I read and loved The Break several years ago, so I was really excited to see The Strangers on the long-list for the Giller Prize. I think this was my favourite of the four nominees I read, so I was a little disappointed not to see it make the short-list.
The Strangers focuses on 3 generations of metis women in the Stranger family, featuring 4 perspectives in total. The first two perspectives are from Phoenix and Cedar, sisters and some of the youngest members of the family. Phoenix is in a youth detention centre and Cedar has been bouncing around in foster care before settling in to live with her father’s new family. The other two perspectives are from Elsie, their mother, who suffers from a drug addiction and is continually trying to get clean, and Margaret, their grandmother (Elsie’s mother), who never quite got to live the life she wanted.
Vermette is a very accomplished writer. She had me hooked from chapter 1, which is so emotional and left me immediately gutted. The first two chapters are about Phoenix and Cedar and these two characters kept me captivated throughout the entirety of the novel. They both have two very different stories and I think the juxtaposition of their two lives is what made this narrative so compelling. Elsie’s storyline was probably my least favourite of the 4 as I found her narrative to be a bit repetitive, but the inclusion of her perspective is so important to the overall themes of the novel.
I liked Margaret’s storyline as well and found her to be a fascinating character, but it’s the only perspective that’s not told at the same time period as the rest of the characters. We get flashbacks from all characters, but none of Margaret’s story is told in present day, which I found made it feel a bit disconnected from the rest of the novel. Singularly, every single one of these perspectives is powerful, but I found the first 3 to work together as a more cohesive story. Margaret’s felt like it could have been it’s own narrative and while it added further context, it was somewhat separate from the rest, though still impactful.
But really this is a minor complaint. Multi-generational family dramas are my favourite kind of story and this is one that packs a punch. I was sad not to see this make the shortlist for the Giller, but so glad it’s still getting the praise it deserves! Definitely recommend checking this one out. Also, that cover art is gorgeous!! 4.5 stars.
Now that I’ve finished Phoebe’s latest book, I think you can officially induct me into the Phoebe Robinson fan club. I’ve read all 3 of her books very shortly after they were published and she has definitely become an auto-buy author for me.
Her first book, You Can’t Touch My Hair, was pretty good, but I was bowled over by her second book, Everything’s Trash, But It’s Okay. She has this wonderful mix of essays that are both funny and meaningful. She makes me laugh out loud, while also sending me deep into thought about how I interact with the world as a white woman. Honestly, I would love if every essay in her book was as unforgiving as her essays on motherhood and the white saviour complex, because these essays worm their way into my bones and stay with me long after reading. But I can understand how her more humourous essays also added much needed balance to the anthology.
I think this is probably my favourite book of hers to date because she covers so much ground in so few essays. The two essays mentioned above spoke to me more than some of the others, but I see so much value in everything she has written and she does a good job and writing to a lot of different audiences. No question, her essays on being a boss, travelling, and her hair are not written for me, but they still make me reflect on how differently we all interact with the world based on race, class, and gender.
I also loved that this book dedicates a lot of time to talking about the pandemic and quarantining. Not in a negative way about how our governments handled the crisis or anything, but about how we as individuals dealt with suddenly being forced to live and work in close proximity to our partners for months on end. The pandemic is finally starting to show up in some of the books that I’m reading and it was so refreshing to listen to Phoebe talk about it. We’ve all been through something over the past year and I’m so excited for the type of literary reflection we’re going to start getting in the coming years.
I definitely thought some of the essays were better than others and I would have loved to get more, shorter essays instead of so few long ones, but I can’t deny that I loved everything about this book. Phoebe knocks it out of the park on the Audiobook narration and I’m determined to finally listen to her podcasts to fill the void until her next book comes out!
