Tag Archives: Bestseller

August 19, 2025 · 12:19 pm

The Wedding People: What fun.

Alison Espach set my vacation off to the best possible reading start with The Wedding People. Such a good start, in fact, that I found myself unable to really get going with book number two because it wasn’t the same great romp. So promise me if you have a plane ride, a long weekend, a sick-day where you are well enough to read a novel but not nearly well enough to work on a report you’ll grab this one.

Oh sure, it’s not brilliantly written (though it is not at all badly written), and it oozes with privilege (despite the nod to the adjunct salary and the lack of benefits that come with being an adjunct it is still very much a book that derives some of the joy of reading from the opportunity to read about how rich people throw a wedding), but if you can – if you can – park these critiques and settle in for the rom-com ride you shall not be disappointed.

What the book does best – amid the laugh out loud funny moments of dialogue and situational humour – is remind the reader that where happiness and love come from (first and always) is within and not (as so many rom-coms promise) from the perfect other person. It’s not an overly complex idea or nuanced theme, but the book presents it carefully and warmly in ways that let the reader knowingly agree in a way that doesn’t feel like reading a motivational poster in a home decor shop – live! laugh! love! – but instead like several years of therapy: ah, yes, love comes from within. Which is to say, it’s an explicit theme (like I think our protagonist, Phoebe, says it directly at one point lol) but it’s not hammered and, more importantly, we feel like Phoebe earns the revelation through actual character development and introspection.

So enjoy, enjoy.

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April 25, 2025 · 1:53 pm

North Woods: Do you believe in ghosts.

It’s an odd time to be Canadian and reading a deeply American novel. Is there such a thing as reading patriotically? Even when you’re someone who feels discomfited by nationalism and patriotism? I suppose there must be if my reading of Daniel Mason’s North Woods is to be believed.

The book itself – held apart from reading it in Ontario in 2025 – is beautifully written. The kind of thing where you admire the writing as art and pause at particularly striking descriptions and are moved.

And then the story – or many stories, I guess – is one of all the lives that pass through a particular patch of forest and a house built there in the New England woods. Each chapter offers a new moment in time and new lives led there (sometimes the decedents of previous owners, sometimes newly ‘discovering’ the house and its forest). While each chapter brings a selection of plot and affect (ambition, murder, betrayal, madness, grief) the thematic question of *what endures* persists both bubbling below the surface and explicitly called up in the form of ghosts, found artefacts, bones and hallucinations.

It’s an American novel for its geography, to be sure, but also for this fascination in legacy and ambition – of conquering and taming the land (though the land has something to say about that) and ownership and triumph. So you can know that going into it and read it alongside whatever feels you may have about that nationalist aspiration.

And you can also read it as an ecological narrative of land and nature having a much, much more expansive sense of time and scale. Where the house crumbles, where the sharp focus of one life that we intimately explore in a chapter is literally and figuratively subsumed under layers of dirt, where the trees persistently enclose and crowd out the human. And while their are moments in reading that this expansive sense of time and natural power reads as (unexpectedly, perhaps) claustrophobic, for the most part this reader found it entirely hopeful. Perhaps its the Unitarian in me that believes in that interconnected web of all living things less troubled by the smallness of one life and more optimistic in the eventual and inevitable dissolution of the one life into the natural whole. Or perhaps this is what the book best offers: you are small, your time is small, and yet all still vivid and worthy.

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May 17, 2023 · 1:54 am

The Last Thing He Told Me: A Forgettable Title, for a Memorable Book

It is an extremely good feeling when a person you love loves a book that you love. Orders of magnitude better feeling when a person you love who does not normally (ever) read books (1) reads a book and (2) loves a book and (3) that book turns out to be one you don’t mind/enjoy (I want so much to go so far as to say love, but… #integrity).

I get that this is what it means to share passions and that this is so much of what does underpin close relationships – I do. But so many of my recent friend additions have been ones where the first point of connection is being Adults With Small Dependents And Too Many Responsibilities, and not The! Joy! Of! Reading! (though to the credit of K. and K. this *is one of our shared connections, and I’m grateful for it).

