Mini-Reviews: December 2023

I have been reading (some, at least), but I sure haven't been posting reviews! And this week totally got away from me when I got sick with norovirus just before Christmas - it took me out for five days! To make sure I get reviews posted in the year that I read the books, I'm going to bust out mini-reviews for the books I've read and haven't reviewed yet this year. 

Darling Girl: A Novel of Peter Pan by Liz Michalski

352 pages

Published May 2022 by Penguin Publishing Group

Source: discovered when the author commented on one of my Instagram posts

Publisher's Summary: 

Life is looking up for Holly Darling, granddaughter of Wendy—yes, that Wendy. That is, until she gets a call that her daughter, Eden, who has been in a coma for nearly a decade, has gone missing from the estate where she’s been long tucked away. And, worst of all, Holly knows who must be responsible: Peter Pan, who is not only very real, but very dangerous. Holly is desperate to find Eden and protect her son, Jack, from a terrible web of family secrets before she loses both her children. And yet she has no one to turn to—her mother, Jane, is the only other person in the world who knows that Peter is more than a story, but she refuses to accept that he is not the hero'she’s always imagined. 

Darling Girl brings all the magic of the classic Peter Pan story to the present, while also exploring the dark underpinnings of fairy tales, grief, aging, sacrifice, motherhood, and just how far we will go to protect those we love.

My Thoughts: 

It's not uncommon for an author to comment on an Instagram post, likely in search of finding a reader interested in taking a look at their work. I don't usually follow up but this time I did and was intrigued. By a coincidence, I also happened to be reading the next book at the same time. Two books inspired by classics, both where our perceptions from the classic are turned upside down. 

You'll have to accept a big of magic (but then you know that going in, of course), that you might never understand some of the "science," and that Eden was kept a secret from everyone for years. The sense of urgency I would have expected was somewhat missing. But I really enjoyed the way Michalski incorporated the key characters from the classic and picked up from that storyline to craft her own work. It was a good escape from heavy reads while also touching on heavy themes. I enjoyed it a lot. Thanks for commenting on my post, Ms. Michalski, and introducing me to your novel!

The Fairytale Life of Dorothy Gale by Virginia Kantra

384 pages

Published December 2023 by Penguin Publishing Group

Source: my copy courtesy of the publisher, through Netgalley, in exchange for an honest review

Publisher's Summary: 

Dorothy “Dee” Gale is searching for a place to belong. After their globe-trotting mother’s death, Dee and her sister Toni settled with Uncle Henry and Aunt Em in Kansas, where Dee attends graduate school. But when Dee’s relationship with a faculty member, a bestselling novelist, ends in heartbreak and humiliation, she’s caught in a tornado of negative publicity. Unable to face her colleagues—or her former lover—Dee applies to the writing program at Trinity College Dublin. Dee’s journey to Ireland leads her to new companions: seemingly brainless Sam Clery—who dropped out of college and now runs a newsagent’s shop—is charming and hot, in a dissolute, Irish poet kind of way; allegedly heartless Tim Woodman—who stiffly refused to take back his ex-fiancée—seems stuck in his past; and fiercely loyal Reeti Kaur, who longs for the courage to tell her parents she wants to teach underprivileged girls rather than work in the family business. 

In a year of opportunities and changes, love and loss, Dee is mentored by powerful women in the writing program, challenging her to see herself and her work with new eyes. With her friends, Dee finds the confidence to confront her biggest fears—including her intimidating graduate advisor, who may not be so wicked after all. Faced with a choice with far-reaching consequences, Dee must apply the lessons she’s learned along the way about making a family, finding a home...and recognizing the power that’s been inside her all along.

My Thoughts: 

This one takes the original classic and moves it into the twenty-first century. Dorothy is now "Dee"; sister Toni's nickname is "Toto." After they're orphaned, they move in with their aunt and uncle on a Kansas farm, where they're provided everything they need but never feel the warmth of love Dee craves. So when that tornado of bad publicity, instead of moving home, she travels to Ireland (Oz). There she meets her scarecrow, tin man, lion, Glenda, and a wicked witch. 

