nother book for May...

Because I’ve been interspersing Silver Birch contenders with my “adult” books, it’s been difficult to keep track of what I’ve read, so thank goodness I write everything down in my notebook or I would have completely forgotten about another book I read this month, between An Audience of Chairs and The Lost Bookshop. 

In British author Clare MacIntosh's It’s Not What You Think, thirty-something single mom Nadeeka is sure her too-good-to-be-true boyfriend is having an affair.  She’s seen the signs before.  So when she comes home to surprise him, thinking he’s with another woman, she is more than shocked to find him dead on her living room floor, police and detectives steering her away from the scene of the crime and consoling her on her loss.  But as she tries to get answers from the detective, this twisty tale gets more and more complex, and she (and we) learn that she must question everything and everyone she thinks she can trust, and that a suspected affair is the least of her worries in this excellently crafted domestic thriller.  I can’t tell you any more because I don’t want to give anything away, but I think this is one of MacIntosh's best books yet.  And while it has so many twists and turns that you might suffer whiplash, it’s actually all credible, and paints a potential reality that is very scary indeed.  I would highly recommend this book, but be warned that it’s not a light read; rather, it's a serious look at what could easily happen, and is probably happening right now, possibly in some city or town near you. 

That’s all for today.  Get outside and enjoy the lovely weather!  Oh, and sorry to say that the Montreal Canadiens lost game 5 last night, so the Carolina Hurricanes will go on to play against the Vegas Golden Knights for the 20206 Stanley Cup.  Sad for us, good for my newly restored reading time at night.  Win or lose, I’ll always be a Habs fan.  Stay cool and keep reading!

Bye for now… Julie

Post for the end of May...

I’m taking advantage of this brief window when Riley’s had his evening snack and is contentedly lying on a fuzzy pillow on the floor to write this single post for May.  I can blame Riley for not posting, but I’m also blaming hockey for being behind in my reading.  Ever since the last 2 games against the Tampa Bay Lightning, I’ve been obsessively watching the Montreal Canadiens playing and winning that round, then taking the next round to Game 7 against the Buffalo Sabres and winning, and now playing against the Carolina Hurricanes.  It’s a lot of tv-watching, which also cuts into my reading time!  I did read two books that I’ll tell you about briefly, and also a bunch of Silver Birch books which shall remain secret. 

The first book I read had been on my shelf for about 20 years, and I had to make room for the new books I bought at the CFUW Book Sale, so I removed it from my shelf and thought that I’ll either read it or get rid of it.  Am I ever glad I didn’t just get rid of it without giving it a try, because it was amazing!  The book is An Audience of Chairs by Joan Clark (great title, right?!), and tells the story of a woman who suffers symptoms of bipolar disorder.  As a young woman, people in her small Cape Breton town just thought Morvanna was eccentric, but her mother, too, struggled with mental illness until her untimely death, and her father tried to be supportive.  She married young and became a mother shortly after her marriage.  She always struggled, but her husband and father put her unusual behaviour down to her artistic temperament.  But when one of her actions put the lives of her daughters at risk, her husband removed them and Morvanna became estranged for nearly two decades.  When by chance she learns of her oldest daughter’s upcoming wedding, she yearns to attend and reintroduce herself to her daughters, but can she pull herself together sufficiently in time to get to the wedding?  You’ll have to read the book to find out.  And I would highly recommend that you do read this book.  It was amazing, and highly readable, with credible characters and interesting settings and scenarios, and it dealt with mental health issues with compassion and empathy.  What a great book by this bestselling Canadian author! 

