Category Archives: Prize Winner

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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June 30, 2026 · 2:30 pm

Stone Yard Devotional: Mice, mice, forgiveness

Oh but Charlotte Wood’s Stone Yard Devotional is fantastic. Simple story really – woman goes to a convent for a few weeks to take a rest from the State Of The World and doesn’t leave. While she’s there a few things happen: bones of a former nun are found and returned, a woman from her childhood whom she wronged by action and inaction, Helen, visits; a mouse plague besieges the convent and countryside.

Most reviews describe the book as ‘meditative’ which I take to mean ‘without much plot’ and that is true, I suppose, if we mean plot to (just) be a series of events (and yes, yes, that is definitionally plot). But for this reader it didn’t feel like things weren’t happening. Of course it could be the slow sequence of events works as formal mirror to the daily existence in a convent, or it could be that it’s meant to remind us that there need not be Big Change for there to be… big changes in a person.

Our protagonist doesn’t appear to intentionally remove herself from the world and its spiralling of human-caused destruction, but more seems to find herself through that same “inaction” going about a life of hyper-focused, task-based orientation: first I wake up. Then I feed the chickens. Then I empty mouse traps. As if in the deliberate choice to do just the next one thing there might be a means of making this world bearable.

She doesn’t believe in God, or at least doesn’t declare this to herself, and so isn’t a nun herself – a distinction she makes at several points – she is instead something of an unintentional objector to the rest of the world. It’s not that she’s withdrawing from modernity for technological reasons (though since reading this one I’ve once again renewed my commitment to quitting my phone addiction) more a moral objection to her own complicity and inability to make change.

Okay so there’s all of that but for me the core of the book is questions of forgiveness: what does it mean to forgive someone? How might you do it (do you just decide and then do the ‘work’ of forgiveness)? What right do you have to ask for/demand forgiveness? What do you need to do to earn it? How do we forgive between individuals, among groups and from humanity to the earth? What reparation are required, if any, in the work and process? Can forgiveness be exacted without this work of repair? How grievous the harm before something is unforgiveable? How might we forgive ourselves even if/if those we seek forgiveness from refuse us?

Oh the book does So Much to ask and explore (without resolution, I think) these questions. Made for a lovely patio discuss with A. with the only conclusion that there might be something distinct between the feeling of forgiveness and the verb of it. And something distinct between the act of repair and the forgiveness that might, or might not, follow.

Enthusiastic recommendation of this one.

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June 29, 2026 · 3:37 pm

Flashlight: And I thought I had family drama

It took me nine weeks and three recalls from the library to finish Susan Choi’s Flashlight and it’s my fault, I know. My excuses are feeble – how many times can I claim divorce as a distraction from fiction? just the once? lol – and made more pathetic by the quality of the book, which is: excellent.

There is the beautiful writing – and it is – and the core mystery of the book that begins with what happens to the father and continues throughout – but there is, more, the depth of the characters. A great ability to hold a character over a lifetime – from child to aging adult – and make moments of their development and change feel neither forced or inevitable, instead the ways we choose our life in scenes of deliberate (in)action.

You want more of a plot description? Fine, fine. Serk – the dad – and 10 year old Louisa are out on the beach in Japan (despite Serk hating the water, but these are the sacrifices we make for our children). Next thing we know Louisa is washed up on shore, Serk is gone (presumed dead) and Louisa attatches herself to a memory of a flashlight.

Then back and forth we go through space and time – to Serk’s childhood in Japan to a family in postwar North Korea to Louisa’s mother, Anne, and her choice to give up her son Tobias before marrying Serk and the kind of kid Tobias is and how they all fit together in bits of part truths and a lot of Things That Go Unsaid.

It’s a book about memory – those that are real, those we invent, those we wish we could forget, those we didn’t know we had until something (a song, a smell) finds them for us – and a book about how and why we hope.

And so with that – here’s hoping this was a blocker book – the kind so rich it held me for literal months – but now complete I can with a rush read all the many, many books mounting around me in my ceaseless aspiration to be 25 again and doing nothing all summer but reading. Alas.

I’m not actually sure if I should suggest this one for your summer reading list given how long it took me to finish. But you, dear reader, are better focused and better energized than I. So read. So read.

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April 24, 2026 · 6:55 pm

The Guardian and the Thief

Who knew a book so heartbreaking could be so suspenseful. Maybe there are lots of examples? Well here is one: Megha Majumdar’s The Guardian and the Thief. Set in the near-future of India where the climate catastrophe has brought famine and social/political unrest we follow two families as they try – in their unique ways – to escape the conditions that keep them hungry and suffering.

A terrific book for any course wanting to consider ‘social determinants of health’ the book sets up in stark terms (somehow without being annoying about it) the way class intersects with bodies – where they can go, what they can expect, and how they will thrive or fail.

For this reader it was a sort of awe at the way Majumdar manipulates sympathy – vacillating between Ma and Boomba, but then also for Ma and Boomba amid an environment where they are set up to make – in their various ways – chillingly choices about who and what to prioritize, and at what cost. And while it is meant to be the near future, it feels urgent and present in ways that were/are unsettling and uncomfortable: what are we willing to look away from to prioritize our immediate family, ourselves? What will we hoard – if not food, then land, or transportation, or access – and how much do we need to imagine ourselves safe (and from what, or whom) and for how long?

Over the course of one week we are kept in suspense and agony for what they can each control and what is wrested from them. And beautiful writing that lets the reader slip inside the story and align, betray, align again with characters without noticing that the story is being spun.

Go, go and enjoy, while being prepared to be asked to reckon with what you might give up and what you might take so as to save who you claim as your own.

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