This being not just a retelling of The Wizard of Oz, but also a romance, you know that everything will end well. The fun is all in the getting there, in seeing each of the characters get what they want (or, in at least a couple of cases, what they deserve), in seeing the ways that Kantra works in so many parts of the classic while still telling a story that sounds contemporary. It was just what I needed when I read it - fun, an ending I wanted, and all of the familiarity I seemed to have craved. 

Wellness by Nathan Hill

Read by Ari Flakes

18 hours, 56 minutes

Published September 2023 by Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group

Publisher's Summary: 

When Jack and Elizabeth meet as college students in the gritty '90s Chicago art scene, the two quickly join forces and hold on tight, each eager to claim a place in the thriving underground scene with an appreciative kindred spirit. Fast-forward twenty years to suburban married life, and alongside the challenges of parenting, they encounter the often-baffling pursuits of health and happiness from polyamorous would-be suitors to home-renovation hysteria. For the first time, Jack and Elizabeth struggle to recognize each other, and the no-longer-youthful dreamers are forced to face their demons, from unfulfilled career ambitions to childhood memories of their own dysfunctional families. In the process, Jack and Elizabeth must undertake separate, personal excavations, or risk losing the best thing in their lives: each other.

My Thoughts: 

I'm seeing this one on lots of "best of 2023" lists and it was an Oprah's Book Club pick. And I get that there's a lot of meat to this one, a lot to think about, a lot to discuss. But it's so, so long and reading a book about a marriage falling apart was just not the thing I wanted to read when I was listening to this one. Maybe if I had read this one at a different time of year, instead of a time of year when I was trying to work so hard to keep in the spirit of the season, I would have enjoyed it more. Publisher's Weekly called this one Dickensian and it certainly did have that feel; things just kept getting worse and worse. It also says that this book never loses sight of its humanity; but, for me, it felt more like Hill was interested in getting his ideas out into the world. Hill asks the questions: do the narratives we craft give our lives meaning, do they harm us or do they help us? I don't know. What I do know was that I felt like both Jack and Elizabeth decided it was easier to give up because things didn't turn out easy and the way they expected. And I found that far too frustrating to enjoy the book.

All The Beauty In The World: The Metropolitan Museum of Art and Me by Patrick Bringley

240 pages

Published February 2023 by Simon and Schuster

Publisher's Summary:

Millions of people climb the grand marble staircase to visit the Metropolitan Museum of Art every year. But only a select few have unrestricted access to every nook and cranny. They’re the guards who roam unobtrusively in dark blue suits, keeping a watchful eye on the two million square foot treasure house. 

Caught up in his glamorous fledgling career at The New Yorker, Patrick Bringley never thought he’d be one of them. Then his older brother was diagnosed with fatal cancer and he found himself needing to escape the mundane clamor of daily life. So he quit The New Yorker and sought solace in the most beautiful place he knew. To his surprise and the reader’s delight, this temporary refuge becomes Bringley’s home away from home for a decade. We follow him as he guards delicate treasures from Egypt to Rome, strolls the labyrinths beneath the galleries, wears out nine pairs of company shoes, and marvels at the beautiful works in his care. 

Bringley enters the museum as a ghost, silent and almost invisible, but soon finds his voice and his tribe: the artworks and their creators and the lively subculture of museum guards—a gorgeous mosaic of artists, musicians, blue-collar stalwarts, immigrants, cutups, and dreamers. As his bonds with his colleagues and the art grow, he comes to understand how fortunate he is to be walled off in this little world, and how much it resembles the best aspects of the larger world to which he gradually, gratefully returns. In the tradition of classic workplace memoirs like Lab Girl and Working Stiff, All The Beauty in the World is a surprising, inspiring portrait of a great museum, its hidden treasures, and the people who make it tick, by one of its most intimate observers.

My Thoughts: 

Now this one, at a relatively slim 240 pages, caught my interest immediately, and held it tight. Bringley does a lovely job of weaving together the circumstances of his life that brought him to the Met and how those circumstances made it the perfect job for him in that moment. 

