reading lately: August roundup

Right off the bat, I have to state my apologies: the best book I read this month isn't publishing until... December. But for myself, I am definitely glad I read it this early, because my month needed it amidst the several disappointments in this roundup 😑 Put Rabbit Rabbit on your TBR in any case - it will actually be perfect reading for beginning a new year, as you'll see.

Literary/contemporary fiction

Rabbit Rabbit: As she rings in the New Year on a girls' trip to Florence with her two best friends, 39-year-old and very single film editor Billie makes a big decision for her next year: she is going to become a mother. But then minutes later she hits it off with a Scottish guy at the bar. The magical connection they have and their personalities/interests make them seem absolutely perfect for each other, aside from the deal-breaker: he doesn't ever want to have kids. We revisit Billie on the first of the month throughout this life-changing year as she pursues the path she has decided on but as she also continues to connect with Arthur across continents and time zones - and faces the decision about which way to go when her heart is pulled in two equally strong and important directions. I really loved Jennifer E. Smith's The Unsinkable Greta James - less so the book that followed it because I thought the cast of main characters was a bit big - but she is back to form in this one, focusing on a central character with a believable and easy to love romantic interest and an enjoyable set of supporting characters. I loved that it has some rom-com feels in the banter, the cuteness of the developing relationship, and the dreamy qualities that just wrap you up in their story - but that it is no standard rom-com with the standard tropes and the (usually eye-rollingly avoidable) miscommunication/break-up before the 3rd act and without the alternating perspectives between the two leads - I much prefer having just the heroine's perspective, honestly. It's more about a woman at a crossroads, deciding what she wants the rest of her life to be. First and foremost that's whether she wants to have kids, and then next it's whether that's also going to involve pursuing a romantic partner. Her 39-going-on-40 status makes her feel relatable to me of course, and I love a character who is confident and competent in life and work (plus love an interesting job behind-the-scenes!) but just has this life consideration/decision that she's working through, especially as relates to having reached mid-life. It's a book that's easy to sink into and an absolute pleasure to read, but it isn't flippant or fluffy, written with wit and warmth and some depth of character. In this vein would recommend for fans of Linda Holmes as well. ★★★★.25

Everything That Is Beautiful: Niamh Ryan is like the honorary extra child in the expansive and exuberant Foley household, running around the farm with their kids, playing on hurley teams coached by their father Liam, a national legend in this amateur sport, and being doted on by their mother Helen - a far cry from Niamh's own household where she's an only child, her mom is a bit cold and critical, and her dad is an alcoholic. But though she continues to live in the area as a 20-something school teacher, Niamh hasn't set foot in the Foley house for the last 3 years, ever since an inciting incident broke down the relationships. A wedding for one of the Foley siblings is now forcing them back into proximity, and to finally addressing and hashing out the event and ensuing disagreement that pulled them apart. It took me a little while to get all of the characters and their relationships straight, and also to get accustomed to the format - it almost reads as interconnected short stories, since the focus changes among characters each chapter and the author drops us in at different intervals, rather than presenting a linear narrative. It means you have to fill in a bit between the lines, or that you get different angles on what happened in the past. But like with Donal Ryan's Heart, Be at Peace (another Irish novel I read earlier this year, a more literary/gritty one though), by the end it felt like the best way to tell this story. I'd say it's mostly character driven; the "inciting incident" is a plot point, sure, but it's not this huge unfolding of story in terms of plot, more of an instance that is used to examine family/friendship relationships and how they fray and mend, and how they inform who we are (or think ourselves to be). The writing had me completely immersed in this Irish community's life, and though the actions of the central women in this story were sometimes hard to understand, they felt like three-dimensional people with flaws and complications and with hearts. I felt empathy and care for all of them in the end - thanks in part to the character development and to how they were all drawn in by and affected by the men in their orbit, finally coming back together as women in strength and friendship. ★★★★

