Grief Cottage - Gail Godwin

Bloomsbury, June 6, 2017.

Four Stars

Eleven-year-old Marcus has just lost his mother (and only family member) to a freak car accident. He is taken from everything he knows and is sent to live with his great aunt Charlotte on a small island in South Carolina. Charlotte, whom Marcus had never met, is a reclusive painter with an unusual past. Estranged from her family at a young age, Charlotte has carved out a quiet, private life for herself – and the arrival of Marcus changes everything.

Marcus was very close to his mother before she died, but life wasn’t perfect then either. The two lived in poverty, and Marcus was involved in an incident at school in which his best friend was badly injured. Although he is devastated over the loss of his mother, Marcus is ready to start over on the island. When Charlotte introduces him to the partially-collapsed cottage at the end of the beach that inspired her to become a painter, Marcus becomes obsessed with the ruins known locally as Grief Cottage. It was destroyed by a mysterious fire during a hurricane fifty years before – a boy and his parents had been renting the cottage at the time, and they disappeared in the storm. Their bodies were never found.

Marcus begins visiting the cottage daily, and he forges an unusual connection with the spirit of the missing boy. As his curiosity builds, so does his courage – Marcus opens himself to the spirit world, and he finds himself wanting to please the ghost so that he will show himself. There is an element of darkness that hovers over Marcus and the cottage, an inevitable sense that we will soon find out whether the spirit is benevolent or not.

Meanwhile, Aunt Charlotte is succumbing to her own demons – after a bad fall, she is unable to paint and begins to go stir crazy in her unused studio. In the past, Charlotte has used painting to suppress her feelings about her abusive past, and now it has all come to the surface. She starts drinking more than usual, hiding herself in her studio and leaving Marcus to fend for himself. The relationship between aunt and nephew is really beautiful – despite their vast age difference, they both crave the care and affection of the other, but find it difficult to let go of their independence. Their cohabitation is comfortable and relaxed, despite the shadows hovering over them.

Grief Cottage is not a ghost story as much as it is an exploration of grief, and the many different ways that people cope with loss. Marcus learns at a young age that death is inevitable, and that it is important to make connections with each other while we have the chance. The strong relationships and incredibly real characters are highlighted by the atmospheric setting – steamy summer days and a misty, uncertain presence hovering over it all. Godwin has created memorable, meaningful characters that will live beyond the novel for a long time, and I will be looking for more of her novels in the future.

I received this book from Bloomsbury and NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.

Once, in Lourdes - Sharon Solwitz

Random House Publishing, May 30, 2017.

 

Three Stars

 

Once, in Lourdes chronicles the powerful connection between four teenage friends in the turbulent summer of 1968. They are misfits on the edge of adulthood, yet still filled with a childlike innocence. The friends live in Lourdes, Michigan where they hang out in a park nicknamed “The Haight”, in imitation of the free love revolution happening in San Francisco. They spend their time there discussing Buddhism and obsessively playing games of bridge.

 

The story is narrated by Kate, a fiercely loyal friend who struggles with her weight and with her overbearing stepmother. She is envious of beautiful Vera, who has a disfigured hand that only serves to make her striking looks more ethereal – but her real issues (drug use and inappropriate sexual behaviour) are hidden. The rest of the group is comprised of the two boys, C.J. and Saint, both of whom are dealing with unusual family circumstances and many surprising secrets.

 

After a disastrous, drug-fueled night, Vera asks her friends to make a pact – they will live the next two weeks to the fullest, doing all the things they always wanted to do, and then they will hold hands and jump off the cliff in their beloved park. The novel explores the power of teenage bonds, even when they don’t seem to make sense to the outside world. What happens in the next two weeks will determine the futures of all four of the friends, and whether they will live to experience adulthood.

 

I expected to like this dysfunctional teen story, but I just couldn’t connect with the characters, whose naïve confusion and misplaced loyalty made them seem ridiculous. There were long stretches of plot that didn’t serve to develop the characters, although there were some nice short stories embedded in this too-long novel. Vera had the most potential to be interesting, but her extreme melodrama made it difficult to relate to her.

 

The heightened emotions of the characters reminded me of the worst parts of high school, where everything is black and white, and nothing will ever get better. I could empathize with some parts, but not really relate to their problems. Nevertheless, I had to keep reading to find out who, if any, of the friends would survive the pact – although even that was anti-climactic. While the setting and some of the language was compelling, the characters were not. This novel is still worth a read, but it just didn’t come together as nicely as I had hoped.

 

I received this book from Random House Publishing and NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.

New Boy - Tracy Chevalier

Hogarth Press, May 11, 2017.

