The Rituals by Rebecca Roberts (Blog Tour)
Rebecca Roberts adapted her 2022 Welsh-language novel Y Defodau, her ninth, into The Rituals, which draws on her time working as a non-religious celebrant. Her protagonist, Gwawr Efa Taylor, is a freelance celebrant, too. The novel is presented as her notebook, containing diary entries as well as the text of some of the secular ceremonies she performs to mark rites of passage. We open on a funeral for a 39-year-old woman, then swiftly move on to a Bridezilla celebrity’s wedding that sours in a way that threatens to derail Gwawr’s entire career. A victim of sabotage, she’s doubly punished by gossip.
As she tries to piece her life back together, Gwawr finds support from many quarters, such as her beloved grandfather (Taid), a friend who invites her along on a writing retreat, her Welsh-language book club, a high school acquaintance, other customers and a sweet dog. She and the widower from the first funeral make a pact to start counselling at the same time to work through their grief – we know early on that she has experienced the devastating loss of Huw, but the details aren’t revealed until later. A couple of romantic prospects emerge for the 37-year-old, but also some uncomfortable reminders of past scandal.
There are heavy issues here, like alcoholism, infant loss and suicide, but they reflect the range of human experience and allow compassionate connections to form. Gwawr’s empathy is motivated by her bereavement: “That’s what keeps me going – knowing that I’ve turned the worst time of my life into something that helps other people. Taking the good from the bad.” You can see that attitude infusing her naming ceremonies and funerals. I’ll say no more about the plot, just that it prioritizes moments of high emotion and is both absorbing and touching.
I think this is only the second Welsh-language book I have read in translation (the first was The Life of Rebecca Jones by Angharad Price). It’s whetted my appetite for heading back to Wales for the first time since 2020 – we’re off to Hay-on-Wye on Friday. The Rituals is a tear-jerker for sure, but also sweet, romantic and realistic. I enjoyed it in much the same way I did The Collected Regrets of Clover by Mikki Brammer, and was pleased to try something from a small press that champions women’s writing.
With thanks to Random Things Tours and Honno Welsh Women’s Press for the proof copy for review.
Buy The Rituals from Bookshop.org [affiliate link]
I was delighted to be part of the blog tour for The Rituals. See below for details of where other reviews have appeared or will be appearing soon.
Short Stories in September Roundup: Munro, Ulrich; Virago Anthology
This comes a few days later than I intended, but better late than never. I’ve been focusing on short stories in September for the last eight years. In September 2021 I read 12 short story collections; last year it was 11.5; this year I finished 11, so pretty much par for the course, and pushing my year-to-date total to 30 story collections – not bad going for someone who feels like she hardly ever reads stories and doesn’t seek them out. This year’s reviews are here, here and here.
Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage by Alice Munro (2001)
I always think I’ve never read Munro before, but that’s not the case. A decade or more ago I read Lives of Girls and Women. The ironic thing is that I chose it because I thought it was the odd one out in her oeuvre, being a novel rather than short stories. In fact, it’s a linked story collection, and really they might as well be discrete stories. That book left no impression, but I’d happened to accumulate several more Munro collections over the years and, especially after she won the Nobel, felt delinquent for not reading her.
There are nine stories in the 320-page volume, so the average story here is 30–35 pages – a little longer than I tend to like, but it allows Munro to fill in enough character detail that these feel like miniature novels; they certainly have all the emotional complexity. Her material is small-town Ontario and the shifts and surprises in marriages and dysfunctional families.
More commonly, she employs an omniscient third person to allow her to move between minds, yet I found that the three first-person stories were among the most memorable: in “Family Furnishings,” a woman recalls the encounter with her father’s cousin that made her resolve to be a writer; in “Nettles,” childhood friends meet again in midlife and a potential affair is quashed by the report of a tragedy; in “Queenie,” a young woman spends a short time living with her older stepsister and her husband, her music teacher she ran off with. This last one reminded me of Tessa Hadley’s stories – no doubt Munro has been an influence on many.
For instance, the title story, which opens the collection, gave me strong Elizabeth Hay and Mary Lawson vibes. A housekeeper sets off on the train to start a new life, encouraged by a romantic correspondence fabricated by her adolescent charge, Sabitha, and her friend. Munro pays close attention to domestic minutiae like furniture and clothing. Illness and death are frequent seeds of a story: cancer in “Floating Bridge,” the suicide of an ALS patient in “Comfort,” and dementia in the oft-anthologized “The Bear Came Over the Mountain.”
Individual plots are less likely to stay with me than the quality of the prose, the compassionate eye, and the feeling of being immersed in a novel-length narrative when really I was only halfway through a few dozen pages. I’ll certainly read more Munro collections. (Free from a neighbour) 
Close Company: Stories of Mothers and Daughters, ed. Christine Park and Caroline Heaton (1987)
Back in 2021, I read 14 of these 25 stories (reviewed here) and set the book aside. At that time I noted the repeated theme of women’s expectations of their daughters, and that was true of the remainder as well. The editors quote Simone de Beauvoir in the introduction, “the daughter is for the mother at once her double and another person.” So in Emily Prager’s “A Visit from the Footbinder,” Lady Guo Guo subjects her spirited daughter to the same painful procedure she underwent as a child. The cultural detail was overpowering in this one, like the author felt she had to prove she’d done her research on China. The father–daughter relationship struck me more in Judith Chernaik’s Jewish Brooklyn-set “Honor Thy Father and Thy Mother.”
From this batch, two stood out the most: in “Children’s Liberation” by Jan Clausen, Lisa rebels against her lesbian mother’s bohemian lifestyle by idolizing heterosexual love stories; and in Zhang Jie’s “Love Must Not Be Forgotten,” a daughter comes to understand her mother by reading her diary about her doomed romance. My overall favourites, though, were still the stories by Jane Gardam, Janet Frame, Alice Walker and Charlotte Perkins Gilman. (Free mall bookshop) 
Small, Burning Things by Cathy Ulrich (2023)
Ulrich’s second collection contains 50 flash fiction pieces, most of which were first published in literary magazines. She often uses the first-person plural and especially the second person; both “we” and “you” are effective ways of implicating the reader in the action. Her work is on a speculative spectrum ranging from magic realism to horror. Some of the situations are simply bizarre – teenagers fall from the sky like rain; a woman falls in love with a giraffe; the mad scientist next door replaces a girl’s body parts with robotic ones – while others are close enough to the real world to be terrifying. The dialogue is all in italics. Some images recur later in the collection: metamorphoses, spontaneous combustion. Adolescent girls and animals are omnipresent. At a certain point this started to feel repetitive and overlong, but in general I appreciated the inventiveness.