And I read a rather long but quite interesting book for my Friends Book Club, which is meeting tomorrow night.  The Lost Bookshop by Evie Woods is told from the points of view of three different characters and two different timelines, and explores the life of one of the most significant booksellers of the 1920s, and the perils she faces as she hides from her domineering brother.  In the present day, we have a young woman from Dublin on the run from her abusive husband who meets a PhD candidate in search of a lost bookshop.  Opaline is expected to marry her brother’s friend, a much older, dull man with whom she has nothing in common.  She escapes to France, where she meets and begins working for Sylvia Beach at Shakespeare and Company Books, but must escape again and again as her brother tracks her down, recreating her life and future each time she goes on the run.  Over a century later, Martha is running from her abusive husband and ends up in Dublin where she begins working as a live-in cleaner and general “help” for an elderly women who has an interesting, if secretive, past.  When Martha wakes up in her basement room on the first morning, she sees a pair of shoes at her window and meets Henry, a PhD candidate who is trying to find a lost bookshop that supposedly contained the manuscript of a second novel by Emily Bronte, and which is purported to be located at this very address.  Henry and Martha begin a friendship that slowly blossoms, but this budding relationship is not without its challenges, and these two young people must figure out a way to make it work while also pursuing their own freedom from their situations.  Oh, and there’s a tree growing in Martha’s basement apartment, a tree that is growing out of the walls and into the ceiling, one that happens to be bearing books… hmmm…  I found the magical elements a bit fantastical, and it was a bit too long and confusing, going back and forth between Opaline, Martha and Henry, but it was a love letter to books and bookstores and was definitely worth finishing.  I’m curious to hear what the discussion is going to be like tomorrow night. 

That’s all for now.  Go, Habs, Go!!  Oh, and keep reading! 

Bye for now… Julie

Super-quick post for April...

While Riley is preoccupied with the birdies and squirrellies in the backyard, I’ll take a minute to give you a short review of the non-Silver Birch books I’ve read this month.  There were two of them. 

The first was a YA Eco thriller by Welsh author Caryl Lewis called The Danger of Small Things, which was like a YA version of The Handmaid’s Tale, except the young girls are tasked with hand-pollinating the buds on the trees because of the extinction of all pollinators.  Once they reach “breeding age”, they are married off to someone in the ranks and sent off to have children.  It was a really amazing book that had me hooked from the very first page.  It was both engaging and horrifying, and could serve as a cautionary tale for what will happen if we don’t do something drastic to stop the destruction of our Earth and all her fragile ecosystems. 

Then I read a bunch of Silver Birch books in between, and then I received notification that my hold for Sophie Hannah’s new book, No One Would Do What the Lamberts Have Done, was ready.  This was a sort-of mystery/not-mystery, and an example of metafiction at its best.  It concerns the Lambert family, led by mother Sally, who are on the run from their home in a quaint British country village because one of their neighbours has accused their dog, Champ, considered by Sally to be another of her children, of biting their daughter.  Adamant that it couldn’t have been Champ, Sally nonetheless flees and an elaborate escape plan unfolds.  This book is hard to write about because it twists and turns and there are surprises all over the place and sometimes more questions than answers, but that’s a big part of the fun of reading it, so I don’t want to give anything away, even by presenting questions to consider.  It was a fun romp, less “bloody” than the audiobook I also just finished by the same author, The Next to Die, which is #10 in the “Spilling CID” series featuring DS Charlie Zailer and DC Simon Waterhouse.  The Next to Die was OK, not amazing, but I was interested in listening right to the end, although the conclusion was a bit far-fetched and not very credible.  I found the comedian, Kim Tribbeck, to be the most interesting, sarcastic and funny character, and the dialogue between her editor and publisher regarding her memoir, Origami, was also pretty interesting.  If you've never read any Sophie Hannah books before, don't start with this one, but maybe some of her earlier books, or even The Lamberts, although it's atypical of her usual mystery/thrillers.

That’s all I can manage tonight, as Riley is on his way to my chair… sigh… he needs more “mama time”!! 

Take care and keep reading! 

Bye for now… Julie

Last post for March...

I’m thinking that this is now going to be a monthly blog rather than a weekly one, as I’m spending so much time reading for the Silver Birch committee and so little time reading for my own pleasure.  And this will be a quick post because it’s late and I’ve had a long day. 

Two weeks ago I read The Man in the Brown Suit by Agatha Christie for my friends book club meeting, where we were each supposed to read something by the Queen of Crime.  I chose this book because it was a stand-alone, neither a Hercules Poirot novel nor a Miss Marple one.  It told the story of a young woman in England in the 1920s who, after her sole parent passes away, finds herself longing for adventure amid the offers of marriage to respectable older men and secretarial posts from which she beat a hasty retreat.  When she decides to go off on an adventure to Africa following an unusual encounter on the subway platform involving a man in a brown suit and a subsequent murder at a nearby house for let, she finds herself in the centre of a mystery with many possible suspects and potential dangers, an environment in which she thrives.  Although it was definitely outdated and the plucky heroine was a bit too “Nancy Drew” for me, it was still an enjoyable and quick read.  Too bad I was not feeling well and had to miss the meeting - I’m curious what the others thought of their books and the author. 