 

Five Stars

 

New Boy is the latest offering in Hogarth’s Shakespeare series – it is historical novelist Chevalier’s version of Othello. It takes place over the course of one day in a suburban schoolyard in Washington in the 1970s, channeling all the emotional upheavals that eleven-year-olds can experience in the hours between recess and late afternoon.

 

Osei Kokote is the son of a Ghanaian diplomat, and this is his fifth first day of school in as many years. He is accustomed to starting over, making allies and enemies amidst the immediacy and high drama of middle school. He is also used to the attention that comes with being the only black boy at his suburban school – and to the casual and outright racism that begins with teachers and parents, and is quickly imitated by the children.

 

Dee, like Desdemonda in Othello, is the most popular girl at school – and she is tasked with showing Osei around for the day. She is intrigued by the new boy, admiring his differences but also aware of their similarities. They quickly fall into the intense sort of relationship that can only take place between recess and kickball, and their happiness inspires jealousy in those around them. Ian (Iago) is the bully who decides to destroy the budding friendship just to flex his ego and schoolyard power. He manipulates the situation in shockingly devious and adult ways, resulting in tragedy – by the end of the day, none of the children will ever be the same.

 

Chevalier is known for writing historical fiction, such as The Girl with the Pearl Earring, but she does an impressive job with this near-contemporary retelling of a much older story. Although technically the story is set fifty years in the past, it could easily take place in a schoolyard today, because so little has changed. The complex dynamics of middle school accentuate the inherent racism of suburban America, as these children become their future selves in the shadow of the judgmental adults who are meant to be teaching them openness and acceptance.

 

The novel is set in five acts, divided by two recesses and a lunch break. It is a microcosmic world where a day can seem like an eternity just because you’re eleven – the children’s adult-like concerns are punctuated by jump rope and kickball. The tight constraints of this narrative are effective, emphasizing the heartbreaking tragedy of Othello by compressing the intense emotions into a few short hours. Ian’s vindictive, petty schemes result in a tragedy that will be inevitable until boys like Ian stop imitating men like Iago. Despite its 1970s setting, I found this to be the most relevant and current novel in the Hogarth Shakespeare series so far, and I look forward to more like it.

 

I received this book from Hogarth Press and NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.

The Perfect Stranger - Megan Miranda

Simon & Schuster, April 11, 2017.

Four Stars

Leah Stevens is a disgraced journalist who has to leave Boston, after being accused of fabricating a source and ruining a man’s life. She is facing a restraining order and a potential lawsuit, when she runs into an old college friend, Emmy Grey, who offers her the perfect escape. Emmy is moving to rural Pennsylvania to escape a troubled relationship, and she invites Leah to share the rental house with her.

Leah is relieved to have a chance to start over – she gets a job teaching at the local high school and tries to put her past behind her, slowly adapting to quiet, small-town life. But just when things are starting to settle down, a woman is assaulted near Leah and Emmy’s house – and she bears a striking resemblance to Leah. Before she can understand what exactly this means for her, Leah realizes that Emmy has disappeared – a possible victim of the same attacker.

Detective Kyle Donovan works with Leah to search for clues about Emmy’s whereabouts, but they both soon realize that Leah knows very little about her friend – in fact, Emmy’s entire existence is called into question. She has no social media presence, and no paper trail leading to her supposed jobs and residences. To make matters more complicated, Leah’s intimacy with Kyle begins to jeopardize the whole case – as her credibility is called into question, Leah must confront her own past to clear her name and save Emmy. Before long, it seems like everyone in their small Pennsylvania town has shocking secrets to hide.

This slow-paced thriller is filled with clever twists, made all the more eerie by how real they seem – the circumstances Leah finds herself in could happen to anyone, and it forces us to question how well we can ever know the people we call friends. The reality of Leah and Emmy’s lives is uncertain and unreliable, with the ground constantly shifting beneath the reader. Although I didn’t love the characters, I did begin to really believe in them, and their very bad decisions. Their story was dark and complex – even though I guessed some things, it all came together in a very unexpected and satisfying way.

I received this book from Simon & Schuster and NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.

House of Names - Colm Toibin

Scribner, May 9, 2017.

Four Stars

House of Names is Toibin’s retelling of the ancient Greek tale of Clytemnestra, Agamemnon, and their ill-fated children. The story is violent, vengeful and shocking – and surprisingly modern in theme and execution. Originally described in Aeschylus’ trilogy, The Oresteia, this version mostly focuses on the events of the first book, in which King Agamemnon is the main protagonist.

Agamemnon is king of the ancient city of Mycenae, but he is hungry for more power and decides to set sail for Troy. He has promised his oldest daughter Iphegeneia in marriage to Achilles – but then the gods offer him favourable winds in exchange for her sacrifice, and the wedding suddenly becomes the gruesome scene of Iphegeneia’s murder. As expected, Clytemnestra goes mad from grief at the death of her daughter and the horrific deceit of her husband. As Agamemnon embarks for Troy, Clytemnestra plans her revenge. She seduces her husband’s enemy and prisoner, Aegisthus, and together they rule Mycenae while Agamemnon is away.

