Tag Archives: book-review

February 13, 2026 · 1:52 am

The Correspondent: The courage to connect

I know I’m late in praising Virginia Evans’ The Correspondent. It’s on a million best-of lists and many of you have recommended it to me. What can I say. I was busy reading romantacy novels and separating from my soon-to-be-ex-husband (whee!). Fun fun.

But actually go get The Correspondent. It is fun (or at least in its formal elements) and helpful. Epistolary (that is to say, written in letters) the novel follows the aging life of Sybil through her correspondence with all manner of people.

A book in praise of human connection – not just the letter writing kind of connection, actually this is only a tiny part of it – more a book about how bravely reaching out to someone (sometimes a stranger, or a famous stranger, or a family member, or a friend, or a salesperson, or anyone) to tell them you’re thinking of them or what you like about something they did or what they’ve done to hurt you or what you admire about them or what you are reading or really anything (write about anything, Sybil says) is courage and connection and what we all need most.

The courage to connect at a time of intense loneliness for so many. The courage to say oh hey, yes, me? I was thinking of you and am just writing to say as much. And then the shock – the shock that never tires – of having this desire for connection reciprocated.

What Evans does best (I think) (and truest to my experience) is to have Sybil instruct young people in this art of courageous connection. She promises them that sometimes people will not write back (and this may be for many reasons and the arrogance of assuming it is you) and that is fine. The joy is in casting the line and that in knowing that sometimes – enough, actually – there is response, and sometimes – enough, actually – there is reciprocation and deep connection.

That these lines can – enough, actually – become thick connections that can hold us over years, through the hardest things, through the most joyous.

Sybil teaches these young people (and through them the reader) of the arrogance of assuming we can Go It Alone, or the cowardice of expecting others to come find us. We find one another when we bravely say ‘oh hey’ and then write back.

It’s a book about many other things – grief (of dead children or lost marriages or lost time), friendship, motherhood, guilt, romance, aging bodies, and trust – but for me (for me the reader right now) it was most of all this message of courage and connection. Certainly when I the individual human have needed it most, but no less, no less, when we the world most urgently do.

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February 13, 2026 · 12:45 am

Careless People: Lessons in Narration

Sarah Wynn-Williams used to be the director of public policy at Facebook. She got fired and then wrote a book about her experience working at Facebook and with the senior executives there. She doesn’t think much of the people or the organization – offering many scenes of casual and direct cruelty, indifference and pursuit of profit above all else. Yes, Careless People is a gentle title for the memoir – could have been titled ‘Cruel People,’ or ‘These Fucking Assholes’ or something similar.

And Wynn-Williams gives lots of scenes that support this characterization. Moments where executives knew about harm decisions (or indecision) might cause to whole countries (let alone people) and did nothing. This idea of “they did nothing” is a repeated one by Wynn-Williams – she, the Cassandra calling out the disaster, only to be assiduously ignored. Convinced – or at least claiming to be convinced in the memoir – that the best way to change the company was to do so from the inside.

It’s a bit hard to believe that there wasn’t the tiniest bit of self-interest fuelling Wynn-Williams. Just the tiniest. Like whatever salary she was making played no role in staying on? Like she wasn’t willing and able to let go some of the agonized changes she was trying to make to preserve democracies or to prevent crime or whatever whatever

And I’m prepared to believe Zuckerberg and Sanders are as bad as Wynn-Williams makes them out to be, but in reading it I couldn’t help but wonder (suspect?) that no small part of this book was a desire to exact revenge. Like some of it just read as… vindictive? Even if it was accurate?

Anyway, it made the whole thing read like an exercise in trying to parse what is unreliable narrator and what is accurate. But even with that layer of skepticism, the book is engrossing in its outrage for the callousness, or “carelessness” of the Facebook folks.

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January 24, 2026 · 1:51 pm

Silver Elite: Romantasy for Your Broken Attention Span

If you are concerned that you can no longer read a full book because your attention has been fragmented and blown apart by social media and the internet, you are not alone. The feeling that sitting and slowly absorbing a dense novel might be a kind of torture – or an impossibility akin to a couch to marathon pace – is shared. And you can make arguments about whether long form reading needs to be privileged over something like long form listening or watching (though if my experience is any guide, I don’t bring focused attention to those tasks either – I long form listen while I’m also running or cleaning, and I haven’t watched a full length movie without scrolling at the same time in years). But for me there is something particular about the long, deep read – distinct from audiobooks (and I know some of you will want to fight me on the hierarchy of physical book v audiobook – ‘it’s all a story!’ whatever whatever). Something to the mindfulness that requires (invites? encourages?) doing nothing but reading.