Published on 2 July by Okay Donkey Press. With thanks to publicist Lori Hettler for the free e-copy for review.
I also read the first two stories in The Best Short Stories 2023: The O. Henry Prize Winners, edited by Lauren Groff. If these selections by Ling Ma and Catherine Lacey are anything to go by, Groff’s taste is for gently magical stories where hints of the absurd or explained enter into everyday life. Ma’s “Office Hours” has academics passing through closet doors into a dream space; the title of Lacey’s “Man Mountain” is literal. I’ll try to remember to occasionally open the book on my e-reader to get through the rest.
September Releases by Chloe Lane, Ben Lerner, Navied Mahdavian & More
September and October are bounteous months in the publishing world. I’ll have a bunch of books to plug in both, mostly because I’ve upped my reviewing quota for Shelf Awareness. There’s real variety here, from contemporary novellas and heavily autobiographical poetry to nature essays and a graphic memoir.
Arms & Legs by Chloe Lane
I reviewed Lane’s debut novel, The Swimmers, a black comedy about a family preparing for an assisted suicide, this time last year. It seems there’s an autobiographical setup to the author’s follow-up, which focuses on a couple from New Zealand now living in Florida with their young son. Narrator Georgie teaches writing at a local college and is having an affair with Jason, an Alabama-accented librarian she met through taking Finn to the Music & Movement class. She joins in a volunteer-led controlled burn in the forest, and curiosity quickly turns to horror when she discovers the decaying body of a missing student.
There’s a strong physicality to this short novel: fire, bodies and Florida’s dangerous fauna (“To choose to live in a place surrounded by these creatures, these threats, it made me feel like I was living a bold life”). Georgie has to decide whether setting fire to her marriage with Dan is what she really wants. A Barry Hannah short story she reads describes adultery as just a matter of arms and legs, a phrase that’s repeated several times.
Georgie is cynical and detached from her self-destructive choices, coming out with incisive one-liners (“My life isn’t a Muriel Spark novel, there’s no way to flash forward and find out if I make it out of the housefire alive” and “He rested the spade on his shoulder as if he were a Viking taking a drinks break in the middle of a battle”). Lane burrows into instinct and motivation, also giving a glimpse of the challenges of new motherhood. Apart from a wicked dinner party scene, though, the book as a whole was underwhelming: the body holds no mystery, and adultery is an old, old story.
With thanks to Gallic Books for the proof copy for review.
The Lights by Ben Lerner
I’d read fiction and nonfiction from Lerner but had no idea of what to expect from his poetry. Almost every other poem is a prose piece, many of these being absurdist monologues that move via word association between topics seemingly chosen at random: psychoanalysis, birdsong, his brother’s colorblindness; proverbs, the Holocaust; art conservation, his partner’s upcoming C-section, an IRS Schedule C tax form, and so on.
The vocabulary and pronouncements can be a little pretentious. The conversational nature and randomness of the subjects contribute to the same autofiction feel you get from his novels. For instance, he probes parenting styles: his parents’ dilemma between understanding his fears and encouraging him in drama and sport; then his daughters’ playful adoption of his childhood nickname of Benner for him.
A few highlights: the enjambment in “Index of Themes”; the commentary on pandemic strictures and contrast between ancient poetry and modern technology in “The Stone.” I wouldn’t seek out more poetry by Lerner, but this was interesting to try. (Read via Edelweiss)
Sample lines:
“When you die in the patent office / there’s a pun on expiration”
“the goal is to be on both sides of the poem, / shuttling between the you and I. … Form / is always the answer to the riddle it poses”
“It’s raining now / it isn’t, or it’s raining in the near / future perfect when the poem is finished / or continuous, will have been completed”
This Country: Searching for Home in (Very) Rural America by Navied Mahdavian
Mahdavian has also published comics in the New Yorker. His debut graphic novel is a memoir of the three years (2016–19) he and his wife lived in remote Idaho. Of Iranian heritage, the author had lived in Miami and then the Bay Area, so was pretty unprepared for living off-grid. His wife, Emelie (who is white), is a documentary filmmaker. They had a box house brought in on a trailer. After Trump’s surprise win, it was a challenging time to be a Brown man in the rural USA. “You’re not a Muslim, are you?” was the kind of question he got on their trips into town. Neighbors were outwardly friendly – bringing them firewood and elk kebabs, helping when their car wouldn’t start or they ran off the road in icy conditions, teaching them the local bald eagles’ habits – yet thought nothing of making racist and homophobic slurs.
I appreciated the self-deprecating depictions of learning DIY from YouTube videos and feeling like a wimp in comparison to his new friends who hunt and have gun collections – one funny spread has him imagining himself as a baby in a onesie sitting across from a manly neighbor. “I am shedding my city madness,” Mahdavian boasts as they plant an abundant garden and start learning about trees and birds. The references to Persian myth and melodrama are intriguing, though sometimes seem à propos of nothing, as do the asides on science and nature. I preferred when the focus was on the couple’s struggles with infertility and reopening the town movie theater – a flop because people only want John Wayne flicks.
This was enjoyable reading, but the simple black-and-white style is unlikely to draw in readers new to graphic storytelling, and I wondered if the overall premise – ‘we expected to find closed-minded racists and we did’ – was enough to hang a memoir on. (Read via Edelweiss)
Reviewed for Shelf Awareness:
(Links to full text)
The Wren, The Wren by Anne Enright
Enright’s astute eighth novel traces the family legacies of talent and trauma through the generations descended from a famous Irish poet. Cycles of abandonment and abuse characterize the McDaraghs. Enright convincingly pinpoints the narcissism and codependency behind their love-hate relationships. (It was an honor to also interview Anne Enright. You can see our Q&A here.)
When My Ghost Sings by Tara Sidhoo Fraser
This lyrical debut memoir is an experimental, literary recounting of the experience of undergoing a stroke and relearning daily skills while supporting a gender-transitioning partner. Fraser splits herself into two: the “I” moving through life, and “Ghost,” her memory repository. But “I can’t rely only on Ghost’s mental postcards,” Fraser thinks, and sets out to retrieve evidence of who she was and is.
