Tag Archives: popular fiction

Darling Rose Gold -Stephanie Wrobel

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If you’re at all familiar with Gypsy Rose and Dee Dee Blanchard, then you’ll settle right into Stephanie Wrobel’s novel Darling Rose Gold. In this story, told in alternating voices, Patty and Rose Gold are reunited after Patty’s five year prison term. She was incarcerated for aggravated child abuse. Patty denies the allegations.

Once upon a time, they said, a wicked mother gave birth to a daughter. The daughter appeared to be very sick and had all sorts of things wrong with her. She had a feeding tube, her hair fell out in clumps, and she was so weak, she needed a wheelchair to get around. For eighteen years, no doctor could figure out what was wrong with her.

The novel begins on the day Patty is released from prison. She is hopeful that she and her daughter will be able to repair their relationship. She wonders, “if I spent almost two decades abusing my daughter, why did she offer to pick me up today.”

Rose Gold is 18 when her mother is convicted and her narrative focuses on the past, specifically the period of time that her mother is in prison. She is making a valiant effort to reclaim her life. She is working and trying to save money to get her teeth fixed; they have rotted from years of throwing up. Five years later, when Patty is released, Rose Gold is living in the house she has purchased and raising her infant son, Adam, solo.

When mother and daughter are reunited, things are tense and strange. Neither narrator is particularly reliable or sympathetic. Patty is given a room with eyes painted on the ceiling; Rose Gold keeps her bedroom locked. The people in their small town make it clear that Patty is not welcome. She is friendless and dependent on her daughter. As she watches her grandson, she reminisces about Rose Gold’s childhood.

When I brought Rose Gold home that first night, I was captivated. Give me another kid to watch sleep, and I’ll tell you I’d rather watch a couple of geezers golf eighteen holes. But when it’s your own kid? Ask any mother. They know.

Darling Rose Gold landed on all sorts of Best Of lists when it came out in 2020, but I would have to say that my reading experience was nothing special. I didn’t particularly like the way it was written; I felt as though I was being told everything. This is a game of cat and mouse except that both characters are rats.

Midnight is the Darkest Hour – Ashley Winstead

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I really wish the cover flap hadn’t compared Ashley Winstead’s novel Midnight is the Darkest Hour to Verity because it really does her book a disservice. Winstead’s book is far superior to Hoover’s (but I am not a fan of Hoover at all, so there’s that).

Ruth Cornier lives in Bottom Springs, Louisiana, where her father is the evangelical preacher in charge of Holy Fire Baptist. An only child, Ruth leads a sheltered, friendless life; her only companions are books, in particular, Twilight. She dreams of one day finding her own Edward Cullen.

…in the vampire Edward, I found everything I’d ever wanted in a man. He loved Bella with single-minded devotion, a self-effacing passion beyond anything a human man was capable of. That’s in turn how I loved him.

(I too have loved a taciturn vampire, although mine was a little less sparkly than Edward. LOL)

But anyway.

Everett Duncan also lives in Bottom Springs. An act of violence brings Everett and Ruth together and bonds them when they are seventeen and the story flips between this early period of their relationship and several years later, when they are 23. When a skull is discovered in the swamp, Everett and Ruth work together to uncover Bottom Springs’ dark underbelly.

In the present day, Ruth lives on her own and works at the local library. She has very little to do with her parents, stepping away from the church’s fire and brimstone teachings. Everett has left Bottom Springs, returning “every year on the first true day of summer.” Things are different this year, though, and not only because the discovery of the skull, but because Ruth has a boyfriend, Deputy Barry Holt.

I read Midnight is the Darkest Hour in one sitting. It’s the perfect blend of southern gothic and mystery, plus a dash of angsty romance. (Which, c’mon, if you’re going to love a vampire, you gotta love the angst.) This book has a lot to say about the patriarchy, religion, and family. Ruth has been cowed all her life, but when she decides she’s not going to take it anymore – well, that’s a journey worth taking.

I think Winstead’s only gotten better. I wasn’t a huge fan of In My Dreams I Hold a Knife (although there were some parts of it I really did enjoy), but I LOVED The Last Housewife. Midnight is the Darkest Hour is another winner and I can’t wait to see what she writes next.

