Books I've Read: Hard Girls

This was one of those frustrating books that should have been better than it was.  All the elements were there - great characters,  compelling storyline and some good twists, but somehow the book fell flat for me.

Set across different time periods, the book is about twins, long estranged, who reunite to solve an old mystery about their mother who disappeared when they were young.  Jane, who as an adult lives a quiet suburban existence, being a good mother to her daughter and as a good a wife to her husband as she possibly can, keeps her past cleanly buttoned away.  She takes care of her father the best she can, but their relationship isn't particularly close.  

When Lila, the twin she hasn't seen or head from in many years makes contact and says she thinks she's found their mother, Jane's safe, suburban life is irrevocably disrupted.  She initially thinks she might be able to ignore Lila, but what happened with their mother back then has had such a profound effect on both girls' lives and on their father, she has to know the truth.

Woven into this story about the now-adult girls seeking the mother who abandoned them is the story of their teenage adventures and the act of violence that changed both their lives, and their relationship with each other, forever.

This book wasn't hard to read and the plot was compelling enough to keep me turning pages, but I really didn't like or sympathize with any of the characters.  Except, bizarrely, the twins' father.  Everyone made choices that didn't make sense for who they are and the reveals of why they made these choices never really satisfied.

So, while there is plenty to like here - espionage, secret identities, action and adventure - it's not a wholly enjoyable book.  So I won't recommend this one.

But don't just listen to me.  Here's the blurb:

Two estranged twin sisters as they hunt down their elusive mother in this razor-sharp crime novel from "master of the dark arts" J. Robert Lennon. (Kelly Link)

Jane Pool likes her safe, suburban existence just fine. She has a house, a family, (an infuriating mother-in-law,) and a quiet-if-unfulfilling administrative job at the local college. Everything is wonderfully, numbingly normal. Yet Jane remains haunted by her her mercurial, absent mother, her parents’ secrets, and the act of violence that transformed her life. When her estranged twin, Lila, makes contact, claiming to know where their mother is and why she left all those years ago, Jane agrees to join her, desperate for answers and the chance to reconnect with the only person who really knew her true self. Yet as the hunt becomes treacherous, and pulls the two women to the earth’s distant corners, they find themselves up against their mother’s subterfuge and the darkness that always stalked their family. Now Jane stands to lose the life she’s made for the one that has been impossible to escape.

Set in both the Pool family’s past and their present, and melding elements of a chase novel, an espionage thriller, and domestic suspense, Hard Girls is an utterly distinctive pastiche—propulsive, mysterious, cracked, intelligent, and unexpected at every turn.

Weekly Goals 26-1-26

 I had both a productive and restful weekend this weekend, so that's good.  Feeling at least somewhat ready to face work this morning.  It's not going to be a fun week, I suspect, with all the "change proposal" meetings happening and people feeling uncertain about their jobs. I'll just keep my head down, and get on with my own work and try to be supportive if people need someone to talk to.

The weather is looking iffy again for some of the week, but I'm hoping to ride to work most days.  It will be a miracle if I actually get to do it five days out of five.

I've started clearing out my WDC portfolio and have a little more space.  I want to continue with this project, especially if I settle on an idea for a new book to work on.  Or even if I just keep writing flash fiction for a few more weeks while that novel idea germinates.  It's still pretty vague, but I'm thinking it will be set over one 24-hour period and it's a romance.  Think, Before Sunrise, but set behind the scenes at a low-rent kind of music festival or county fair.  I know who the girl is, but the boy's still a little out of focus. But I know that if I wait, he'll tell me who he is.

What are your goals this week?

Celebrate the Small Things 24-1-26

 

It's the end of the week, so what am I celebrating?

It's the weekend!

And yes, I know it was a short week with a holiday on Monday, but it's been super busy and I need a break.  I have quite a nice quiet weekend planned this week, so I'm looking forward to that.  Lots of writing stuff and maybe a movie.  The weather is pretty dreadful, so even though the garden needs some attention, it's going to have to wait.

After the flurry of rejections I received early in the week, there have been no more, which is good.  No more requests, either, which is less good, but I'll take whatever wins I can get.

The new book is continuing to get good feedback from my critique group.  It doesn't follow any of the rules of storytelling and novel structure, but somehow the characters are compelling enough to keep people reading despite the lack of an inciting incident in the right place and no real antagonist.

What are you celebrating this week?

Books I've Read: Day

This was another of the books I really enjoyed while I was on vacation.  I picked it up because I enjoyed The Hours which is by the same author and was interested to read something else by the same person.  I was also curious if the author might be interested in time as concept, considering the titles of both books...

And Day is about time, sort of, but mainly about family.  It's set across a day with sections called Morning, Afternoon and Evening.  The wrinkle?  The morning, afternoon and evening are in different years, so the book actually spans 2019, 2020 and 2021, following the same family.

In the morning of 2019, Isabel and her husband Dan are struggling with the fact they need to kick Isabel's younger brother out of their loft where he's been living while recovering from his most recent break-up.  Amid the morning chaos of getting kids off to school, we see the strain their marriage is under and the deep affection both of them have for Robbie which is making it harder to ask him to move even though they know their ten-year-old son needs the space to begin asserting his independence.  Robbie, who is unsatisfied with his life, has created an online persona much more adventurous and glamorous than himself and revels in posting and watching followers eat it up.

