November 3, 2023
Four Books I Really Loved
These four books are going to have spots on my Favourite Books of the Year list for sure, so I want to make note of them them here, but (apart from Penance, which I read last weekend) they were also books just so thoroughly read for pleasure that I didn’t want the work of writing a proper review….
Penance, by Eliza Clark
I bought Penance after reading a review in the New York Times and I was so glad I did. Set in a desolate English seaside town (is there any other kind of English seaside town?) on the literal eve of Brexit, it’s the story of a teenage girl who is set on fire by a group of her peers, the novel framed as a Capote-esque true crime expose by a male author who has interviewed the girls involved in the incident, as well as the mother of the victim. Although by the end of the book, readers will be asking who isn’t the victim here, and while the dead girl hardly had it coming, this also isn’t a typical story of bullies gone homicidal—there are all kinds of dynamics at play, and there’s a centuries old curse, a legacy of witch trials, a haunted amusement park, and more, which made it a pretty satisfying read for near Halloween.
*
Games and Rituals, by Katherine Heiny
It’s possible that loving Katherine Heiny’s work could constitute a very large part of my literary identity if I let it, and a highlight of 2023 for me was that a new Heiny book was in it, just as I’d read everything else she’d written (and I guess it’s time to reread now). I didn’t love Games and Rituals as much as I did her earlier collection Single, Carefree, Mellow, but that’s a high bar, and I did love it enough to read an advanced copy during a snow storm in December and then buy a hardcover and read the whole thing again in April. All these months later, I’m still thinking about the story of the women dressed inadequately as she’s helping her husband’s ex-wife move, hauling boxes in the freezing cold, a woman she’d first encountered years before when the two of them worked a overnight suicide hotline together. Heiny gets compared to Laurie Colwin (I encountered her first as emcee of a literary event celebrated the reissue of Colwin’s work in 2021), but she also has Sue Miller vibes in mapping unconventional emotional terrain and reinvention of the family tree as family is made and remade. I love her.
*
The Rachel Incident, by Caroline O’Donoghue
I read this one over the August long weekend, partly on the beach, and it was incredible, twisty and full of surprises. It’s about an Irish journalist who lives in London covering Irish issues, their abortion referendum in particular, and she happens to be quite pregnant with her first child, all this the backdrop to a story of something that happened years before when she was a student in Cork and shared a house with her friend James, who’d been her colleague at a bookstore where they’d finagled a professor she’d had a crush on into holding a book launch for his academic book that really wasn’t of interest to anyone, but what happens that night changes the course of everybody’s life. A story of class, love, and friendship. I loved it.
*
Tom Lake, by Ann Patchett
I bought the hype, and the book lived up to it, but also I wasn’t resisting, and I think that’s key. A slow and cozy book, set during Covid lockdown. A mother’s three grown daughters return home to help with the family’s cherry harvest, and she tells them stories of her experiences playing Emily in productions of “Our Town,” the daughters still scarce believing that once upon a time, their mother was almost a movie star. This is a novel about mothers and daughters and their unknowability to each other in fundamental ways. It’s also an ode to Thornston Wilder’s “Our Town,” which I know absolutely nothing about (I think it’s quintessentially American…), and I enjoyed it anyway. Plus I found a used copy of “Our Town,” which I’m looking forward to reading soon.
