Tag: friends

Happy Place

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Rating: ⭐⭐⭐⭐
Author: Emily Henry
Genres: Romance, Fiction
Pub. Date: April 2023

At this point, I feel like Emily Henry needs no introduction. She’s become one of the most popular contemporary romance writers and I continue to be a fan of her storytelling style. First and foremost, I find her romances to be incredibly believable, and I love that even though romance is central to the plot, there’s always a lot of other issues going on in her stories. She has captured some pretty heavy themes in her books and despite the name, I think Happy Place is her saddest book to date.

Harriet and Wyn have been separated for 6 months, but they haven’t worked up the courage to tell their friends yet. When they find out that their friend Sabrina is selling her family cottage in Maine, the 6 friends meet up at the cottage for one last hurrah at Harriet’s ‘happy place’. The problem is, Harriet and Wyn don’t want to bring down the party with their break-up, so they pretend to still be together until the end of the trip.

I’m sure you can guess how this goes. It’s both as predictable as you expect, while also being surprisingly unpredictable and heartbreaking. Parts of this book really worked for me, while other parts didn’t. I don’t mind a good fake dating scenario, but I’m not a fan of the miscommunication trope, which this book definitely had. 

Harriet and Wyn’s love story worked for me. I loved the flashbacks and getting to know how they fell in love. It was really soft and believable and the two characters had undeniable chemistry. I also liked the inclusion of so many secondary characters. The storyline about finding a group of people you connect with and then having to grow up and go in different life directions is very relatable and I think it brought more depth to the story. 

Emily Henry is good at creating really complex dynamics between her characters in a very sad kind of way. Sometimes no matter how much we love another person, there are just pieces of our lives that will never be compatible. It’s important to give and take, but not at the expense of the core of who we are. Henry weaves these intricacies into her characters in a way that you legitimately wonder if they will be able to reconcile and make it work in the end. Harriet and Wyn never had a problem of loving each other, but they struggle with being the person that the other needs. They are both people pleasers to the extent that they sabotage their own happiness. 

It’s a compelling story and I sped through it, but having some time to reflect, there were definitely some aspects about it that I didn’t like. Mostly it was to do with the rest of the friend group. I thought the concept for the book was great, but in practice, I didn’t think any of the secondary characters were very well developed. I never really got a sense of who any of the friends were, except for Sabrina at the end. Nobody was very fleshed out and because of this, it was hard to empathize with any of them. 

Honestly, I thought Sabrina was terrible. Without giving anything away, I thought she made some really questionable choices and while I understood that in theory, her decisions were made from a place of love, it didn’t excuse her for playing God with her friends’ emotions and generally being so manipulative. Had her character been a little better developed, I might have understood her better, but all 4 of the friends felt like shells of people to me. 

Second, as much as I love Harriet and Wyn, I thought the ending was a bit frustrating. Just talk to each other and say what you really mean instead of constantly making assumptions about the others motivations and feelings. At the end of the day, these two still had a lot to learn about each other and it was just kind of sad that despite being together so long and loving each other so much, they had no real understanding of each other’s psyche or emotional state. 

Finally, this book was just too sad. There’s a time and a place for really sad and emotional books, but a contemporary romance with a hot pink cover with happy cartoon beach goers is not it. You should absolutely have highs and lows in your narrative, but I really think you need a certain level of balance so that the entire book doesn’t read as sad and nostalgic. Harriet and Wyn had a lot of happy moments in the earlier days of their relationship, but the present day narrative was just so sad that it overwhelmed the rest of the book. If you’re going to bring your reader low, you have to have a recovery plan. This book was depressing from start to finish and as much as I loved the characters, it left me feeling sad and overwhelmed rather than hopeful. 

I still really liked it. If you’re an EH fan, definitely pick this one up, but it’s not the kind of romance I would be in a rush to re-read. Book Lovers remains my favourite to date, but I will 100% be reading Emily’s next book, Funny Story.

