Grave Talk
I am always a fan of a good title, and this one works on a couple of levels. Nick Spalding has created an interesting premise for discussing life and death and grief in this book that documents the interaction of two people who have recently lost loved ones and are having an impossible time moving past the experience.
Alice’s husband Joe died of a heart attack in his early 40s, and she didn’t make it to the hospital in time. She has a feeling that something or someone messed up when Joe came into the emergency room for treatment, because why else would such a young man go like that? Ben’s brother Harry, a rising young surgeon, was diagnosed with leukemia and succumbed rather abruptly, and Ben, who is struggling with his need to live up to the rest of his family (they’re all doctors), is especially bereft because Harry was the one who was there for him when his parents were absent or too busy for their younger son. One day, the two mourners visit the cemetery where their people are buried, and the coincidence of the grave sites being closely adjacent brings them together in an oddly freeing ritual of friendship.
There is a certain comedic element to the book, based on Harry’s last wish left for Ben in his will. Harry asks Ben to visit the cemetery yearly, dressed each time as a different character dictated by Harry and carrying out a ritual that is meaningful to the two of them. So on that first fateful day when Ben meets Alice, she is prodded out of her focus on her own all-encompassing grief by the unusual experience of sharing the cemetery with a man dressed in a Kermit the Frog costume, standing at attention and humming the song “We Are the Champions” under his breath. Once Ben manages to convince her that he’s not a weirdo but rather the victim of his sadistic dead brother’s practical joke, the two of them have a meaningful conversation about their losses and agree to meet up at the graves on the same day each year to check in on each other.
This goes on for some time, and the once-a-year encounter showcases for Ben and Alice and also for the reader how uneven is the movement away from grief and how prolonged it can be, far beyond the expectations of those who haven’t experienced bereavement firsthand.
I liked the characters and felt that for the most part their development over the once-yearly visits was believable. I would have liked a little more detail about each of them than the bits they were able to convey in that annual conversation with one another, but the characters did develop and grow and remain interesting. Their respective resolutions felt a tiny bit facile to me, but over all I empathized with them and found the story engrossing, if not riveting. Er, ribbeting?
Meant to be
I don’t in general believe that anything is “meant to be.” But if anything could convince a cynic that there is such a thing as destiny, it would be one of Jenny Colgan’s novels. Close Knit was particularly illustrative of that theme, in that it was perhaps a little more transparent than its author might have intended in telescoping the story. I pretty much knew who the protagonist would end up with from about the third chapter (despite various rather transparent red herrings), and spent the rest of the book waiting for her to figure it out for herself and/or for the author to put her and her intended in the right kind of meet-cute circumstances to make it happen.
I didn’t know that there is a book—The Summer Skies—that precedes this one and stars another main character (the pilot) as its protagonist. But this read perfectly well as a stand-alone, and now I can go back and enjoy that one too.
As is usual with Colgan’s books, the beautiful, bare, wind-swept islands of northern Scotland are as much a character as anybody else in the book, and reading her lyrical descriptions almost persuades me that I would love to live in a locale that is fairly constantly beset by frigid winds, in almost total darkness during the winter and perpetual light in summer due to its place far above the equator. Likewise, the people with whom she populates the small towns and villages of the islands are in equal parts ordinary and distinctive, most of them sounding like the perfect neighbors and friends, with a curmudgeon or a crank thrown in here and there for ballast.
Authors should have to vet the copy written to describe their books on Goodreads (or does it come from the publisher? if so, shame on them!), because there were many inaccuracies in the details of this one. First of all, it’s described as a summer novel, which I suppose you could marginally support, since some of the action takes place in May; but in a clime where May can bring rain, hail, or even snow, it’s not exactly a typical summer vacay beach read! Second, the main character is described as having many friends, but the truth is, everyone in her knitting club is her mother’s age (or older), and Gertie is more their pet project than their contemporary. She is actually rather isolated, being a shy, dreamy “girl” of 30 who has no girlfriends or dates her own age. Third, when Gertie decides to take on a new job, it’s described as air stewardess on a small plane, but in fact her actual primary task is to run the desk at the tiny terminal, checking in the passengers and their belongings and making sure everything goes smoothly in the run-up to each flight. She is required to go up in the plane in order to understand aspects of her job and to occasionally serve as crew, but that’s a much less important function.