And in between reading juvenile and young adult books, I also reread Smilla’s Sense of Snow by Peter Høeg following a discussion I had with a friend.  We were talking about Greenland and he commented that he’d never seen the movie, nor had he read the book, and so we decided to read it at the same time and have a “two-person book club”.  He started yesterday and I finished this morning, and I can’t wait to discuss it with him.  I’ve both read the book and seen the movie before, many years ago, so I sort of remembered the story, but I’m curious to hear how it was for a first-timer.  If anyone doesn’t know this story, it focuses on the main character, thirty-seven-year-old Smilla, a native Greenlander who was moved to Denmark and sent to boarding school when she was a young girl after the death of her mother.  At the start of the book, Smilla’s six-year-old neighbour, Isaiah, has fallen from the roof of their building and has died.  This was deemed an accident, but after going up to the roof and examining the footprints in the snow, Smilla determines that he was not playing and that it was not, in fact, an accident.  Estranged from her father and having no one to confide in, she seeks answers on her own, putting herself at considerable risk but also drawing on her deep traditional knowledge from her years in Greenland about snow, ice, the sea currents, and weather in general.  She eventually begins to form a relationship with another tenant in the building, the mechanic, who appears to be another solitary type, but she does most of the investigating on her own.  She becomes more deeply entrenched in a labyrinthine plan involving many shady characters, and nothing is as it seems, until she begins to wonder who she can trust and if she’ll be able to get out alive.  I loved this book and movie, which I read and saw back in the 1990s, and it did not disappoint upon rereading.  I remember thinking, “How does she know what all this means and how can she come up with such amazing ways to foil the plans of the villains?”, and I had this very same thought this time around.  This novel reminded me of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo by Stieg Larssen (I’ve seen both film versions, but have never read the book), in that they both describe complex mysteries and have kick-ass heroines.  I would recommend this novel to anyone who is interested in Denmark-Greenland history, Danish noir mysteries, or complex psychological and environmental thrillers.  I actually went back into my previous posts to see if I’d already written about this book, which I hadn’t, but what I found was a mention of this book in reference to another book, White Heat, by Canadian author M J McGrath, the first in the “Edie Kiglatuk” series.  I also read The Boy in the Snow, and have just discovered that there’s a third book in this series that I haven’t read, The Bone Seeker, which I just put on hold at the library. 

That’s all for tonight.  Take advantage of the longer daylight hours, which makes for more reading time in the evenings! 

Bye for now… Julie

First post for March...

I’ve been busy reading possible Silver Birch nominees this month but just finished an adult novel last week that I want to tell you about.  I’d actually almost forgotten that I put Some Bright Nowhere by Ann Packer on hold at the library, but I’m glad I did as it was a very interesting, quick read.  I was actually despairing to my husband that all the books I had requested from the library recently seemed to deal with death and grief, so when I picked this one up, I thought, “Oh no, not another one!”.  But I stuck with it and found it to be unputdownable..  This is a novel of Claire and Eliot, married for nearly 40 years, as they face the final months of Claire’s life as she finally succumbs to cancer, a struggle she’s been fighting for the past eight years with Eliot always by her side.  Now, with the end no longer an abstract but a reality, Claire asks Eliot to leave and allow her to spend these final months with her best friends Holly and Michelle.  Of course Eliot is outraged, and we may agree initially, but as the novel unfolds, we learn more about their lives and relationships and see why Claire would make such a seemingly unfathomable request.  This novel was the dissection of a marriage at its worst period, and while it was compulsively readable, I didn’t end up really liking either character, although they were certainly portrayed fully and three-dimensionally.  What was most interesting was that, while Claire was the one facing imminent death, the main character was Eliot, which certainly seems to tell you something about his character.  His responses to Claire’s actions and requests seem entirely reasonable, but that didn’t make him any more likable to me.  Packer did an amazing job of exploring grief and loss, and the in-between state of “not-loss” when a loved one is dying but not yet dead.  It was an excellent book that I would recommend if you are looking for a book with major themes of loss and grief. 

That’s all for today.  Take care and keep reading!