Bringley has a tremendous appreciation of the works housed in the met and had me looking up works of art constantly. I have always regretted that the hubby and I had devoted so little time to the Met when we went there while in NYC on our honeymoon (seriously, I saw the Brooklyn Bridge, I could have skipped walking on it) and now I'm feeling like a trip to NYC just to spend a couple of days there might need to be scheduled. 

This is a lovely book filled with appreciation for the working people of the Met and the wonders displayed there. It's also a lovely book about how one man dealt with grief. I highly recommend this one. 

The Rachel Incident by Caroline O'Donoghue

The Rachel Incident by Caroline O'Donoghue

304 pages

Published by Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group

Source: my copy courtesy of the publisher, through Netgalley, in exchange for an honest review

Publisher's Summary: 

Rachel is a student working at a bookstore when she meets James, and it’s love at first sight. Effervescent and insistently heterosexual, James soon invites Rachel to be his roommate and the two begin a friendship that changes the course of both their lives forever. Together, they run riot through the streets of Cork city, trying to maintain a bohemian existence while the threat of the financial crash looms before them. 

When Rachel falls in love with her married professor, Dr. Fred Byrne, James helps her devise a reading at their local bookstore, with the goal that she might seduce him afterwards. But Fred has other desires. So begins a series of secrets and compromises that intertwine the fates of James, Rachel, Fred, and Fred’s glamorous, well-connected, bourgeois wife. Aching with unrequited love, shot through with delicious, sparkling humor, The Rachel Incident is a triumph.

My Thoughts: 

We first encounter Rachel years later, when she is married, pregnant and a journalist (finally using that college degree). She's come across an article mentioning that Fred has fallen into a coma and it takes Rachel straight back to the past, to the time when she first met James while working in a bookstore together. At six-foot tall, bookish, and adrift, Rachel was easy prey for James, who all but bullied his way into her life. Soon the two were living together, becoming the best of friends. "Running riot" is a good description of the lives they were living; "bohemian existence" is putting it nicely. 

Everything is going swimmingly, despite them struggling to make ends meet. When James comes to the reality that he's gay, they both embrace it. But when James and Fred hook up, it changes things. Yes, Fred brings them bottles of wine, flowers, and fancy foods. But it's hard for Rachel to see Fred, her literature professor, as her best friend's lover. Until, in desperation, she realizes she can use the situation to her own advantage. Soon Fred has found her a position as his wife's intern, a position which pays poorly but gives Rachel an emotional life and a new friend. 

Meanwhile Rachel has found herself a boyfriend, a young man who is more than a little listless and unreliable. When he has to go home to care for his mother, Rachel discovers that she's pregnant. Through a misunderstanding and other circumstances, Rachel finds her relationship with Fred's wife at an end, her relationship with James tested, and herself a pariah in the community. 

O'Donoghue manages to create a book that starts out very much playing for laughs but the humor gets darker as life gets harder and harder for Rachel. Ireland in an economic collapse means Rachel's only hope for a job is in a call center, her parents' dental practice is going under, and her boyfriend can't be relied on to help. O'Donoghue tackles a lot in this one - sexuality, sexual identity, infidelity, economic crisis, unwanted pregnancy and the difficulty in finding medical help, parent/child relationships, friendships, morality. Rachel isn't always a sympathetic character, but I couldn't help but care for her, especially as the adults around her kept letting her down. I was glad that O'Donoghue circled back to the beginning of the book and gave readers (and Rachel) some closure and hope. 

Mini-reviews: Nine Perfect Strangers by Liane Moriarty and Jackal by Erin E. Adams

Because I know that I'm going to forget what I even thought of some of these books, I'm going to have to resort to mini-reviews...again.  

Nine Perfect Strangers by Liane Moriarty 

Read by Caroline Lee

Published September 2018 by Flatiron Books 

Publisher's Summary: 

Could ten days at a health resort really change you forever? 

These nine perfect strangers are about to find out... 

Nine people gather at a remote health resort. Some are here to lose weight, some are here to get a reboot on life, some are here for reasons they can’t even admit to themselves. Amidst all of the luxury and pampering, the mindfulness and meditation, they know these ten days might involve some real work. But none of them could imagine just how challenging the next ten days are going to be. 