A final pet peeve is the cover design: While there is a knit shop in the village similar to the one depicted on the cover, the women of the knitting club have a persistent feud with its owner and, in fact, hardly frequent it, so to give it pride of place as the cover design is as bad as the stationary bookstore on a street corner that appears on one of Colgan’s other books about a mobile bookmobile that travels around an island supplying reading wherever it goes.
The story line that propels the action of Close Knit is that Gertie has somehow let her life slip through her fingers. She lives at home with her mother and grandmother, and her friends are their knitting club ladies, so she has no significant men in her life. She got a job 10 years ago at the local market and somehow the time has passed her by while she unloaded groceries, dusted shelves, and worked the till. Her only real entertainment is knitting beautiful scarves, socks, and hats, and the only place she experiences excitement is in her romance novel-driven dreams. Then she’s given the opportunity to switch jobs, which she does partly because there is a handsome and charismatic airline owner whose planes and helicopters use the terminal and she thinks this might be an opportunity to get to know him. But fate has something different in mind for Gertie…
Even knowing what would probably happen, I thoroughly enjoyed going through the process, as one enjoys a cup of cocoa and some warm slippers at the end of a long, cold afternoon. That’s probably more than half the appeal of a Colgan novel—the tactile and culinary descriptions set in the perfect atmosphere in which to enjoy them. The designation “cozy” was meant for her books.
Slow burn
I just finished Rainbow Rowell’s newest novel for adults, called Slow Dance. Back when I was a brand-new teen librarian, her book Eleanor and Park hit the top of the chart for teen novels, and I read it with my high school book club and fell in love—with her characters and their story, and with her writing. This book could be about Eleanor and Park at 33, if they followed certain trajectories that first took them away from one another and then brought them back together after a fair number of life experiences, although Eleanor and Park had the sense to figure out just how much they liked each other, while Shiloh and Cary (despite one experience during their college-age years) are frustratingly obtuse about their feelings.
This is a longer novel than it needs to be, and I say that out of a fair amount of impatience at certain points with the sheer pigheaded insistence both characters show when it comes to misunderstanding one another’s motives, thoughts, and feelings. But at the same time, I got it; if you have ever been in a one-sided relationship—or even one that you thought was one-sided—and struggled with how much or how little to reveal, and whether to go for it or keep it to yourself forever, you will get it too.
Shiloh and Cary were best friends in high school, part of a steadfast trio with their pal Mikey, and while they were inseparable and had secret feelings for each other, they never managed to make it out of the “friend zone,” except for a weekend of bliss coupled with massive misunderstandings during Shiloh’s college years. They grew up on the poor side of Omaha, and both had plans to escape; Shiloh was going to be an actress and probably head for New York City, while Cary’s exit plan was to join the Navy. Cary fulfilled his objective, but Shiloh dabbled in theater until she met an acting teacher with partner potential, then produced two children followed by a divorce, and remained stuck in Omaha, living with her mom and kids in the house where she grew up. Fourteen years later, they both attend a second wedding for their friend Mikey, and reconnect—sort of. The old feelings resurface, along with the misunderstandings, the ambivalence, the life conflicts, the water under the bridge…in short, they have a lot to get over and get past if they are ever to share something meaningful. The will-they won’t-they, combined with the flashback story of how they got to this point in their lives, is the story here.
The saucy banter, the genuine emotions, and the honesty of expression brought back the best parts of Eleanor and Park; and although there are moments when you want to take one or both of them by the shoulders and give them a good shake, you’re mostly rooting for Cary and Shiloh to get it together and succeed at this second-chance romance. (And you also want a happily ever after for Shiloh’s extremely engaging children, Juniper and Gus.) A solid entry for Rowell’s adult realistic fiction shelf.
