cassidy, Robby Benson, Jan-Michael Vincent, Richard Gere and then David Boreanaz, who introduced me via my deep and abiding love for Buffy the Vampire Slayer to fandom proper by way of message boards and fanfiction and, eventually, LiveJournal, where I happily spent a good decade of my life.

At school, my students know me as the teacher obsessed with Ryan Gosling and over the years they have added to a huge wall of photos and other stuff devoted to the superior Canadian Ryan. (see above)

Emma Straub’s (This Time Tomorrow) latest novel American Fantasy is definitely relatable to me. This is the story of 50-year-old Annie who is on a four day cruise, a trip she was supposed to take with her sister, Katherine, who broke her leg and couldn’t come. This is a special cruise because Boy Talk will be on the ship along with 2000 woman (and a smattering of long-suffering husbands and some gay dudes) known as Talkers, uber fans of Boy Talk who have “sold millions of records. Millions. More records than artists today even imagine selling.”

But that was then; this is now. Now Boy Talk are middle aged men (and their fans are middle aged, too.) Sarah, the assistant tasked with making sure the band is looked after, and that their legions of fans have a fabulous holiday, describes the band to one of her new employees, Tyler:

It’s Shawn and Keith Fiore; they’re brothers. Shawn’s the de facto leader, I’d say, you’ll see what I mean. Intense. Keith is the nicest one. Corey West, who you’ll probably recognize from TV, et cetera. Scotty Sanchez and Terrance Campbell. Scotty is the life of the party, a sweetheart; Terrance is kind of a weirdo.

Annie is relatively ambivalent about the whole cruise, but her sister insisted that she go and life hasn’t been great for her recently. Newly divorced and with her daughter out living her own life, she feels a bit adrift, so why not go and see these boys (men!) who adorned her bedroom walls as a teenager. She never actually expects to have any fun, but soon enough fun is exactly what she is having.

The novel’s perspective shifts between Annie’s, Sarah’s and Keith Fiore’s, who is feeling increasingly isolated and out of sorts. His own marriage is on the rocks and, frankly, life hasn’t been that great. He does, though, understand which side his bread is buttered on. The women on this cruise were “crammed together like fish in a tin, and they were paying to do it. They were paying for Keith’s entire life.”

For four days, the Talkers, Annie included, drift through a variety of photo ops and mini concerts all designed to give the fans an up-close (but not too close) and personal (but not too personal) experience with the band. The lives of these three main characters and a whole list of secondary characters twine together in unexpected ways.

In many ways, this novel made me feel seen. In the early 90s, while I was living in England, I got the opportunity to see David Cassidy in Blood Brothers in the West End. I wrote about meeting him at the stage door in my review of the novel I Think I Love You.

My time in the Buffy fandom was so important to me. When I was in my early 40s, David Boreanaz came to New Brunswick and made a film called These Girls. I got to meet him.

I cried for about three solid hours after this picture was taken.

So lots and lots of this book was 100% relatable to me. And so was Annie’s personal journey of rediscovering herself post divorce as she “wondered if being alone was better or worse than being unhappy. Some days, she wasn’t sure.”

American Fantasy didn’t pack the emotional punch for me that This Time Tomorrow did, but I found it interesting, entertaining, occasionally laugh-out-loud funny and definitely made me want to dig out my Robby Benson scrapbooks. Yes, I still have them.

After Everything You Did – Stephanie Snowden

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Reeta wakes up from a coma, handcuffed to a hospital bed. She doesn’t know how she got there; she doesn’t know her last name; she doesn’t remember anything about where she came from. And she definitely doesn’t remember committing the horrific crimes for which she is accused.

Inside she felt hollow. No personality lingered, no feeling of happiness or stress or calm or anger filled the void. She felt only weakness. She tried to access the feeling of hate or fury that would surely drive someone to do these things, but she couldn’t. She couldn’t find a malevolent fascination with the macabre, or a perverted desire for blood and gore. She rooted deep into her absent character and could come up with nothing but empty space.

Reeta is accused of murdering two young women who look like her and there are two more missing girls. The FBI know for a fact that it’s her, even though these days the evidence against her might be considered circumstantial at best. But it’s 1966, not 2026. Desperate to figure out who she is, Reeta reaches out to Washington Post reporter Carol Joyce hoping the reporter will help. All Reeta has to go on is the photograph Agent Willow gave to her. Reeta knows the man in the photo is her father.

Carol knows the man in the photo is connected to Pine Ranch, a plantation house turn religious homestead aka cult, led by the charismatic Jeb. But information about Jeb and the cult is meted out at a snail’s pace (and too bad because that was the most interesting part of this story).

