Tag: library loans

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.