September 18, 2025
Vic Book Sale 2025
Another year, another stack from the Victoria College Book Sale. Which was wonderful, but HOT and crowded, and I was very tired, and also nostalgic for the days when I had not yet acquired all the books by beloved authors like Margaret Drabble and Penelope Lively, when the pickings seemed easy. But that’s what makes it all the more miraculous to discover gems like the last remaining Sue Miller novel I have yet to read, and also Barbara Trapido (whose novels don’t turn up much in Canada). And a very hard-to-find Louise Fitzhugh novel, which is not a novel without problems, but any Louise Fitzhugh book is worth my time (I read a library copy years ago). Penelope Fitzgerald’s bio of her father and his brothers! Muriel Spark on Mary Shelley (WHAT???). A couple of Anita Brooker’s (one first edition!), an Elizabeth Bowen, and one more by Mary Hocking, whom I’ve read once before and I’m not completely sure I’m on board but we shall see…
September 17, 2025
Heads Up
Summer’s on its way out the door, but the sunshine is returning to my south-facing kitchen table. And the snapdragons continue to bloom.
September 17, 2025
Enthusiasms for September
Every month I round up my blog content in the Pickle Me This Digest. Admittedly, I’ve been summering hard lately so blog content is minimal, BUT I also make the digest extra worthwhile to subscribers by including a list of things to be excited about (ENTHUSIASMS) and this month’s is extra good. Check it out!
September 16, 2025
Lucky Night, by Eliza Kennedy
I was a different person ten years ago when I read and reviewed Eliza Kennedy’s novel I Take You, and praised its portrayal of a woman who dares to defy societal expectations of what a wife is supposed to be, how a woman is supposed to behave (in commercial fiction, no less!). Or maybe I was the exact same person but had not yet learned how much our society resists these narratives; how the patriarchy is determined to prevail, whatever it takes; and what a low tolerance commercial fiction readers tend to have for female protagonists who are, shall we say, imperfect candidates. For protagonists who blur the lines between right and wrong, who aren’t trying to make us like them, who know themselves if they know anything at all. (I published my own book with such a protagonist in 2017. The reception on Goodreads caught me by surprise, which seems so naive now.)
A decade later, I picked up Kennedy’s third novel, Lucky Night, about Jenny and Nick, both married (to other people) who’ve been having illicit trysts here and there for six years, but never have they managed to spend a whole night together. Until now, when Nick books them into a brand new luxury hotel in a Manhattan high rise, and their time together begins as expected, although not without hiccups—it’s a heady moment as they contemplate their situation (the novel moves between their two third-person perspectives, back and forth in scene) and also alarms keep going off in the building, glitches in the system, simply a distraction (and they’re assured that everything is fine).
Even without the alarms, things would be fraught for Nick and Jenny. What do they really mean to each other? And why does each of them find it impossible to say? After six years of relations, they’re still putting on masks for each other, still pretending to be people other than who they are, still resistant to admitting what they really mean to each other and what consequences that could mean for their marriages, their children, their entire lives. (Refreshingly, this is a not a novel about guilt or shame regarding adultery. Both Nick and Jenny have worked through those feelings, and Lucky Night is about something more complicated, more interesting. Kennedy cites Laura Kipnis’s Against Love in her acknowledgements, a book that’s described as “an indictment of the martial ideal”).
And then the stakes get kicked way up high when it turns out the building is on fire, and Jenny and Nick are stranded way up above the blaze, awaiting a rescue that may never come, their story a locked room thriller with a consideration of the minutiae of high rise fires and the dynamics of adultery, sex and love. Will the lovers get what they deserve? And what they deserve exactly, I suppose, depends on your perspective, something that each of them is aware of. And the novel’s author is surely aware of this too, but makes Lucky Night brave, propulsive, and interesting.
September 16, 2025
It’s a Love Story
My friend sent me a message on Monday: “How much is love really like driving a new Maserati down a dead end street?????” And it’s a good question, I think, one that underlines just how much Taylor Swift is a songwriter on par with Bruce Springsteen (which is saying a lot). The line that open Swift’s song “Red” from her 2012 album of the same name, and continues, “Faster than the wind, passionate as sin, ending so suddenly/ Loving him is like trying to change your mind/ Once you’re already flying through the free fall/ Like the colors in autumn, so bright, just before they lose it all.”
Fall is Taylor Swift season for me now. Okay, all the seasons are Taylor Swift seasons for me now—(Forever) winter, (Cruel) summer, spring a time of lavender hazes and purple pink skies, new beginnings. But oh, fall, the season of Evermore. Plaid shirt days, as we start the countdown back to December and also anticipate a brand new album forthcoming in just over two weeks. I can’t wait.
