Category: literary fiction

Looking for You by Alexander McCall Smith (Literary Fiction)

I’m loving this new McCall Smith series about the Perfect Passion Company — an old fashioned matchmaking service based in Edinburgh. This is book number two. On the surface, it is a story about a variety of characters and how the matchmaker — Katie — works to find the perfect match for them. But as with all McCall Smith books, it’s teeming with hidden depth as it explores life, love, and the pursuit of happiness (liberty isn’t really an issue here).

The writing is lovely — McCall Smith never condescends and he can make the most exquisite sentence out of utter mundanity. I couldn’t exactly explain why, but he is the only male writer whose female characters I absolutely love. He explores individuals, relationships, and various social and cultural milieus with a process that seems to incorporate detailed observation, in-depth reflection, multi-faceted synthesis with an output of clear and tender explanatory prose. He has written over 40 books and still manages to include “musings” that either teach me more or brings me fresh insight. What appear to most to be light and accessible novels, are for me books of rich meaning.

In this episode, the relationships barriers explored include missed opportunities, poor timing, external expectations, and reevaluation of one’s own criteria. So many different forms of love, so many different people trying to understand their own relationship to happiness. As always, we are treated to many interesting asides on poetry, music, art, and other intellectually spicy aspects of life.

Some Quotes:

“She cherished this too, the place in which she lived and worked, and the land beyond its bounds, because love spilled over from one person, one object, to embrace so much else. Love spread.”

“This is an achingly, beautiful city, he thought, and I fall more in love with it every single day. I still love, Melbourne, of course, but the heart is large enough, has enough chambers, to allow for more than one love. Not everybody knew that, he said to himself, but he did.”

“What a strange, frustrating, mysterious thing was love. In a world in which there would never be enough of everything, in which not all desires could be met, love was rationed, just as happiness was. Some were perfectly happy with the share they were allocated; others felt they got too little And then there were some who failed to grasp a fundamental truth about the way love worked, which was that you got back roughly the amount you put in. That was so basic that you would think that everybody would understand it, But they did not, for some reason, and had to learn the lesson — if they ever learned it — the hard way.”

Thank you to Vintage and NetGalley for providing an advance copy of this book in exchange for my honest review. The book will be published on February 11th, 2025.

Help Wanted by Adelle Waldman (Literary Fiction)

Writing: 5/5 Plot: 3.5/5 Characters: 5/5

A surprisingly engaging book about a set of bottom of the ladder retail workers and their hopes for more hours and some hope of upward mobility. They have a lot working against them — their hours are minimized to avoid having to pay benefits; each character faces his or her own limitations — a learning disability; a thick accent; trying to go straight when drug dealing is SO much more lucrative; false arrests; mental illness; single parenthood; transportation issues; and even lack of generational wealth. The characters have a lot of depth — none of the above is dealt with in any kind of stereotyped way.

But the book doesn’t take the easy way out — there is no blaming of corporate policies or resentment of management. Instead we get a pretty in-depth view of the situation through the eyes of different workers — each with his or her own thoughts, skills, goals, regrets, and fears. And — again through the voice of individual characters — some pretty interesting (and varied) analyses of the how things got to be the way they are.

The book description calls it “incisive and very funny” — I agree with the incisive part but although the story resisted the slide into depressing territory, I wouldn’t exactly call it funny. However, it is very well written and boasts excellent characterization, and after an initial irritation at what promised to be a stupid (IMHO) plot (but then wasn’t), I ended up enjoying it a lot.

Back After This by Linda Holmes (Rom-com)

Writing: 5/5 Characters: 4/5 Story: 5/5

I really enjoyed this (very) funny, well-written, and actually insightful rom-com written by the author of Evvie Drake Starts Over. I like rom-coms when they are clever, witty, and most of all — NOT STUPID. I can’t stress that last quality enough. This was a perfect, read-in-one-sitting exemplar of exactly what I love in a rom-com and perfect for this stressful season.

Cecily is a podcast producer who agrees (think forced, bribed, coerced) to star in a podcast about modern dating with the help of a dating guru / popular Influencer. An introverted audio nerd by nature, this takes her so far out of her comfort zone that she feels impending implosion looming everywhere. Plenty of (well-paced, well-written) comedy follows, but I was impressed that she gained some real insight into aspects of her own personality that were getting in the way of her getting more of what she wanted from life. While I can’t bear to read about physical makeovers, psychological makeovers — are fascinating.

As an aside, I learned interesting components of podcast production (and marketing) which were new to me and described with a depth that showed true understanding on the part of the author (pet peeve: I hate when characters have a huge passion for something but then never do or think about it in any meaningful way).