I was hoping After Everything You Did was going to be a quick page turner, but it wasn’t. No quick internet searches available to speed things along, sadly. No forensics to clear up any lingering confusion. At 350 pages, it just took a dog’s age to get anywhere and when the twist finally came (and judging from the reaction on Goodreads, it was a shocker to lots of readers), I found myself just sort of weary from all the times characters swallowed thickly.

Just okay for me.

Twice – Mitch Albom

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Never in a million years would I read a book by Mitch Albom and then Twice was chosen for our March book club. Where did my aversion come from, I wonder, because I know nothing about him. I mean, everyone and their dog has heard of Tuesdays with Morrie, reportedly one of the best-selling memoirs of all time. It’s a book that many teachers use in their classrooms at school, but I never have. I have never seen the movie, either. Never had any interest.

Twice is the story of Alfie Logan who discovers, age eight, that he has a unique ability to relive events over again. He uses it for the first time when his mother dies. Despite being told to sit with her while his father runs to the store, Alfie goes out to the soccer field. When he returns home, his mother is gone. The next morning, he wakes up to discover that she is still alive; essentially he has been given a do-over. During this second chance encounter, his mother tells him that “This is something [he’s] going to be able to do the rest of [his] life.” But she cautions him: “But it won’t fix everything, Alfie. The second time won’t always be better than the first.” But reliving this moment doesn’t save Alfie’s mom because, as he discovers, he

can’t change mortality. If someone’s time is up, it’s up. I can travel back to before the death takes place. I can alter how I experience it. But it’s still going to happen. Nothing I can do to stop it.

Can I say it was better, rewinding my mom’s departure? I don’t know. The first time, I left the house and returned motherless. The second time, I stood witness as she departed this world. You tell me.

Thus begins Alfie’s long life of second chances. As expected, in the beginning he uses this gift to save face, to meet girls, to excel at school. He is reunited with Princess, the girl he met when they were both children in Africa (Alfie’s mother was a missionary), and he redoes a few days in order to win her affection.

The story is told across the table from Bahamian casino detective LaPorta, who has nabbed Alfie for winning two million bucks at the roulette table. Surely he’s cheated. Alfie insists that LaPlant will understand everything once he reads this journal, which is addressed to ‘Boss’ (I was thinking God because there is a Christian undercurrent running through this book).

It was storming on the morning I picked up this book. I knew I had to read it before our meeting which was only a handful of days away. I flew through it in about three hours. It was easy to read because a wordsmith Albom is not. The book purports to be about the choices we make and how those choices shape us and our lives, but the structure of the novel and its saccharine dénouement made it mostly unpalatable for me.

Saltwater – Katy Hays

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Loads of people liked Katy Hays’ sundrenched (it takes place in Capri, which is pretty much the only thing I liked about it) thriller Saltwater. Told from multiple perspectives, it’s the story of a bunch of rich assholes behaving badly and maybe I’ve just had enough of that in RL to care very much about it happening on the page.

Helen Lingate is vacationing on Capri with her father, Richard, her Uncle Marcus and Aunt Naomi, her boyfriend, Teddy, and Marcus’ assistant (and Helen’s friend) Lorna. The Lingates return to the same villa every year to honour Helen’s mother Sarah’s accidental (but was it, though?) death 30 years prior.

Helen is trapped by her family’s wealth. She just wants to live her life, but she can’t. She is haunted by the family tragedy, has a relatively distant relationship with her father, and has never really made any friends until Lorna came into her life. Now the two women seem to be plotting some sort of “get-out-of-Dodge” scheme that will free them from the tangle of family obligations (Helen) and sleeping with rich old guys (Lorna). Just about the only good thing about Capri (other than, you know, the sun and endless drinking) is Ciro, the handsome son of the villa’s housekeeper, whom Helen has known and loved since she was a child.

Everyone has a secret in this book; I suppose that is what is meant to keep you turning the pages, but the problem is that I didn’t care about any of these people. Helen is 33, for God’s sake, and she is behaving as though she doesn’t have any agency at all. Seriously, I just wanted to give her a good shake. If this is all so unpalatable, just take Ciro and go. Hard to give up all that cash though. But even the cash isn’t what Helen thinks it is.

What motivates any of these people, beyond money, is hard to pinpoint. As Helen says “Money is my phantom limb. It was part of my body once. I know this because I feel its loss like an ambient current that runs up my spine, an occasional, sudden shock. Money is metabolic, a universal part of our constitution.” Um? What?