2025 marks ten years of me being a Swiftie, of us being a family of Swifties (with a short hiatus when Reputation came out, and we thought we didn’t like her anymore. [We were wrong]). Ten years ago this summer, my six-year-old daughter came home from day camp and told us she liked a song called “Bad Blood,” a song I’d never even heard of, although I’d heard of Taylor Swift—I heard “Love Story” for the first time on the radio in 2009 when I was driving to pick up a second-hand crib off Craigslist for her when she was a baby; I remember hearing “I Knew You Were Trouble” playing on the radio in a candy shop while I toted her in a carrier on my chest.
But Taylor Swift never really permeated my consciousness until “Bad Blood” and we bought the 1989 album, and my memories of that summer have that album as the soundtrack, my kids still so little, in carseats in the backseat. (Which reminds me of her lyric from “Cruel Summer,” “I’m drunk in the back of a car/ and I cried like a baby coming home from the bar.” And how my kids were so confused wondering why a baby was coming home from a bar, and what had happened at the bar that had upset the baby so much.) I loved it all, but especially fell in love with “Shake It Off” and the idea that my children might grow up with music in their minds saying, “It’s gonna be alright.”
Which has been what Taylor Swift has meant for me every since (Reputation era notwithstanding, although it grew on me). I remember listening to her Lover album in July 2020, and being so grateful for it as some light in the darkness. And then she went and dropped her Folklore and Evermore albums (on July 24 and December 11), both of them such gifts when everything was sad and hard, to get lost in her storytelling, characters like Dorothea; Rebecca Harkness; Marjorie; Betty, Jame, the narrator of “August” (plus that notorious gossip, Inez). Every August since, I’ve spent the month humming lines about salt air and rusty doors. And now I think of summer’s turn into fall as the “August” to “Cardigan” transition. All of it so bittersweet, beautiful and ephemeral.
Last November was a nightmare, the results of the US presidential election terrifying for reasons that have come to pass, and I feel like it’s part of why everyone dove in a bit extra when Taylor Swift arrived in Toronto for her Eras tour dates over the course of that month. There has never been a more joyous, fun and creative time to experience Toronto, which came alive with (non-tortured) poets in the streets, Swift-themed pop-ups, a street temporarily renamed Taylor Swift Way, shops, restaurants and tourist destinations getting in on the Swiftie action. (Our Swiftie family took first prize in the Royal Ontario Museum’s Taylor Swift Scavenger Hunt, WHICH WAS NOT EASY, and we continue to celebrate this as one of our proudest accomplishments.) Tay-Ronto was pretty darn obnoxious to all the haters (and the liars and the dirty dirty cheats in this world who could have been getting down to this sick beat), I realize, but for the rest of us, it was a beautiful display of community and solidarity, and so much fun. It was music in my mind saying it’s gonna be alright.
So yes, I cried when her engagement news dropped. (I don’t claim to be sane or level-headed. The last ten years have broken me into pieces.) I love her. I love her happiness. I love how my daughters love her, and I love that we can love her together.
September 15, 2025
Ripeness, by Sarah Moss
This is not a review. I’m still piecing together my experience of reading RIPENESS, the latest novel by Sarah Moss (out now in Canada), whose work I fell in love with through her three short novels, GHOST WALL, SUMMERWATER, and THE FELL. Her most release is the memoir MY GOOD BRIGHT WOLF, about her childhood and more recent experiences with anorexia. And now RIPENESS, a novel-sized novel, but which rips apart convention regarding structure. The very first sentence is, “Yes, Edith says.” Quotation marks done away with, long long paragraphs, dialogue within those paragraphs, the novel comprising two sections whose relationship is hard to discern, except that they are both about Edith, one (in third person) set in the present where Edith is around 70, divorced, living a comfortable life in Ireland, and the other (first person) about Edith’s experience in the 1960s on the cusp of adulthood travelling to a villa in Italy to spend time with her older sister, a ballerina, who is waiting out the final weeks of an unwanted pregnancy.
How do these two sections knit together? The answers to that question are not straightforward, but they’re interesting, even if I’m not sure what they are yet. How does the story of her sister’s child connect to Edith’s friend’s discovery in the present that her mother had once given up a child long ago, a son who was raised in America and who is returning to Ireland, a place to which he feels he belongs? A place to which Edith, who is Edith, will never belong. Edith an exile who is the child of an exile, her mother a Jew who was the sole member of her family to survive the Holocaust when she was sent to the British midlands just in time. How does all this connect to the Ukrainian refugees who’ve made their homes in Ireland, and the less familiar-seeming refugees from other places whom Edith’s neighbours resent and wave placards against?