A cross between Lori Gottlieb and Curtis Sittenfeld — the best of them both!

Some great quotes:
“I wondered exactly where that research had been done. Presumably the University of Unsupported Hunches, where I was guessing she was a tenured professor.”

“He took me to an ax-throwing bar on our first date, and he was very good at ax-throwing, which I suppose impressed me, because you never know when you might need a guy who can kill a monster in a cartoon dungeon.”

“But we finally agreed on a loose top that fell off one of my shoulders and a pair of pants that had just enough stretch to accommodate my newly emphasized hips without making me look and feel like a vacuum-sealed pork shoulder, ready for a sous vide bath.”

“He had the facial symmetry and the perfectly shaped dark hair of a Lego prince.”

“I tried to dig my smile out of the recesses of my personality.”

“It made for a long dinner, learning quite that much about Andrew’s gym routine.”

Thank you to Ballantine Books and NetGalley for providing an advance copy of this book in exchange for my honest review. The book will be published on February 25th, 2025.

Death of the Author by Nnedi Okorafor (Literary / spectulative fiction)

A captivating book about Zelu — a disabled Nigerian American author (unpublished) and teacher who gets cancelled (and fired) due to her insensitivity (really deeply provoked impatience!) with her more irritating students. It’s also about the new book she writes — Rusted Robots — which becomes an overnight sensation. A post-apocalyptic story where robots and AI are at war over the tattered remains of human civilization, Rusted Robots brings her fame, fortune, some wild, tech-based opportunities, and a whole lot of people who suddenly feel entitled to tell her exactly what to do.

There are so many intellectually interesting and intersecting threads in this story — AI and automation, family, gender roles, African culture, authorial creativity and control, fame, freedom vs safety, disabilities, and the balance between individual and society — but the overarching theme is one of my favorites: the place of narrative and story in human culture. After all, I read fiction because I seek understanding, not just information.

Okorafor manages to blend multiple genres brilliantly, and since I am a fan of both literary and speculative fiction, I was riveted from start to finish. The characters were drawn so deeply — like all of my favorite people, they seemed to be compelling, annoying, loud, supportive, controlling, and caring all at once. I appreciated the fact that while most of the characters were Black (with the exception of the “wealthy white dudes” who keep finding her), there was no antipathy towards white people, just more of a lack of interest.

The big twist at the end absolutely blew me away. And a last little make-me-happy tidbit? She included a call out to one of my favorite (and fairly obscure for the U.S.) books — So Long A Letter by Mariamba Ba.

In my Top Reads of the Year list.

Quotes:
“The rusted robots in the story were a metaphor for wisdom, patina, acceptance, embracing that which was you, scars, pain, malfunctions, needed replacements, mistakes. What you were given. The finite. Rusted robots did not die in the way that humans did, but they celebrated mortality. Oh, she loved this story and how true it felt.”

“The capitalism machine had used her book, her attempt at shouting into the void, to make visual comfort food for drowsy minds.”

“She thought about Rusted Robots and the main character, who understood deep in her circuits that true power was in the harnessing of it, not the possessing of it. And when you were aware of the moment you harnessed power, that was when it was most difficult to navigate.“

“Narrative is one of the key ways automation defines the world. We Humes have always been clear about this fact. Stories are what holds all things together. They make things matter, they make all things be, exist. Our codes are written in a linear fashion. Our protocols are meant to be carried out with beginnings, middles, ends. Look at how I have been built. My operating system is Ankara themed, my body etched with geometric Ankara designs. I’m the embodiment of a human story. But true storytelling has always been one of the few great things humanity could produce that no automation could. Stories were prizes to be collected, shared, protected, and experienced”

Thank you to William Morrow and NetGalley for providing an advance copy of this book in exchange for my honest review. The book will be published on January 14th, 2025.

Show Don’t Tell by Curtis Sittenfeld (Literary Stories)

A set of short stories with such thorough character development and such clear, succinct, and essence depicting prose that I read the whole set without once wishing I were reading a novel instead (I tend to get bored with short stories about 1/3 of the way through the collection).

The stories run the gamut of professions, relationship statuses, races, and problematic situations. Just about all of them got me thinking about some little aspect of life that I hadn’t necessarily considered before. While the characters are all different, they do seem to all share an earnestness, a tendency toward reflection, a (shared with us) path to insight, and a focus on whether or not they are, indeed, good people. A few over thinkers (unfortunately, I do identify with this). I loved the exploration of human fitness and honesty within relationships. There is plenty of dramatic tension, but of the “it could happen to me” variety and not the melodrama that so many people seem to crave.

