Category: General Fiction

I Was Told it Would Get Easier
by Abbi Waxman
Rating: ★★★½
isbn: 9781472277152
Publication Date: August 5, 2020
Pages: 329
Genre: Fiction
Publisher: Headline Review

Jessica and her daughter Emily are touring colleges. For Jessica, this is going to be the chance to reconnect with the daughter she seems to have lost. But for Emily, it's a preview of freedom, and the chance to explore a new and exciting future.

Yet before any of this can happen, their perfectly planned trip is derailed into a series of off-roading misadventures: mother-daughter skiving, skipped mandatory meetings, and a scuffle with the FBI...
With seatbelts fastened, physical and emotional baggage safely stowed away, this mother-daughter duo might be ready to hit the road, but are they ready to reconnect to the person sitting next to them?

I am on both an Abbi Waxman and a general fiction jag, so I ordered this the other day, even though I was pretty sure I wasn’t going to be the target audience for it.

I was correct.  It was still a good read, but while I can empathise with the mother and daughter in this book because I have a bff with a teenage daughter, I myself am not a mother to a teenage human (just a teenage cat, which is enough thankyouverymuch) so I failed to emotionally connect to the narrative.  That’s ok, because it still entertained me and took my mind off my own real life.  It also made me thankful I grew up when I did, those glory days when you could just graduate from high school and with good grades and better SAT/ACT test scores, just apply to your universities of choice.  Sure, Ivies still made you work for it, but it wasn’t the trial of fire and ice it is today.  Also: corporate college tour companies; my mind boggles.

The Bookish Life of Nina Hill
by Abbi Waxman
Rating: ★★★★½
isbn: 9781472266217
Publication Date: July 9, 2019
Pages: 335
Genre: Fiction
Publisher: Headline Review

Meet Nina Hill: A young woman supremely confident in her own... shell.
Nina has her life just as she wants it: a job in a bookstore, an excellent trivia team and a cat named Phil. If she sometimes suspects there might be more to life than reading, she just shrugs and picks up a new book.

So when the father she never knew existed dies, leaving behind innumerable sisters, brothers, nieces, and nephews, Nina is horrified. They all live close by! She'll have to Speak. To. Strangers.
And if that wasn't enough, Tom, her trivia nemesis, has turned out to be cute, funny and interested in getting to know her...
It's time for Nina to turn her own fresh page, and find out if real life can ever live up to fiction...

Back when I read The Garden of Small Beginnings, I realised I’d read Abbi Waxman before, but I could find no record of my reading The Bookish Life of Nina Hill.  This drove me more than a little cray-cray at the time because I remembered reading the book; I distinctly remembered many, many plot points.  But nowhere on my too-many book sites was there any record of it.  I did finally find the book on my bookshelves (the Read bookshelves), and accepted the fact that I must have read it during the Great Reading Slump of 2020, and it fell through the cracks of my book-life despondency, never to be acknowledged until now.

I’ve recently ordered Adult Assembly Required, and as it involves a few of the characters from Nina Hill, I thought now would be a good time to re-read tBLoNH.

I love this book.  Waxman writes incredibly likeable characters, laugh-out-loud dialog that’s witty as hell, and buried at exactly the right depth in all this sunshine-y fun is the acknowledgment of Very Real Life in the form of crippling anxiety.  Nothing is downplayed or made light of, but it’s not turned into a massive melodrama either.  I don’t have crippling anxiety, but Nina Hill and I share a lot of other character traits (actually, I probably fall closer to Lydia, her niece, but never mind), and I’d like to think that if I did have crippling anxiety, I’d handle it with the same optimism and humor Nina Hill does, even if she sometimes visits self-denial-land more often that she should.

My loquaciousness is still sleeping off the 3 day weekend, so that’s really all I’ve got.  It was a great book, even the second time around, and a lot of fun to read.  I can’t wait for Adult Assembly Required to arrive, and in the meantime, I’ll likely re-read The Garden of Small Beginnings too.

