The English Understand Wool, by Helen DeWitt
I just have this to say about this book: run out right now and buy yourself a copy. (okay okay, you can also borrow it, but you are going to want your own copy, trust me). It is funny, surprising, well-written, sophisticated. The hard copy is beautifully made. It is also just 50 pages long. But deeply satisfying on a 250-page level. I refuse to spoil it by saying anything more.
Greenwood, by Michael Christie
A story that begins in 2038 and then travels generationally back in time to 1908, following the ancestry of the Greenwood family who may, or may not, be who they seem to be. Ok, it’s really not as mysterious as all that, but it’s a great bit of story-telling! And by “bit” I mean 600 pages (pairs nicely with the 50-page Helen DeWitt book). The structure reminded me of Cloud Atlas, minus the scifi stuff, in the way that mysteries are revealed in the second half of the book, as we continue our journey in reverse, from 1908 back to the story-present time of 2038. Eco-anxiety alert – there is some despair around the potential fate of trees 🙁
What Strange Paradise, by Omar El Akkad
This was an Amnesty International book club pick, and is the story of a 9 year old Syrian refugee, the sole survivor of an overloaded, broken-down ship that sinks off the shore of a small island already overrun with refugees. The book was met with mixed reviews at our book club. Criticisms included a lack of relatable and likeable characters which could have been fixed with greater depth of character development. Personally I think there was a reason for this but the reason is a major spoiler. One person was also disappointed at the inclusion of a particular epigraph that, if you understand the reference, gives away the entire story. With the benefit of hindsight, she is absolutely correct, so fair warning, if you read the book, you may want to skip over the first epigraph page (or at least don’t research what it is in reference to).
The Maidens, by Alex Michaelides
My husband is one of the few people who didn’t like the movie The Sixth Sense (and by “didn’t like” I mean “hated”). It’s his opinion that the movie purposely misled viewers, and he was not remotely impressed at the big reveal because he feels we were, in fact, lied to. As expected, there have been a lot of “yes, buts” in response to his arguments. Case in point: when Bruce Willis’s character Malcolm meets with Cole’s (Haley Joel Osment’s) mother Lynn (Toni Collette), there is a brief scene of them sitting in the same room, awkwardly not speaking or looking at each other. This is a lie, according to my husband, and if you’ve seen the movie you know why it’s filmed this way. The “yes, but” comes from Cole saying “they only see what they want to see” to explain Malcolm not noticing that no conversation was taking place. Fair, but I can see my husband’s point (ditto when Malcolm is late to meet his wife for his anniversary dinner and she ignores him, grabs the cheque, and leaves, “yes but” he was late and she was probably just angry). The Maidens was a bit like this for me. IMO the author tries way to hard to create a bunch of different viable suspects for a murder, to the point where we are certain the murderer had a dog as a child and one of the suspects has a picture in his living room of himself with a dog. But none of these people are the actual culprit and the real murder is so far from someone you’d suspect, I feel in way like I was lied to. “Yes but” all the misdirection still fit into the story, just in entirely unexpected ways. In summary, it wasn’t a terrible book and anyone who liked The Sixth Sense might enjoy it a lot. Yes, but the deception went a little too far for my liking.