Bye for now... Julie

Post on a crisp, sunny Sunday...

It’s sunny and clear, with blue skies and not much wind, making the very cold temperatures bearable.  I read a couple of books over the past two weeks that I can tell you about, along with a few Silver Birch books, which must remain secret on pain of death! 

The first was very good, The Book of Guilt by Catherine Chidgey.  Set in England in 1979 in an alternate world where no one won WWII, three brothers are the last remaining children in an unusual orphanage that is part of the Sycamore Scheme, a project begun in 1945 that the government is winding down.  These boys know almost nothing of the outside world, and yet they are happy where they are, supervised by their three “mothers”, only wishing to one day go to the Big House in Margate once they are well enough.  One of their mothers reveals that they will eventually leave the boys’ home and hopefully get adopted by families in a town or city, and that they will have Socialization Days with girls from a sister orphanage.  One of the girls reveals that all is not what it seems and that the things they are being told are not really true.  Layer by layer, the true history of the orphanage and the nature of the Scheme are revealed, and the future of these boys is called into question.  I don’t want to give anything else away, but it was a very good dystopian novel that kept me reading late into the evening.  I would highly recommend it to anyone who enjoys dystopian fiction, particularly pertaining to children. 

And I read Emma Donoghue’s historical novel, The Paris Express, for my book club meeting yesterday.  This novel has been well-reviewed and nominated for at least one major literary award, which was the reason one of the book club members recommended having it on the list.  This novel explores a little-known train wreck in Montparnasse in 1895, and the lives and interactions of the various characters, some real and some fictional, who are on board.  At the meeting, we all agreed that there were too many characters to keep track of and not enough plot, but that once they started interacting (too far into the book for our liking), it got interesting.  We also all felt that the notes at the end of the book were probably the most interesting part, and we felt that we learned a lot about life at that time as well as how a train functioned.  Most of us would not recommend it, and were surprised that it garnered so much acclaim, but it was very well researched and was an interesting premise.  Too bad it had so much backstory for everyone and not enough plot. 

Anyway, that’s all for today.  Stay warm and deep reading!

Bye for now... Julie

Quick post on a Snowy Monday...

It’s been declared a Snow Day for the Region today, and although it’s already 2pm, since I’m enjoying a hot cup of chai and a Date Bar (my traditional "posting" treat), I feel that I have to write a quick post before getting back to my book, which I was hoping (optimistically!) to finish today. 

I read an interesting book last week that reminded me so much of my move to Toronto when I was young, all the friends I made and the experiences I had.  The In-Between Bookstore by Edward Underhill tells the story of Darby, a young trans man living in New York.  At the start of the book, he's just lost his job creating maps for a start-up, his rent is about to skyrocket, and he’ll be turning thirty in a couple of weeks.  While out celebrating a birthday with a group of his queer friends, he makes the decision to move back home to Oak Falls, Illinois, to put some distance between himself and his NY life and maybe gain some perspective.  But when he returns, he finds that Oak Falls has changed almost as much as he has since he left a dozen years before.  His mom is selling the house and moving into a brand new condo, so he uses this as an excuse for being back any time he runs into someone he knows.  The person he least/most wants to run into is his former best friend Michael, a friend who supposedly ghosted him after Darby (the girl) came back from a semester at boarding school in their senior year.  Maybe if they reconnect, he can finally figure out what happened and will be able to move on and ahead, and possibly also figure out where he belongs.  The only thing that hasn’t changed at all is the bookstore Darby used to work at when he was a teen, The In-Between Bookstore… at least it hasn’t changed for Darby.  In fact, as soon as he walks into the bookstore, he’s transported back to 2009, and is confronted by his teen self working behind the counter.  What is he supposed to do with this?  Is there a reason for him to be travelling back in time (impossible, according to his research)?  Should he be finding something out? Imparting wisdom to his younger self to help make the trans road easier?  Or is it all random and pointless?  In between bookstore visits, Darby gets swept along by his mother and by adult Michael into helping with the move, planning a party and participating in social and sports events, none of which he’s excited about.  Where does he belong?  Is Oak Falls the place he should settle, or should he try to get back to his friends and life in New  York?  In order to find out the answers to these and many other questions, you’ll have to read this whimsical, moving, delightful novel.

That's all for today. Stay warm and keep reading!

Bye for now... Julie