Impossible
I picked up this book mainly because I thought I had read Matt Haig’s previous book, The Midnight Library. And at some point I must have actually believed I had read it, because I gave it a five-star rating on Goodreads. But there is no accompanying book review, which is unheard of for me since about 2012, so I looked through all my back posts and discovered that I had planned to read it, but somehow ended up instead with The Left-Handed Booksellers of London, by Garth Nix!l Anyway, that means The Life Impossible is the first book by this author that I have read, which means I came to it under false pretenses.
I may still read The Midnight Library, because I did enjoy parts of this one, and that one is better, according to the reviews of countless others.
I was initially drawn to this one by the description, which was about Grace Winters, a retired teacher who has been experiencing a dreary sameness to her days. (I related to this, being a retired librarian of a certain age who is mostly housebound.) Then she discovers that someone with whom she had a brief friendship decades before has left her a house on the island of Ibiza (one of the Balearic islands off the coast of Spain in the Mediterranean). There is some mystery about what happened to this friend—she is presumed dead, but no one can give Grace a clear account of how—and Grace decides, impulsively, to go to Ibiza and find out.
Up to that point, the story seemed like it was going to be one of those books where somebody who is stuck hits a turning point and changes her life, and that is, indeed, Grace’s story; but the magical bit to this tale isn’t that she discovers herself by embracing a different lifestyle in a fresh locale, or that she meets someone or acquires a new and exciting avocation. The magical bit is, indeed, magic—it’s something that is described by those who introduce her to it as a natural phenomenon that is the next step along the way for the evolution of humans’ innate powers or abilities that just looks like magic. And the explanation of its source is even more bizarre. So, this is a story for which you have to be willing to suspend disbelief, which at some moments feels easy and natural and at others may cause you to say “What?!” and put down the book.
I don’t know whether to characterize this story as magical realism or as a metaphysical metaphor or what. It has some uplifting and ah-hah moments, but I had as hard a time embracing them as Grace does. I appreciated the setting and the beautiful descriptions of Ibiza, about which I have been fascinated ever since I read about the place in a Rosamunde Pilcher novel 25 years ago, and I liked the eco-consciousness the author promotes; but some of the elements of the story were just too weird for me, and the narrative becomes borderline didactic in its zealous promotion of self-actualization.
Also (and some may find this too nit-picky, but so be it), I didn’t like the vehicle that caused Grace to write down her saga: She receives an email from a former student who is having a really hard time—Maurice has lost his mother, lost his job, been dumped by his girlfriend, and is in despair—and instead of doing something concrete to assist him, such as sending him an encouraging response, or engaging in a series of helpful phone conversations during which she listens and is supportive, or referring him to a therapist and following through to make sure he is okay, she makes it all about herself. She tells him “I know what you’re going through” and then writes a 300-page manuscript about her own issues and how she resolves them, and sends it to him as if that will somehow fix things. I mean, he might find that it briefly diverts him from his own problems, but short of going to Ibiza himself and trying to replicate her experience, it certainly doesn’t address his crisis, particularly because what did happen to her could cause him to think she’s lost her mind.
Hmm. Have you ever started out writing a book review thinking that you had enjoyed the book and discovered, by the time you dissected all of its elements for your readers, that maybe you weren’t so thrilled by it after all? Yeah. Well.
Positives:
• Some truly epic descriptions of the character and beauty of the island of Ibiza
• Some engaging characters
• A protagonist with whom some may closely identify (at least initially)
• A useful portrayal of how capitalism is destroying nature
• Some lyrical writing and a few memorable moments and quotable quotes
Negatives:
• A lot of angst and some petulant indignation
• Meandering narrative that prolongs the story to no purpose
• Magical elements that start out appealing but end up being pretty weird
• A certain self-centeredness on the part of the protagonist and several of the other characters
I guess you will have to decide for yourself on this one.
Revisiting Mount Polbearne
I just finished reading Sunrise by the Sea, the fourth book by Jenny Colgan set on the fictional island of Mount Polbearne, modeled on St. Michael’s Mount in Cornwall with its tide-bound causeway from the mainland. The first book, Beach Street Bakery, tells the story of Polly Waterford, who moves to the island to get over a bad relationship and ends up turning her avocation for bread-baking into a job, then meets Huckle, a local bee keeper with hidden depths. The two subsequent volumes (Summer at the… and Christmas at the…) continue their story. This fourth chapter definitely includes Polly and Huckle and their quirky twins, Avery and Daisy, but it is primarily the story of a newcomer to Mount Polbearne, and could probably be read as a stand-alone, although you would miss some of the nuance contained in Polly and Huckle’s back story.
