Category Archives: Fiction

October 25, 2026 · 4:26 pm

Partita: I wanted to love it so much

I LOVED Demon Copperhead. Like have waxed endlessly about it, given it as a gift, recommended it over and over. And so when I got gifted (thanks, B.) a copy of Partita I was so excited. Imagine me skipping my way to the bath with a glass of wine and this book just certain I would come out wrinkled and changed.

And oh the writing IS beautiful, and there are descriptions I wanted to clip out and send around the world for the quality of writing is just spectacular, and reason alone to read it.

But the story? I don’t know. Maybe my expectations were too high (they were almost certainly too high) but the whole things just read as a… so what? or like, really? you let this one love story of your 20s rule your life this long? And sure, there’s a not so subtle theme of how we ‘hoard’ things, stories, ideas about ourself and that in this holding too tight limit our acceptance and love of the life, things, people we actually have. So maybe it was more than this love story – rich as it was in its telling – wasn’t believable enoguh for the resonance and impact it wrought on our protagonist?

And for music lovers there’s much to love in here about the telling of the pianist on her way to international fame and the suffering and struggle that it takes to be That Good (and I did, really, love the suggested musical pairings for different chapters and was happy, truly, to bring more Chopin into my daily life).

And yet, it couldn’t help but have stark comparison with Ann Patchett’s Tom Lake which has the same theme of young artist ruined by love who must life the rest of their lives wondering about the kind of life they could have had if they had followed (or in this case been able to follow) their art to it’s fullest degree. And it pains me, PAINS ME, to say Patchett did it better.

So while I started Partita with all the eagerness of a favourite novelist’s new book, by the end I was just ready for it to be over, not convinced I had encountered any new idea or view onto the world, though I had spent time with some of the best writing you’ll come across. So separate form and content maybe? Or know that the story itself is Just Okay, and the writing remains spectacular.

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October 25, 2026 · 4:17 pm

Jacob Have I Loved: Young Adult Fiction is For Adults, Too

Katherine Paterson is probably (?) best known for Bridge to Terebitha, but I recommend you to Jacob Jacob I Loved, too. Particularly if you have some sense that your life is fated and you have no choice but to Do What You Are Doing. Here’s a book – for young people, for old people, for people-people – that brings to attention the way we choose, or might be able to choose, or choose despite our constraints, the kind of person we want to be and the life we want to live.

In this case we follow twin sisters where one, Caroline, is spectacularly precious and adored, and the other, Sara Louise, who – well, let’s admit that the limited narration might open questions about its reliability – isn’t. And how Sara finds around her evidence of a narrative of who she thinks she is and what she can become, ever believing this to be true and letting this story limit what she will let herself imagine for her life or for her capabilities. And so the book through the (eventual) shifting of this self narration shows the young adult reader the power of the story we tell about ourselves. That to be who we want to become a big part of it is is declaring who we think we can and could be.

It runs up, of course, against the usual ‘choice amid constraints’ without ignoring these – Sara Louise, in choosing her future, has to make sacrifices of family and future that her parents may have wanted, choices that come with economic repercussions, and significantly, force her to see the ways she has externalized her own sense of limitation. So yes, we can’t choose to be anything we want, or can’t choose anything without consequence, but, the book says, we have more choices than we imagine.

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September 6, 2026 · 1:22 pm

Whistler: I Loved It

Did I love Ann Patchett’s Whistler for the book itself or for the experience of reading it? Hard to say. It’s been so long since I’ve read a book in deep immersion. You can blame the pandemic, or parenting, or divorce, or the interet, or the deterioration of all our attention spans wrought by smartphones or all of the above, but long gone are the easy days of picking up a novel and just… reading it until it ends. Now I read in fragmented chunks of a chapter at breakfast, a few pages before passing out asleep, a few pages when I sit myself down and firmly insist I Am Going To Relax And Read.

Cue bringing Whistler on a six day canoe trip. Here, I thought, will be where I read. And for the first four days I had the same problem as at home, only here the distractions were the need to hang bags in trees to keep them from the bears or the pure exhaustion of having portaged for 75km. Until the fourth day when we were spoiled with only two hours of paddling and arrived at a site where I could hang my hammock and just… read. And guys, I read that book and was immersed in it and time disappeared and everything was bliss.

You knew there was going to be an Until.

Until the book itself failed me. Oh but it’s perfection in narration – story telling at its best with funny and full characters that make their truth known in small actions and perfect dialogue. A plot that understands its scope – girl reunites with long forgotten third step father and recalls and then explores a trauma they shared alongside revisiting and reinterpreting family dynamics and forging new ones – and executes with brilliant pacing. Terrific writing that is neither showy nor wasted.

*spoilers ahead

But then Patchette can’t seem to clinch it. Unwilling, I guess, to kill Eddie *which BY THE WAY the only time I stopped reading was to take a break to tend to the fire because I knew (or thought I knew) that Eddie was about to die and I couldn’t accept it and didn’t want to. Oh there’s an elegant and literary way of explaining this ending – the precision of knowing ‘when to stop,’ and the genius of exploiting the core theme that we are all writing our own stories, we are all deciding at any given moment what part of our story matters to ourselves and to others and what to do with the stories we tell ourselves about ourselves and other people (I am not kidding, the theme here is brilliantly done and stays with you) but it felt like such a cop-out, like an unwilligness to give this reader what she yearned for: a big cathartic cry on a hammock overlooking an Alogonquin lake lol

Alas, I was left to imagine my own ending – and if I were in a book club that read a book we could talk about it. For now, maybe you tell me: what was it like to read this one? what did you make of the ending?

Yours in the temporary bliss of deep reading. And here’s hoping this sets the pattern by reminding me of the exquisite joy of being in a great book.

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September 6, 2026 · 12:54 pm

Land: Bor-ing (tell me I’m wrong)

You have seen Maggie O’Farrell’s Land. It is front and center on display tables and people are talking about it. Her first book, Hamnet, was a big deal and so this next book was bound to generate attention. Only problem is, at least in my opinion (and isn’t that why you’re reading this) Land is overhyped boring.

Oh the book starts out with promise. The writing is – really – extraordinarily beautiful. Subtle, specific and aching. I am for sure recommending you do not read this book the whole way through but you should read the first 50 pages for the pure enjoyment of the prose. And the plot from the opening is similarly promising: we’re in 19th century Ireland and a boy and his father are out making a map, strange circumstances in the forest and the father goes mad. All kinds of questions surface: what caused the madness? what will happen to the family given the precarity of their existence without the father’s income?

If only these were questions that could sustain 500 pages OR if only these questions were further complicated. Alas. What then follows is a sort of generational history of the plot of land and the people who had lived there. Which I regret to inform you does not constitute an interesting plot. Yes, of course, each family or person who lived on the land has unique stories and yes, of course, the book aims to remind the reader of the richness in history and longevity of the natural world that we so boldly claim to own or occupy. And in the case of Land the history of the land holds those of great acts of cruelty and suffering – including a lot about the Great Famine that I didn’t know and legit found interesting/haunting. However. You may be eager to read a genealogy of a place and if that’s the case you might well enjoy Land. If you are expecting something where characters develop or Things Happen you best look elsewhere. This is a novel that took the idea of ‘setting’ and ‘literary devices’ just… didn’t bother to sketch out how the rest of the elements of fiction might need to come into play.

I’m sure I’m wrong – I have to be because everyone else seems to love this book – so tell me why and how.

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