The Vaster Wilds by Lauren Groff
(Already featured in my Best of 2023 so far post.) Groff’s fifth novel combines visceral detail and magisterial sweep as it chronicles a runaway Jamestown servant’s struggle to endure the winter of 1610. Flashbacks to traumatic events seep into her mind as she copes with the harsh reality of life in the wilderness. The style is archaic and postmodern all at once. Evocative and affecting – and as brutal as anything Cormac McCarthy wrote. A potent, timely fable as much as a historical novel.
Zoo World: Essays by Mary Quade
A collection of 15 thoughtful nature/travel essays that explore the interconnectedness of life and conservation strategies, and exemplify compassion for people and, particularly, animals. The book makes a round-trip journey, beginning at Quade’s Ohio farm and venturing further afield in the Americas and to Southeast Asia before returning home.
The Goodbye World Poem by Brian Turner
The lovely laments in Brian Turner’s fourth collection (a sequel to The Wild Delight of Wild Things) dwell in the aftermath of the loss of his wife and others, and cultivate compensatory appreciation for the natural world. Turner’s poetry is gilded with alliteration and maritime metaphors The long title piece, which closes the collection, repeats many phrases from earlier poems—a pleasing way of drawing the book’s themes together. (My review of the third volume in this loose trilogy is forthcoming.)
And a bonus review book, relevant for its title:
September and the Night by Maica Rafecas
[Translated from the Catalan by Megan Berkobien and María Cristina Hall]
A new Logistics Centre is to cut through Anaïs’s family vineyards as part of a compulsory land purchase. While her father, Magí, and brother, Jan, are resigned to the loss, this single mother decides to resist, tying herself to a stone shed on the premises that will be right in the path of the bulldozers. This causes others to question her mental health, with social worker Elisa tasked with investigating the case. Key evidence of her irrational behaviour turns out to have perfectly good explanations.
Certain chapters alternate Jan’s and Anaïs’s perspectives, recreate her confusion in a psychiatric hospital, or have every sentence beginning with “There” or “And” – effective anaphora. Although I didn’t think Jan’s several romantic options added to the plot, this debut novella from a Spanish author was a pleasant surprise. It’s based on a true story, though takes place in fictional locations, and bears a gentle message of cultural preservation.
With thanks to Fum d’Estampa Press for the free copy for review.
Short Stories in September, Part III: Linked Collections by Jonathan Escoffery & Soraya Palmer
These two debut linked short story collections had enough in common to get a mention in yesterday’s Book Serendipity post, including a 2023 publication date, a central sibling pair, Jamaican heritage, and memories of a devastating hurricane.
If I Survive You by Jonathan Escoffery
A starred Kirkus review first put this on my radar, and I requested a copy back in February. Though I enjoyed the first two stories, I then set the book aside. Its longlisting for this year’s Booker Prize reminded me to pick it back up and it’s now one of the six on the shortlist.
Five of eight stories are filtered through the consciousness of Trelawny, the younger son of Topper and Sanya, who immigrated to Miami in the late 1970s to escape unrest in Kingston, Jamaica. Older brother Delano is the golden boy, yet in a post-recession landscape both sons struggle to get by. After their parents’ split, the family home seems like a totem of security.
An accident leads Delano to give up his tree service business and pursue reggae music professionally. Trees play a pivotal role: when Topper humiliates him at a party by calling him “soft” and “defective,” Trelawny attacks his father’s beloved ackee tree with an axe. After Topper kicks him out, Trelawny lives in his car, accepting a succession of strange and sordid gigs (the stuff of “Odd Jobs” and the title story; “in Miami … you’re as likely to wind up getting your organs harvested as you are to make a profit”) before settling on teaching.
Three stories are in the always engaging second person (one of those inhabiting Topper’s perspective), three are narrated in the first person by Trelawny, and two are in the third person – the one about Delano and another about their cousin Cukie (“Splashdown”). Family legacy, particularly from fathers, is a major theme. “I felt sick with hatred,” Trelawny says. “For her [racist] father, yes, but for all fathers, for their propensity for passing down the worst of themselves.”
Trelawny is an entertaining POV character, jaded but quick-witted as he navigates microaggressions. People are confused about whether he’s African American or Latino. “In Flux,” the opening story and probably the strongest, has him coming to terms with what it means to be Black in America while living in Florida or at college in the Midwest, prompted by a question he frequently has to field: “What are you?” My other favourite story was “Independent Living,” in which he’s an administrator for an oversubscribed senior housing block and has to become as wily as his residents.
Escoffery creates a strong sense of place and character. I suspect there’s a lot that’s autobiographical here, as is common in first books. His ambivalence about sites that hold personal significance is palpable. Ideally, a linked collection will be composed of confident stand-alone stories that together are more than the sum of their parts. I didn’t really feel that about these. While the voice is promising and several stories are highlights, the whole didn’t set me on fire. (And I’d be astonished if it won the Booker. That’ll go to a guy named Paul.) Maybe Escoffery has a great novel brewing, though.
A favourite passage:
“On the day you are scheduled to begin the sixth grade, a hurricane named Andrew pops your house’s roof open, peeling it back like the lid of a Campbell’s soup can, pouring a fraction of the Atlantic into your bedroom, living room—everywhere—bloating carpet, drywall, and fibreboard with sopping sea salt corrosion. It disinters the kidney-colored fibreglass from the walls and ceiling, splaying the house’s entrails on the lawn. The storm chops your neighbor’s house to rubble, parks a tugboat at the far end of your street.”
With thanks to 4th Estate for the free copy for review.
Buy from Bookshop [affiliate link].
The Human Origins of Beatrice Porter & Other Essential Ghosts by Soraya Palmer
Sasha and Zora are steeped in Caribbean folklore absorbed from their parents. Nigel, from Jamaica, tells them about “Rolling Calf,” the vengeful ghost of a butcher paying penance for all the animals he slaughtered; Trinidadian Beatrice reminds them that the hero of the Anansi stories is a woman. Like the trickster spider, these Brooklyn adolescents will have to live by their wits when their family disintegrates – Nigel leaves to marry a German woman and Beatrice returns to Trinidad when she’s diagnosed with metastatic skin cancer.
Apart from a few third-person segments about the parents, the chapters, set between 1997 and 2005, trade off first-person narration duties between Zora, a romantic would-be writer, and Sasha, the black sheep and substitute family storyteller-in-chief, who dates women and goes by Ashes when she starts wearing a binder. It’s interesting to discover examples of queer erasure in both parents’ past, connecting Beatrice more tightly to Sasha than it first appears – people always condemn most vehemently what they’re afraid of revealing in themselves.