Fiona and Jane

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Rating: ⭐⭐⭐.5
Author: Jean Chen Ho
Genres: Fiction
Pub. Date: Jan. 2022 (read Feb. 2022)

I’m really sad to see this isn’t getting the best reviews on Goodreads. On the one hand, I kind of get it, but on the other, I actually really liked it. Fiona and Jane is a short book that spans more than 2 decades, observing the friendship of two Taiwanese-American girls as they flit in and out of one another’s lives. Fiona and Jane were best friends growing up and while they drift apart in their 20’s, they keep coming back to each other through the years. It’s described as being told through short stories, but I didn’t really think they read like short stories, more like a non-chronological retelling of their friendship.

Jane grew up in America and is devastated when her Dad leaves to teach in Taiwan when she’s in high school and never returns. In her anger and youth, Jane makes a decision that has long lasting emotional consequences on who she grows to be. Fiona lived her childhood in Taiwan with her mother and grandparents and eventually moved to LA with her mom, where she met Fiona. The two girls become fast friends, each secretly envying the relationship the other has with their family. The girls make adolescent mistakes and Fiona eventually moves to New York and struggles with the guilt of leaving a friend behind, while Jane struggles with the sadness of feeling abandoned.

It’s not so much a re-telling of their lives as snapshots of them. The plot feels aimless and the timeline can be confusing, so I see why people aren’t loving it. But I love a good character driven novel and I did find it interesting, so the format didn’t bother me and I liked getting to know the flaws of each of these characters. I did want just a little bit more from the narrative though. Props to the author for leaving so much interpretation up to the reader, I do think this can be challenging for debut novelists and I think she lets her readers draw their own conclusions. There is no large catharsis in the storytelling, so while I think it’s accurate to life, it did leave me questioning how the author decided what to include and where to end her story. It’s an interesting read, but I felt it could have used a little bit more depth.

There was just one part of the book that I had to comment on because I found it so weird. The story is told in first person, switching between Fiona and Jane, but for one chapter, it switches to the first person perspective of Fiona’s boyfriend. I found this a bit jarring and I’m not really sure why the author opted to include another viewpoint, for only ~10 pages. It seemed like an odd choice. But overall, I liked the writing style and would give 3.5 stars!

Watch Over Me

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Rating: ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐
Author: Nina LaCour
Genres: Fiction
Pub. Date: Sep. 2020 (read Dec. 2020)

Watch Over Me was an impulse buy at a local bookstore. I’ve heard a lot of good things about Nina LaCour’s other book, We Are Okay, and the phrase “aged out of foster care” in the book synopsis intrigued me. Plus the cover art and end pages for this book are absolutely gorgeous, so I wanted it for my shelf. Publishers, never underestimate the power of beautiful end pages! I really wish more books had them.

Anyways, I started reading this almost right away and it’s one of those slow burn character driven novels that I absolutely love. The plot wasn’t quick paced, but I was sucked into the story and more or less read it in two sittings (it’s a short book). This was a weird mix of magical realism and ghosts and it just really worked for me.

18 year old Mila has aged out of foster care and been accepted to work as a teaching intern on a farm. The owners, Terry and Julia, have supported many foster children over the years and offer Mila room and board in exchange for help teaching some of their existing foster children. Mila eagerly accepts and travels to the remote farm to stay in her little one room cabin.
 
At first everything seems too good to be true. Everyone on the farm is extremely welcoming and she finally has a little space and family to call her own. But she soon discovers that the farm is haunted and that she may be forced to confront the trauma of her past. 

It’s a bit of a weird book and I could definitely see this not being for everyone, but I really loved it. First off, the writing is gorgeous – I really felt that there were no words or ideas out of place. At 250 pages, with a large font, it’s a short book, but I felt that the author said what she needed to say and then ended it. She spent time on what mattered and didn’t waffle around on what didn’t. 

Ultimately this is a story of grief and loss and learning to forgive ourselves. Mila had a very traumatic childhood, which compelled her to make choices that she’s not proud of. Yet she’s still an incredibly kind and loving person – her mistakes have not influenced her caring demeanor and ability to see good in others. But they are tearing her apart inside and not permitting her to grow and flourish. 

I really didn’t know how this book was going to go once Mila showed up on the farm. There’s an atmosphere of grief and longing that permeates throughout the entire novel and I wasn’t sure whether to expect good or bad things from the farm and the people who lived there. Everyone was so kind at the farm that I kept waiting for a big reveal for what’s actually going on underneath the surface. This happened, but not in the way I expected.
 
