Category Archives: American literature

July 12, 2026 · 3:31 pm

Heart the Lover: Unexpected

I expected Lily King’s Heart the Lover to be a light romance. Following the college romance of Jordan and Sam and then Jordan and Yash, the book offers up a reading that is on its face that of falling in love, being in love, and heartbreak. With scenes of staying up late to play ridiculous card games, it brought this reader back to my own years of many (many) hours of Settlers of Catan, or nights of drinking wine and pretending we knew enough to debate X philosophical topic before dragging ourselves to brunch the next day.

And while it is that story – the one you expect of life altering, too-big-for-feeling-these-feelings youth on the cusp of adult – it is also one of how we live with the One Decision that Changes Our Lives over many years and into the end of our lives. Realizing – always and again – that we only live once, only one wild and precious life etc, the book asks of Jordan to confront again (and again) her decisions around Yash (which for the sake of spoilers I won’t go into here).

And while it’s true that Jordan has to make one choice in the moment and it’s one choice that she then has to live with, the book offers the perspective that there may, actually, be many right choices to a life well lived and a life full of love. That rather than an option where there is the one decision that could lead you to the one right outcome for life, there are instead choices that lend to happier/harder paths, but also that happier/harder paths present themselves over and over again – that life, unlike a final exam, doesn’t have one right answer.

And for those of us who want nothing but straight As and gold stars and proof that we are doing it Right, this is an excellent book for remembering that we can find/choose/decide again and again love, friendship and joy, but that as much as many of these are our choices to make, we are also subject to the whims of disease, death, surprise and chance. And so yes we should carefully choose what we most want of this wild and precious life, but we should also hold with gentle gratitude those moments and people where we find love, friendship and joy because it is all a choice and it is all random.

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November 8, 2025 · 3:25 pm

Dream State: Strong start and then

I made a mistake in telling a few friends to read Eric Puchner’s Dream State when I was only a third of the way in. It’s such a strong start – evocative writing, a pulling theme (how does one major decision or one major event shape the rest of your life?), interesting characters. Set amid the present and near future of climate catastrophe to make the aging of the characters over the course of the novel vivid against what can feel in our incremental experience of time unnoticed in the sharp changes for the reader between decades for a glacier or a lake or an endangered species.

And it’s not like the writing changed – the scene on the mountain with Elias is haunting and beautiful – it’s more I lost conviction that I knew why any of the characters were making any of their decisions. I suspect it’s a form thing – with the big jumps in time (with the exception of one incredible passage where the two children age together over summers over the course of the passage and the reader feels the slipperiness of time in the verb tenses and the dialogue) happen between chapters the reader is given snapshot moments to make sense of Big character decisions, and honestly, so much happens ‘off stage’ that it’s hard to believe the impact of those decisions on the characters and how they behave next. We have to take it on the faith of third person narration that yes, indeed, Garret and Cece still love on another because that’s what a long marriage means? I guess?

So sorry to M. and K. for forcefully recommending this one before reaching the end. If you haven’t yet started it, I’d say it would be a fine beach read, but not something I’d interrupt a year of comic book reading to go out and get.

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August 21, 2025 · 12:37 pm

Let Us Descend

I can’t place what I didn’t love about Jesmyn Ward’s Let Us Descend but it was something about an uncertainty of what would be/was the trajectory of Annis’s story. Which makes sense, I know, in a book of slavery and the experience of uncertainty and alienation for those enslaved. And maybe love of a book focused on the slave experience is the wrong aspiration – something closer to appreciation and awe for the brilliant writing, the evocative and rich descriptions, the pacing and poetry.

The novel focuses on Annis and her journey of enslavement from a time with her mother to a slave market to a sugar plantation and beyond. The physical journey is marked by spirits and hauntings that make manifest (or as manifest as a ghost can be) the intergenerational trauma of slavery and violence – and the ways resilience come from the stories we have been told and tell ourselves. I suppose my uncertainty about what the novel was going to be about (like it felt like I kept waiting for the plot to begin? or the core conflict to be made clear?) misunderstands that the story is one of survival – and that the meaningful trajectory of experiencing endless uncertainty of place, people and threatened and real violence – and when and how we can claim autonomy and community amid the most abject dehumanized moments – is itself the life of Annis and the plot we are meant to follow.

So in this instance I think the problem was me as a reader – expecting or wanting something different from the story – while the book itself is an expertly crafted, compact gem.

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August 21, 2025 · 1:09 am

Three Days in June: Smooth and swift

You could read Anne Tyler’s Three Days in June in one sitting. A quick little slip into the world of Gail – socially awkward, a little aloof, a little out of touch even with herself – as she prepares for her daughter’s wedding. Over the three days she is (at first forced) reintroduced to her ex-husband, Max, comes up against the kind of relationship she has with her mother and the kind she wants with her daughter, and also forced to question her career choices to date and to come. It’s a compact and (I think) successful way to show how change – big change – can happen in a few days when the build toward it has been a long time brewing and there’s a big enough event(s) to make the change possible.

Lovely, too, to return to Anne Tyler, who I haven’t read in years and years, but who I used to read Every Single Book she wrote.

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