The J.M. Barrie Ladies' Swimming Society
by Barbara J. Zitwer
Rating: ★★★½
Publication Date: April 5, 2012
Pages: 271
Genre: Fiction
Publisher: Short Books

When Joey Rubin stumbles upon a group of elderly women swimming in a lake one freezing January morning, she thinks they must be mad. But then they dare her to come in...

Joey, an overworked New York architect, is in the Cotswolds to oversee the restoration of Stanway House - the stately home that inspired J.M. Barrie to write Peter Pan. It hasn't been easy. The local residents aren't exactly welcoming, and then there's the problem of the brooding caretaker, a man who seems to take every opportunity
to undermine her plans. She soon begins to feel that she can't do anything right.

Until, that is, she discovers the J.M. Barrie Ladies' Swimming Society and begins to take a daily dip with them in their own private Neverland. For Joey, meeting Aggie, Gala, Lilia and co. is a life-changing experience, the beginning of a friendship that will transform her in the most remarkable of ways...

What my daddy would have called a “fair to middlin'” story.  It was good, evenly paced, well-written.  Interesting without being exciting.  A page turner without being suspenseful.  It was extraordinarily realistic in its portrayal of adult friendships – pretty much all interpersonal relationships – without being dramatic.

A very ordinary story, well done.

Still Life with Bread Crumbs
by Anna Quindlen
Rating: ★★★★
isbn: 9781400065752
Publication Date: January 1, 2014
Pages: 252
Genre: Fiction
Publisher: Random House

Still Life with Bread Crumbs begins with an imagined gunshot and ends with a new tin roof. Between the two is a wry and knowing portrait of Rebecca Winter, a photographer whose work made her an unlikely heroine for many women. Her career is now descendent, her bank balance shaky, and she has fled the city for the middle of nowhere. There she discovers, in a tree stand with a roofer named Jim Bates, that what she sees through a camera lens is not all there is to life.

Brilliantly written, powerfully observed, Still Life with Bread Crumbs is a deeply moving and often very funny story of unexpected love, and a stunningly crafted journey into the life of a woman, her heart, her mind, her days, as she discovers that life is a story with many levels, a story that is longer and more exciting than she ever imagined.

I vaguely remember buying this book at a used book shop, mostly because the cover was gorgeous and to a lesser extent, because I’d read Anna Quindlen’s book of essays How Reading Changed My Life and rationalised that there was an outside chance I might like her fiction too – but really, I bought it for the cover.

Last night, I read the synopsis – because it’s been so long since I bought it or looked at it again that I had no idea what it was about – and thought ‘Oh hey, this sounds interesting.’  I decided to try the first page, just to see if the writing was something that would hold my attention, and promptly read the first 5 chapters.  It was a little sketchy at the start, because there’s a scene involving a racoon that I’d have preferred not to have read, and having lived through exactly the same scenario, I cry bullshit on the resolution, but it was a quick scene and not gratuitous.

Midway through though, I was having second thoughts.  The writing is what I’m going to describe as ‘extreme third person POV’; an omniscient narrator who sometimes jumps from one person’s comments or thoughts about a character to asides that reveal what that other character was really thinking or doing or what was motivating them.  It was both interesting, because the reader gets all the facts about what’s really going on beneath the surface, and jarring.  One aside, set in a parenthetical, was over a page long.  At this point it felt like speculative fiction, and I thought … 3 stars.

But then things started coming together, and by that I means the two main characters come together – and kudos to the author for turning the May/September dynamic on its ear without any equivocation.  I didn’t care so much about the romance aspect, but it was at that point that so many divergent stories started to come together into something resembling coherence, and it made me want to stick with the story.  I’m glad I did, because it ended up being an enjoyable story with a satisfactorily happy ending.  I’m a fan of the device Quendlen used, where the end of the book jumps forward in time to give a quick summary of where everyone’s lives ended up; I like the sense of pleasant finality it imparts to the reader, even if it is unrealistic.

I’m not sure I’d read more of her work – but if I do run across any more of it, I’d definitely consider it.

Don't Tell Alfred
by Nancy Mitford
Rating: ★★★★½
Publication Date: January 1, 1960
Pages: 248
Genre: Fiction
Publisher: Hamish Hamilton

Fanny Wincham—last seen as a young woman in The Pursuit of Love and Love in a Cold Climate—has lived contentedly for years as housewife to an absent-minded Oxford don, Alfred. But her life changes overnight when her beloved Alfred is appointed English Ambassador to Paris.