Rating: ⭐⭐ Author: Tracey Lange Genres: Fiction Pub. Date: Aug. 2021 (read Sep. 2021)
I was so stoked for this one, but it turned out to be such a disappointment. It’s an easy read, with the flow between chapters being pretty smooth, but I wasn’t really a fan of the writing style. It was pretty simplistic, which is fine, but I feel like this has been marketed as literary fiction and I just didn’t see it.
We Are the Brennans tells the story of the Brennan family and their life in an Irish suburb of New York. I’m sure you guessed it from the cover, but the Brennans are Irish and as such, had a pretty conservative Irish-Catholic upbringing. Everything seemed to be going great until Sunday Brennan up and left 5 years ago and the family started falling on tough times. But now Sunday is back and the entire Brennan Family are forced to face the secrets of their past.
I live for family dramas, but this one just didn’t work for me. Aside from disliking the writing style, I thought the entire plot was predictable and pedestrian. I disliked almost all of the characters, which isn’t usually enough for me to dislike a novel, but I felt like everything in this book was overly dramatized because in reality, the author didn’t have that great a storyline. I feel like she had somewhere she wanted to take this story, but it was so poorly executed. It had a lot of the pitfalls of a debut novel in that Lange had a lot of ideas and no idea how to tie them all together in a meaningful way.
But mostly I think I just disagreed with her central themes. She had a lot of ideas about family and shame and I struggled to agree with any of them. I’ll get into the details in the spoiler section of the review, but by the end of the book I couldn’t help but acknowledge that me and Lange are just not on the same page. I feel like this Irish immigrant space is something that she knows really well, and maybe other Irish immigrants in NY might be able to relate more, but I also grew up on an island full of Irish immigrants and I felt that she really romanticized the Brennans in an unhealthy way. The book is all about family, but I thought every member in this family was toxic. She kind of tries to acknowledge this towards the end of the book (via Vivienne), but then she’s just like “sod it, they may be toxic, but they all love each other, so it’s fine”.
Anyways, it’s hard to really get into it without spoilers, but a lot of this book hinges on the reveal of a big secret about halfway through the book and this is where it all went downhill for me. I thought the secret was so problematic and that the author had so many blind spots about it that I just couldn’t move past it. So for me this book was a big miss. It’s still a somewhat entertaining read, but I wouldn’t recommend it – there are so many better family dramas out there – skip this one. . . . . . Okay, now for the spoilers. There were two parts that killed this book for me – the “secret” reveal and the ending. Let’s start with the secret.
So the big secret is basically that Sunday got drunk one night when her family was in Ireland and the bartender tricked her into coming up to his room with him. He comes on to her, she leaves, and then he pushes her down the stairs and leaves while she bleeds from a miscarriage.
This scene is so traumatic for her that she leaves New York for 5 years because she can’t bear to tell her family. She is obviously traumatized, embarrassed, and ashamed by the incident. We had an interesting discussion about this secret at book club because we thought it was silly that she didn’t feel she could tell anyone about this. She didn’t do anything wrong and her family should really only feel sympathy for her. In the long list of things that could have gone wrong for her as a woman, we felt like maybe this wasn’t the worst case scenario, the trap of “it wasn’t really that bad”.
This is the one part of the book Lange gets right. Any situation that harms a woman physically or mentally is “that bad”. Society has a tendency to create an unfair hierarchy of trauma, which only results in silencing a lot of women. I read a whole anthology about this concept (Not That Bad by Roxane Gay) and I did really like that Lange never belittled the trauma that Sunday felt from this incident.
What I didn’t like was how it all played out. Because the real reason Sunday feels she can’t tell any of her family members is because she thinks they’ll literally go out and kill Billy, which turned out to be a pretty damn justified fear. So she doesn’t tell anyone out of the fear of how they will react. Sure, it plays into her catholic upbringing, but it drove me crazy that she underwent 5 years of self-imposed exile over how someone else might react to her pain. So she not only takes ownership of what happened to her, but she takes on the added responsibility of what her brothers might or might not do in their anger.