Theme Music – T. Marie Vandelly

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T. Marie Vandelly’s debut Theme Music promises a lot with its prologue. At just eighteen months, Dixie Wheeler is the only member of her family to survive a chilling event in the family home. One day at breakfast, her father left the kitchen, went to his shed and returned with an axe.

He rentered the kitchen, extra warm and cozy thanks to a turkey in the oven, looked upon the bewildered faces of his adoring family, and butchered them all. Well, not all, of course. I lived.

After he was done, her father slit his own throat.

Now, twenty-five years later, Dixie happens upon an advertisement announcing the sale of her family home – not that she has any real memories of it. After the death of her family, Dixie lived with her father’s sister, Celia, and her uncle, Ford, and her cousin, Leah. Now, as an adult, she cohabitates with her boyfriend, Garrett. What can it hurt to go check out the house, she wonders.

The house is “charming” in fact, despite its horrific history. Garrett falls in love with it, too, although he isn’t aware of what happened there. In fact, Dixie hasn’t been forthcoming with the details of her past at all. That’s bound to cause some friction and it does which ultimately means that Dixie moves into the house solo. Not only does she move in, but she brings with her all the household belongings that her father’s brother Davis had stored in his own basement. This includes, unfortunately, a file folder filled with crime scene photos. Davis, it seems, always believed his brother was innocent and until his death was working to prove it.

Theme Music isn’t quite sure whether it wants to be a thriller or a horror novel. Dixie’s house is haunted because of course it is, but most of the book is concerned with Dixie picking up the threads of her uncle’s investigation, and trying to figure out what really happened that day.

Books of this type depend on a likable main character, which I am sad to say, Dixie was not. Was there peril? Yes. Did she do some stupid things? Yes. Were there some twists and suspense? Also yes. But I also often found the tone uneven, sarcasm when it was uncalled for and a fair number of unbelievable plot machinations that caused a little bit of eye rolling.

All that said, Theme Music is a promising debut even if it wasn’t quite sure what kind of book it wanted to be.

This Summer Will Be Different – Carley Fortune

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I think at this point it is safe to say that I buy Carley Fortune’s books not because I like them but because I want to support a Canadian writer. This Summer Will Be Different is her latest book, but I had pretty much the same experience reading it as I did reading Every Summer After and Meet Me at the Lake. But, I also think that I am not the right reader for her books. I am too old to buy into the frothy type of romance she is selling.

In this book, Fortune has stepped away from Muskoka and landed in Prince Edward Island. And there’s the first problem, but we’ll get to that later. Lucy (who wears her hair in braids) has left her life in Toronto for a little break in PEI with her best friend, Bridget. Bridget is from PEI and can’t wait to show Lucy the island’s magical wonders. Except Bridget has missed her flight and Lucy has arrived solo. She ends up at Shack Malpeque and it is there that she meets Felix.

His eyes were the most dazzling shade of iceberg blue, striking against his deep tan. A cleft parted the center of his chin. His face hadn’t seen a razor in at least two days, and it was a study in contrasts. Strong jaw. Soft pink lips, the bottom fuller than the top. The bright eyes trimmed in black lashes.

We’re very much in Romance 101 territory and it’s only page 5.

Felix and Lucy experience a connection – as is the way of these things – and before you can say Anne of Green Gables these two crazy kids (Lucy is 24 and Felix, 23) are have mind-blowing sex. Things get complicated because Lucy doesn’t realize that Felix is actually Wolf, Bridget’s younger brother. (How she manages to have a bestie whose younger brother is called Wolf, a name she isn’t curious enough to ask about…I dunno, but there you have it – the meet cute.)

Over the course of five years, Lucy and Felix keep this ‘relationship’ a secret for slightly silly reasons because it would seem that they have undeniable feelings for one another. The novel toggles back and forth from this first meeting to subsequent visits to PEI where Felix and Lucy both keep their distance from each other (because Bridget can’t find out for reasons that make zero sense) and also have hot sex (which is made less hot by the amount of times Lucy asks for “more”).