Marisa Rosso’s grandfather has died and, although he lived in Italy and she saw him rarely (she lives in England), her cherished childhood memories from their time together have sidelined her with grief. The two of them were similar in demeanor and had a quiet but close relationship in the midst of their loud Italian family, and soon the grief has metamorphosed into something bigger; Marisa feels that along with her grandfather she has also lost an essential piece of herself. Grief turns into anxiety and then agoraphobia, and soon Marisa is working her job remotely from the confines of her sublet bedroom and curtailing every other activity. Her rather self-centered landlord thinks he’d prefer a less fraught home existence, and decides that Marisa has to go, to make room for more fun-loving roommates, but he speaks to a wealthy friend of his and manages to get her a place to live in a holiday rental on Mount Polbearne. Once the overwhelming anxiety of getting to Cornwall and out onto the island is past, Marisa thinks she could enjoy the solitude of the tidy little apartment, until her next-door neighbor moves in. He’s large, loud, Russian, and teaches piano lessons from morning to evening, then plays melancholy discordant compositions late into the night, and the constant clamor keeps Marisa in a state. Something has got to give…
This is the usual charming signature Colgan mixture of beguiling location, delightful characters, some life challenges, and lots of cooking and baking. I enjoyed catching up with the protagonists from the other books, and Marisa’s passage through grief is both revelatory and cathartic. It’s not “great literature,” but what can I say—I’m a fan.
Prescience
I have always been confused by how this word is pronounced; the syllables divide up as pre•science, but according to the dictionary, you pronounce it PRESH•ens. Before I looked it up the first time, I was pronouncing it “pre-science,” because the definition is “the fact of knowing something before it takes place,” so it made sense to me that it would be pre-, or before, science, because that would mean it was something known “before the fact.” In other words, a prediction, which is another weird word (previous to speaking it?). The English language is wild and wonderful.
Anyway, I thought it was an appropriate title for a review of Liane Moriarty’s most recent book, Here One Moment. A bunch of people get on a plane—parents, children, young people, middle-aged, elderly, all caught up in their own plans—and among them is an unremarkable older lady who rises to her feet during the long delay before takeoff and, pointing her finger at each passenger, methodically predicts their deaths (age and cause). Some laugh as if it’s a good joke (mostly those whose prediction is for 96 or 103, of old age), while others panic as she details disease, accident, or violence at a young age or in the immediate future. When the short flight is over and they all disembark, the incident is put out of the minds of most, whether it’s skeptically, uneasily, or forcefully, but when the first passenger dies exactly as the “Death Lady” predicted, the rest are no longer so dismissive.
After the events of the flight, the story jumps between multiple story-lines detailing the lives and reactions of half a dozen passengers, interspersed with chapters from the lady’s life, and we wait to see whether she is a delusional fraud or a true clairvoyant, worrying right along with those passengers with imminent and uncertain ends as they pretend normalcy, choose avoidance, or change their lives to avoid their fate.
The question for the reader is, of course, if you knew your death date, would you do anything differently? Would you try to defy fate, manipulate the statistical likelihoods, shift your timeline? The germane quote Moriarty used in the book was from Elisabeth Kubler-Ross:
“It is only when we truly know and understand that we have a limited time on Earth and that we have no way of knowing when our time is up that we begin to live each day to the fullest, as if it were the only one we had.”
I enjoyed the exploration of the Butterfly Effect idea and, of course, drew parallels with that movie and also with Final Destination. It’s also been compared with The Measure, by Nikki Erlick, which I have not read (except for the Goodreads summary). This book dragged a bit during the detailing of Cherry Lockwood’s life (the lady with the pointing finger), but suspense was maintained in the sections about each person who was dealing with the prospect of an imminent demise, of causes mostly not under their control. So although the book seemed to take me an inordinate amount of time to get through, I would recommend it for those who find this question philosophically intriguing. Not my favorite book of Moriarty’s, but also not my least favorite!