Meanwhile, the remaining children, Electra and Orestes, are forgotten by Clytemnestra – she is eclipsed by her lust for bloody vengeance. And when Agamemnon does finally return, he has brought back a lover of his own. In all the confusion, Orestes is kidnapped by Aegisthus’ men so that his mother Clytemnestra will be forced to collaborate with him in her own plan. Several sections are narrated by Orestes as he eventually escapes and is exiled from Mycenae, although they are not as powerful as Clytemnestra’s first-person accounts. Back at home, Electra bides her time, steeped in cold calculation and rage at her parents’ horrible decisions.

In their tragic quest for glory and power, Toibin brings these mythical characters boldly to life. Clytemnestra especially becomes sympathetic in her grief and rage at the loss of a child and deception of a loved one. While Agamemnon kills at the behest of the gods, Clytemnestra’s murderous feelings are much more human and relatable. This retelling elevates the role of women (Clytemnestra of course, but also Electra) where they are often underrepresented in classical texts – and in contrast, Orestes and Agamemnon are relegated to the background and not even given a first-person voice. While some knowledge of Aeschylus’ original story would be helpful – especially in order to see where this strays from the original and how it fits into the larger story arc of The Oresteia – it can also be read on its own for the compelling, emotional, extreme family drama that it is.

I received this book from Scribner and NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.

After the Bloom - Leslie Shimotakahara

Dundurn Books, April 15, 2017.

 

Three Stars

 

Rita Takemitsu is a recently divorced mother, living in Toronto in the mid-1980s. Her daughter is spending the summer with her father in Vancouver, and Rita has the summer off from teaching school, so she is free to wallow in the self-pity she is feeling about the direction her life has taken. That is, until she finds out that her mother Lily has gone missing – and the police aren’t taking the case seriously.

 

Lily has a history of memory issues and mental breakdowns, which Rita struggled with throughout her childhood. Rita was raised by her grandfather after her father left them, but Lily often confused the two men with each other. When Rita meets with Lily’s newest husband to report her disappearance, she discovers that he knows very little about her past. With little help from the police, and a stepfather that has given up on Lily, Rita decides to start investigating on her own.

 

Rita finds out that Lily had been attending the meetings of a group that sought reparations for the Japanese internment during World War II – she had been interned in a camp in California when she was eighteen years old. A professor whose father was also interned is helping with the cause, and he and Rita begin working together to track down Lily. The two of them end up getting involved in a very normal, realistic relationship that was one of the highlights of the novel. Although the book moves through history – from Lily’s time at the camp to Rita’s summer in Toronto – I found that the characters in Rita’s section were much more fleshed out and believable.

 

The mystery of Lily’s disappearance is offset by the literary and historical elements of Lily’s past and Rita’s family drama, especially as she attempts to reconcile her mother to the person she once was. There is also the mystery of who Rita’s father really was – Lily claims that it was Kaz, a man she met at the camp, but as Rita gathers information about her mother, she also learns that her father may have been someone very different. Lily fell in love with Kaz despite the flaws and warning signs, and she seemed to be trying to convince everyone, including herself, that he loved her. Lily lies constantly about her past, but it is not always intentional, as even she does not seem to remember the truth through her confusion.

 

This novel explores a horrific period of our history (and Canada is included here too) that is often glossed over and ignored. People at the time thought that the interned Japanese were being treated even better than the general public, when in fact they were herded into army barracks and fed just enough to survive. More importantly, their homes, businesses and civil rights were taken from them. Although the sections set in the camp were more historically interesting, I found the modern characters more compelling. Their reconciliation of their parents’ pasts was emotional and intriguing, and a subject that is relevant to all of us today.

 

I received this book from Dundurn Books and NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.

Woman No. 17 - Edan Lepucki

Crown Publishing, May 9, 2017.

 

Five Stars

 

I seem to be in the minority here because I absolutely loved this book – everything about it, from the complicated female main characters to the twisty and surprising plot, checks boxes off my reading wish list. Woman No. 17 is a darkly humorous noir novel about women and the roles they take on – mother, wife, daughter, lover – and the boundaries they break to redefine those roles. It also explores the importance of female friendship, and how well we can ever know the people that share our deepest secrets.