Overall, LaCour does a really good job of conveying the longing we all feel to be loved and accepted. Though Mila is forced to confront her demons, she finds everything she’s ever been longing for on the farm. We can always begin anew. We don’t have to be defined by the mistakes of our past and we are always still worth being loved. Especially in these pandemic times, aren’t we really all just longing for home? Sometimes it’s a place, sometimes it’s a person, but we all long to belong.

Heidi

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Rating: ⭐⭐⭐
Author: Johanna Spyri
Genres: Children’s, Middle Grade, Classic
Pub date: 1880 (read Jan. 2019)

Oh Heidi, a girl after my own heart. I bought a new copy of Anne of Green Gables last year after my childhood copy was accidentally donated and decided to pick up copies of both Heidi and the Secret Garden, which had cute matching covers. I never read Heidi as a child, but I was into the mountain setting and was basically hoping for Anne of Green Gables set in Switzerland.

Heidi definitely does not have the same charm as Anne, who is one of my all-time favourite female characters, but I could appreciate her love of the simple life and the fresh mountain air. Heidi is a little orphan girl who, up to the age of 5, lived with her Aunt in the small Swiss town of Dorfli. At the age of 5, her aunt decides she has spent enough resources on Heidi and drags her up the mountainside to instead live with her Grandfather. Her grandfather is seen as a bit of a hermit by the townspeople and is fairly misunderstood, so they all pity Heidi when they see her on the way up the mountain.

However, Heidi immediately settles into life at her Grandfather’s cabin and is totally enamored with the beautiful mountain views, the wildflowers, and her neighbour Peter, the local goat-herder. Likewise, her Grandfather’s life is taken over by Heidi and he starts to find a new joy in life. I thought the whole mountain setting – two misfits finding love with one another – story was brilliant and was totally into this book at the beginning. I can see why it’s a classic, but like I said, Heidi just doesn’t have quite the same charm as my other beloved children’s books and it’s pretty slow moving. I struggled through the story at times and unfortunately, the ending of the book hasn’t really aged all that well.

It is a sweet story with christian undertones and themes. In the middle of the story, Heidi is extremely distraught when she is removed from her grandfathers and forced to live in Frankfurt. She finds the town so dark and dreary and she doesn’t understand the way of life, so she is misunderstood by those around her and yearns more than anything to return to Grandfathers. She learns about God and is taught to put her trust in his plan and is ultimately rewarded by her prayers and faith. While some elements were problematic, I was impressed that this book features both a girl in a wheelchair and a blind person.

I can’t write this review without discussing the ending, so if you’re unfamiliar with this classic and plan to read it, please stop reading here. SPOILERS AHEAD.

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So I didn’t really like the ending of this book. I definitely don’t fault the author for it because this was written in the 1800’s, but in my opinion the ending doesn’t really hold up today. I had two issues with the ending, the first of which is that Peter sucks! Peter is a pretty big introvert, whereas Heidi loves people and making new friends, and he is constantly threatened by Heidi’s other relationships and acts out pretty aggressively in his jealousy (both with the Doctor and Clara). My problem was that Peter’s behaviour was totally wrong, but he never really suffered any consequence from it. He destroys Clara’s chair for heaven’s sake and though he feels bad after, no one ever holds him accountable to his actions. They were just teaching him it’s okay to be an asshole.

My second issue was with Clara suddenly gaining the ability to walk by sheer force of will and the power of fresh mountain air (supposedly). I don’t fault the author because I’m sure people with disabilities had it rough in this era and their disabilities were not as well understood. So gifting her character with the ability to walk again seems like the perfect ending to a childhood story. It just doesn’t really stand up today and I’d hate for little girls in wheelchairs to read this book and be preached the message that if they just pray and want it enough, they might be able to walk again too. Or to feel like they can only achieve happiness by the curing of their disability and that the ultimate dream is to escape your disability. I liked Clara because despite her disability and sickness, she had a great attitude and didn’t actually seem that hampered by her disability. Being in a chair is nothing to feel bad about and is not an impediment on happiness. So I just don’t think this ending holds up in light of the body positivity movement and is a little insulting to the less able-bodied.

3 stars for the sweet story and setting, but beware some of the ideas are a little preachy and out-dated.