Soon she finds herself mixing with royalty and Rothschilds while battling her hysterical predecessor, Lady Leone, who refuses to leave the premises. When Fanny’s tender-hearted secretary begins filling the embassy with rescued animals and her teenage sons run away from Eton and show up with a rock star in tow, things get entirely out of hand. Gleefully sending up the antics of mid-century high society, Don’t Tell Alfred is classic Mitford.

Oh this was a lot of fun.  Ostensibly the third book of the series that includes Love in a Cold Climate and The Pursuit of Love, it’s been so many years since I read the first two that I barely remember the important characters, but it made not a lick of difference.  Don’t Tell Alfred takes place 30 years after the events of the first two books, and anybody who is still alive is almost too different to recognise anyway.

Fanny is now the main character, rather than just the narrator, but it seems she’s also a helpless bystander in the three ring circus her life has become when Alfred becomes the Ambassador to France.  One hilarious calamity after the other – most involving her extended family, if not her own children – has her scurrying to keep one step ahead of the chaos, and if not one step ahead, arranging the fall out so that Alfred comes out looking his best.

Not quite under the surface of these calamities – it bubbles up regularly throughout the story – is every parents lament over their childrens’ avowal to reject every principle they were ever taught.  This being the late 50’s, the rejection is, as the age of Aquarius looms, that much more outsized and outrageous.

Throughout the narrative, Mitford takes potshots in turns at the British, the French and, of course, the Americans (I’m pretty sure it’s a national sport in the UK); about the only country to come out unscathed from her pen are the Irish, which she feels a rather lot of sympathy for.  It all reads as though it’s meant in good fun and it adds to the often manic laughs.

So far, Mitford is 3 for 3; I have a couple of her other titles on my TBR and I’m curious how well the humor will hold with a whole new cast of characters.

Miss Benson's Beetle
by Rachel Joyce
Rating: ★★★
isbn: 0857521993
Publication Date: June 11, 2020
Pages: 389
Genre: Fiction
Publisher: Doubleday

Margery Benson's life ended the day her father walked out of his study and never came back. Forty years later, abandoning a dull job, she advertises for an assistant. The successful candidate is to accompany Margery on an expedition to the other side of the world to search for a beetle that may or may not exist. Enid Pretty is not who she had in mind. But together they will find themselves drawn into an adventure that exceeds all Margery's expectations, eventually finding new life at the top of a red mountain.

This is a story that is less about what can be found than the belief it might be found; it is an intoxicating adventure story and it is also a tender exploration of a friendship between two unforgettable women that defies all boundaries.

My rating is not an accurate portrayal of the quality of the book, my rating is an accurate portrayal of my enjoyment of the book.

I say this because it’s not the book I thought it was going to be.  That’s entirely on me, because I’ve read another of her books and I should have known better.  But I got sucked into the summary about the expedition in search of a golden beetle, and allowed myself to be seduced by images of New Caledonia, beetle hunting, and elusive orchids (which depend on the golden beetle, of course).

This was not that book.  This is a wonderfully written book about deeply flawed and lonely people who come together under the guise of searching for the golden beetle.  Also motherhood, mental breakdowns and devastating nutritional deficiencies.  There’s a lot of baggage in this book and very little of it is related to the beetle expedition.

They do make it to New Caledonia and they do hunt for beetles; those moments were the best parts for me, but they were all too brief.  For the rest of it, I just kept thinking this was Thelma and Louise Get on a Ship.

This book is a lesson in the power of titles, covers and summaries.  I have a friend who wouldn’t look twice at this book, and it is perfect for her; if I can get her to read it, she’s going to love it.  Whereas I, who thought everything about the ‘wrappings’ of the book screamed “this is the book for you!”, found it to be not at all what I expected and was a little disappointed.

That does not mean it’s not a good book; it’s an excellently written book, and I recommend it to anyone who enjoys a book about emotionally broken people persevering and finding their happiness.  It’s just not the book I was looking for.