Should this come with a trigger warning?

A reminder and a warning.

Reminder: If you are joining us for the Nerdy Friend book club, remember to read the next two stories and add your comments here.

Warning: This is a longer one than usual! I had an extremely productive month of reading, and you are being subjected to write-ups on 6 books. Next month migration season opens so it will likely even out.

In The Woods, by Tana French

I include Tana French among my favourite authors, along with Guy Kay (who needs to write another book!), Emily St. John Mandl, and Marina Endicott. In The Woods is her debut novel, and introduces detective partners Rob Ryan and Cassie Maddox. Tana is a master at writing characters who are complex and flawed and lost, who make bad decisions and are trapped inside their inability to make them right, who negatively alter the course of their life through stubbornness and hurt feeling. Like me. Like any of us. (Trigger: relationship problems.)

Tiny Beautiful Things, by Cheryl Strayed

I might be the only person who didn’t *love* Cheryl Strayed’s book Wild, which I found a bit self-indulgent and tedious. But I read Tiny Beautiful Things on the recommendation of one of my neighbourhood book club members and because I didn’t have to wait 37 weeks for it on Libby. And I have to say I liked it better, for the most part. For a short-ish stint, Cheryl played the role of a school-of-hard-knocks advice columnist named Sugar, during which time she doles out advice in the form of harsh truths like how to break up with a long term friend who is holding you back, or how you deserve to find love but might not find it if you don’t first love yourself. She tempers this advice with her own extremely personal and moving stories which help soften the blow, so to speak. My complaint is that by the end of the book it felt like way too many stories were of people struggled to find (or feel deserving of) love and it started to feel like just a medium for Cheryl to share her own stories over selecting the best letters to provide a broad range of other people’s struggles. Maybe this is just a reflection of the lonely world we now live in, thanks to (anti)social media, but it did feel like this is yet another book that could have been 50 pages shorter. (Trigger: lots of relationship problems.)

The Story of Us, by Catherine Hernandez

To be right upfront, I didn’t like this book, and I am a bit surprised at all the accolades it received! There were some odd (to me) creative choices, the most troublesome one being that the story is narrated by a character, MG, who is a baby/fetus/”maybe baby”(a “maybe baby” is an unfertilized egg). I didn’t love this narrative choice, but I didn’t hate it so much as I hated the idea of it. In a world where women are denied access to pregnancy-termination health care because religious wackos and alt-right control freaks argue that a “fetus” is a “baby”, this seems like an irresponsible choice.

But still, I honestly enjoyed the first half of the book quite a bit, with its peek into the lives of Filipina nannies. It was especially interesting, and sometimes not so easy, to read the perspective on how Canadians take advantage of their nannies (backing them into working for free on their days off, for example) and also on the way our speech forces people to repeat themselves when we use expressions like “are you kidding me?” 

However, I felt, in the second half, the book lost its way, when MG finds work caring for a transgender woman with Alzheimer’s. At this point, it couldn’t seem to settle on a theme. Is this a book about a Filipina nanny dealing with the insensitivity and culture shock of living far away from home? Is it a book about caring for someone with Alzheimer’s? Is it about realizing one’s own transphobia? Is it about the sacrifices we make for family that maybe aren’t as appreciated as we think they should be? Is it about community? Is it about generational trauma? Is it a story about sexual assault? What the heck, Catherine! Make up your mind!! It seemed like any time there was a deeply compelling line of story-telling, she skipped right onto resolution and acceptance. For example, one minute the nanny, MG, is disgusted by the idea of Liz, a “man who pretends to be a woman”, and practically one paragraph later she’s picking out dresses for her to wear to the market. In another paragraph-long bit of growth, MG transitions from discomfort to acceptance in referring to a nonbinary person, Ash, as “they/them”. I would have appreciated more depth to the inner reflections MG must have gone through to come to terms with these very foreign ideas. It was also in the second half of the book that the narration lost its charm for me. Here we have a baby narrating not to us, the reader, but to Liz (using “you” pronouns) and referring to her (the baby’s) mother MG in third person (using “she” or sometimes “MG” or sometimes “Ma”) and then throwing in Ash who is referred to as “they”. I don’t have any issues with the pronouns of any of these people (you, she, they) except that because of the way the writing was structured it was often extremely confusing to figure out what or who was being talked to or about. And significantly, if I was transphobic, nothing in this book would make me re-evaluate my views because she doesn’t stay with the topic long enough to compel it. (Trigger: too many to mention.)

A Pitying of Doves, by Steve Burrows

Burrows’ second book, and while the first one was enjoyable, I found this one much more satisfying. He’s smoothed the edges off his between-chapter leaps in time and place, and he’s starting to round out his cast of characters, giving them more depth and complexity. His main character, Domenic Jejeune is still a bit overly introspective, and I look forward to him starting to open up a bit more to his colleagues as he becomes more comfortable with them. Otherwise, eight books of Jejeune’s reticence is going to become tiresome. (Trigger: relationship problems.)

A Man Called Ove, by Fredrik Backman

After being recommended by two of my fellow readers, I happened to find a copy in a church book sale for a dollar so I caved and bought it. I was promised laugh out loud along with some sad parts that might make me cry and that’s pretty accurate. Maybe more smiles than actual LOLs, but close enough. Ove is suicidal, dreaming of the day he joins his deceased wife in some better place, but don’t worry, his suicide attempts keep getting interrupted by his overly gregarious neighbours. I was surprised that the book didn’t come with content warnings, since that seems to be the way especially where themes of suicide are concerned. That said, listen to the podcast Search Engine, episode titled “What do trigger warnings actually do” to find how, in many cases, they are actually increasing anxiety rather than reducing it. (Trigger: suicide.)

Mother-Daughter Murder Night, by Nina Simon

I was going to comment about how one of the main characters is undergoing chemotherapy to treat lung cancer but still manages to have the energy to primp, dress in Armani suits, and click around on kitten heels. Then I read in the epilogue that the writer was dealing with her own mother going through chemo treatment while writing the book and then thought who the hell am I to judge what someone dealing with cancer and chemo can and wants to do to feel like a human being! Don’t be so judgmental, Risa!!

Reading this book clarified a few wheelhouse things for me. Detectives doing a less-than-bang-up job, for whatever reason, and being shown up by amateur sleuths .. like it. If the detective in question is a man and the amateur is a woman … even better (because frankly, we all know that men ignore women ALL THE TIME and it’s satisfying to watch vicariously as a man gets upstaged by a woman. Sorry. No, wait, not sorry.) If there is a second, insider detective who secretly sides with the amateur … excellent! There is a caveat, however. I like this in a one-off book, but hate it in a series, because eventually I want to yell at the characters just get over yourselves and get along for pete’s sake! (Trigger: men yelling like big babies.)