black cake

Black Cake was such a beautiful book to read. I didn’t love the story the way I wanted because the family was too terribly sad, but the novel was gorgeous.

When I read names in novels I often just skim over them in my head (I know other people say they do it, too.) I think because of this, two large “reveals” in the book were ruined. I discussed the story with another reader who said she was surprised when she realized that two characters were the same person — and later that another two characters were also the same person. But I’d already made the pairs the same person in my head somehow, I guess due to my inattentiveness in focusing on the names? So I think that took something away from the story that might have felt more revolutionary as the book progressed.

Nonetheless, the writing was so engaging. The actual lyrical feeling of the words - expertly capturing emotion - made me want to keep turning pages (even though the brokenness of the characters made me want to quit). I definitely felt the heavy sadness of generational issues in this story.

Stories with two timelines can be done effectively, and although this was about the easiest plot mechanism ever to do that (listening to a recording from a dead character tell the story of the past), it was still really effective.

local woman missing

Local Woman Missing is outside the genres I normally read. I’m not the murder podcast type, nor usually the “who killed the nice lady” book reader.

Because of this, I can’t really judge if this book was unique. My gut is that it was pretty formulaic, if only because it was twisty and full of red herrings to make you feel confident-confused-resolved-suspicious-confused-ohhhhh as you read. I did feel all those feels, but it still left me with my basic problem with this genre. There is no happy ending because even if you find the woman “not dead” all I can think about is how broken she’s going to be and how much therapy her kids are going to need and how her marriage may fall apart in a year anyway from the stress.

So I guess my point is, alive is good, of course, but not happy. And as I get older, I like books that end with certainty. I want to know what the trajectory is after the story.

Still, this was a very fast-paced read and full of enough moments of creative dialogue that I certainly enjoyed it. I read it in two days, which means a book is keeping my attention.

I also thought this book had reasonable confusion, in that I questioned a lot of what I was reading from unreliable narrators vs. just a story that is convoluted. The author really established the varying perspectives and swapped around so that you had to really think who knew what.

the index of self-destructive acts

This book had a great first act, a good second act, and a little bit of a slow third act. The Index of Self-Destructive Acts became a tale of who the reader hates the most as the story progresses between characters. I’m not sure what it says about me as a person that by the end, the only character I could muster any sympathy for was the old white man who’d been cancelled for saying something deemed racist on ESPN. (Not that that was the cause of my sympathy, but at least he had dementia. The rest of the characters were making their terrible decisions in full possession of their faculties.)

One key takeaway from this book was a NEW, obscure baseball stat. Baseball loves a good obscure fact, and the index of self-destructive acts was a new one to me that I will certainly be tallying in the future with a freshly sharpened pencil. (Just kidding, I am not that guy.)

The setting was pleasant in that it was set in the historical time period of the Obama administration. Weirdly, it felt like it was “set” there, too, not just that the author had written a book before 2017. I mean, it was released in 2020 so maybe he did, but that’s not what it felt like. It felt like historical fiction set in the history of a decade ago.

I should have guessed from the title that this book would be about a lot of people unwinding their lives into tangled messes. (It was like watching all the disaster Poldark ensemble but without Demelza to cheer on—and frankly, she is the show.) There is no hero in The Index of Self-Destructive Acts, and there’s no anti-hero. There’s just a lot of people facing tough times and temptations and stress and making selfish or foolish or naïve (or illegal) decisions while you watch and turn the page to see what fresh horrors await.

Ok, I’m being a little dramatic, but they do a lot of stupid (extremely believable) things.

One note: I thought the author did a good job of portraying what I would assume is a lot of people’s experience with an extra-marital affair: a huge letdown. It wrecks your life, and the only thing that really captured your attention in the first place was the sneakiness. There’s zero payoff, just cost.

Since there was no one to cheer for in this story, I felt like the end dragged. I wasn’t waiting for revenge or vindication or certainly for any love to be requited. It was a slow burn of just waiting for the author to stop telling the story. Very little climax or conclusion. There were just no more words at the end. And then it was over.

the mountain between us

LOVED this book. Nothing had me glued like this since Project Hail Mary and Dark Matter. I love a good adventure, and this was a fantastic adventure. All of the stars.

You get over the fact that Ben’s a surgeon and survival expert pretty quickly because that’s why he and Ashley stay alive at all after the plane crash to begin with. So essentially, instead of “oh sure he just happens to have a knife,” you understand that you yourself would already be dead (“if I’m dead, you guys have been dead for weeks” dwight schrute).

It becomes less of an everyman-survival epic and more of a what-if-Bear-Grylls-and-I-survived-a-plane-crash-together story—and that’s ok, because you realize it would probably look a lot like this.

I haven’t seen the movie, and I’ve heard it ruins something very specific (avoiding a spoiler) so I’m going to say I won’t watch it and then instead watch it very begrudgingly in a few months.

This book caught my attention and held it so much that I read it from 9 pm until 1 am, then again from 5:30 am (when the baby woke up) until I was finished around 8:30 am.

I promptly threw it at my husband and announced, “You have until dinner to read this or I’m telling you the entire thing and spoiling the story which you will love.” He’s very smart, so he read it cover-to-cover immediately as well. He also loved it, although he did a bunch of math like a weirdo to determine how long Ben’s little campstove could have lasted and he swears Charles Martin overestimated.

