Tag Archives: Wars of the 20th Century

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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January 5, 2025 · 2:13 am

The Women: I Just Knew It

(Spoilers ahead) Kristin Hannah’s The Women looked like a book I would not like. But so many best of lists promised greatness (and marketers did their best with prominently featured placement on shelves at book stores) and so I went in for it. And I should know enough of what I like now to have known better. Alas. Here we are 500 pages later and this will not be a popular post because everyone else on the internet loves this book, so okay, hate me and move on.

Why do they like it? Well as historical fiction mashed with romance it has genre going for it. With a plucky heroine in Frankie McGrath who follows a character arc we just know – we just know – from the outset is going to be fine in the end despite all the Trials and Tribulations we have character going for it. Add in the unbeatable combination of the untold story of American women in the Vietnam War with an almost-critical-but-never-quite-unpatriotic view on the American role and we have plot and theme.

And sure. There’s appreciation for the centralizing – from the boldness of the tile allllll the way through – of the role of women in the war and the way their experience after the war was forgotten, marginalized or dismissed. And how women, don’t you know, just stick together and are there for one another. And there’s something to be said for the propulsive first part that has Frankie in Vietnam with plot and character developments fast and fierce.

But from the moment Jamie’s near-dead body gets on the plane I knew. I just knew there was no way this book was ending with anything short of a miraculous resolution where Frankie and Jamie would end up together and ride off into the sunset. And while the sunset doesn’t quite materialize, the end is exactly that – a triumphant tying up of all loose threads into something more than a bow, something like an artistic arrangement where every string has become a thing of beauty.

I don’t know. Is it wrong to dislike a book for being so obviously saccharine? For being so outrageously committed to making sure Everything Works Out? When – and here’s an obvious point – for most in the Vietnam War everything did not work out.

Better and other complaints could be in the boring writing that is straightforwardly narrative with little to get excited about. Or the wooden secondary characters that are only present to do their specific secondary character thing – an emotionally dead mother, a traditional father, a consistent and steadfast best friend, a rakish boyfriend, an honourable fiancé – YAWN – with nary a complexity to their name. Or that the politics of the book is bland and ultimately committed to American exceptionalism.

So learn from my mistakes. Do not be drawn in by the prominent placement on any table or any best of list. This is one to skip.

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Filed under American literature, Fiction, Historical Fiction, Worst Books

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March 1, 2024 · 2:36 am

The Wreckage: Does indeed pull your heart apart

Michael Crummy wrote (another) lovely novel in The Wreckage. Set in Newfoundland (not yet part of Canada, triva folks!) during WWII this precise romance just… wrecks you (get it? GET IT). Wish Furey, Catholic, falls for Mercedes (Sadie) Parsons (Protestant) and her mother Won’t Have It. So they have some secret romps and then through a series of accidents get separated and oops Wish goes off an enlists and gets shipped off to fight the Japanese. *lots of spoilers follow*

Only to encounter this Japanese soldier, Nishino – born and raised in racist Vancouver – who is represented as sadistic with a particular cruelty toward Canadians (and friends of Canadians, like Wish). And so over the war Sadie waits, Wish gets by in a POW camp being tortured by Nishino and then witnesses the detonation of the atomic bomb on Nagasaki. By the time Wish gets home he’s deeply changed by what he has done, seen and had done to him. It’s the sort of thing you know: effects of war and trauma, and yet somehow its made fresh in the decades of suffering that follow this one small, particular person, what is lost for both of them.

It does what historical fiction does best and shakes the snow globe of the present to let the reader see it as it is, but slightly different. And so with daily stories of horror and trauma around the world The Wreckage helped this reader begin to grasp the impossibility of scale of loss. If we humans can’t make sense of big numbers (I heard that somewhere, I know you have to) The Wreckage lets us see in this one man, this one couple, all that is destroyed and lost. And that we cannot look away.

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Filed under Bestseller, Canadian Literature, Fiction, Historical Fiction

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November 21, 2023 · 2:50 am

The Invisible Life of Addie Le Rue: Improbable, Excessive Adjectives and Many Smoky Eyes

People on Goodreads really like V.E. Schwab’s The Invisible Life of Addie Le Rue and so do all the readers that kept it on the bestseller list for ages. I do not. Heretic!

Sure it has some of the vibes of The Time Travellers Wife (which against my better judgement I loved) and a little bit of The Shadow of the Wind in that the devil features alongside used bookshops, but despite these cousins in delightful bath reads, this one is a dud.

Following Addie Le Rue after she makes an ill-advised deal with the devil for “freedom” but finds herself cursed to live forever without ever being remembered by anyone (making it impossible to do all sorts of practical things like earn money or have an apartment or write things down – all these petty annoyances catalogued over hundreds of dull pages), the novel is something of a romance when Addie meets the also-cursed Henry and falls in love (Henry’s curse is for anyone who meets him to fall in love with him – which doesn’t sound so bad if you ask me). Then we have to spend several hundred pages attentive to whether Addie will find a way to convince the devil who BY THE WAY has become her lover over the past three hundred years (which doesn’t seem nearly long enough for the eternal being of the dark, but quibbles) to let Henry go.

No, the most annoying part? Like all these sorts of epics – let’s call The Hundred Year Old Man syndrome – Addie finds herself in altogether too many improbable historically significant moments and meeting altogether too many historically significant people. I mean she’s only three hundred years old. There aren’t that many wars and revolutions and discoveries and Moments in 300 years and yet she finds herself in the middle of all of them. Literally hanging out at the cafes with Voltaire and then watching Franz Ferdinand get shot – though strangely quiet all through the Depression.

I know this is not a book premised on being believable, and surely there has to be a way to keep a reader engaged through 300 borning years of history that are otherwise just her waiting for her annual date with the devil and for her eventual meeting with Henry. But – stick with me – let me suggest then that this would be much better rewritten as a short story, or maybe a 200 page novel with a couple of choice historical scenes. As it is… bloated and boring.

And this reader wanted to like it for its faintly feminist whisper at the outset of a 17th century woman not wanting to marry and have children. But the of course, we couldn’t have this be a Good Romance without having her give it all up three hundred years later for a man – with bewitching green eyes and rumpled bedsheets. GROSS. (not that I have anything against green eyes, per se, but you get what I mean).

Oh – final point of complaint. It is the kind of writing that finds the only way to describe something is to describe it with three adjectives – always. Like the air is always moist, dank and dreary. And Henry is always charming, witty and kind. Enough!

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