Old-fashioned feel
I have always enjoyed the books of Rosamunde Pilcher, although she wrote so few that I have had to resort to re-reading each of them multiple times (which is no hardship). I was therefore delighted when someone in the Friends and Fiction Facebook group mentioned that British author Marcia Willett wrote in a similar vein but that she liked Willett’s even better than Pilcher’s. I went to the Los Angeles Public Library website to see if they carried any of hers as e-books, given that I don’t get out much but can order books through Overdrive straight to my Kindle. I was happy to find a few, and checked out Indian Summer, which was almost immediately available.
After having read about 25 percent of the book, I logged onto Goodreads to enter it as my “currently reading” title and was shocked to discover that it had just been published in 2014, a mere 10 years ago. The book’s setting and characters and particularly the writing style are old-fashioned to the point that they remind me of some of my favorite authors of the 1940s-1960s—Rumer Godden, Elizabeth Goudge, Daphne du Maurier, James Hilton and Dodie Smith. In fact, this book reminds me particularly of Smith’s lesser known It Ends with Revelations, probably because of the theatrical connections of the books’ protagonists.
Willett’s earliest novel appears to have been published in 1995 (which may seem aeons ago to some of my younger blog-followers, but is just yesterday to someone born 40 years before that), and she didn’t begin writing until she was 50 years old; but that makes her about 80, not nearly elderly enough to channel this particular sensibility in her novels. It’s not just the setting, in rural Devon, that makes it feel this way; it’s the characters, who are generational landowners and tenants on the one hand and theater people and writers on the other, and in the way they relate to one another and to their environment. There is still that unspoken, unacknowledged consciousness of class that hasn’t existed to this degree in England for a while now (or at least I don’t think it has!) but is definitely still alive in this story. Additionally, there is a certain focus with which some of the writers from the era I mentioned approached their story-telling that includes a specific attention to nature and a leisurely and appreciative approach to the organic cycles of life that you simply don’t come across much in modern works.
The book revolves around a central character, Mungo, a retired theater actor and director whose primary residence is London but who also has a place in Devon, a part of the larger property owned by his brother. I say “revolves around” because while all the characters have at least a tenuous connection with Mungo, he mostly facilitates, rather than stars in, the little stories portrayed here. Mungo’s brother, Archie, inherited from their father, a conservative man who didn’t appreciate either Mungo’s profession or his sexual identity. Archie and his wife, Camilla, are struggling to make ends meet on the estate by renting out their two cottages. Philip and Billy are brothers who inherited the running of the “Home Farm” (a portion of Archie’s estate) from their father and will pass it to Philip’s son, unless Archie decides to sell up. Staying in the two cottages—one updated and the other dilapidated and awaiting repairs—are Emma, an army wife with two children, Joe and Dora, and a six-month lease; and James, a writer, who is wandering around Dorset for part of the summer, researching locations for his second book. Completing the cast are Kit, a friend of Mungo’s who has come down to consult with him on what to do about the reappearance of a figure from her past; and Marcus, a military friend of Emma’s husband who is trying to make time with her while her husband is away in Afghanistan.
Each of these characters or groups of characters stars in their own vignette within the larger picture of this Indian summer in Devon. Although there is one secret from the past that turns out to be rather shocking, for the most part the events are only exciting to those directly involved, being ponderings about what will or may happen in the future based on choices made now. There is a gentle humor revealed in the obliviousness of the author, who has met all the other locals but has not only completely misconstrued their personalities and concerns but has arrived at the assumption that life here in Devon is constant, unchanging, and bucolic, when in fact there are many tempestuous passions hiding behind the façades of everyone in the story.
While I could not agree with the woman who considered Willett superior to Rosamunde Pilcher in her authorial abilities, I did enjoy this gentle, rather charming tale of friendships and secrets in the English countryside.
Bafflement and outrage
Have you ever read a book that, in the end, you wished was even worse than it was? I have just had that experience.
The real wish is, of course, that you had never read it in the first place, but that ship has sailed, to indulge in a cliché for the sake of staying on point with this book’s entire raison d’être. The Vacationers, by Emily Straub, should come printed with a disclaimer at the front that says, Please check the Goodreads reviews before assaying this!