I’ve had too much of the patois + legends/magic realism combo recently (e.g., When We Were Birds) and Palmer tries too hard to root her stories in time through 1990s pop culture references. She also exhibits a slightly annoying MFA stylistic showiness, whereas Escoffery’s work feels more natural. Still, this is more novel than stories (the opposite is true for If I Survive You) and thus the kind of book that would make a good wildcard selection on the Women’s Prize longlist. (Passed along by a book club friend) 
A favourite passage:
Zora: “It was like the end of a Jenga game, the way shit just fell apart. Our family foundation had been fading slowly for years, and yet when it all collapsed, it seemed to happen all at once.”
Buy from Bookshop [affiliate link].
Final reviews and a roundup coming up soon.
Currently reading: Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage by Alice Munro; Close Company: Stories of Mothers and Daughters, ed. Christine Park; Small, Burning Things by Cathy Ulrich
Short Stories in September, Part II: Brautigan, Doyle, Minot, Simpson
Every time I do this self-set challenge, I am amazed anew by how different short story collections can be in mood and theme – even if their overall concerns are the same as in most fiction: life and death, relationships, identity, choices. Today I have one debut work, two new-to-me authors, and a disappointing showing from an old favourite.
Revenge of the Lawn: Stories 1962–1970 by Richard Brautigan (1972)
There are more than five dozen stories in this slim volume, most just one to three pages and in the first person (55 of 62); bizarre or matter-of-fact slices of life in the Pacific Northwest or California, often with a grandiose title that’s then contradicted by the banality of the contents (e.g., in the three-page “A Short History of Religion in California,” some deer hunters encounter a group of Christian campers). The simple declarative sentences and mentions of drinking and hunting made me think of Carver and Hemingway, but Brautigan is funnier, coming out with the occasional darkly comic zinger. Here’s “The Scarlatti Tilt” in its entirety: “‘It’s very hard to live in a studio apartment in San Jose with a man who’s learning to play the violin.’ That’s what she told the police when she handed them the empty revolver.”
In the absurdist “Homage to the San Francisco YMCA,” a man replaces his plumbing with poetry: “He took out his bathtub and put in William Shakespeare. The bathtub did not know what was happening. He took out his kitchen sink and put in Emily Dickinson. The kitchen sink could only stare back in wonder.” Brautigan has an incomer’s admiration for California: “I come from someplace else and was gathered to the purpose of California like a metal-eating flower gathers the sunshine.” Many of the flash stories feel autobiographical and bridge country and city life with themes of bear hunting versus movie-going and riding buses.
There are some macho attitudes towards women, who are generally objects of male desire rather than subjects in their own right. But I appreciated this flash fiction collection for its unexpected metaphors and tonal range, from the over-the-top humour of “Complicated Banking Problems” to a pathos-filled rundown of a life in “The World War I Los Angeles Aeroplane.” (Secondhand – Westwood Books, Sedbergh, 2023)
I Meant It Once by Kate Doyle (2023)
A debut collection of 16 stories, three of them returning to the same sibling trio. Many of Doyle’s characters are young people who still define themselves by the experiences and romances of their college years. In “That Is Shocking,” Margaret can’t get over the irony of her ex breaking up with her on Valentine’s Day after giving her a plate of heart-shaped scones. Former roommates Christine and Daisy are an example of fading friendship in “Two Pisces Emote about the Passage of Time.”
The title phrase comes from “Cinnamon Baseball Coyote,” one of the Helen–Grace–Evan stories, when the sparring sisters are children and the one writes down “I hate my sister” and saves the paper in her desk because, as she tells their father, “I don’t mean it anymore. I only kept it because I meant it once.” Moments of great drama or emotion, and the regret that comes in their aftermath, are the stuff of these mainly New York City-set stories.
Across nine first-person and seven third-person stories, the content and point of view are pretty samey and minor; nothing here to make you feel you’re reading a rising star of American fiction. I only found a few standouts. “Hello It’s You” is about Meg’s history of same-sex partners: though she’s with Sara now, she can’t stop thinking about Jenny, her college girlfriend. “Aren’t We Lucky” has a soupçon of magic as it imagines a house and its ghosts resisting renovations. But my favourite was “Moments Earlier,” about Kelly’s medical crisis and the friends who never get past it.
With thanks to Corsair for the free copy for review. See also Susan’s review.
Why I Don’t Write and Other Stories by Susan Minot (2020)
Minot was new to me (as was Brautigan). These stories were first published between 1991 and 2019, so they span a good chunk of her career. “Polepole” depicts a short-lived affair between two white people in Kenya, one of whom seems to have a dated colonial attitude. In “The Torch,” a woman with dementia mistakes her husband for an old flame. “Occupied” sees Ivy cycling past the NYC Occupy camp on her way to pick up her daughter. The title story, published at LitHub in 2018, is a pithy list of authorial excuses. “Listen” is a nebulous set of lines of unattributed speech that didn’t add up to much for me. “The Language of Cats and Dogs” reminded me of Mary Gaitskill in tone, as a woman remembers her professor’s inappropriate behaviour 40 years later.
Eight of the stories are in the third person and two in the first person. They’re almost all accomplished in terms of scene setting and creating characters and motivations, but I can’t say Minot won me over such that I’ll seek out more of her work. Only a few stories will stay with me: “Green Glass,” in which a man encounters his ex-girlfriend at a wedding and cuts her down to size in a way that alarms his current partner; “Boston Common at Twilight,” an account of a strange but ultimately non-consensual sexual encounter; and my favourite, “Café Mort,” the only one with a speculative edge, about an establishment that only serves the dead. (New bargain purchase – Dollar Tree, Hagerstown, Maryland, 2023)
Hey Yeah Right Get a Life by Helen Simpson (2000)
This was my sixth collection from Simpson, who only appears to write short fiction. This was one of my least favourite of her books, unfortunately, because her common theme of frazzled mothers trying to balance parenting with career felt tired. The title story is about Dorrie, mum of three, and this set of characters recurs in the final piece, “Hurrah for the Hols.” Simpson does get the mindset just right:
She had to be thinking of other people all the time or the whole thing fell apart.
I can’t see how the family would work if I let myself start wanting things again, thought Dorrie; give me an inch and I’d run a mile, that’s what I’m afraid of.
The whole pattern of family life hung for a vivid moment above the chopping board as a seamless cycle of nourishment and devoural.
It was like being on holiday with Punch and Judy – lots of biffing and shrieking and fights over sausages.