Now I know women do this all the time – take on the responsibility of other people’s actions, but I’m f*cking sick of it. Lange could have taken this whole ordeal and written something really meaningful and healing about it, but instead she takes a woman’s pain and uses it for drama. There are several instances of victim blaming where both Sunday and Kale (maybe Denny too?) think that she had too much to drink, indirectly blaming her for Billy’s actions. There’s some exploration of how the ordeal was traumatic for Sunday, but I don’t feel like Lange ever explores that in any depth. Sunday’s assault is simply used as a lazy way in which to create this time and space between her characters and to spurn on the actions of the rest of the book’s male characters. I detest when assault is used solely for drama and the motivations of other characters and try as I might, I just couldn’t look past it throughout the entire second half of the novel. Denny, Mickey, and Kale are all toxic characters and the fact that they “love” Sunday doesn’t excuse them all going out and being violent assholes about it. In fact, it’s so toxic, her fear of it drives her away from them for 5 years.
Which brings me to my second point – the ending. So Kale leaves Vivienne even though he knows the Brennans are all toxic and liars (but their “his” liars, AWWW), and everyone seems to finally be moving forward, acknowledging that as a family they can band together and support one another because that’s what families do. But then we find out Mickey actually murdered Billy (which was also super predictable), and they’re just like, “oh…. but it’s okay, we’ll get through it together like we always do”.
I’m sorry, but what kind of messed up theme is that. What a way to end your book, with a family condoning and shielding a murderer – yeah, that’s exactly the kind of message I want to take with me from this book! If this was a thriller, sure, but it’s not and it doesn’t fit. I feel like Lange just places the Brennans on this pedestal and because of her proximity to the subject matter, she can’t see what kind of bias she brings into this story. Love doesn’t excuse your actions. You show love by showing up for your family members and creating safe spaces for them. If the theme was about surviving these kind of toxic behaviours it would be great, but this book only condones them.
Anyways, there’s other things I didn’t like (namely the treatment of Vivienne), but I feel I’ve ranted enough. Obviously I didn’t like it and I like it even less now that I’ve taken the time to vocalize why I didn’t like it. I’m honestly blown away by how many high reviews this got on goodreads. I feel like I missed something, maybe I did, but I’m still done with this book. Good riddance.
Rating: ⭐⭐⭐ Author: Ash Davidson Genres: Historical Fiction Pub. Date: Aug. 2021 (read Sep. 2021 on Audible)
The logging of old growth forests is a hot topic in BC these days and with all the big news stories about corporations polluting water supplies, the synopsis of this book really piqued my interest. It had two good narrators, so I decided to pick it up on Audible.
Damnation Spring combines the two issues I’ve summarized above into one big scandal. It’s the 1970’s and Rich and Colleen have lived in Damnation Grove for their entire lives, where Rich works as a tree-topper with a logging company and Colleen as a midwife. They have one son and have desperately been trying for a second, but poor Colleen keeps suffering miscarriages.
Through her work as a midwife, Colleen starts to remark that there have been a lot more complicated births, as well as infant deaths. Word starts to spread that other women have also been having miscarriages and rumours start to circulate that the pesticides the logging company sprays on the forest is potentially getting into the water supply and causing birth defects.
As an employee of the logging company and new owner of a swath of old growth forest that he’s dreamed of logging, Rich stands on one side of the scandal, while Colleen stands on the other. On top of everything, environmentalists and indigenous groups have been flooding the town arguing for the protection of the trees and threatening the way of life of this long time logging town.
To say this book tries to tackle a lot of issues would be an understatement. The problem was that I don’t think the author really did justice to any of them. This was actually the perfect setting for a story of such depth because so many of these issues are often related. I did really like the inclusion of the local First Nations band, who argued for the protection of the trees and waterways despite the terrible racism and abuse they suffered. I thought the idea of blending all of these issues into one was really smart and multi-faceted, it just wasn’t executed quite as well as I would have liked.