So if that’s a hard(er) experience for you than it used to be let me offer that you are not alone. And that for some, the answer to the challenge of concentration has been romantasy. The portmanteau genre bridging romance and fantasy first came to my attention with Fourth Wing (which I read but can’t find the review) and at the time I thought “this is ridiculous,” and also “I cannot put this down.” Is it the erotica? Maybe. Or the relentless plot pace of Something Is Always About To Happen That Is Very Dramatic? Maybe. It certainly isn’t the quality of the writing or the character development.

The same is absolutely true of Dani Francis’ Silver Elite a sort of hunger games meets fifty shades of grey meets harry potter (in that there are elements of near-children battling while at school while also having explicit sex). Though to my credit (*she said with some defensiveness*) I came to this book through the recommendation of the New York Times and so had some vague sense that it would be #literary and #worthy

If you are okay to free yourself from ideas that reading need be an entirely intellectual exercise – or that you need focused thematic development for something to be good – you might just find true enjoyment in Silver Elite. There’s a bit of work to get oriented to the world building and some gymnastics to sort out the character hierarchy, but once you’re through that it’s just a fun romp through plot and romance. A bodily exercise of enjoyment rather than a brain one.

And the strangest thing will happen. You’ll be standing in line, or waiting between meetings, or finished putting the kids to bed and instead of reaching for your phone to scroll as if there might be an answer to the abyss at the bottom of the feed, you instead want to reach for your book. And you start to read promising yourself just a few pages before you get on to doing X or Y and that beautiful, magical feeling of two hours disappearing happens and you return to this world reminded of what it is to be focused, absorbed and transported.

Now for suggestions for books that do the same without requiring me to blush deeply while reading it in public. Or better still, the things I need to do to finally, at last and fully break my phone addiction. Yes, I’m open to throwing it down a well and never using the internet again.

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August 31, 2025 · 5:48 pm

Wild Dark Shore: Eco-parenting-elegy

I’m trying to remember the name of the book I reviewed here that was about the near future, climate catastrophe, parenting, and some biblical themes. I really liked it. The bible part is what did it: A Children’s Bible.

Why am I trying to remember that one? Because Charlotte McConaghy’s Wild Dark Shore reminded me of it – similar theme of how to parent amid the climate collapse, of how to not only explain to our children the destruction and loss, but to prepare them for the present and future of suffering and inequality and grief.

Wild Dark Shore manages to keep you reading what might otherwise be too overwhelming an indictment of our inaction and paralysis of the scale of the problem by placing the themes amid a gentle mystery and a (albeit somewhat implausible) romance.

The mystery: a woman washes up on the shores of Shearwater island – a remote island where there is one family who are there to protect Earth’s last seed banks until the seeds can be moved to a safer location (the sea levels are rising, permafrost melting and the seed bank is no longer safe) (if such a location even exists). As she recovers and we learn why she is there, she begins to uncover suspicious things and witness strange behaviours from the family. What, the reader wonders along with her, happened here.

From there plenty of implausible plot points follow – and I enjoyed and liked the book too much to take much issue with them – but there is a host of things that just… didn’t seem likely (at all), but I allowed because the writing was beautiful and, perhaps, because I wanted them to be possible (the romance not the least of them).

But what the book does best (at least, I think) is make palpable the choices that climate catastrophe have forced on those parts of the world already most impacted and will – are – forcing on the privileged like me through the pressing decisions around the seeds, but also – and most evocatively – in the choices about what to do with/for/by our children. What sacrifices ought we have made already or should we be making to the future (and no, this isn’t an argument for effective altruism, more a practical question of what can one generation reasonably do to better the outcomes for the next).

The climactic scene – while perhaps too on the nose and overly layered with Symbol – brings this question to a head and the reader is left mourning not just the particular loss for the family, but through this synecdoche our greater loss as a planet.

Anyway. It’s not a perfect book by any stretch, but it will make you feel something about our planet and our connection to it – and that is no small feat.

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