No, I’m not usually this vindictive when reviewing a book I didn’t like, because, I reason, perhaps someone else will like it better. But despite a couple of pre-publication glowing reviews (how much were you paid?), no one does, and people need to know that!
The characters were a group of the most repellently dislikable people I have encountered since trying to read The Casual Vacancy, by J. K. Rowling, which can serve as the perfect example of that book I mentioned in my first sentence—bad enough to make me stop reading by Chapter 4. Unfortunately, these people had enough of an initial tinge of normalcy that I was bamboozled into believing that this story could go somewhere and be something, so I kept reading, wondering when that might happen, only to arrive at the end and say, “What? What?” As a reviewer on Goodreads who is rendered even more bitter than I observed,
“I kept reading in the hopes that
someone would drown.”
—Meghan
So, you’re wondering, what is so terrible? It’s kind of hard to explain. The Vacationers is basically a book about a family who go on vacation together in Mallorca. There are the parents, New Yorkers Franny and Jim, who are having a crisis in their relationship that happened after the reservations were made, so they decide to go through with the vacation anyway; there are the children, 28-year-old Bobby (lives in Florida, sells real estate with a sideline in health supplements) and 18-year-old Sylvia (about to leave for college, desperate to lose her virginity); there is Bobby’s cougar girlfriend, Carmen (who everyone resolutely dislikes); and there is the best friend of Franny, gay Charles, and his husband, Lawrence (hoping to adopt a baby), all brought together in a beautiful house in the hills for a two-week sojourn. The potential family dynamics could, and should have, proved interesting, but…they didn’t. All the things under scrutiny mostly happened or have at least been substantially foreshadowed before the trip began, which causes tension and a lot of talking. Let me amend that: whining, over-dramatizing, obsessive dwelling on he-said she-said I should’ve you could’ve why didn’t you, if only? “White people problems!” should be printed on the cover as one of those shorthand blurbs offered up by other authors to help out their friend’s book sales. There is a load of privilege, entitlement, and snobbery accompanied by a faint whiff of racism, a bit of misogyny and, as some reviewers noted, the reader keeps wondering if this is a send-up but concludes that unfortunately,
it is not.
I’m not going to dwell on everything that was wrong with this “slice of life” disaster (Definition: “A storytelling technique that presents a seemingly arbitrary sample of a character’s life, which often lacks a coherent plot, conflict, or ending”) except to give a small spoiler by way of illustration: When girlfriend Carmen walks out on the vacation (and on Bobby) and makes her own way back home rather than stay and be subjected to any more of this, I should have followed her out the door. But that unfortunately happens too late in the story to have made a significant difference.
I gave it one star on Goodreads. I wavered around two, simply for the descriptions of the locale and the food, but no. Those were merely unfairly employed lures to keep me reading.
Sweetness and lies
The description of Mrs. Quinn’s Rise to Fame gives off major cozy vibes: Jenny, a woman of 77, happily part of a couple for 59 years with her beloved Bernard, 83, feels a little restless settling further and further into the undeviating routine of their retirement. She takes an unexpected opportunity to apply to be a contestant on the television show “Britain Bakes” (yes, think The Great British Bake-off), to see if life still offers the potential for meaning and adventure. She enjoys the new-found independence of her choice, but it brings up some old memories that begin to affect both her and her relationship…
It sounded ideal: I like baking and recipes, and I like seeing older people charging towards life rather than sinking into it. But…I’m going to quote another Goodreads reviewer here:
“I feel tricked. I wanted ‘elderly woman finds herself through entering a baking contest.’ Instead, I got ‘elderly woman reminisces about the most traumatic thing that ever happened to her (which she’s kept a secret for 60 years) while participating in a baking contest.'”
The trouble started for me when Jenny decides to keep her application a secret from her husband until she knows for sure that she got in, or at least has a good chance. I didn’t have such a problem with that—you don’t want to get people’s hopes up, or deal with their expectations, for that matter—but the way she went about it was inconsiderate and rather thoughtless (not to mention incredibly inept), and leads her husband to believe that she’s hiding something serious, like a life-threatening illness. And when she realizes that is the conclusion he has drawn, she doesn’t come clean and put his mind at ease! I began to like and respect Jenny a little less.