Villa Coco: The narrator of this tale looks back at how he ended up in Tuscany, a bit aimless after graduating from college with an archivist degree, for a job that purports to be creating a catalogue of the contents of a 92-year-old baronessa's mansion. But when he arrives, he finds that the eccentric baronessa and her equally as eccentric friends and employees (who have all been bestowed with wacky nicknames) don't actually seem willing or interested in having the variety of treasures - art, artifacts, you name it - in this chock-full and crumbling villa catalogued, and he has no idea what he is doing there. He finds himself thrown into the midst of their lives, whether serving as an odd-jobs guy or a tv-watching companion for the baronessa, an Italian/English learning partner of the cook, an entertainer of the rotating cast of guests from bohemians to minor royalty, and romantic interest of the baronessa's handsome nephew. I can see the point of this book is to be a bit of a diversion showcasing eccentric characters and the magic of the Tuscan countryside, but at the same time a tale of the power of friendship and love. But the execution felt like it was maybe trying to be a bit too clever? The circuitous conversation left the protagonist himself confused, and me the reader just as much so. I felt like I was *supposed* to be charmed by all of the singular characters and their foibles and antics, but it was so hard to get a foothold into anything with such a disjointed and meandering narration (same for the plot and the dialogue). It was well over 100 pages in before I realized that the plot was actually going somewhere in terms of uncovering a secret about the baronessa's past, and everything felt so opaque that I was surprised I actually even figured out what it was in the end... Granted, I was indeed charmed by some of the descriptions of Tuscany and the food, and I chuckled a few times at conversations, but unfortunately I was not as captivated by the inside pages as I was by the outside cover of this book. ★★★.25

Mystery/thriller

The Whispers: At first I found this to be kind of a standard suburban mom drama slash "nobody knows what's happening behind closed doors" neighborhood page turner that felt similar to books I've read in the past (Big Little Lies, Not That I Could Tell, All the Other Mothers Hate Me, Friends with Secrets, Her One Regret [listed in order of liked best to least]). There were zero positive/healthy relationships, and only about two characters I felt sympathy for, but still it was fairly juicy and interesting, and as I went along I found that it actually had a bit more edge and darkness to it than I had expected (though not overly disturbing - and the tragic injury to a child at the center of the story is sad, but it's not overly hard to read about in terms of scariness as the focus is much more on the guilt feelings - whether warranted or not - and self-preservation attitudes of people surrounding the situation). I was also gratified to see it didn't necessarily wrap up as neatly as some other books I've read in this subgenre. There's always plenty to discuss when it comes to books on what constitutes a "good mother" - and in this one the (surprising) last line alone is a whole discussion to itself - and within the drama I found some compelling thoughts about motherhood, where we get to see the honest inner dialogue of things that many might think but feel they're not allowed to say aloud, like: "[Daughter] Chloe does make Blair happy. Immeasurably. It is everything else that has happened along with Chloe, the changes in herself and her worth and her marriage that happened so slowly they were imperceptible. Where she’d once felt motherhood had given her so much more than she’d had before, now she could only see it as having taken everything away. Now she cannot reconcile the love she has for her daughter with how confined she feels by the privilege of being her mother." Overall I thought it was a good beach read in being easy to get into and having soapy relationship drama, but maybe didn't stand out from the crowd enough in terms of writing/character development to overly wow me. ★★★.25

Scrublands: I'm on record many times over as being interested in picking up anything described as "for fans of Jane Harper" (and of course, "for fans of Tana French", which is what led me to Jane Harper in the first place), but naturally some publisher comps are more successfully applied than others. In this case I had pretty high hopes because beyond the publisher blurb, it was recommended for fans of Jane Harper in the recent NYT 50 best thrillers of the 21st century list (not on the list itself, but mentioned underneath a Jane Harper book that was on the list). This book about an Australian journalist who visits a rural community that had been slowly dying away because of drought, but now even more so because of infamy - it was the site of a shocking mass murder perpetrated by a priest, in broad daylight - started out feeling like a great comp title. One year on from the shootings, Martin's editor gives him the assignment to write a feature on how the town is doing, in part to mark the anniversary, and in part to ease Martin back into things after a job-related trauma suffered while reporting in the Middle East. So he's dealing with baggage, and entering a place where there is this tense atmosphere because of the never-ending hot weather and of course the collective grief - and then in his interviews with townspeople Martin starts to realize that the accepted version of events may not have been how it all went down. When a new development shakes the town - the discovery of two bodies in a ditch - Martin has a lot more investigating to do than he thought when he was first assigned this story. Promising mix of plot and atmospheric setting and a lot of psychology mixed in - for the victims, the survivors, and the investigator alike - but sorry to say that in my opinion it lost the Jane Harper comparison for character development and plot/writing quality maybe 50 pages in. I probably should have stopped, but instead it ended up being one of those books I finished and was kind of mad about it. What is so great about Jane Harper books is that there is a constant underlying tension that is so artfully done that you want to keep turning the pages like crazy even though it is a super slow burn of a plot. Plus while the leads have obvious flaws, there is still a care for them. In this book though, I lost the tension quickly and the slow burn thus turned to boredom with occasional blips of bonkers drama. Also, while I initially found Martin to be super competent in his work and sympathetic in what he was dealing with mentally, he turned to self-serving and smug and smarmy (whyyyyyy do we have to have the lead immediately start sleeping with a key witness or source in books like this???). I did find the theme of the harms of sensationalist journalism interesting, but they felt really out-of-date - not sure if that's a difference of Australian/American media or just being in such a post-newspaper age now. Overall, I thought the mystery plot had way too many elements and convenient introduction of facts after-the-fact, the narrative style didn't feel very artful, and the characters' motivations often made no sense to me. Sorry to say I don't agree with the NYT that you should pick this up if you like Jane Harper books. And sorry for the author of the book, the hopes that NYT gave me for this read being dashed probably made me knock at least .5 stars off my rating... ★★.25