But I’ve read too many of her exasperated-mum stories at this point. Two here were about female bankers. One, “Burns and the Bankers,” set at a seemingly endless Burns Night supper, rather outstayed its welcome and made overly obvious its message about this being a man’s field. Do read Simpson, but maybe not this (despite the amazing title); I’d recommend Four Bare Legs in a Bed or In the Driver’s Seat (UK title: Constitutional) instead. (Secondhand – Books for Amnesty, York, 2023)
I’ll have one more set of reviews and a roundup on the last day of the month.
Currently reading: If I Survive You by Jonathan Escoffery; The Best Short Stories 2023: The O. Henry Prize Winners, ed. Lauren Groff; How to Disappear by Tara Masih; Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage by Alice Munro; The Human Origins of Beatrice Porter and Other Essential Ghosts by Soraya Palmer; Close Company: Stories of Mothers and Daughters, ed. Christine Park; Small, Burning Things by Cathy Ulrich
September Focus on Short Stories, with Reviews of Bloom and de Kerangal
This is the eighth year in a row in which I’m making a special effort to read short stories in September; otherwise, story collections tend to languish on my shelves (and Kindle) unread. In September 2021 I read 12 collections and in September 2022 it was 11.5; let’s see how many I get to this year!
As someone who doesn’t claim to love short stories, I was surprised to see that I’ve already read 19 collections this year. Some of the highlights have been Old Babes in the Wood by Margaret Atwood, How Strange a Season by Megan Mayhew Bergman, What We Talk about When We Talk about Love by Raymond Carver, Games and Rituals by Katherine Heiny, and Sidle Creek by Jolene McIlwain.
I have a whole shelf of short story options set out for me and will make my selections from there. For now, I have brief reviews of two collections I read during a quick trip to the USA.
A Blind Man Can See How Much I Love You by Amy Bloom (2000)
My second collection by Bloom this year, after Where the God of Love Hangs Out; somewhat confusingly, the latter reprints two of this volume’s Lionel and Julia stories, so there were actually only six stories here that were new to me (5 x first-person; 3 x third-person). However, they’re all typically great ones. The title story has a mother accompanying her daughter to the medical appointments that will transform Jessie into Jess, her son, and also taking a chance on romance. “Rowing to Eden” explores the dynamic between best friends, one lesbian and one married to a man; the one has already been through breast cancer treatment so can counsel her friend from experience.
In “Stars at Elbow and Foot,” a woman whose baby died goes back to the children’s hospital to volunteer with the disabled. “Hold Tight” also reflects on loss and accidents (but is probably the throw-away story if I had to name one). “The Story,” which closes the book, had me hunting for autobiographical correlations what with its mentions of “Amy.” By far my favourite was “The Gates Are Closing,” in which D.M. is having an affair with the synagogue president’s husband, who has Parkinson’s disease. As Yom Kippur approaches, he gives his mistress an ultimatum. The minor assisted dying theme in this one felt ironically prescient of Bloom’s own experience accompanying her husband to Dignitas (the subject of In Love). As always, Bloom’s work is sensual, wry and emotionally wise.
Canoes by Maylis de Kerangal (2021; 2023)
[Translated from the French by Jessica Moore]
These eight stories are all in the first person; although I tend to prefer more diversity of narration, the plots are so dissimilar that it makes up for that homogeneity. In an author’s note at the end, de Kerangal writes that her overall theme was voices, especially women’s voices; perhaps ironically, then, the collection uses no speech marks. In “Mountain Stream and Iron Filings,” the narrator’s friend Zoé is on a mission to lower her voice to make it more suitable for radio. “Nevermore” has a woman contributing a recording of herself reading Edgar Allan Poe’s epic poem “The Raven” to an audio library. “A Light Bird,” which I found particularly poignant, is about a widower and his daughter deciding what to do about their late wife’s/mother’s voice on the answering machine.
“After” has a school leaver partying and figuring out what comes next, “Ontario” revolves around a trip to Canada, and “Arianespace” has an investigator visiting an elderly woman who has reported a UFO sighting. The longest story (billed as a novella), “Mustang,” focuses on a French family that has relocated to Colorado in the 1990s. The mother, recently bereaved, learns to drive their rather impractical American car.
Like Painting Time, the collection is in thrall to questions of deep time. This is clearest in “Bivouac,” in which a woman undergoes a procedure while the dentist tells her about an ancient human jawbone found deep under Paris. Prehistory is even present in the metaphorical language: “the first foothills of the Rockies sketched the backbone of a sleepy stegosaurus who’d escaped extinction” (from “Mustang”). Each story also mentions a canoe, if only in passing (e.g., the dentist’s necklace charm in the first story).
As was my main quibble with Mend the Living, though, de Kerangal is all too fond of arcane vocabulary. I mean, she uses “alveolar” twice in this very short book; there’s also “sagittal slices” and “sinuous mnemic circuits.” Some sentences stretch to fill two-plus pages. So overwriting is a recurrent issue I have with her work, but I would certainly recommend that her fans read her short fiction, which I found more accessible than her novels.
With thanks to MacLehose Press for the free copy for review. Canoes will be published on 28 September.
Currently reading: Revenge of the Lawn by Richard Brautigan; I Meant It Once by Kate Doyle; The Best Short Stories 2023: The O. Henry Prize Winners, ed. Lauren Groff; Why I Don’t Write by Susan Minot; Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage by Alice Munro; The Human Origins of Beatrice Porter and Other Essential Ghosts by Soraya Palmer (linked stories); Small, Burning Things by Cathy Ulrich.
Resuming soon: The Secrets of a Fire King by Kim Edwards; If I Survive You by Jonathan Escoffery (I read the first two stories ages ago, but its longlisting for the Booker Prize is the impetus I need to pick it back up); Hey Yeah Right Get a Life by Helen Simpson.
Are you a short story fan? Read any good ones recently?
Literary Wives Club: Sea Wife by Amity Gaige
My sixth read with the Literary Wives online book club (see also Kay’s and Naomi’s reviews), and favourite so far!
{SPOILERS}
Amity Gaige’s fourth novel, Sea Wife (2020), places the protagonists’ relationship in the ultimate pressure cooker: a small sailboat where they will live and travel with their two young children – Sybil, 7, and George, 2 – for one year. Michael and Juliet Partlow’s marriage was in trouble even before they set off for Panama in the yacht Juliet. The voyage seems equal parts second chance and doomed swan song.