I didn’t enjoy this book, but I read it to the end because, y’know, there’s a part of me that wanted to know how it would all play out. There were a bunch of requisite twists near the end and while some readers were likely shocked and surprised, my reaction was more of the eye-roll variety. I found the writing choppy and repetitive and, like I said, it took me way longer to read this than I thought it would.

So, not for me, but I suspect lots of people would find it enjoyable.

The Wasp Trap – Mark Edwards

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I whipped through Mark Edwards’ thriller The Wasp Trap in a couple sittings (helped along by two storm days), but it wasn’t really because the book was anything particularly special.

Twenty-five years ago, Professor Sebastian Marlowe assembled his “revolutionaries”, six 20-somethings with particular skills, and invited them to come to Thornwood, a stately country manor, to develop a dating app based on years of his own research.

At the end of the summer, after a party-gone-wrong, the six were shipped off to their homes in various parts of England and with the exception of Theo and Georgina, who had fallen in love and subsequently married, they don’t speak to each other until after Marlow has died and Theo and Georgina invite them to a dinner party in their former employer’s honour.

This is one of those locked room mysteries where you are meant to be suspicious of everyone’s motives. The story is mostly told through Will’s eyes. He’d been hired to write the web site’s copy, so it makes sense that he’s the observant one, the one who tries to piece things together when things go sideways. Which they do.

Once all the gang’s back together, someone in the house turns out not to be who they said they were…well, more than one someone, actually. Suddenly, the revolutionaries find themselves unwilling participants in a deadly game of “tell me your secret”.

The Wasp Trap toggles between the summer at Thornwood and the present day and reveals to the reader that, Lily, the genius of the group was also working on a separate project, an app that could figure out whether or not someone is a psychopath. As Will notes when Lily broaches the idea

The genius. The lothario. The salesman. The affluent couple, the joker and the local girl. Finally me, the wordsmith, whose role was to write it all down.

If any of us were a psychopath, I already had a good idea who it would be.

This is one of those books that will appeal to a lot of readers. It’s fast-paced, there are clearly stakes, lots of twists and cliffhangers that will make you turn the pages. It was just okay for me, but that’s just me. I didn’t really care for any of the characters that much and I wasn’t a huge fan of the ending.

Mileage will definitely vary.

Deep Cuts – Holly Brickley

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I think your enjoyment of Holly Brickley’s debut novel Deep Cuts will very much depend on how much you love music…and not just in a casual way but in an all-consuming, possessive, nerdy way.

Percy and Joe meet at a campus bar in Berkeley in 2000. They are both students and peripherally known to each other “in that vague way you can know people in college, without ever having been introduced or had a conversation.”

Then “Sara Smile” comes on while they are both waiting for drinks and it kicks off a conversation about the difference between a perfect track and a perfect song. Apparently, there is a difference. Percy explains:

“A perfect song has stronger bones. Lyrics. Chords. Melody. It can be played differently, produced differently, and it will almost always be great. Take ‘Both Sides, Now,’ if you’ll excuse me being a girl in a bar talking about Joni Mitchell–any singer who doesn’t suck can cover that song and you’ll be drowning in goosebumps, right?

[…]

“Now, ‘Sara Smile’–can you imagine anyone besides Daryl Hall singing this, exactly as he sang it on this particular day?”

Joe is an aspiring musician and Percy a writer and their meet cute morphs into a decade long will they/won’t they, should they/shouldn’t they relationship. Joe has a girlfriend, Zoe, “a tasteful punk”. Joe describes their relationship to Percy as “a perfect track [because you] need the context–family, friends, our hometown.” Soon, the three are hanging out together, although it’s clear that Percy has a thing for Joe.

Joe asks for Percy’s advice about some of his music and Percy is nothing if she isn’t honest. She tells him his song “is over-written [and] kind of forced” but that his singing is “magical.” Joe comes to depend on this honesty as he starts to chase a professional musical career.

When Zoe and Joe break up and Zoe gives Percy her blessing to make her move, things are further complicated because Joe, it seems, doesn’t want to mess up this musical partnership the two have going. Thus the will they/won’t they. Their lives pull them in different directions after college, but they are besties (without the benefits) until one night at a wedding when they suddenly aren’t.

I enjoyed Deep Cuts well enough. I did find all the song references tedious, but that didn’t stop me from making a playlist. I found Joe and Percy sort of tedious, too, but only in that way many kids in their 20s are – especially as seen from the viewpoint of someone in their 60s. I suspect that had I read this book in my 20s, I would have enjoyed it a lot more. That is not to say that I didn’t enjoy this. I loved the angst; I enjoyed some of the secondary characters. The dialogue felt authentic and so did the 20-something navel gazing.

