I accidentally found another book about books! It was also about a lot of other stuff, some credible, some fantastic, and most of it a little over the top. It is All About Evie, by Cathy Lamb.

I said, after my months-long dedication to Kate Atkinson’s convoluted mysteries interspersed with the literary but somewhat bleak novels of Jane Harper, that I wanted something fluffy; but fluff overwhelmed everything else in my first choice of 2020, and my second was a promising but ultimately disappointing one. This book definitely brought the fluff, along with some magical realism, but in this case it was fluff with which I closely identify, so the reading was a much more pleasurable experience.

Evie lives on one of the San Juan Islands in the Pacific Northwest, in a remodeled carriage house painted in my color schemes, stuffed with toppling towers of books and surrounded by a rose garden. She has many animal friends—the list includes dogs, cats, goats, sheep, horses, and alpacas—who live with her and keep her company. She has a bookstore in town, where she lectures people on expanding their minds by reading out of their chosen genre, and serves delectable pies and cakes and interesting kinds of tea while conducting book clubs for diverse demographics. She has a mother and several aunts who live nearby and who give her love and quirky advice and don’t smother her too much. In essence, it sounds like my idyllic lifestyle.

She also (here comes the magical realism) has premonitions. Some are good, some are horrifying. Some she can do something about, others she can’t fix no matter how hard she tries, and some she doesn’t want to alter because sometimes karma should be a bitch.

Cathy Lamb has definitely bought into the idea that the first line is everything in hooking her readers’ attention: Hers in this book is, “I knew she was going to be hit by a white truck.” (In the next book of hers that I decided to read, it is “I left my wedding dress hanging in a tree somewhere in North Dakota.”) In this way she introduces Evie’s premonitions. Evie sees a future for someone—you could rather refer to them as precipitating events—and feels compelled to act on her knowledge, and yet what do you do? Walk up to someone and say “Excuse me, please be late for work today so that scaffolding doesn’t fall on you and kill you”? Try that and see what happens. In Evie’s case, it taught her to be secretive, made her overly anxious most of the time (obsessively watching her surroundings for signs to determine when the premonition will manifest), and occasionally led to criminal acts such as locking her favorite librarian in her home so she wouldn’t get hit by a train, or risky behaviors like climbing up to the peak of a two-story house to fix some shingles so that her elderly neighbor wouldn’t try to do it himself and break both legs in the fall.

These premonitions are why Evie has buried herself in a small town, in a small bookstore, with mostly animals as friends—a lower incidence of premonitions than would hit her in the overcrowded press of the big city. These precautions have not eliminated her problems, but have certainly reduced them to be almost manageable.

Evie has only ever had one premonition about herself, and it’s about her death, in a car accident, when she meets another woman driver on a one-lane road on the edge of a cliff; but she never sees the ending. She feels like someone dies, but doesn’t know if it’s her or the other woman, and she has an odd feeling that she knows the other woman, although she’s never seen her before.

This leads us to an alternate narrator in the story, a pregnant teenager locked up for murder in Portland, Oregon in 1975, whose sole defense in her trial is that she “saw” her boyfriend’s father trying to kill her boyfriend, and the vision led her to a pre-emptive strike to prevent that act.

This alternate narrator also lets in a big dose of reality to this so-far quirky and not-so-serious story. The book turns out to have a darker vein of truth about misogyny and abuse of women and children, which is both powerfully handled and disconcerting as a contrast to the extremely lighthearted nature of most of the rest of the narrative. Setting these incidents against the backdrop of Evie’s aunts, who construct and wear fantastical hats on all occasions and do nude yoga on the beach, is sort of like when renowned magical realism author Alice Hoffman abruptly transitioned from 1995’s Practical Magic, with its witchy tequila-drinking women who could fly, to 1997’s Here on Earth, a tale of a twisted adolescent love that returns to poison the adults who participated in it. But Alice kept those in separate books. Lamb does not.

It didn’t make me dislike the book, exactly; but it did pull me up and make me wonder whether it was wise to try to pack it all into one volume.

There are some wonderful scenes, on both sides of the narrative. One that was a favorite was when a goth teenager came into the bookstore looking for yet another vampire novel, and Evie lost her patience and insisted that the girl read a memoir.

I pointed to the seats by the windows. “Sit. Open the book. Read it.”
“I have to meet my mother soon.”
“Text her. Tell her to come here when she’s done doing whatever. You have got to expand your closed mind and read about other people in this world who don’t bite necks and have long teeth.”

The other I particularly enjoyed was when the temporary police chief, who has decided that Evie should date him despite her patent dislike of him, attempts to intimidate her and gets owned by the townspeople, who all gather around him in the street to comment loudly and unflatteringly about his particular style of bullying and ask if he can’t get a date any other way. Both are wonderfully written; I just had trouble shoe-horning them into the same narrative.

I liked All About Evie well enough to try another, so I am on to Julia’s Chocolates (the one in which the wedding dress is abandoned in a tree in the first sentence). I’ll let you know my conclusions soon…