Frances Welty, the formerly best-selling romantic novelist, arrives at Tranquillum House nursing a bad back, a broken heart, and an exquisitely painful paper cut. She’s immediately intrigued by her fellow guests. Most of them don’t look to be in need of a health resort at all. But the person that intrigues her most is the strange and charismatic owner/director of Tranquillum House. Could this person really have the answers Frances didn’t even know she was seeking? Should Frances put aside her doubts and immerse herself in everything Tranquillum House has to offer—or should she run while she still can? 

It’s not long before every guest at Tranquillum House is asking exactly the same question.

My Thoughts: 

I've long been a fan of Moriarty's and even when I felt like one of her books was starting slowly, it always came around to draw me in, to make me think. I come to care for the characters. 

Except this one. I kept waiting for the moment when Moriarty would reel me in but it never happened. Maybe it was because I never cared much for any of the characters. As much as we learned about them, I never felt like any of them was particularly nuanced; rather that they were each developed to fill a need. I fact, before I finished listening, I had set the pace to 150%. I had heard that this one wasn't Moriarty's best, but I assumed that even a lessor Moriarty would still be a book I'd enjoy. I'm sorry to say I was wrong. 

Jackal by Erin E. Adams

336 pages

Published October 2022 by Bantam

Publisher's Summary: 

It’s watching. 

Liz Rocher is coming home . . . reluctantly. As a Black woman, Liz doesn’t exactly have fond memories of Johnstown, Pennsylvania, a predominantly white town. But her best friend is getting married, so she braces herself for a weekend of awkward and passive-aggressive reunions. Liz has grown, though; she can handle whatever awaits her. But on the day of the wedding, somewhere between dancing and dessert, the bride’s daughter, Caroline, goes missing—and the only thing left behind is a piece of white fabric covered in blood. 

It’s taking. 

As a frantic search begins, with the police combing the trees for Caroline, Liz is the only one who notices a pattern: a summer night. A missing girl. A party in the woods. She’s seen this before. Keisha Woodson, the only other Black girl in school, walked into the woods with a mysterious man and was later found with her chest cavity ripped open and her heart missing. Liz shudders at the thought that it could have been her, and now, with Caroline missing, it can’t be a coincidence. As Liz starts to dig through the town’s history, she uncovers a horrifying secret about the place she once called home. Children have been going missing in these woods for years. All of them Black. All of them girls. 

It’s your turn. 

With the evil in the forest creeping closer, Liz knows what she must do: find Caroline, or be entirely consumed by the darkness.

My Thoughts:

Honestly can't remember what made me request this book on Netgalley. I think I received an email saying, "since you read _______, you might like Jackal." I must have liked that first book because it made me think I would enjoy this one. And I did. But for one thing and I'm not sure I can even tell you what it was, without giving away the ending of the book. 

Let's just say that it threw the book into a genre that isn't my usual read. To be fair to the book, Adams gave me plenty of hints that's where she was going. I just kept hoping that the evil would turn out to be something different. Fair enough to say that there's plenty of evil in this book that has nothing to do with fantastical elements. And there are plenty of monsters of all kinds, as Adams uses the horror genre to explore racism. 

Did I hope for a different ending? Yes, slightly. But along the way, Adams had me chasing my tail, trying to figure out who Liz needed to be most afraid of, tossing red herrings out all through the book, making a book that was well worth the read. 

Ancestor Trouble (A Reckoning and A Reconciliation) by Maud Newton

Ancestor Trouble (A Reckoning and A Reconciliation) by Maud Newton

400 pages 

Published March 2022 by Random House Publishing Group

Source: my copy courtesy of the publisher, through Netgalley, in exchange for an honest review

Publisher's Summary: 

Maud Newton’s ancestors have vexed and fascinated her since she was a girl. Her mother’s father, who came of age in Texas during the Great Depression, was said to have married thirteen times and been shot by one of his wives. Her mother’s grandfather killed a man with a hay hook and died in an institution. Mental illness and religious fanaticism percolated through Maud’s maternal lines back to an ancestor accused of being a witch in Puritan-era Massachusetts. Maud’s father, an aerospace engineer turned lawyer, was an educated man who extolled the virtues of slavery and obsessed over the “purity” of his family bloodline, which he traced back to the Revolutionary War. He tried in vain to control Maud’s mother, a whirlwind of charisma and passion given to feverish projects: thirty rescue cats, and a church in the family’s living room where she performed exorcisms. 