I liked all of the stories but here are a few that tickled my thinking bone: a VP of film production heading to Alabama to convince the religious author of a popular marriage book to allow a gay couple in the movie; a babysitter for a future internet billionaire; a woman researching the “Billy Graham rule” that “if you’re a married man, you don’t spend time alone with another woman;” a covid story that unearths strange behavior patterns in a long time couple.

Quotes:
“He’s the kind of writer, I trust, about whom current students in the program have heated opinions; I’m the kind of writer their mothers read while recovering from knee surgery. To be clear, I’m mocking neither my readers nor myself – it took a long time, but eventually, I stopped seeing women as inherently ridiculous.”

“Even if it takes a month to get through a novel, the ritual still anchors me, the access to lives I’ll never live.”

“Among the gifts Alison had given me years before when she said ‘only white women are afraid of getting old’ was the reminder, at a time when I’d needed it, of just how many cultural narratives were optional rather than compulsory.”

“I hadn’t thought adulation was something I wanted or needed; I had thought companionship sufficed. But I’d failed to anticipate how calamitous the standard erosion of affection over time could be when you started with a modicum as opposed to an abundance.”

“Not for the first time, it occurs to her that perhaps, rather than exploring the customs of married, heterosexual socializing, she is inadvertently demonstrating the isolation of modern life.”

“I’d noticed over time that neither she nor Cheryl insulted themselves in the reflexive, somewhat disingenuous way my white friends did; Allison and Cheryl didn’t use self-criticism as a bid for either praise or bonding.”

Thank you to Random House and NetGalley for providing an advance copy of this book in exchange for my honest review. The book will be published on February 25th, 2025.

Rabbit Moon by Jennifer Haigh (Literary Fiction)

Writing: 5/5 Plot: 4/5 Characters: 5/5

When red haired, six-foot tall Lindsey Litvak is slammed by a hit and run driver in Shanghai, her suspension between life and death is a shock for her family and friends, each of whom reflects on how this completely unforeseen point was reached. Her (bitterly) divorced parents — Aaron and Claire — who race across the world in a panic; her ethnically Chinese adopted sister Grace, now stuck in a Quaker summer camp that she hates while her parents abandon their homes; her secretive and stylish gay best friend Johnny, who fades into the background as the Americans march in; and even the apartment building manager who knew more about her situation than he lets on.

Backcasting through time, pieces of history help us to understand how the intersections between lives were set into motion, eventually crashing into the blunt trauma of the accident. The writing is excellent, full of small reflections and insight on the part of each character. Themes around cultural differences, coming-of-age stories, sexual predators, multi-cultural adoption, queerness, and all the various influences that shape a person permeate the novel.

Quotes:

“The Quaker camp, which Grace hates, looks like a penal colony and is priced like a five–star resort.”

“When disaster strikes, Claire can always be counted on to lose her shit, her anguish eclipsing the original crisis in its demands for attention and care. If the house burst into flames, Claire’s distress would demand the firefighters’ full attention. It would be unforgivable, an act of monstrous insensitivity, to put out the fire first.”

“Since earliest childhood, Lindsay has drawn up language like a cut flower and water.”

“Efficient sleeping is Aaron’s superpower. He can fall asleep at will – anytime, anywhere — and wake on time without setting an alarm. His consciousness operates on a toggle switch: the two settings are wide-awake and dead asleep, with nothing in between.”

“In those moments Lindsay was the whole world to him, the center of the known universe. The feeling was intoxicating. She would chase it for the rest of her life.”

“His skepticism was infectious; it made believing sympathetic. Eventually, Claire surrendered to it. Exhibiting a striking lack of foresight, she neglected to cultivate a relationship with God, to pray or fast or do any of the things a person would do if she actually believed. Now, in her hour of need, she feels unable to ask for blessings.”

Thank you to Little, Brown and Company and NetGalley for providing an advance copy of this book in exchange for my honest review. The book will be published on April 8th, 2025.

I Leave It Up to You by Jinwoo Chong (Literary and Multicultural Fiction)

Writing: 4/5 Characters: 5/5 Plot: 5/5

Loved this unusual book about family, culture, relationships, and … Korean style sushi — all told in a heartfelt, reflective, and often humorous style.

Jack Jr. wakes up from a nearly two year coma to a fair amount of confusion and a deeply interrupted life. So interrupted that his job, apartment, and husband seem to have all disappeared while his family — whom he hadn’t spoken to in years — seems reluctant to give him the information he needs. What follows is a kind of coming-to-age-redux story, as he in many ways has to start over again — forced to revisit familial relationships and previous life choices.