Narration alternates between the spouses, as Juliet in the present day sits in a closet reading excerpts from Michael’s ship’s logbook. The latter are in bold font and right-aligned to distinguish them, though his voice would be enough to do so: Juliet is a cynical poet and failed PhD candidate, while Michael is a commonsense financier. Issues of money and politics have come between them. But Juliet’s trauma from childhood sexual abuse and subsequent estrangement from her mother, who disbelieved her, is the greater problem.
Gaige has rendered these two voices very effectively, and maintains tension about what will happen when the Partlows leave Colombia for Jamaica and storms brew. Early on, Michael is warned that changing a boat’s name is bad luck, and it doesn’t take long to confirm that maritime superstition. Michael may think he’s doing it as a sweet tribute to his wife, but you have to wonder if he’s actually replacing her, or admitting that he’s lost her in real life.
Enhancing the epistolary nature, Gaige includes transcripts from an interview and some of Sybil’s therapy sessions (in which she sounds too young; would a seven-year-old seriously say “loveded” as a past participle?), fragments of Juliet’s unfinished dissertation on Anne Sexton, and so on. I think I would have omitted the final section of documents, though. Still, this was a darn good read: literary but suspenseful, and fitting the Literary Wives brief perfectly for its claustrophobic focus on a marriage. (Birthday gift from my wish list)
The main question we ask about the books we read for Literary Wives is:
What does this book say about wives or about the experience of being a wife?
A marriage changes a lot over the years. A project embarked on with the best of intentions can falter for any number of reasons. A person you once thought you could rely on might let you down. I feel Juliet internalized impossibly high standards for an ideal wife and mother that set her up for failure – it must be difficult for someone who has been a victim to do anything but go through life wounded.
Both protagonists explicitly reflect on their marriage and acknowledge that they have not known how to love or be there for each other, and so have felt alone.
Juliet: “I realized that the loneliness was not new at all. That, in fact, I had been lonely for a long time. Because my husband and I did not know each other. We did not know how to help each other or work together. And yet our fates were bound. By a theory. I mean our marriage. The arrangement was illogical.”
Michael: “Have I lied to her? Sure. I lied to her the moment I represented myself as someone she could count on for a lifetime. … We can’t seem to love each other in the same way at the same time.”
Next book: Hamnet by Maggie O’Farrell in December (a reread for me)
20 Books of Summer, 18–20: Ayanna Lloyd Banwo, Sarah Hall, Meghan O’Rourke
Whew, it’s the final day of the challenge and I’ve managed to finish and write up a last batch of two novels and one nonfiction work: a magic realist tableau of love and death in Trinidad, a fateful romance set against the backdrop of the construction of an English dam in 1936, and a personal and cultural record of chronic illness and its treatment in contemporary America.
When We Were Birds by Ayanna Lloyd Banwo (2022)
I was sent a copy as part of the McKitterick Prize shortlist. The setting of a cemetery, Fidelis in Port Angeles, Trinidad, had vaguely attracted me even before its nomination. Emmanuel Darwin has turned his back on his Rastafarian upbringing to cut off his dreadlocks and work as a gravedigger (any contact with the dead is anathema in the religion). Meanwhile, Yejide, who lives in the hills, is losing her mother, Petronella, and gaining a legacy she’s not sure she wants: the women of her family are caretakers of the souls of the dead, keeping them alive in exchange for protection. Like the corbeaux, dark counterparts of tropical parrots, they tread the border of life and death. As All Saints’ and All Souls’ Days draw closer, Darwin and Yejide together have to decide whether they will be swallowed by the graveyard or escape it. While this was atmospheric and had alluring elements, the speculative angle was not notably well realized and the particular form of patois – eschewing all possessives and most verb conjugations – drove me nuts. I skimmed this one. (Free from the Society of Authors)
Haweswater by Sarah Hall (2002)
I bought this in Cumbria one year and started reading it in Cumbria the next. Once I got home, however, there was little impetus to keep going. Were it not for the temporary local interest, I likely would not have finished this debut novel, which lurches between dry and melodramatic. As it is, I had to skim to the end. Had it been my first taste of Sarah Hall’s work, it might have put me off trying her again.
The frame is historical: Haweswater was indeed dammed to provide water for the city of Manchester in 1936, flooding the village of Mardale. Hall focuses on the people of Mardale, specifically the Lightburn family, who have persisted with farming despite its particular challenges in this hilly landscape. When Jack Liggett comes out from the City on behalf of the waterworks, he meets with hostility, including from the Lightburns’ daughter, Janet, who negotiates for their tenancy to continue until the dam is actually built. Then, well, you know, Romeo and Juliet and pride and prejudice and all that, and they start an affair. Hall has always written forthrightly about sex, starting here.
There’s a climactic final 60 pages in which three major characters die, two in symbolic acts of suicide, but it was a little too much tragedy, too late, for me after the dull midsection. I was intrigued, however, that a plot point turns on golden eagles being in the valley, as Wild Fell, another of my Haweswater-set reads, opens with the presence of the ghost of England’s last golden eagle, who vanished in 2015. This related snippet shows how over-the-top Hall’s use of dialect is: “Golden eagles wud be mor’less gone, gone or illegal these days, like, notta funni bizniz t’be gittin’ mixed up in, eh? What kinda daft bugger d’yer take mi for?” It’s like Thomas Hardy rustics – hard to take seriously. (Anne-Marie Sanderson’s haunting song “Haweswater” is based on the novel.) (Secondhand – Clutterbooks, Sedbergh, 2022) 
The Invisible Kingdom: Reimagining Chronic Illness by Meghan O’Rourke (2022)
Well before I was a devoted follower of the Barbellion Prize for books on disability and chronic illness, I was interested in these topics. For much of her forties and fifties, my mother struggled with fibromyalgia, one of a suite of illnesses misunderstood or even dismissed by the medical profession (as O’Rourke puts it, with a tongue-in-cheek nod to Jane Austen: “it is a truth universally acknowledged among the chronically ill that a young woman in possession of vague symptoms like fatigue and pain will be in search of a doctor who believes she is actually sick”). I hope this National Book Award nominee goes some way toward convincing skeptics that these are real conditions to be addressed by listening to patients and treating them holistically.
