Fiction

What Alice Forgot by Liane Moriarty opens with an interesting premise: Alice Love falls off her spin bike, hits her head, and forgets the previous 10 years of her life. A lot has happened in that time. At 29, she was newly pregnant and madly in love with her husband. At 39, she was a stressed out mother, and on her way to divorce.

It’s fun for a little while. I’m not the same person I was 10 years ago, and what would she say/act/do if she could inhabit my body right now? But this book is so focused on the idea that women are best when both a mother and a wife that I almost stopped reading it. I’ve known for a long time that I don’t want children, and I don’t see marriage as something to strive for just for the sake of being partnered up. I usually don’t mind reading books about motherhood and marriage (as my love of Little Fires Everywhere shows), but What Alice Forgot hones in on women needing these things to be happy to such a level that I soured on the book by the (unfulfilling) conclusion.

What Alice Forgot was published in […]

I’ve had a copy of Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow by Gabrielle Zevin on my bookshelf for a while, and kept passing on it. Too many people whose literary tastes I trust posted that they were WRECKED or DESTROYED by this book — in a positive way. I have no problem with those kinds of reads but didn’t know if I could handle one right now.

Turns out I didn’t need to worry. I liked this book very much but it didn’t quite reach deep enough into my chest to pull my heart out.

Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow is about three friends, primarily Sadie and Sam, who meet when Sam is in the hospital and Sadie’s sister is too. They bond by playing a video game. Why Sam’s in the hospital is the first slight mystery of the book, and the narrative moves along while dropping hints about foreboding events in the future or in the past as the story moves ahead. What happened to Sam’s foot? Why does he live with his grandparents? Did Sadie’s sister survive? What was the big event that changed everything for the gaming company they eventually form? And where does the third friend, Marx, […]

Can you be perfect? Can you force it upon yourself? Your children? Your block? Your town?

Of course not, which is one of the main themes running through Little Fires Everywhere by Celeste Ng. I loved it, perhaps because I also love mess, especially mess that springs up in the face of strong, sometimes cruel opposition.

The multiple narratives of the book flow from two women: Elena Richardson and Mia Warren. Elena lives a well manicured life: she met her husband in college, had four kids, has a tidy job, and a large, beautiful home. Mia is a wandering artist who wanders into Shaker Heights, Ohio with her daughter Pearl, and rents a condo from the Richardsons.

We know from the start that things don’t end well. The book opens with the Richardson house on fire, started by someone setting “little fires everywhere.” Which is really what the book is about. Despite Elena’s striving for the perfect life, everything is burning around her — in her own home, and in their planned, progressive community of Shaker Heights.

I thought Ng made up Shaker Heights for the book, but it’s real, and she moved there with her family when she was nine years […]

I know it’s not “spooky season,” but I read “beach reads” all year round, so why not check out a creepy book in May?

A Dreadful Splendor by B.R. Myers(which I found out about through a review on Smart Bitches, Trashy Books) is about Genevieve Timmons, a spiritualist in Victorian London who is yanked out of the gallows at the behest of Mr. Pemberton, a mysterious man who lives in an grand estate on a cliff by the sea. He’s mourning the death of his fiance. The police said it was suicide, but he doesn’t agree. He doesn’t want Timmons to bring forth his fiance’s ghost — he knows what she does is an act  — but to hold a seance with the goal of getting her killer to confess.

There are multiple mysteries running through this book, including what happened to Timmons’ mother, and Myers writes in a way that the killer really could be anyone. Still, I was surprised (in a good way!) about the resolution.

It’s creepy and gothic, but it doesn’t get all the gruesome — for a while, I pictured the estate looking like the Haunted Mansion in Walt Disney World. It does get more serious […]

As you may know if you’re a long time reader, I am a fan of the romance genre, particularly of newer romances that explore something different than “rich white man + rich white lady fall in love and get married.” Because of that, I decided to read an older one, just to see how far romances have come: Sonora Sundown by Janet Dailey.

Turns out this book is a bit of a peculiarity both because of the series it was part of, and the author herself. But let’s start with the series.

Sonora Sundown is part of the “Americana” series, where Dailey wrote 50 romances set in 50 states. I found this, the Arizona book, in a Little Free Library near me (and then Montana Nebraska and New Hampshire in another one a few blocks away).

In a 1997, Dailey told the St. Pete Times (now Tampa Tampa Bay Times) that she started writing her first romance novel in 1974 when she and her husband sold their construction business and decided to travel around the country in an Airstream Trailer. Sonora Sundown was published soon after, in 1978.

The books were incredibly popular. The copy I have is from the fourth print […]

While working on my book proposal, I cast around for something to read that would be deeper than a romance novel, but also not non-fiction that would distract me from the non-fiction I was trying to write. My mom told me she was reading Barbara Kingsolver’s The Bean Trees, which reminded me that I’d found a copy of Kingsolver’s The Poisonwood Bible in a Little Free Library. I’ve read many of her books before, including The Bean Trees, and Animal, Vegetable, Miracle, so I cracked it open without really knowing what it’s about.

It’s an epic story/parable about the Price family, specifically mom Orleanna, and daughters Rachel, Leah, Adah and Ruth May, Evangelicals who are brought to the Congo in 1959 by patriarch Nathan Price. He’s a looming figure in the story — he’s on a quest to “save” African souls by shoving the white man’s way of life on them, and he also beats his wife and children — but we never hear from him. Instead the story is told from the rotating point of view of the five women, who grow and change in radical ways throughout the book, which ends in the 1980s.

Kingsolver lived in […]

After I finished The Seamstress of Sardinia, which was Book 9 of this year’s series, I went online and searched for other books about this Italian island. That’s how I found Under a Sardinian Sky by Sara Alexander. I ordered a used copy, and texted my friend “this better be the most dramatic book I’ve ever read.”

And it is! Which is the problem. It’s too much.

Carmela is a dress maker engaged to the son of the wealthiest man in town. She should be happy right, right? What more could a gal want? A lot, it turns out. To quote Belle, feels like she’s meant for more than this provincial life (or: life on an island trying to figure itself out after WW II).

Even though I didn’t really like the overblown story (and stories around her, since there’s drama all around), it does highlight why I had a problem with A Thousand Days in Venice, Book 15 of this year’s series. You can click on that review but tl;dr some of that author’s descriptions of the locals, and how they were satisfied with their station in life, sounded, well, ignorant. Carmella is seen the same way by British […]