The Mountain Between Us is more than the survival. It’s not just the backstory. It’s not just the “what if’s”. This book is just a perfect balance of everything that makes you tell yourself “one more chapter” and not put it down. Aside from having a very powerful pro-life message, it also has a very pro-marriage message which you infrequently find in books with any kind of romantic tension. You can truly love and hate the characters because they are real people.

Don’t read this on a plane (I mean, or do, maybe you live on the edge), but I loved every page of this book. And it has a great dog! Napoleon! The writing paces with my favorite slow-down-and-speed-up feeling where time passes endlessly for the suffering character in a paragraph or two, but you can also live in a moment for two full pages. I love that experience. Kudos to Charles Martin. This book is a masterpiece.

before we were yours

If you haven’t read more of my blogs, you won’t know I’ve been a foster parent for over a decade. So I tend to try and avoid books like Before We Were Yours since they can feel either (1) really personally devastating or (2) overly saccharine with a false happy ending.

Stories need a bad guy. And books about foster care and adoption, I find, have to pick a bad guy, too, and it’s usually the sexually abusive foster parents. Not saying it doesn’t happen (of course it does) but that is not something I like to read for fun. Of course, historically, a lot of people want the bad guy to be the birth parents which is often unfair, too. Again, not saying it doesn’t happen (of course it does) but let’s not just jump to conclusions that all kids in the system have terrible birth parents — because they don’t.

I didn’t LOVE this book, but I can see why a lot of people did. It presents the truth/horror of what Georgia Tann did, but allows you a believably pleasant ending by making the HEA primarily about the next generation.

For a book with a lot of historical value, there’s a bit too much cloak-and-dagger mystery with the modern storyline of a grandchild (or IS she?!) trying to figure out her family’s sordid (or SWEET?!) past. I do appreciate that the author was trying to get people to read a fictionalized book on a tough topic, and I’ll grant this flourish of mystery was probably a marketable way to do it.

The book asks some important questions about healing from trauma, foster care, adoption, and poverty. Not many books about adoption and foster care present the good, the bad, and the ugly, and this one does.

The truth is, every adoption breaks up one family—even as it forms another. It’s always bittersweet.

Worth the read, even if I won’t ever rave about it. Too close to home for me to consider much on this topic “entertainment",” but this story still has merit and should be told.

book review: the winners

I didn’t know the Beartown story was continuing until I saw this book on my sister-in-law’s coffee table and promptly stole it. She’s lucky she’d already finished it…

I loved Beartown. Still one of my favorite books of all time. My review here. I did not love its sequel Us Against You (because it undoes much of Beartown’s positive message by excusing an abuse of power through its promotion of a relationship between a teacher and a student).

I wasn’t sure what to expect with the third book, especially since it’s MASSIVE in length compared to the first two. What am I getting myself into? I wondered.

The Winners introduces so many new characters, but it brings back your old friends. It’s like a homecoming reunion.

Spoilers for Beartown and Us Against You below, but no spoilers for this book.

The best part of Backman is the way you deeply know a character after just a few sentences. This man is the master of the short glimpse. The three-page intro to Hannah and John (and the way he flips your perceptions on their head) is probably the best example of his genius in this series. He somehow captures someone’s essence so quickly.

It’s interesting how some books will tell you all about a character’s hair color, height, eye color (and breast size if it’s a male author writing a female character) but leave out their actual personality. Backman is the opposite. You’ll know their deepest fears, their greatest strength, their desperation, and the depth of their moods even if you don’t remember what they look like. He actually does you a favor but not giving all the characters names - some people stay as “the editor-in-chief” or “the colleague” all the way through the book so you don’t have to keep as many small-town-inhabitants straight in your mind.

His commentary on marriage is so deep:

The hard part of a marriage isn't that I have to live seeing all your faults, but that you have to live with me seeing them.

I think, just due to its length, there were a few parts I skimmed. There are some bits that get preachy, where I think the author is probably trying to undo what some readers may have perceived as his overly rose-colored-glasses view of what happens when you report an assault. (Beartown has a huge up-hill battle but ultimately most people believe the victim. It seems the author is trying to say with this book that he understands that is not always the case.) There’s also a more explicit description of an assault than I remember from Beartown, which I did not wish to dwell on.

The Winners was worth the time investment, and more. You’re looking for heroes, and you find them. You’re looking for villains, too, but you mostly find deep sadness, guilt, confusion, insanity, a history of abuse, and a lot of conflicting feelings of judgment that make you think. Makes you worry. Makes you want to talk to your kids more about difficult topics.

The ending of this trilogy is so satisfying. Backman gives you glimpses into the future of every character so you know how their stories end — even minor characters get the full-future treatment so you can really imagine the generations to come. It’s magic. There’s 300 books, at least, in this novel — a Backman paragraph is better than a novel from a lot of other authors.

This book has the best final two lines, I think, of any novel I can recall reading. I want to tell you but I promised no spoilers.

Grr. I want to tell you though. It’s just so good.

Go read the book.

The last two sentences are bliss.