Romance/rom-com

One & Only: Cassia believes in soul mates, and that's because her family's LA multigenerational matchmaking business is based on their ability to read facial features and (this part is a secret to all but Cassia and her family) see into the client's past and get the name of the client's true love through a vision of them in a previous life. When Cassia and her team track down this person in the present and match them up with the client, sparks fly. The only person they haven't been able to track down though? Cassia's match. And as she approaches 40, this search for the elusive Daniel Nam feels even more fraught. If she doesn't have a daughter, her family's magical gift will die off with her; but even more so, she is ready to have a partner in love and life. As her decade-long search for her match continues though she has a meet-cute with a younger guy and starts to develop true feelings for him despite her reservations about the age difference and his more carefree lifestyle. Until he introduces her to his boss and friend... Daniel Nam. Admittedly I don't love a love triangle trope, but this one is unique. She's got the person she *knows* she's supposed to be with because of her grandmother's powers of prophesy, but she's also got such strong feelings for this other person that she met first and clicked with in an organic way. Interestingly, with the title being One & Only it actually made me think about how there's actually not just one soulmate out there - I think she could have fully been happy with both of these men; the issues really arose because of comparing them. And in the thing I really don't like about love triangles, much of the contrast is in the "safe" option who is type A and driven and schedule-oriented like her, versus the "free spirit" option that breaks her out of her routine. (As someone happily married for 20 years to someone who might be considered the "safe" option in a rom-com, I kind of resent the implication that the best love stories are the ones that make the protagonist stop being "boring" and into her schedule and spreadsheets... some of us really are just book-loving, organized homebodies, okay??) While I had some quibbles based on the tropes, it was overall a fun beach read that stands out from other rom-coms thanks to the magical realism element, the Korean cultural (and food!) aspects, the fabulous LA and environs setting, and the strong matriarchal relationships that are just as much the story as the romance. Would recommend for fans of Ashley Poston (especially her earlier books - I haven't loved the more recent ones) for the magical realism/rom-com combo, and Korean-American rom-coms like those by David Yoon, Mary HK Choi, Susanne Park. ★★★.5

Historical fiction

Wait for Me: I really enjoyed Amy Jo Burns' Mercury for the perfect mix of plot and character, and the strong sense of place with the 1990s small town rust-belt setting - so I was very interested in trying out her newest release, which looked like it would have some similarities in terms of era and small town feel. And with the purported plot about a folk singer who went missing at the height of her fame in the 1970s - and how this connects to a young budding musician, whose gas station owner father claims to be the last to have seen singer Elle Harlow alive, in the 1990s - I thought it would have that elusive but enjoyable just-right mix of plot-driven and character-driven too. Alas, this one did not live up to expectations, and partly because I just kept feeling like I've read this story before. Not this exact story of course, but the untrained young musician with lots of personal baggage who is just so talented that the world has to take notice is most definitely a story that I've read enough of - Daisy Jones & the Six was super fun as the first one (and excellent thanks to the stand-out oral history format), but then I've encountered this also in Songs in Ursa Major and The Future Saints more recently. On top of that, it's sometimes hard to read a book about a fictional writer or musician who is supposed to be soooo amazing and then the author tries to give us snippets of their work - and it never blows me away. I think it would be much better to show me in other ways that they are super talented, rather than give me made-up song lyrics. Reading song lyrics is so boring! It might be reasonable to call this Daisy Jones & The Six meets Where the Crawdads Sing, but there was just nothing in it that grabbed me and drew me in like with those books, and the characters fell a bit flat. ★★★