Her parents’ divorce, when it came, was a relief. Still, her position at the intersection of her family bloodlines inspired in Newton inspired an anxiety that she could not shake, a fear that she would replicate their damage. She saw similar anxieties in the lives of friends, in the works of writers and artists she admired. As obsessive in her own way as her parents, Newton researched her genealogy—her grandfather’s marriages, the accused witch, her ancestors’ roles in slavery and genocide—and sought family secrets through her DNA. But immersed in census archives and cousin matches, she yearned for deeper truths. Her journey took her into the realms of genetics, epigenetics, and the debates over intergenerational trauma. She mulled over modernity’s dismissal of ancestors along with psychoanalytic and spiritual traditions that center them. 

Searching, moving, and inspiring, Ancestor Trouble is one writer’s attempt to use genealogy—a once-niche hobby that has grown into a multi-billion-dollar industry—to expose the secrets and contradictions of her own ancestors, and to argue for the transformational possibilities that reckoning with our ancestors offers all of us. 

My Thoughts: 

Had I shared with you recently that I've been thinking about taking a break from blogging and focusing that time instead to genealogy? A number of things have been driving me that direction and this books is one of them. I don't have nearly the colorful family history that Newton does (a friend once commented that my childhood was like something out of a sixties television program) but I'm yearning to learn more about the reality of our families, not just their names and dates of death. Newton, on the other hand, had some (well, a lot) of questions to be answered in her research, not the least of which was to understand why she is the person she is. 

Newton's father routinely severely punished her for things like getting a B+ (he is no longer a part of her life). Newton's mother did nothing when Newton told her mother that her stepfather had raped her. Her granny warned her to watch for signs of mental illness in herself (Granny's own sister had spent most of her life in a mental institution after having danced naked in the streets). How could she be the product of these people Newton came to wonder. 

As Newton begins to research her family history, she discovers that it's not simply enough to know about her ancestors. She needs to know the "why" of how she became the person she is because of who they were. This leads her to research epigenetics (I keep coming across that study since I read Jamie Ford's The Many Daughters of Afong Moy, which introduced me to the idea), neuroscience, genograms, and spiritual practices. Newton ties a piece of her own personal ancestry and life with her research into each of these subjects making them more understandable for the lay person. 

You know you've read a book that's important when it doesn't just inspire and educate you, but when reviews of it show up on NPR and in the New York Times (and I highly recommend looking up those reviews because they are certainly more eloquent about this book than I am). 

Newton asks a lot of questions, many of which can't be answered. But this book certainly has me asking questions and hoping to find answers of my own. Although, as Newton found out, we won't necessarily like the answers we find when we begin looking into our ancestors. 

Dark Tides by Philippa Gregory

Dark Tides (The Fairmile Series Book 2) by Philippa Gregory

Published November 2020 by Atria Books

Source: my copy courtesy of the publisher, through Netgalley, in exchange for an honest review

Publisher's Summary:

Midsummer Eve 1670. Two unexpected visitors arrive at a shabby warehouse on the south side of the River Thames. The first is a wealthy man hoping to find the lover he deserted twenty-one years before. James Avery has everything to offer, including the favour of the newly restored King Charles II, and he believes that the warehouse's poor owner Alinor has the one thing his money cannot buy—his son and heir.

The second visitor is a beautiful widow from Venice in deepest mourning. She claims Alinor as her mother-in-law and has come to tell Alinor that her son Rob has drowned in the dark tides of the Venice lagoon.

Alinor writes to her brother Ned, newly arrived in faraway New England and trying to make a life between the worlds of the English newcomers and the American Indians as they move toward inevitable war. Alinor tells him that she knows—without doubt—that her son is alive and the widow is an imposter.

Set in the poverty and glamour of Restoration London, in the golden streets of Venice, and on the tensely contested frontier of early America, this is a novel of greed and desire: for love, for wealth, for a child, and for home.