Enter Laura Dave’s The Last Thing He Told Me. Our ill-named book club (famous for never picking, never-mind reading a book) decided we’d had enough mockery, and so we’d read a book. Problem: C. who refuses to read (anything? that can’t be true. But made up things where you might feel something). So we gave her the power to choose the book, and she did. And she loved it! (though, she – like me – couldn’t remember the name of it two weeks after reading it, so maybe something to take back to the focus group: get a better title).

I won’t tell you it’s the best book you’ve ever read, but it is a romp. The sort of thing you can immediately see being turned into a miniseries (oh wait, it has been already?) starring someone and someone and extra tall wine glasses. It follows Hannah and her step-daughter Bailey in the days after Hannah’s husband/Bailey’s father, Owen, goes missing – oh he leaves behind some notes, some cash, and is wanted in connection with a collapsing ponzi scheme (though maybe all ponzi schemes are collapsing? anyway).

While tripping along the thriller-suspense-can’t-put-it-down-just-one-more-chapter-I-swear lane, the book stumbles into some interesting thematic questions about what it means to be a parent – like literally in the sense of the limits of biology, but of course more in the sense of what responsibilities, what sacrifices, what ways of thinking-being are required. It makes a reasonably good case that ‘parent’ is to be – the verb, I mean – and has almost nothing to do with the noun.

And if you’re not into books with parenting themes there’s still lots of quasi-car chase scenes to keep you entertained, and modestly interesting other threads about identity and starting over. Perfect book for a beach or airplane.

But mostly? It’s a lot of fun. And so much more fun when your not-a-book-club people read it with you. Thanks, C.

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October 22, 2020 · 4:40 pm

The Vanishing Half

Brit Bennett’s The Vanishing Half has a LONG waitlist at the library, and so when I found it on the ‘Seven Day Quick Reads’ shelf I scooped it up (knowing, as I did, that I would be accruing serious fines as the likelihood of me finishing it in seven days was… poor. Given I was still reading A Little Life. Alas. The library deserves my money. ANYWAY.). Long waitlist, no doubt, because the book tops many of the top recommendations for 2020 novels and hits the right notes for a bestseller: family saga, race and identity in America, rich people, good writing. And I fault no one for recommending it, and no one for seeking it out and reading it.

You can feel the ‘but’ coming, can’t you?

But. The novel takes it’s ‘point’ and makes it just too didactic for this reader’s enjoyment. Like if you took a Bernenstain Bear’s picture book that has a literal moral on the front page and made it into well written literary fiction. Just as preschoolers can smell the moral a mile away and find the badgering about sharing or politeness or bullying (or more recently, environmentalism) to be off-putting, the way this novel continues to circle, draw arrows, reinforce in bold its message that identity is created and identity is performative and well, it gets to be a bit distracting.

So right – the plot: twins are born in Mallard, an African-American town premised on its preference for light skin. In their teenage years they run away and separate: one twin, Stella, goes on to live her life ‘passing’ as a white woman, the other, Desiree, returns to Mallard to raise her darkest-dark skinned daughter, Jude. Jude meets Stella’s daughter, Kennedy. The history and present of the family collapses, collides, secrets and ‘truths’ threaten and reveal. [Oh and Jude falls in love with a trans man, Reese, whose addition to the story reads as entirely about driving home for the reader the gaps and tensions between who we are, how we are ‘read’ by the world, how we perform and the meaning our bodies create and signify – and of course the material consequences of how others read us.] And the book does make that clear. That as much as Stella has the option of passing, Jude would not, that the idea that all identity is performative runs up against the way the world reads us, not ever simply or only how we wish to be seen or valued.

So yes. I do think there’s enough of interest her to make this a book well worth reading, and certainly an excellent selection for a book club. Just not a book you’ll read without feeling (at a few points) like maybe it was written to be taught in high school or undergraduate classes. Or a book club!

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