Life itself provides some deep cuts of its own. Mistakes are made. Feelings are hurt. Friendships ebb and flow. By the end of the book I was trying to decide if Percy and Joe actually should or shouldn’t be together. They hurt each other, but they love each other, too. Like any great song, they are a sum of all their parts.

The Hollow Kind – Andy Davidson

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Body/cosmic/folk horror isn’t really my thing, I don’t think, but Andy Davidson’s The Hollow Kind is still an entertaining, albeit slow (until the last 50 or so pages) read.

Nellie and her young son, Max, have fled their lives and headed for Georgia, to the rural property left to her by her grandfather, August Redfern. Nellie’s husband, Wade, is abusive and Nellie was desperate to get away, so even though the property is dilapidated, Nellie is certain they can be quite happy there.

What Nellie doesn’t really understand is the property’s dark history, which began in 1917 when August, not a native southerner, meets George Baxter and then his daughter, Euphemia, who becomes August’s wife. Euphemia’s dowery is 1000 acres of woodland. George tells August:

Roots go deeper here than you ight imagine, August. Appease them and you’ll recoup your money soon enough. I promise you that. In these woods, there’s no end to the riches a man can now.

Unfortunately, August doesn’t know the half of it.

Davidson’s novel moves back and forth between Nellie and Max in 1989 and August and his young family in 1917-23. We are also privy to a short period of time that Nellie spent with her grandfather at Redfern Hill when she was a teenager, which I guess helps us to understand why he would have left the property to her. Although it is clearly obvious that the property is not quite right and any sane person would not even consider staying there, Nellie is between a rock and a hard place. She has no place else to go.

There is menace at every turn for Nellie and Max. Wade is still out there. George Baxter’s grandson, Lonnie, is desperate to get the property back and he is a nasty piece of work, and then there’s the house and property. The first sight of the house fills Max with dread.

…the old house rearing up before them has teeth, claws, is a thing alive. A dragon in the midst of a long slumber. It sees us. A fresh sweat springs out beneath his clothes. Above the roof, bats loose themselves like stones from slings.

The history of Redfern Hill is complicated and gruesome. It takes a long time to get where it’s going, but if you don’t mind the meandering pace, there’s lots to like about this book.

Atmosphere – Taylor Jenkins Reid

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I hope that my first read of 2026 is not an indication of how the rest of my reading year is going to go because Taylor Jenkins Reid’s novel Atmosphere was just not for me. My first experience with Reid was Daisy Jones and the Six and I loved it. I was so sure that she was going to be a favourite author for me, and so I started with her backlist and read One True Loves and it was a no from me. Since it came before Daisy Jones though, I thought I would read something after, so I tried Malibu Rising. Also a no. I would not have picked up Atmosphere for that reason alone, but a book about lady astronauts was of zero interest to me anyway. Then it got selected for my book club.

Joan Goodwin has a “PhD focusing on the analysis of magnetic structures in the solar corona” but she is “spending her expertise teaching eighteen-year-olds the definition of a parsec.”

Vanessa Ford is an aeronautical engineer who is also a pilot. She is “tall and straight, her shoulders broad.” The first time Joan lays eyes on her, she thinks “That’s an astronaut.”

These two woman are astronaut candidates in 1979. Historically, Sally Ride was the first woman in space. She went to space in 1983. Fictionally, Joan and Vanessa count themselves among “The Six.”

“The Six” became part of NASA Astronaut Group 8, a selection of 35 candidates tapped to begin training at Johnson Space Center in Houston in 1978. And the women weren’t the only ones making history. The class of astronauts in training was also NASA’s first to include people of color — three African Americans and one Asian American.” – CNN

Joan and Vanessa become friends, and then more than friends, a relationship that they keep secret for a variety of reasons. I found the whole love story part of this book super cringey. You want me to believe that two women, smart enough to be tapped as astronauts, are sneaking around and having inane conversations about how the sky now makes sense because of the other person. I mean, you wanted to be an astronaut, right? You never wanted to know anything about the sky until you looked into the eyes of a beautiful astronomer? Yikes.

Beyond the cringe, I just found the writing pedestrian. Loads of people on the WWW were calling Atmosphere a six star read, a book that made them bawl their eyes out. It made me want to tear my hair out. I didn’t particularly care about any of these characters. Joan’s sister, Barbara, is selfish and miserable (until she finds a rich man). Barbara’s daughter, Frances, is precocious and meant to be a surrogate daughter for Joan because they are way closer than mother and daughter. Even that relationship felt inauthentic.

This one’s a dud.