There is all this and so much more, so much ripeness—the fruits on the trees in Italy, the very pregnant Lydia, Edith at the beginning of her experience just before she goes to study at Oxford. There is no sex for young Edith, but plenty for Edith in the present day (she utters the first line in the midst of it). A study of maternal ambivalence, of bodies, of citizenship, of youth, and age, and fathoming unfathomable things. RIPENESS is a novel about saying YES, and also saying no, sometimes. About life, and consequences, and I need to read it again in order to fully understand it, but the point is that I want to.
September 10, 2025
A Sense of Things Beyond, by Renée Belliveau
Who gets to remember in war? Who gets to be remembered? And how does that remembering perpetuate the very narratives that makes war possible (and often likely) in the first place? These questions and more are at heart of A Sense of Things Beyond, the second novel by Renée Belliveau, whose fiction is informed by her work as an archivist, and who I had the good luck of being able to work with in the early stages of this book. It tells the story of two people in the early 1920s who are struggling to move forward from their experiences in WW1, especially since those experiences fail to conform with the simplistic and conventional narratives of war and all its glory.
Rose was a nurse who worked on the front lines, who enlisted from her home in Toronto with pride at lending her skills to a cause she believed in, along with her fellow Canadians fighting on the side of righteousness. For Frederick, who Rose has met once before (his brother is married to her sister), things are more complicated. He’s studying languages in Berlin when Archduke Franz Ferdinand is assassinated, and has come to think of Germany as his home, which means he stays too long once war is declared and spends the duration as a civilian detainee at the Ruhleben internment camp, an experience with its own trauma inherent, but nobody around him sees it that way afterwards. Some even think he got off easy because he never had to fight, and he makes his case even less sympathetic by refusing to demonize the Germans as an enemy. He’d been there when the war ended, saw the people of Berlin starving and suffering, and he refuses to mark a line between “us” and “them.”
Which makes sense to Rose, who has seen what war does to bodies, who knows it happens to bodies on both sides, who has seen the mud and seen the death, and knows that stories of heroism are mostly just myths. She has seen also the way that stories like hers have been left out of the narrative, and stories of colonial soldiers who were people of colour, and has lost faith that people like her beloved nephew died for a reason. And so when she connects with Frederick at his home in Nova Scotia while she’s visiting her sister’s family, a romance grows between them, and both of them are force to face the hard experiences they’ve been trying not to think about since war ended. And only once they’ve finally done that can Rose and Frederick begin to face a future, maybe even one together…
This is a novel that brings history to life, that brings untold stories into consciousness, and complicates the way we think about war and remembrance. At a moment when military conflict is all too common (and more dangerous than ever), we need stories like this one to remind us of what it is to be human.
September 8, 2025
Taking Stock for September
Making: plans to get the word out about and celebrate my new novel, DEFINITELY THRIVING
Getting: cozy in my cardigan. Summer is not hanging around this year!
Cooking: Nothing at the moment, but Smitten Kitchen’s pasta salad with roasted carrots and tops is on the menu for the tonight!
Sipping: Tea sweetened with honey, because there was just the littlest bit left in the jar. I learned this trick from Jen Knoch—pour tea into the jar to get the dregs. Preventing food waste is delicious.
Reading: Ripeness, by Sarah Moss. I just started it this morning so am still just on the opening pages.
Waiting: for tonight, like Jennifer Lopez, but also differently, because I’m going to see Miriam Toews at the Toronto Reference Library.
Looking: At the trees outside my kitchen window which are suddenly turning autumnal (and I don’t hate it).
Listening: The sound of kids on the street outside. And someone operating a power saw. There is a bylaw in my neighbourhood that someone must always be operating a power saw or a leaf blower. If this wasn’t happening, we might all die.
Wishing: That everybody everywhere could find a little bit of peace in their hearts.
Enjoying: That my youngest child now makes her own way to school. I thought it would be hard to lose the framework of school walks, but it’s freed up so much time.
Appreciating: That both my children are happy at school.
Eating: Ripe pears. So good.
Liking: My new jeans, which are the first high waist jeans I’ve ever had? And they’re so comfortable and look great.
Loving: The sunshine on my garden.
Buying: Or ATTEMPTING to buy warm pjs for my kids at the new LL Bean. We’re going camping this weekend and neither of them have suitable sleepwear. Wish me luck.
Managing: the epic task of making sure all the produce gets eaten during the most delicious season in Ontario. This requires washing all the fruit, keeping fruit bowls filled, making sure the basket of grapes does not get lost in the back of the fridge, yelling at everybody to EAT THE STONE FRUIT. It’s a full time job. I’m not sorry.
Watching: I went to the movies on Friday and saw The Roses and loved it so much.
