Category Archives: American literature

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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August 17, 2026 · 9:55 am

Buckeye: Neighbours making neighbourhoods

Truly as I sat down to write this I got a text from a neighbour and friend who is looking after my garden while I’m away and took out my garbage bins and generally is great for helping give care. These are neighbours who also – thank god – send their children unaccompanied to the park with mine and cultivate the kind of interdependent independence that childhood thrives on – a kind of freedom that parents using GPS tracking watches and hyper-surveillance of children find suspect.

It’s a weird, and very small thread of Patrick Ryan’s Buckeye to attach to, but I was – am – so glad for the way the kids in this book grow up free to roam on bikes and until the streetlights come on and with many, many other children such that they create and cultivate micro communities of relationships. And glad that my kids have tiny opportunities for this, too.

Okay, that’s not really what this book is about and is more about when it is about – following the generation of youth who fight in and live after WWII the book explores how their childhood is shaped by their damaged or absent veteran fathers, then by their own experience fighting, and then watching their own children conscripted for Vietnam. Of course I knew this was a generation that moved through these global conflicts – but following it through the microcosm of two families – two deeply and surprisingly intertwined families – made the permeation of those conflicts into the character of individuals and their world more tangible.

It is also a book about how the mores of the time shaped sexuality and its expression, gender roles, race (ish – this is a rather lightly treated theme and pretty reduced to extremes and headlines) and (barely) class.

These pieces of ‘the times’ also inform how the characters make or don’t make their choices.

[Aside: I got distracted and called away from finishing this post and here it is a month later and I’m doing my best to recall what else I wanted to say about the book But]

One choice – or the same choice made over and over again – centers the book. How a choice for (or against) fidelity to a spouse cascades across a life; how a choice for (or against) the truth (and what exactly is the truth – is it not lying or is it proactive honesty?) explodes relationships and alters lives; how (beyond the individual) choices of global politics made (again and again) find new and familiar patterns.

I enjoyed the book, but if my, now several weeks later impression, holds, its not one that will shatter or shake you. Just a pleasant one for a cottage or a beach or – as the waning days of summer arrive – to read in half hour snippets before collapsing to sleep. Like a well told story of the realist variety where the writing is good but not distractingly good, where the characters are interesting and have an arc but are not people you spend any time outside the book thinking about, and where the plot is one you could describe over the table at a trivia night and everyone would agree that sounds interesting but is not, in the end, that interesting. It is a fine book.

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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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