Category: General Fiction

Another winner from LT!  I loved this book and I’m going to buy a copy to have on my shelves.

I really enjoy epistolary novels, and this one tugged at me harder than most because one of my closest friends lives in Denmark and he and I have been corresponding for years, so the parallel pushed it up that extra half star.

If you don’t have a friend in Denmark you correspond with, it’s still a good book.  I’m not sure how to describe it really, except to say it feels like a very realistic correspondence between two people who have never met, yet have become close.  There’s a hesitation, a caution, in the sharing of opinions that rings true and the storylines that slowly and subtly unfold are the storylines that unfold everyday, everywhere.

There’s no happy ending, but there’s no unhappy ending either.  It ends with hope.  A genuinely lovely story.

LT is on a roll.  This was, mostly, a delightful read, with a side salad of melancholy, regret and loneliness.  Mostly, thank goodness, delight.  The story is told with a dual POV between Veronica and James.

Veronica is a cranky old bird, but wealthy enough that most people would just call in imperious.  She comes by it honestly, as events in her life have served to sever her from who she used to be and who she might have turned out to be.

James is a hot mess, living off the dole and occasionally self-medicating and just trying to get through it all.  He, too, comes by his dysfunction honestly, though he seems to have a very good heart.

When Veronica and James meet for the first time, it’s not a success, and Veronica walks away from her only relative in the world.  It’s her trip to Antartica, her resulting precarious friendship with one of the scientists, and a small fluff ball of a baby penguin that finally cracks Veronica’s shell, and that crack brings James to Antartica and together again with Veronica.

The reunion happens relatively late in the book, so the resolution is a bit … not rushed, but not strung out either.  It mostly works.  What I enjoyed most was – ok, it was the penguin, totally and completely the penguin – but what I enjoyed second most was that the author wrote a story about an 86 year old woman travelling to Antartica, alone, and she did it unapologetically, without caveats, or explanations.  Almost as though people on the top end of the age spectrum still had agency; imagine that.

An easy read that isn’t an empty one; a book to be enjoyed while still leaving the reader with a few things to chew over afterwards.

Another LT Recommendation and another average-ish read.  It would have been better but …

In my own categorisation system, I’ve got this under ‘chick-lit’, a term that offends many but I have no problem with.  It’s a book written by a woman, about young women and their issues.  My best comparison would be to Mary Kay Andrews, except these women (and their men) all talk very explicitly about sex.  Why is this weird?  Well, because the story itself has no explicit sex scenes, or even any implicit sex scenes – it’s all very vanilla.  Except for these random conversations where they start throwing around language and topics that are usually reserved for actual sex scenes.  I like to think I have a wide variety of acquaintances and I no no-one who talks like this, although maybe they do in the privacy of their own home.  Either way, it was jarring and felt out of sync with the rest of the story’s style.

Putting that aside, the story was good.  All three of the females are confronted with challenges, and one of them is pretty broken.  I found her annoying.  Not because I didn’t like her (she’s very together for someone so broken), but because the author harped on about her broken-ness and by about 75% in, it felt way over played.

I’m not sorry I read it, but I’m unlikely to seek out any more of her work.  I genuinely enjoy a good chick-lit once in awhile, but this one felt like it was trying a little bit too hard to be something else, and I have no idea what.

Ding ding ding!  LibraryThing has served up a winner!  I loved this book, and have ordered up a copy for my library.  Gretchen Anthony serves up a great story, well written, with delightful interludes between chapters, that for me, elevated this book from ‘good’ to ‘really, I’m enjoying the heck out of this’.   Some of the interludes add a bit of backstory to what’s going on, as well as a bit of depth.  Truly, without these, I think the book would still be good, but average, and I’d argue that Anthony’s best writing is found here.

The dynamics between the mother and her daughters here hits close to home for me, so I enjoyed the dip into the familiar, and I loved watching how they conspired to save the bookstore.  Laney has all the best lines, and I’ll admit I found Bree a bit too fragile for my tastes, but she finds her own in the end.  The conflict at the beginning of the story isn’t the real conflict of the book, but even so its resolution was stunningly anticlimactic.  Making it more realistic wouldn’t have really added anything to the real story, so I have no problem over looking it.

It’s just a fun book and well worth investigating if you’re in the mood for some heartfelt entertainment.

This is one of those books that I enjoyed, but should have loved.  It has all sorts of elements that resonate with me, and it was well written to boot.  If I were to use a fishing metaphor (and I am), I’d say the hook caught, but failed to set, leaving me with an enjoyable ride that I was able to shake off when finished, without lasting effects.

The MC is a 40 year old who has always known she doesn’t want kids of her own, and after a cancelled engagement, is coming to realise she doesn’t want to get married either; she cherishes having her own space and not having to share it with anybody else.  But coming back to her hometown reunites her with her high-school boyfriend as they and her BFF try to figure out the mystery behind the wooden duck.

I like what the author was trying to do here, with the romantic dynamic, but I’m not sure … I think she might have written herself into a corner, and her attempt to extricate herself from that corner left the ending unsatisfying.  It’s probably the most realistic ending in Real Life, but in fiction it left me wishing for a better resolution.  The plot about the duck was fun, and I enjoyed how they did the research and followed the clues, though as a long time mystery reader, some of it felt a tad clumsy.  Nothing that made me cringe, but these characters weren’t investigators, so their awkwardness was probably quite realistic.

All in all, it was a great library read; I enjoyed the story, but I’m not going to wish I owned a copy of my own.  I’m glad I read it, but I’ll be happy to return it too.