 

Lady Daniels lives in the wealthy Hollywood Hills, overlooking Los Angeles. Newly separated from her husband Karl, Lady decides to hire a nanny to care for her toddler son while she works on her memoir. Far from being as privileged and entitled as she sounds, Lady grew up poor and feels like an imposter in the hills. She raised her older – now eighteen-year-old – son, Seth, on her own and struggled to get by until she met and fell in love with Karl. Lady struggled financially, but also emotionally, as she coped with raising a nonverbal son who has been diagnosed with selective mutism – he can hear and is capable of speaking, but communicates instead through sign language or his iPad. Lady’s memoir is about life with a nonverbal child, but her secrets are holding her back from even beginning the book.

 

Esther is a college student in her 20s, struggling to find her place in the world. She applies for the nanny job on a whim, and Lady hires her without even bothering to check her references – fortunately for Esther, who is in the process of reinventing herself as “S”, and turning her whole life into an art project in which she channels her erratic, alcoholic mother. Instead of repelling people, as she expected, the entire Daniels family is drawn into S’s exciting, charismatic personality. She becomes a confidante for both Lady and Seth, creating dangerous undercurrents of intimacy and shocking conflict.

 

The first person point of view alternates between Lady and S, including flashbacks into their dark pasts. Both women had horrible, neglectful mothers which formed them into the women they are now, often in unexpected ways. This novel explores so many powerful issues, such as alcoholism, anxiety, depression, abuse and low self-esteem, to name a few – these are universal themes, but here they are viewed with a decidedly female slant. This is far from chick-lit, and it was exciting and reaffirming to read about strong women with all their faults – Lady and S made incredibly bad decisions, but they are good, honest, complex and real.

 

The title of the novel refers to a series of photographs taken of various women, seemingly caught unaware in their natural environment of cluttered kitchens and unmade beds. The photographer is Lady’s sister-in-law, and it is never clear if it was her intention to objectify these women or to empower them. I think the novel, at least, is about women using their own agency to shift the boundaries of womanhood – to go from being an art object to being able to accept themselves, without pretending to be someone else. In the end, all the secrets come out, and it is just as dark and twisty as you expect it to be – but at the same time, I laughed out loud many times, in both recognition and amazement at Lepucki’s uncanny ability to capture these vicious, sensitive, complex characters.

 

I received this book from Crown Publishing and NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.

Burntown - Jennifer McMahon

Doubleday Canada, April 25, 2017.

Four Stars

The only other book I’ve read by McMahon is The Night Sister, which was more of a traditional thriller, although it too had paranormal elements. Burntown is more complex, but it is somehow also more subtle. It is a horror novel, but the characters have a depth that isn’t always found in the genre. It begins in suburbia in the 1970s, but develops into a contemporary, industrial caper through gritty city streets and crumbling abandoned buildings.

As a young child, Miles witnessed his mother being murdered by a man wearing a chicken mask. Despite Miles’ testimony, his father becomes the main suspect and eventually commits suicide – or so everyone thinks. Miles is removed from life as he knows it, and grows up to marry his childhood sweetheart, Lily. Their daughter Eva’s best memories are of watching her father invent strange new things, such as dolls with hidden compartments for her to explore. However, Miles’ most important invention is a machine that allows people to speak to their deceased loved ones – the machine was based on blueprints left behind by Miles’ father, and supposedly designed by Thomas Edison.

One night, a terrible storm destroys Miles and Lily’s idyllic farmhouse – the river overruns its banks, and Eva wakes up on the shore with a head injury that has affected her memories. Her mother tells her that her father and brother are dead, and that they are being pursued by an evil man. Eva’s name is changed to Necco – after her favourite candy – and she and Lily go off the grid and into hiding on the streets of the city. Necco adapts to her life on the run, and she is even happy in her naïve way – until her mother is killed and her boyfriend is murdered while he sleeps beside her. Suddenly, Necco knows her past has come back to haunt her.

With Necco’s face plastered all over the news, wanted for the murder of her boyfriend, she connects with two unlikely friends – both women who are on quests of their own – and the three of them work together, following the clues to piece Necco’s past together. They meet the “fire-eating” women who live on the riverbank, and end up staging their own enchanted circus.

The “chicken man” is on a search for vengeance, but the paranormal fears he inspires are not as outright frightening as in The Night Sister. Although slow in parts, the novel is suspenseful – it is more thoughtful, like a puzzle to be pieced together. The story is surreal, imaginative and even whimsical at times, yet it is also dark and stormy. Like Necco, we cannot see who is good and who is evil until it is almost too late. There are influences of Alice Hoffman’s magic realism and Stephen King’s horror – although my initial comparison was to Lauren Beukes’ urban fantasy novels. Altogether, this novel was odd and unusual, but surprisingly captivating. I highly recommend this to any fans of McMahon or of unconventional horror novels with intriguing characters.

I received this book from Doubleday Canada and Goodreads First Reads in exchange for an honest review.