In 2012 the author became seriously ill and spent much of her thirties in a fog of pain, spending the equivalent of several days per month at doctors’ appointments and agreeing to ever more bizarre treatments in her desperation. Some of her issues were autoimmune and/or genetic: Hashimoto’s (thyroid), Ehlers-Danlos, POTS, endometriosis. She also dealt with infertility at the same time as she was trying to get well enough to contemplate having children. For her, the turning point was when she was diagnosed with Lyme disease and put on antibiotics. (Later she would travel to London to get fecal microbiota transplants to restore her microbiome.) Chronic Lyme is similar to long COVID, the true extent of which we’re only just beginning to understand; reading a list of the symptoms, I was tempted to remotely/retrospectively diagnose a few people I know with one or the other. It can be ever so slightly miserable reading about navigating all of these conditions, though nowhere near as miserable as it must have been for O’Rourke to live through them, of course.
I knew the author for her exquisite memoir of losing her mother to cancer, The Long Goodbye. Here the writing is more functional and journalistic, but I was still impressed by the attention she pays and the connections she draws; she’s also a poet, so she’s open to emotions and keen to capture them in words. In the face of the unexplained, she contends, chronically ill people are searching for meaning and narrative (restitution, chaos or quest, as Arthur Frank named the three options). She probes her own psyche: “had I become trapped in my identity as a sick person, someone afraid of living? If my mission in life had been reduced to being well at all costs, then the illness had won.” There’s a good balance of research, personal experience and general reflection in this one. (Passed along by Laura – thank you!)
Related reads: Ill Feelings by Alice Hattrick, It’s All in Your Head by Suzanne O’Sullivan, Waiting for Superman by Tracie White
And that’s a wrap! My summer reading was a little scattered and not as thematic as initially planned, but I stuck to my pledge to read only print books that I owned, and then cleared half of them from my shelves through reselling or donating to the Little Free Library. I’ll definitely call that a win.
My favourite from the 20 was a novel, Search by Michelle Huneven, then Making the Beds for the Dead by Gillian Clarke (poetry), followed by two chef’s memoirs, A Cook’s Tour by Anthony Bourdain and Dirt by Bill Buford, and Dorthe Nors’ nature/travel essays. The one DNF and couple of skims are unfortunate, but these things happen.
Next year I fancy a completely open challenge – just, again, getting through books from my shelves. (Maybe all hardbacks?)
Summer Reads, Part II: Cocker, Kroon, Levy & Lewis-Stempel
(Part I was here, ICYMI.) Cooler days here as we say a drawn-out farewell to summer and welcome in early autumn; I’ve been seeing ripe blackberries and Vs of geese for a few weeks now. This batch of books I read from the library truly encapsulated summer: swifts flying overhead, cold lemonade as a reward for sticky outdoor activities, and travels through the confusing cities and inviting countryside of the Continent.
One Midsummer’s Day: Swifts and the Story of Life on Earth by Mark Cocker (2023)
We saw our last swift in Newbury somewhere around 13 August. The three and a half months they were with us passed in what felt like an instant, leaving us bereft until they come back.
Why is it that books seem to bunch together by topic, with several about Henry James or swifts or whatever all being published within the same year or few years? It’s unfortunate for Mark Cocker, a well-respected author on birds and environmental issues in general, that he is two years behind Charles Foster and Sarah Gibson with this work on swifts. I also think he attempts too much, in terms of both literary strategy and subject matter (see the second part of the subtitle), and so loses focus.
The book employs a circadian structure, recording what he sees from his garden from one midsummer evening to the next as he looks up at the sky. Within this framework he delivers a lot of information about the world’s swift species, a fair bit of it familiar to me from those previous books; more novel are his stories of remarkable sightings, like a vagrant white-throated needletail in the Outer Hebrides (it later died in a collision with a wind turbine). But he also tries to set swifts in the context of the grand sweep of evolution. I skipped over these sections, which felt superfluous. With his literary allusions, Cocker is aiming for something like Tim Dee’s exceptional Greenery but falls short.
This could have made a superb concentrated essay, maybe as part of a collection devoting each chapter to a different species, because his passion is clear and his metaphors excellent as he holds up swifts as an emblem of the aerial life, and of hope (“In a social screaming display these weaponised shapes blaze together as a black-swarming meteor in a widening orbit that burns over the houses or between them”). The few-page run-on sentence about how humanity has gotten itself into the climate crisis is pretty great (though Lev Parikian did so much more concisely in Into the Tangled Bank: It’s “f***ing f***ed”). But Foster has written the definitive tribute to swifts, The Screaming Sky, and in just 150 small pages.
Rhubarb Lemonade by Oskar Kroon (2019; 2023)
[Translated from the Swedish by A. A. Prime]
This was like an update of The Summer Book by Tove Jansson: the delicious innocence of a Scandinavian island summer is threatened by change and, ultimately, death. Vinga is happy to escape her troubles for a simple island life with Grandpa. They eat the same foods day after day, do the same things week after week, and slowly work on refurbishing the wooden sailing boat he gave her. Ruth, the shopkeeper’s granddaughter, couldn’t be more different: she hates the sea, misses the city, and is fully immersed in social media and celebrity culture. Yet Vinga finds her captivating and tingles when she’s near. “Things would be so much easier if we’d never met. Things would be so much more boring if we’d never met.”
Prime won Sweden’s August Prize for this YA novel (spot the reference to The Murderer’s Ape, which won the same prize!). As will be familiar to regular readers of YA, we see Vinga dealing with issues like bullying, loneliness, body image, and family breakdown. She’s called back to the mainland to meet the baby her father has had by the new woman in his life – a trip that coincides with the worst storm the island has seen in ages and a chance for Grandpa to play the sea captain hero. But falling for Ruth, kissing a girl, is not a reason for angst. It’s just the way things are. Kroon makes no grand claim that this will be true love, forever. It’s a teen summer romance, and exaggerated by the cover. Maybe it will last; maybe it won’t. The deeper love is familial, particularly between Vinga and her grandfather.
August Blue by Deborah Levy (2023)
My third novel from Levy, and a typically confounding one. The facts are simple enough: Elsa M. Anderson is a pianist who has had something of a breakdown. She retreats from giving concerts, dyes her hair blue, and bounces between European capitals in the later days of the pandemic, giving music lessons and caring for her mentor and adoptive father, Arthur, who’s dying on Sardinia. In between there are laughs and lovers, searching and sadness, all muffled by Elsa’s (Levy’s) matter-of-factness. Meanwhile, there’s a touch of the uncanny in the doppelganger Elsa keeps seeing. First, her double buys the carousel horses she had her eye on in Athens. Then Elsa steals her twin’s trilby hat. There’s a confrontation late on but it doesn’t seem to make much difference. The doubling appears to be a way of making literal the adopted Elsa’s divided self. I’m not entirely sure what to say about this one. I enjoyed reading it well enough. Though I never felt compelled to pick it up, when I did I easily got through several chapters at a time. But I’m not convinced it meant much.