My primary criticism would actually be that this book was too long, although that’s not quite right, it’s not so much that it’s too long, but that the author didn’t really focus on the right aspects of the story. Now this is just my opinion, but the author spent a lot of time talking about logging that I just didn’t care to read. There is so much time dedicated to the logging company, the company drama, and waxing on and off about logging techniques. I just didn’t really care about any of it. I totally got and appreciated that this was a logging town and that it was the community members entire livelihood. Despite popular opinion that we shouldn’t be logging old growth forests (agree), I could still empathize with the community. I 100% bought into Rich’s dream of wanting to log the 24/7 tree, I understood why and yes, I felt bad for him. But this was the smaller part of why I wanted to read this book.
Sadly I felt Davidson just didn’t spend enough time on the whole ‘poisoning-the-water-supply’ angle. I felt like most of the book was an expose about uncovering the water pollution, versus a fight to stop it. This is covered to a certain degree, those who stood up against the spraying were definitely ostracized, but generally I found the conclusion of this plot point to be unsatisfying. It almost felt like the resolution of the two issues were tangential to one another. By which I mean, the pesticides issue was only solved because of the duplicity of the logging company selling out to the Park, negating the need for spraying. It made me question what was even the point of me reading this entire story when at the end of the day, it was still the logging company ultimately calling the shots. . It just made me feel like this was a book about logging, with all the other conflicts thrown in just for the drama of it, rather than the reverse. Likewise, I thought it should have ended earlier and felt there was some unnecessary drama thrown in at the end that didn’t really add to the story.
I did still enjoy the book, but honestly, I think I’d rather just go read some non-fiction about it instead, because we know there’s enough drama surrounding these topics that there’s no need to have to make it up.
I’ve had a bunch of people asking me my thoughts on this one and it’s a book that has me really conflicted. I’ve heard so many great things about Crying in H Mart, and I would definitely not hesitate about recommending this book. But I was really on the fence about how to rate it. I decided on a 3 star rating because I had started to lose interest during the last third of the book, but after writing this review, I found a lot more arguments for why this was actually a really good book, so I decided to increase my rating to 4 stars. One of the reasons I love taking the time to actually write reviews is it forces me to meaningfully reflect on what I’ve read.
Crying in H Mart is a memoir about the author’s relationship with her mother, food, and how the two have become intertwined. It is a deeply personal book. The primary reason I would recommend this is because the author has such raw honesty, it really did blow me away. She lost her mother to cancer a few years ago and this book is very much a manifest of her grief. It is sad and moving to read – it almost feels wrong to rate it at all, even highly, because the author so clearly wrote this book for herself more than anyone else.
The story does have some ebbs and flows. Like I mentioned, I found the last third a bit slow moving because it focuses more on the author’s life after her mother’s death (which I found somewhat monotonous and not as interesting to read), whereas the first half is so shocking in its honesty that you become completely engrossed. But what makes it powerful is it’s not just about the author’s grief, instead it’s an in-depth look at her complicated relationship with her mother, her culture, and her mixed-race family. A lot of her observations about her mother are very unforgiving. She doesn’t remember all the good things about her mother, but rather, she remembers everything about her mother – the good, the bad, and the ugly. It takes so much courage to write that kind of memoir about grief, which is why I applaud the author and ultimately why I decided to bump my rating up to 4 stars.
Even though parts of this story were less compelling to me as a reader, I feel like Zauner is committed to the memory of her mother as she was and the exploration of her grief through and through. It doesn’t matter what path grief takes or how it looks to other people, it only matters how it feels for you. It’s kind of beautiful to think that our memories of our loved ones don’t have to be confined to one narrative. We are not only the good things or the bad things that we did, we are all of those things, and I can see how remembering it all, good and bad, could be cathartic.
Overall, I think I would recommend the paperback over the audiobook. The audiobook is read by the author, which I usually love, but she is very monotone and I think that may have contributed to my fatigue with the book.
The Paperback Princess 