We are reminded of the location at every opportunity. Like every time someone is buttering toast, it’s with Cows Creamery Churned Butter. And apparently all people eat in PEI is oysters. (I myself have never eaten oysters in PEI, but I am one of those weirdo Maritimers who doesn’t like seafood.) Yes, there is the requisite trip to Green Gables, and the necessary mention of red dirt and ocean vistas etc etc.

The problem isn’t the book per se because I have a feeling that a) I am not the intended audience and b) every single 20-something will be planning a trip to PEI this summer to meet their own version of Felix. For me, all these people were just meh. Bridget is keeping a huge secret days before her wedding and the reveal is anticlimactic. You know Felix and Lucy are going to get their happily-ever-after. At this point in my life, I guess I am looking for characters who have logged a few more miles than these physically perfect twenty-somethings have. So, I really shouldn’t be poo-pooing a book for which I am certainly not the intended audience.

If frothy, sun-kissed, sweet (with a little spice) fiction is your jam, put this in your beach bag and hit the sand. You’ll probably love it.

How to Sell a Haunted House – Grady Hendrix

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Louise and Mark are estranged siblings who are forced to find a way to work together in an effort to clean out their parents’ house. That’s the starting point for Grady Hendrix’s novel How to Sell a Haunted House.

Louise and Mark squabble over everything, including how they should deal with the contents of the house: Mark calls it “junk”; Louise is more sentimental. It isn’t until things start to get, well, weird, that the siblings discover they have more in common than they realized.

When Louise arrives in Charleston, she discovers that Mark has already arranged for Agutter Clutter to come and cart away all the stuff their parents, Nancy and Eric, have accumulated over the years–and it’s a lot of stuff. Well, it’s a lot of puppets and dolls. That’s because Nancy was a puppeteer with “a Christian puppet ministry”. Neither of the siblings is really a fan and one puppet in particular makes “Louise’s skin crawl.”

Pupkin was a red-and-yellow glove puppet with two stumpy fabric legs dangling down from his front and two little nubbin arms. His chalk-white plastic face had a big smiling mouth and a little pug nose, and he looked out of the corners of his wide eyes like he was up to some kind of mischief. His moth and eyes were outlined in thick black lines and he wore a bloodred bodysuit with a pointed hood and a yellow stomach […]he looked like he’d crawled straight out of a nightmare.

How to Sell a Haunted House is often funny, and also violent and creepy (and this will be especially true if dolls and puppets make you uneasy). And, then, like in the other Hendrix books I have read (My Best Friend’s Exorcism, The Southern Book Club’s Guide to Slaying Vampires), it also offers a deeper look at something more meaningful and real than just straight-up scares. (I didn’t find this book particularly scary, although it did, on occasion, make me squirm.)

This book tracks the emotions attached with grief (each section of the book is named after one of the five stages), the unresolved feelings you’re left with when you lose someone unexpectedly, and the notion that when your loved one is gone, all you have left –if you are lucky — are the people you have shared the journey with. If you are really lucky, that is a sibling.

Super enjoyable read.

I Did It For You – Amy Engel

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The fact that I sprung for a hardcover copy of Amy Engel’s (The Roanoke Girls, The Familiar Dark) latest novel I Did It For You should tell you that I am a fan. I am so sad that it wasn’t as good as her previous novels – which I LOVED.

Fourteen years after Eliza and her boyfriend Travis were shot in a local park, Eliza’s younger sister Greer comes home to Ludlow, Kansas. Bad things happen in Kansas, apparently. (It’s the place where the Clutter family - made famous in Truman Capote’s iconic book In Cold Blood – were killed in 1959.)

Greer has a love-hate relationship with Ludlow. On the one hand, her childhood besties Ryan and Cassie are there (Ryan has recently returned home following his divorce; Cassie had never left). On the other hand, she has a strained relationship with her parents. Her father is an alcoholic and her mother buried her grief in relentless cleaning. Why come home now, when she has made a life for herself in Chicago? Well, that’s because two more kids are dead. Greer is convinced that these deaths are connected to her sister’s murder even though the person responsible for Eliza and Travis’s deaths, Roy Mathews, was caught and executed.