La Vie: A Year in Rural France by John Lewis-Stempel (2023)
Lewis-Stempel’s best book in an age; my favourite, certainly, since Meadowland. I’m featuring it in a summer post because, like Peter Mayle’s Provence series, it’s ideal for armchair travelling. Especially with the heat waves that have swept Europe this summer, I’m much happier reading about France or Italy than being there. The author has written much about his Herefordshire haunts, but he’s now relocated permanently to southwest France (La Roche, in the Charente). He proudly calls himself a peasant farmer, growing what he can and bartering for much of the rest. La Vie chronicles a year in his quest to become self-sufficient. It opens one January and continues through the December, an occasional diary with recipes.
The family’s small-scale potager is organic agriculture at its best. He likens it to turning the clock back to the 1970s, or earlier, before England wrecked its countryside with industrial production. (His list of birds in the area is impressive, including some you’d be lucky to come across in the UK – turtledove, nightingale, stone curlew.) In fact, he estimates that his yield per square metre is triple what it was when he participated in that damaging system, for the same amount of work. His lifestyle is also a deliberate resistance to hyper-speed modernity: he scythes his grass, spends days preserving a haul of walnuts, and tries his hand at pressing oil and making spirits. There’s a make-do-and-mend attitude here: when his sheep-shearing equipment goes missing, he buys a beard trimmer at the supermarket and uses that instead.
It’s a peaceful, comforting read that’s attuned to the seasons and the land. There is also gentle mockery of the French with their bureaucracy and obsession with hunting, and self-deprecation of his own struggle to get his point across in a second language. I could never make a living by manual labour, but I like reading about back-to-the-land adventures, especially ones as bucolic as this – two-hour lunches, six-course dinners with homemade wine? Mais oui! 
20 Books of Summer, 15–17: Bill Buford, Kristin Newman, J. Courtney Sullivan
One last foodie selection for the summer: a chef’s memoir set mostly in Lyon, France. Plus a bawdy travel memoir I DNFed halfway through, and an engaging but probably overlong contemporary novel about finances, generational conflict and women’s relationships.
Dirt: Adventures in French Cooking by Bill Buford (2020)
Buford’s Heat was one of the highlights of my foodie summer reading in 2020. This is a sequel insomuch as it tells you what he did next, after his Italian-themed apprenticeships. The short answer is that he went to Lyon to learn French cooking in similarly obsessive fashion. Without knowing a word of French. And this time he had a wife and twin toddlers in tow. He met several celebrated French chefs – Michel Richard, Paul Bocuse, Daniel Boulud – and talked his way into training at a famous cookery school and in Michelin-starred kitchens.
These experiences are discussed in separate essays, so I rather lost track of the timeline. It’s odd that it took the author so many years to get around to publishing about it all. You’d think his sons were still young, but in fact they’re now approaching adulthood. The other slightly unusual thing is the amount of space Buford devotes to his pet theory that French cuisine (up to ragout, at least) evolved from Italian. Unsurprisingly, the French don’t favour this idea; I didn’t particularly care one way or the other.
Nonetheless, I enjoyed reading about his encounters with French bureaucracy; the stress of working in busy (and macho) restaurants, where he’s eventually entrusted with cooking the staff lunch; and his discovery of what makes for good bread: small wheat-growing operations rather than industrially produced flour – his ideal was the 90-cent baguette from his local boulangerie. This could have been a bit more focused, and I’m still more likely to recommend Heat, but I am intrigued to go to Lyon one day. (Secondhand gift, Christmas 2022)
What I Was Doing While You Were Breeding by Kristin Newman (2014)
(DNF, 156/291 pages) As featured in my Six Degrees post earlier in the month. Newman is a comedy writer for film and television (That ’70s Show, How I Met Your Mother, etc.). I liked how the title unabashedly centres things other than couplehood and procreation. When she’s travelling, she can be spontaneous, open-to-experience “Kristin-adjacent,” who loves doing whatever it is that locals do. And be a party girl, of course (“If there is one thing that is my favorite thing in the world, it’s making out on a dance floor”). However, this chronological record of her sexual conquests in Amsterdam, Paris, Russia, Argentina, etc. gets repetitive and raunchy. I also felt let down when I learned that she married and had a child right after she published it. So this was just her “Pietra Pan” stage before she copied everyone else. Which is fine, but were her drunken shenanigans really worth commemorating? (Secondhand, Bas Books & Home)
Friends and Strangers by J. Courtney Sullivan (2020)
I got Emma Straub vibes from this big, juicy novel focusing on two women in upstate New York: Elisabeth, a married journalist who moved out of Brooklyn when she finally conceived via IVF; and Sam, a college art student who becomes her son Gil’s babysitter. Elisabeth misses her old crowd and doesn’t fit in with the middle-aged book club ladies in her suburban neighbourhood; Sam is almost her only friend, a confidante who’s also like a little sister (better, anyway, than Elisabeth’s real sister, who lives on tropical islands and models swimwear for inspirational Instagram posts). And Sam admires Elisabeth for simultaneously managing a career and motherhood with seeming aplomb.
But fundamental differences between the two emerge, mostly to do with economics. Elisabeth comes from money and takes luxury products for granted, while Sam is solidly working-class and develops a surprising affinity with Elisabeth’s father-in-law, George, who is near bankruptcy after Uber killed off his car service business. His pet theory, “The Hollow Tree,” explains that ordinary Americans have been sold the lie that they are responsible for their own success, when really they are in thrall to corporations and the government doesn’t support them as it should. This message hits home for Sam, who is distressed about the precarious situation of the Latina dining hall employees she has met via her work study job. Both Elisabeth and Sam try to turn their privilege to the good, with varied results.
Although I remained engrossed in the main characters’ stories, which unfold in alternating chapters, I thought this could easily have been 300 pages instead of nearly 400. In particular, Sullivan belabours Sam’s uncertainty over her thirtysomething English fiancé, Clive, whom Elisabeth refers to as “sleazy-hot.” The red flags are more than obvious to others in Sam’s life, and to us as readers, yet we get scene after scene meant to cast shade on him. I also kept wondering if first person would have been the better delivery mode for one or both strands. Still, this was perfect literary cross-over summer reading. (Little Free Library)
Bookish Beck = Rebecca Foster. American transplant to England. Freelance proofreader and book reviewer.
Bookish Beck 