I loved the characters — all deeply drawn, realistic, and appealing (to me); I loved the personal and insightful description of working the sushi restaurant — everything from the creative new dishes to the “fish run” at o’dark thirty AM; and I really loved the clashes between cultural, familial, and internal expectations — also know as “family dynamics.”

I gobbled it up.

Thank you to Ballantine Books and NetGalley for providing an advance copy of this book in exchange for my honest review. The book will be published on March 4th, 2025.

You Must Remember This by Kat Rosenfield

Writing: 5/5 Plot: 4.5/5 Characters: 5/5

When Mimi, elderly and suffering from dementia, comes back to the family home (Whispers) in Bar Harbor for Christmas, the family knows it will be for the last time — she will either be gone or completely lost in the past by the following year. But they didn’t expect it to happen so quickly: somehow escaping the house, Mimi goes walking on the ice surrounding the estate in the middle of the night and freezes to death. What sounds like a simple accident evolves into a bit of a mystery and an ongoing hash of family dynamics both past and present.

The characters were both interesting and surprising, especially as they shifted in the eyes of the narrator — Mimi’s granddaughter, Delphine. Del who is also living in Whispers after (spectacularly) blowing up her life in New York City. Del loves hearing Mimi’s stories, and I loved hearing them too. The shifts and connections between past and present bring surprises both in plot and in our perceptions of character.

I’m a big fan of Rosenfield’s columns on various aspects of culture — she goes deep and original. I always find her interesting and most often agree with points made that I hadn’t even considered before. I had no idea she wrote novels and am finding her characterization and plot points to be fully steeped in her cultural acumen and clear writing style. She’s very good at essence! Time to go seek out earlier books — I love discovering a new novelist!

Great for fans of Carol Goodman.

The Frozen River by Ariel Lawhon (Historical Fiction)

Writing: 4.5/5 Characters: 5/5 Plot: 5/5

1789 — Hallowell, Maine. Midwife and healer Martha Ballard — 54 and unusually tall for a woman — is called to attend the fresh body of a man pulled from the ice. She recognizes the man at once — a thoroughly unpleasant man recently accused of participating in the rape of the local pastor’s wife. Thus launches the story of Martha, the town, and various ideas about the pursuit of justice across a period of approximately a year, with parallel leap backs for key pieces of context.

This is a phenomenal story in every dimension — a gripping plot, well-fleshed characters full of life, propulsive writing (impossible to put down) and a complete immersion in the specifics of an historical time and place. At no point did I forget that I was in the late 18th century in a small New England town — small details continually reinforced the setting and I didn’t notice any modern sensibilities sneaking in (I am so vigilant on that front).

While the story was compelling all on its own, I loved the fact that she took the time to explore the characters and their relationships and the way they evolved amid the very real context of the times. I also loved the many bits of history that were tossed in — history like the laws requiring a midwife to ask unmarried women to identify the father while in the throes of labor on the assumption that the circumstances would force out the truth. Also, the fines and punishments laid on both for the “transgression.” Hint: the punishment for the woman was far harsher. I should quickly add that although there were some truly despicable men in this story, most of the men were decent, good and held women in good esteem. This is not a male-bashing recounting of life 200 years ago.

I was quite surprised to find out that most of the plot actually happened. I was thinking to myself that it was a little over the top but that I enjoyed it anyway, but it wasn’t over the top of reality in any case! This piece of biographical fiction (a new term for me) was about the very real Martha Ballard as documented in her diary (unusual for a woman of that age as most were illiterate) and Laurel Thatcher Ulrich’s Pulitzer Prize winning history book based on the same . No wonder the details were so persuasive! The author’s note very clearly identified the (small) fictional additions and modifications.

Highly recommended.

Three Days in June by Anne Tyler

Writing: 5/5 Plot: 4/5 Characters: 5/5

The eponymous three days span the wedding of Gail and ex-husband Max’s only daughter, Debbie. A quick 176 pages manage to encompass the potential perils of Debbie’s marriage and the complete history of Gail and Max’s complex and misunderstood relationship. Deeply character driven — I love that I was so interested in every single character even though I didn’t really like that many of them. To be clear, none of the characters were “bad” people, just mildly irritating and not my types!

The blurb labels Gail as “socially awkward” and that is certainly true, but more to the point, Gail never really seemed to understand herself, especially in relation to others. As the history is retold — in concise, clear, essential prose — we the reader gain the insight that Gail never had, until in a clarifying moment, she finally does. It is brilliantly done.

Read in one sitting — the prose just kept propelling me forward.

Thank you to Knopf and NetGalley for providing an advance copy of this book in exchange for my honest review. The book will be published on February 11th, 2025.