In an effort to uncover the truth, Greer teams up with an unlikely person: Dean Mathews, Roy’s older brother. Together, they try to figure out Roy’s motive for killing Eliza and Travis because while Roy admitted to killing them, he also said he didn’t really know them and so the crime doesn’t make sense to either Greer or Dean.

Maybe if I hadn’t read The Roanoke Girls or The Familiar Dark first, I would have liked I Did It For You more than I did. I read a lot of thrillers, and this one stacks up just fine against many of them. But I was really hoping for the sucker punch The Familiar Dark offered or the dark family secret hidden in the depths of The Roanoke Girls. For me, this just didn’t have the same emotional depth as those two books. That said, the last third of the book definitely outpaced the first two thirds and while I suspected one thing, I was surprised by another revelation. So, not a total miss – really not a miss at all, just not as good as I’d hoped.

Things You Save in a Fire – Katherine Center

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Cassie Hanwell, the 26-year-old protagonist of Katherine Center’s novel Things You Save in a Fire is the only female firefighter at her Texas firehouse. She’s a fierce and dedicated firefighter, and when the novel opens, she is about to receive the valor award. Her career, it seems, is on an upward trajectory…until the night of the awards ceremony when the person presenting her the award turns out to be Heath Thompson and

…his beefy, self-satisfied face, his pompous grin, his self-serving posture, and then, finally, the recognition in his eyes…Let’s just say it altered my emotional landscape. In a flash, my insides shifted from cold shock to burning rage.

Cassie’s life pivots at that point. Not only is her upward mobility with the department derailed, but around the same time she gets a phone call from her estranged mother asking Cassie if she would be willing to move to Massachusetts to provide some support while she deals with a medical issue. Rock. Meet hard place.

Cassie takes a transfer to a small fire station in Lillian, where the captain thinks that “women in the fire service will be the downfall of human civilization” and where she meets the rookie, another newbie who comes from a long line of firefighters. The rookie poses another threat to Cassie because as soon as she sees him for the first time, Cassie’s first thought is “Oh no.” She has guarded her heart from all potential threats since she was sixteen and then this man lifts his “stunning, heartbreakingly appealing face.”

There’s lots to like about Things You Save in a Fire. Cassie is an appealing character and the rookie (Owen) is, as romantic leads often are, perfect. There’s some other stuff in here, too, about forgiveness and family and opening yourself up to love in all its forms. Not really my cup of tea, overall, but I am sure it would be appealing to lots of readers.

Just Like Mother – Anne Heltzel

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Maeve is a book editor in NYC. She’s got a pretty good life, including a friends with benefits arrangement with Ryan. What Maeve doesn’t have is family. She grew up in a matriarchal cult, Mother Collective, a situation from which she escaped/was rescued when she was just a child. The only thing she really misses from that time in her life is her cousin, Andrea. They lost touch and Maeve hasn’t looked for her in years. Then, on a whim, she takes a DNA test and suddenly Andrea is back in her life…and things get, well, complicated.

This is the premise of Anne Heltzel’s first novel for adults Just Like Mother. And it started out really well. I love cult stories, and although this once doesn’t spend too much time in the cult, there is certainly enough information for readers to know that it’s whackadoodle (although, really, are there any cults out there that aren’t?) This is a cult of women, the one male child mentioned is referred to as ‘Boy’. There’s a locked room and strange sounds come from behind the door, a puppy Maeve thinks.

When Maeve and Andrea are reunited, Maeve is both elated and wary. After all, their shared childhoods weren’t idyllic. Andrea seems to have landed on her feet though. She’s made millions as the “CEO of a start-up that had been making the news for its groundbreaking contributions to the lifestyle market.” But almost as soon as Andrea re-enters her life, Maeve’s life starts to implode. She loses her job and then, a personal tragedy catapults Maeve to upstate New York, where Andrea lives in a fabulous mansion with her husband, Rob.

That’s when things get weird. Just Like Mother is one of those books that you keep reading because it is so ridiculous that you can’t stop. Some readers called it “terrifying” and “deeply disturbing” but it was neither of those things for me.