My Thoughts:

I haven't read any of Phillipa Gregory's books since The Other Boleyn Girl. When I got an email about this book, I thought it was time to give her stories another chance. Did the pitch mention this was part of a series? I don't remember. 

I was 100 pages into this book before I realized it was the second book in a series. To be sure, there's plenty of backstory hinted at throughout but Gregory does such a good job of making it seem to be part of the way she wanted to tell her story that it never appeared to be an attempt to catch readers up on a first book. Except...

There are two story lines here, that of Alinor's family in London and that of Ned in the New World. As they summary says, they're brother and sister who write to each other and Ned occasionally sends boxes of herbs. And that is as close as the two stories ever come to intersecting; it was obvious about half way through the book that that would be the case. Alinor's family's story was much more interesting to me and I raced through those chapters, although Ned's might have been a fine story if I were reading it in it's own book. Gregory makes both locations come alive and there are some really terrific characters in both story lines but Alinor's story is the story that has the action and the suspense.

And in the end? Dark Tides is literally the The Empire Strikes Back of this book series. We only ever get the barest glimpse of the entire backstory and the stories more or less just drop off at the end of this book. There may, in fact, actually be more loose ends by the last page as there were at the beginning. 

If you're a fan of Gregory's, I think you'll enjoy this one. And if you've already read Tidelands, I think you won't be disappointed in this next installment of Alinor's story. If you haven't read that one, read it first. 

Bronte's Mistress by Finola Austin

Bronte's Mistress by Finola Austin

Published August 2020 by Atria Books

Source: my copy courtesy of the publisher, through Netgalley, in exchange for an honest review

Publisher's Summary:

Yorkshire, 1843: Lydia Robinson—mistress of Thorp Green Hall—has lost her precious young daughter and her mother within the same year. She returns to her bleak home, grief-stricken and unmoored. With her teenage daughters rebelling, her testy mother-in-law scrutinizing her every move, and her marriage grown cold, Lydia is restless and yearning for something more. 

All of that changes with the arrival of her son’s tutor, Branwell Brontë, brother of her daughters’ governess, Miss Anne Brontë and those other writerly sisters, Charlotte and Emily. Branwell has his own demons to contend with—including living up to the ideals of his intelligent family—but his presence is a breath of fresh air for Lydia. Handsome, passionate, and uninhibited by social conventions, he’s also twenty-five to her forty-three. A love of poetry, music, and theatre bring mistress and tutor together, and Branwell’s colorful tales of his sisters’ elaborate play-acting and made-up worlds form the backdrop for seduction. 

But Lydia’s new taste of passion comes with consequences. As Branwell’s inner turmoil rises to the surface, his behavior grows erratic and dangerous, and whispers of their passionate relationship spout from her servants’ lips, reaching all three protective Brontë sisters. Soon, it falls on Lydia to save not just her reputation, but her way of life, before those clever girls reveal all her secrets in their novels. Unfortunately, she might be too late. 

Meticulously researched and deliciously told, Brontë’s Mistress is a captivating reimagining of the scandalous affair that has divided Brontë enthusiasts for generations and an illuminating portrait of a courageous, sharp-witted woman who fights to emerge with her dignity intact.

My Thoughts:

I'm a huge fan of the writings of the Bronte sisters - Emily, Anne, and Charlotte left their marks on the world. Their only brother, Branwell, did not. He floundered through his life, unable to find his path and a victim of his addictions. What Branwell did leave, though, were letters intimating that he may have had an affair with one of his employer's wives, Lydia Robinson. 

Austin took what is known about their relationship and crafted it into a novel that explores Lydia's side of the relationship. In Austin's hands, Lydia is a complicated character and I had mixed feelings about her. It's a fact that Lydia was married to an older man, in a time period where a woman's security depended on men. It's also a fact that she had only recently lost a child when Branwell began working for the family. Austin takes all of those facts and takes things up a notch making Lydia a woman who wasn't necessarily a fan of being a mother, particuarly not of her surviving daughters, viewing them more as burdens to be unloaded onto the best match she could make than as cherished parts of her heart. Edmund Robinson is portrayed as a man who has lost whatever passion he might once have felt for his wife, whose mother matters more to him than his wife, and whose gambling habit will eventually leave Lydia in a position where she must rely on others to survive after Edmund's death. 

