Tag Archives: writing

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.

Leave a comment

Filed under American literature, Fiction, Prize Winner

Tagged as , , , , , ,

October 25, 2026 · 4:17 pm

Jacob Have I Loved: Young Adult Fiction is For Adults, Too

Katherine Paterson is probably (?) best known for Bridge to Terebitha, but I recommend you to Jacob Jacob I Loved, too. Particularly if you have some sense that your life is fated and you have no choice but to Do What You Are Doing. Here’s a book – for young people, for old people, for people-people – that brings to attention the way we choose, or might be able to choose, or choose despite our constraints, the kind of person we want to be and the life we want to live.

In this case we follow twin sisters where one, Caroline, is spectacularly precious and adored, and the other, Sara Louise, who – well, let’s admit that the limited narration might open questions about its reliability – isn’t. And how Sara finds around her evidence of a narrative of who she thinks she is and what she can become, ever believing this to be true and letting this story limit what she will let herself imagine for her life or for her capabilities. And so the book through the (eventual) shifting of this self narration shows the young adult reader the power of the story we tell about ourselves. That to be who we want to become a big part of it is is declaring who we think we can and could be.

It runs up, of course, against the usual ‘choice amid constraints’ without ignoring these – Sara Louise, in choosing her future, has to make sacrifices of family and future that her parents may have wanted, choices that come with economic repercussions, and significantly, force her to see the ways she has externalized her own sense of limitation. So yes, we can’t choose to be anything we want, or can’t choose anything without consequence, but, the book says, we have more choices than we imagine.

Leave a comment

Filed under Fiction, Prize Winner, Young Adult Fiction

Tagged as , , , , , , ,

September 1, 2026 · 4:53 pm

Go Gentle: I guess you do need a man

I was thrilled on starting Maria Semple’s Go Gentle to see an idea C. and I have bandied about for year – a ‘coven’ of women looking after one another – made literal. Adora, our protagonist, has cultivated an apartment building full of independent women who are committed to living their fully-realized, independent lives, while also looking out for one another (as they are and as they age). Here it is, I thought, the expression of every adult woman’s secret fantasy of a life led where the countertop is clean and self-actualization has come from a sense of worthiness owed only to existence rather than… anything or anyone else.

I suppose I should have been warier on reading the glaring plot hole that is Adora’s financially successful career as a… consulting philosopher. Cue the legit lol. But yes, of course, the extremely wealthy family (or AI company) must have a philosopher on staff to advise on the moral questions of the day. But of course.

And you know, Adora’s particular brand of Stoic self-discipline will find cultural resonance. And the plot – such as it is – invites some delightful romps through art heists and FBI raids and descriptions of billionaire mansions that we all just love to read.

There’s a not unserious section on the #metoo moment of Adora being sexually assaulted on the job and signing the NDA and taking the hush money. And were it not for the absolutely incongruous idea of Adora as a comedy writer turned Stoic philosopher (which, okay, in itself isn’t an unbelievable change, just that the novel does not offer Any Accounting for This Character Development) the section might have offered something more than a bizarre sense that this was what the book was meant to be ‘about’ and that this was ‘serious stuff’.

Only then do we land on the romance. The kind where Adora is finally – finally – complete. Because she finds a man. A man who gets her and always has and with whom she can be fully herself. And barf gag barf. Oh it’s hard. As someone who now has a partner with whom I finally and can fully be myself I don’t mean to downplay the Yes! of discovering that there is another person with whom you can love and be loved. It *is both a surprise and a joy. But it is also not the prerequisite for connection and joy. And in another book, I’d be all for this kind of celebratory character arc. But come onnnnn: in a book that opens with the promise of connection in and through women-caring-for-women to end with a woman-saved-by-the-love-of-a-man… just… ugh.

Oh and I know you’ll tell me that Adora continues to express herself as an independent woman simply “augmented” by this love. Where ‘giving in’ to love is in the titular expression “going gentle” in lieu, I suppose of a feminist “rage” that insists on independence and contemplates the idea that community might be All By Itself a worthy construct for meaning. Lol lol. And you’re right, that’s what the book tries to sell us in its closing. AND YET if ever the marketing pitch team for hetero-monogamy* is in search of a sell-piece, I offer you Go Gentle.

Leave a comment

Filed under Worst Books

Tagged as , , , , , ,

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.

Leave a comment

Filed under American literature, Book I'll Forget I Read, Fiction, Prize Winner

Tagged as , , , , , , ,