One Italian Summer – Rebecca Serle

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At 30, Katy Silver, has just lost her mother to cancer and suddenly she isn’t quite sure what to make of her life: she doesn’t know who she is without her mom.

I cannot yet conceive of a world without her, what that will look like, who I am in her absence. […] I do not ever imagine coming to terms with the loss of her body – her warm, welcoming body. The place I always felt at home. My mother, you see, is the great love of my life. She is the great love of my life, and I have lost her.

The only thing she can think to do, to help her make sense of this senseless tragedy, is to go on the trip to Positano, Italy, that she and her mom had been planning for ages. So, she leaves her husband, the affable Eric, and grieving father behind and lands at Hotel Poseidon (an actual real place where you too can see what Katy saw for a measly $1500 a night -in high season; you can stay for about a third of that in the off season). There, itinerary for two in hand, Katy tries to do the things that she and her mother had planned which was, essentially, to revisit her mother’s own transformative 30th summer on the Amalfi Coast.

Katy isn’t going to have to do it alone, though. First, she meets Adam, a handsome American property developer, who has been coming to Positano for years because “it’s special here […] a little piece of paradise.” Then, miraculously, Katy meets her mother.

Of course, this turn of events is going to take some suspension of disbelief – but just go with it. For anyone who has ever lost a loved one, especially a mom, this reunion will be bittersweet. Suddenly, Katy finds herself actually living that life-changing summer her mother lived 30 years ago…with her mother. It’s a game changer for Katy as she comes to understand her mother in a way it would have been impossible to before.

I see a woman. A woman fresh into a new decade who wants a life of her own. Who has interests and desires and passions beyond my father and me. Who is very real, exactly as she is right here and now.

It’s hard to imagine our parents as anything but our parents. It’s almost like they didn’t have a life before we came along, and I know that this is likely how my son and daughter, both in their twenties now, see me. I am their mom, but before that – just one yawning blank. I wonder if that is also how I saw my own mother? I lost my mother to cancer when I was 45; she was just 67. There are so many things I wish she was here for, so many milestones and heartaches, so many vacations we never had the change to take, and so many questions I wish that I had asked.

For this reason, One Italian Summer is a balm for the soul. The other reason is Italy itself. As anyone who has ever been there knows, it is a magical place. I wrote about my last visit in 2018 here.

None of This is True – Lisa Jewell

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Lisa Jewell’s most recent novel, None of This is True, could have been ripped straight from the true-crime headlines. And just like a true-crime podcast or documentary, Jewell’s book is totally binge-able.

Alix Summer, a successful podcaster who lives a polished life with her successful husband, Nathan, and her two young children in a tony London neighbourhood, meets Josie Fair, a part-time seamstress with two adult children and a husband, Walter, who is old enough to be her father. Their meet cute happens at a local gastropub, not the sort of place Josie would normally be dining, but it is her 45th birthday and she wanted, for once, to do something special. Turns out, it is also Alix’s 45th birthday.

This incidental meeting seems momentous to Josie, so when she accidentally on purpose runs into Alix again she confesses that she doesn’t “break free of the past now, then when will [she]?” She wants to tell her story and Alix is looking for another project. Josie and her messed up life seems like the answer to her creative prayers.

It doesn’t take long for Josie to start becoming full-on obsessed with Alix’s house and the casual elegance of her life. She asks Alix to help her buy new clothes. She takes small, inconsequential things from the Summers’ home, which she visits regularly because Alix’s podcast studio is in the back garden. She captivates Alix with the story her relationship with Walter, which began when she was 13 and he was 42, and of a daughter who ran off at 16. Another daughter, Erin, never comes out of her bedroom. It is clear that Josie’s life is messed up.

Or is it?

As with all of Jewell’s really great books – you really won’t know what to believe…or in this case – who to believe. The book’s structure is comprised of podcast recordings, Netflix documentary transcripts and chapters told from both Josie and Alix’s point of view. It makes for easy reading; I read it in two days. Like the media it mimics, None of This is True is easily consumable, a big bowl of buttered popcorn that’s fun to eat but not exactly life-sustaining.