It was easy to imagine why Lydia might be attracted to a handsome young man who shows her attention and there was certainly a part of me that cheered for Lydia to find some happiness. And then a part of me that grew increasingly frustrated with her recklessness, especially as it became clear that Branwell could not be relied upon to be cautious nor quiet about their affair. Once things really changed for Lydia, though, at a time where I should have felt sorry for her, I found her increasingly irritating and annoyed with the choices she made. It was hard to feel sorry for her. And then it occured to me that Lydia reminded me very much of Becky Sharpe in William Thackeray's Vanity Fair; another woman whose passion undid her and who did whatever it took to survive. It didn't make me like Lydia any more. She was still a woman who Austin portrays as jealous of the relationship between her daughters and their governess but more angry at her daughters for not trying harder to be close to her than she was willing to make that effort. But I could see better what Austin was doing. 

Ms. Austin has clearly done her research and does a fine job of painting a picture of what life was like in that time and place. I would have liked to see a little more character development. Only Lydia felt like she was fully developed; Edmund, their daughters, and other family members and friends often felt like caricatures. The book might actually have benefited from more development of Lydia's other relationships as well. Overall, if I were to put a grade on this one, I'd give it a C, an average book that has good moments and I don't regret reading. Other reviewers on Goodreads gave it much higher marks. I'd recommend you look at a few reviews before you make your decision if you're thinking of picking this one up.

Daddy: Stories by Emma Cline

Daddy: Stories by Emma Cline

Published September 2020 by Random House Publishing Group

Source: my copy courtesy of the publisher, through Netgalley, in exchange for an honest review

Publisher's Summary:

An absentee father collects his son from boarding school after a shocking act of violence. A nanny to a celebrity family hides out in Laurel Canyon in the aftermath of a tabloid scandal. A young woman sells her underwear to strangers. A notorious guest arrives at a placid, not-quite rehab in the Southwest. 

In ten remarkable stories, Emma Cline portrays moments when the ordinary is disturbed, when daily life buckles, revealing the perversity and violence pulsing under the surface. She explores characters navigating the edge, the limits of themselves and those around them: power dynamics in families, in relationships, the distance between their true and false selves. They want connection, but what they provoke is often closer to self-sabotage. What are the costs of one’s choices? Of the moments when we act, or fail to act? These complexities are at the heart of Daddy, Emma Cline’s sharp-eyed illumination of the contrary impulses that animate our inner lives.

My Thoughts:

Four years ago I read and reviewed Cline's debut, The Girls, and was impressed by her writing and remarked that I was looking forward to reading more of her work. So I jumped at the change to read her latest effort; but I'm nearly always torn about short story collections and this one was no exception. As is so often the case, some stories were more interesting than others; and, although there's no doubt that the stories are, for the most part well written, some are certainly better written. 

All of the stories are small pieces of the bigger picture. In many of the stories, we soon become aware that we have missed something big and we leave the story still not aware of exactly what has happened. But what has happened isn't exactly the point of the story; how the characters react is a story unto itself. The stories are, to my way of thinking, unceasingly dark, exposing the ugliness of people. Some of the stories focus on the older men looking back on the failures of their lives (What You Can Do With A General, which looks at a father who doesn't under his grown children who have come home); others focus on young women dealing with the seedy side of the world they live in (Los Angeles, about a young woman who decides to take advantage of the sexual perversity of men without understanding the ramifications of her actions). 

My takeaways from this collection:

• Cline is certainly a talented young author who writes intelligent works and who crafts realistic stories and characters.
• From what I've seen so far, Cline is inclined to look at the dark side of life.
• Knowing that going in will help set expectations and help me to make sure I'm reading her work in the right frame of mind. 

When you're reading books for review, you don't necessarily get the chance to read the book that suits your mood. I don't think this one did that for me and I can't help but wonder if I would actually have enjoyed it more if I had read it at another time. Or, if I so often wonder about short story collections, if I would have enjoyed it more if I had broken it up instead of reading straight through it.