Then we discover that there’s a much bigger secret she’s been keeping from Bernard (and everyone else) for the entire 59 years of her marriage, as the baking of some of her old family recipes brings up memories of her life at 17. She claims that she has kept the secret all this time in order to protect him, but we figure out pretty quickly that it’s to protect herself from being looked at differently by him and by her other close family members. Which didn’t track at first for me, because the secret would explain so much—but once I realized in what way the trauma has shaped their subsequent lives, I liked Jenny even less.
I would really, really like to go into the specifics of why I was kind of horrified by the ramifications of her secret, but I don’t want to give away a central plot point. I will say that I felt like she robbed her beloved (and charmingly portrayed) husband of his agency in a particularly cruel way by never taking him into her confidence.
But…I did thoroughly enjoy the baking narrative, with its descriptions of such delectables as Battenburg Cake and Treacle Tarts; the interactions with her extended family and with the people she met and in some cases befriended on the show; and the descriptions of the filming of the show’s production. Reading those parts immersed me in the bake-off experience, and if the book had been exclusively about that I think I might have liked it better. Many people gave this book five stars, with few being as curmudgeonly as I have been here. Perhaps I am overreacting…but I didn’t like the lies, the implications of Jenny’s emotions about the traumatic event, or the way it finally resolves, which seemed a little too pat.
You will have to decide for yourself whether you want to allow yourself to be whisked away into this story, pun intended.
An addendum: This is my 500th post on The Book Adept Blog!
Funny story
I was headed towards a long, intense perusal of Paolo Bacigalupi’s latest, Navola, but just as I was about to open it, the library popped up in my email to tell me this Emily Henry book was now available for checkout, and I decided to prioritize a shorter, lighter read in the midst of ranting about the Republican convention and scolding Democrats trying to ditch Biden in a last-minute bid for the nonexistent “perfect” candidate. And I’m glad I did.
I was surprised by this one, because I have read four other Emily Henry books and enjoyed them all, but so far Funny Story is my favorite. It’s surprising because a bunch of die-hard Emily fans gave it a low rating and found many things to pick at about the protagonists, the set-up, the story, the writing…not a bestie for many.
I may have been prejudiced by a few things: Daphne, the protagonist, is a somewhat buttoned-up children’s librarian. Miles, the other MC, is scruffy, mischievous, but also deep and troubled, and dead sexy. I also liked the opening premise: Daphne is engaged to Peter, and the wedding is imminent. Peter has a lifelong best friend named Petra, who is dating/living with Miles. Everything is on track when Peter and Petra decide, at his bachelor’s party no less (to which she was, of course, invited), that they are in love with each other, and dump Daphne and Miles. Peter then gives Daphne a week to move out of “their” house, to which he holds exclusive title and, given her limited options as a poorly paid librarian (trust me, there is no other kind), she moves into the second bedroom of Miles’s apartment. So yeah, she’s now living with her ex-fiancé’s new fiancée’s ex…
The next inevitable step is that Daphne, motivated by panic (and by revenge fantasies), intimates to Peter that she and Miles are a couple, and then she has to confess this to Miles. He is surprisingly sanguine about this lie, and promptly starts taking couples selfies to post on Daphne’s social media. And…you can probably guess the rest, although it’s nicely written and plotted, with a fair number of roadblocks in various directions, and also features some wonderful side characters, such as Miles’s sister Julia and Daphne’s new friend Ashleigh, and explores familial issues that illustrate why the MCs are the way they are.
The title may have been misleading for some, hence the disappointment when the book didn’t turn out to be particularly humorous (although it has its moments). It alludes to the story that all couples have and, if it’s a good one, like to tell, about the moment they met. Peter was fond of recounting his with Daphne, but it turns out not to hold a candle to how Daphne and Miles start their relationship. I really liked this book, beginning to end; some of Henry’s others have lagged for me at key points, but this one kept me going, start to finish. Don’t listen to the naysayers on Goodreads—check it out!