Hoping: that Lake Ontario is not too cold this weekend and I can ENJOY a swim (which is different than having a swim and not enjoying it, but I’ll take that too…)
Wearing: I’ve told you already, but my new jeans and a cardigan (and I do so delight in how the world is so Taylor Swift Folklore now and “August” turns to “Cardigan” as the month ticks over…)
Following: Fix the News! It’s the best. Read about the decline of mother to child HIV transmission in Botswana since 2000. It will blow your mind!
Noticing: That not enough people marvelling at decline of mother to child HIV transmission in Botswana. Guys. Get on it.
Sorting: Oh gosh, not enough. Sock and underwear drawer desperately needs it.
Coveting: New Taylor Swift album! And Olivia Colman’s wardrobe in The Roses
Feeling: Pretty good!
Hearing: Thumps through the wall from the house mine is semi-detached to. None of us are alone in the world.
September 8, 2025
Preorder Rewards
Thanks to everyone who helped celebrate the cover reveal for my novel DEFINITELY THRIVING, coming to Canadian and US readers from House of Anansi on March 17, 2026.
We have created the most adorable reward for everyone who places a preorder… (Preordering=heading to your favourite bookselling place—online or IRL—and ordering the book in advance of publication.)
If you preorder today, you’ll be securing something lovely for future-you(the novel itself!), but I will sweeten the deal for you-right-now with these adorable DEFINITELY THRIVING stickers (based on @melanielambrick’s cover illustrations) to express my thanks for your support.
Preorder DEFINITELY THRIVING wherever books are sold, and then email me a proof of purchase AND your mailing address to klclare AT gmail DOT com, and I will pop these beauties into the post for you. Those books! That cat! That declaration, ironic or otherwise, that you are DEFINITELY THRIVING. You know you want it…
About DEFINITELY THRIVING: The heartening and hilarious story of a woman who doesn’t have it all figured out just yet.
After accidentally-on-purpose exploding her listless marriage by being discovered in bed with the next-door neighbours, Clemence Lathbury returns to her hometown resolved to build a life for herself that is good and substantial, to become the kind of sensible woman who won’t be distracted by frippery and romance. It’s supposed to be Eat, Pray, Love, without the love part. But no woman is an island, and soon Clemence finds herself embroiled in neighbourhood drama; beginning a crusade at the local bookshop; becoming adopted by a well-groomed, one-eyed cat; and being forced to admit her attraction to two very different men—each a romantic lead in his own right. But how to choose? And never mind the complications of her quirky family …
A novel about friendship, community, and church jumble sales, Definitely Thriving is a celebration of people who are perfectly imperfect, and all the love and support that’s required for one woman to make it on her own.
*Thanks to @stuart.lawler for sticker design!
September 5, 2025
Rufous and Calliope, by Sarah Louise Butler
When I reviewed Sarah Louise Butler’s beautiful debut novel The Wild Heavens—about a quest to prove the existence of the Sasquatch—in 2020, I wrote, “it’s less about the finding than the searching, about the wonder instead of answers, about the stories we tell about the mysteries both of ourselves and of the world.” Her new novel, Rufous and Calliope, seems like a different kind of story on the surface, not a mythical creature in sight, but it similarly blurs the lines between fact and fiction, fancy and reality, and is wholly under the spell of its vivid natural setting deep in the rugged British Columbia interior.
The novel begins with Rufous, in his forties, suffering from a degenerative neurological disorder. His hold on the present is tenuous, and he’s had to give up driving, leave his job as a cartographer, and the novel finds him on an epic quest across the landscape to return to the treehouse where he and older his siblings made a home for themselves for a season when he was five years old, after the death of their grandmother. And as Rufous walks, the narrative moves back those enchanted days when he and his siblings were ever skirting the authorities who would have brought them into the child welfare system, but he felt cared for, and everything was infused with a magical sense of freedom. But the season came to an end through circumstances that are not delineated until the end of the story, Rufuous’s siblings leaving him the care of a lesbian couple in a small town who run a cafe, and he grows up loved and cared for, but the loss of his siblings wears heavy on his soul and is as conspicuous as the missing little finger on his hand.
What was the cataclysmic event that tore the family apartment? Whatever happened to Rufuous’s twin sister, Calliope? And what’s really going on with Rufous in the present as he makes his way along the route back to the treehouse? Is he actually going to find his siblings there, or is this just another of his delusions and hallucinations, manifestations of the crumbling in his mind? His decline mirrored in the ecological devastation all around him, the wildfire smoke particles he breathes in all along the journey.
Does this sound bleak? Its not, not really. There are harsh truths that are central to the story—death, and loss, and heartache. But these are balanced out by other things that are just as true, examples of care, friendship, extraordinary survival, wonder at the nature and the mysteries of the universe. What an incredible book.