In the afternoon of 2020, the world is locked down and the family is stuck in the apartment.  Violet, the youngest child is terrified of the virus and berates anyone who leaves a window open, certain that's the way the virus will get in.  Nathan, the older son has now moved into Robbie's attic and uses his newfound privacy y to break the rules while distracted, his parents suffer through their fracturing marriage without really speaking to one another.  Robbie, who left the country just prior to the COVID outbreak, is trapped in a cabin in Iceland, still posting from the perspective of his glamorous alter-ego.

I won't go into detail of what happens in the evening of 2021, but it beautifully wraps up this family's story and shows how they've made it through this time of crisis and through an the other side.  There are glimmers of hope for their futures and a certainty that their resilience will allow them to move past this.

I really enjoyed this book.  I thought it might be fragmentary and frustrating in that it's episodic, but the three sections ft together so beautifully, following characters you can't help but feel affection for, even while you're frustrated by some of their actions.  The decisions made in one section echo through the next, showing us how things we do can ripple through our lives, across years and affect everything.

So, I'd recommend this one.  It's literary, but not a challenging read.  The characters are very real and flawed, frustrating you at every turn with their choices or inertia in making choices.

But don't just listen to me.  Here's the blurb:

As the world changes around them, a family weathers the storms of growing up, growing older, falling in and out of love, losing the things that are most precious—and learning to go on—from the Pulitzer Prize–winning author of The Hours

April 5, 2019 : In a cozy brownstone in Brooklyn, the veneer of domestic bliss is beginning to crack. Dan and Isabel, troubled husband and wife, are both a little bit in love with Isabel’s younger brother, Robbie. Robbie, wayward soul of the family, who still lives in the attic loft; Robbie, who, trying to get over his most recent boyfriend, has created a glamorous avatar online; Robbie, who now has to move out of the house—and whose departure threatens to break the family apart. Meanwhile Nathan, age ten, is taking his first uncertain steps toward independence, while Violet, five, does her best not to notice the growing rift between her parents.

April 5, 2020: As the world goes into lockdown, the brownstone is feeling more like a prison. Violet is terrified of leaving the windows open, obsessed with keeping her family safe, while Nathan attempts to skirt her rules. Isabel and Dan communicate mostly in veiled jabs and frustrated sighs. And beloved Robbie is stranded in Iceland, alone in a mountain cabin with nothing but his thoughts—and his secret Instagram life—for company.

April 5, 2021: Emerging from the worst of the crisis, the family reckons with a new, very different reality—with what they’ve learned, what they’ve lost, and how they might go on.

From the brilliant mind of Pulitzer Prize winner Michael Cunningham, Day is a searing, exquisitely crafted meditation on love and loss and the struggles and limitations of family life—how to live together and apart.

Weekly Goals 19-1-26

 I have two main goals this week and I kind of hope to get through both of them today since it's a holiday.

Firstly, I've spent a lot of the weekend prepping my deck to be re-stained, so my goal for today is to stain it.  I may not have time to do two coats (I can't remember how long you need to leave them to dry between coats), but if I can get one on today, I can get the second on next weekend.

My second goal is to finish the beta read I'm doing for a friend in my critique group.  I've done a lot of it already - I probably only have 100 more pages to go.

Apart from that, I want to try and ride my bike to work every day this week, but it looks like the weather may not cooperate with that one.  I swear, this summer has been diabolical.  If the wind hasn't been howling, it's been wet and/or cold.  I mean, it's 13 degrees here this morning!  This is not the summer I signed on for.

And, that's about it for goals this week.  What are you trying to achieve?

Celebrate the Small Things 16-1-26

 

It's the end of the week, so what am I celebrating?

It's a long weekend this weekend.  And I've take Friday off as well, so I have four days off.  That's something to celebrate!  Even if I have a big home-maintenance project I need to get done over that long weekend.  Fingers crossed the weather improves because it's an outside project - I need to get my deck prepped for staining, and then hopefully, stained.  The house is being painted in late February,  so I wanted to do the deck before than so it won't matter so much if I get a little deck stain on the house like I did the last time I stained the deck.

I've had a few readers finish the new book (Street Smarts although I need to find a better title) and they've all been super positive about it which is great because I really wasn't 100% sure the structure or the story worked.  But, apparently it does.  I'm going to wait for more feedback before diving back into revisions because I'd rather have all the feedback on hand before I make changes.  I have a few things I want to change, but they're not major.

Got another request for A Stranger to Kindness too, which makes me happy.  

And I finally got a date for the surgery I've been waiting for.  It's really soon - Feb 18 - but that gives me plenty of time to recover before the season at work starts and I have to travel and stuff.  I will probably miss some stuff in the Arts Festival I have tickets for, but that's a fairly small price to pay.

What are you celebrating this week?

Books I've loved: Mr. Penumbra's 24-Hour Bookstore

 

This was one of the books I picked up to read on my holiday, a kind of random selection off the library shelf because I liked the title.  And it ended up being my favorite read of the vacation!

Set in San Francisco,  the book is about Clay, a young man still trying to find himself after college.  He's had a brief moment of glory as the wunderkind behind a viral marketing campaign, but since then, he's failed to find the career he feels he deserves.  Broke and desperate, he takes a job as a night clerk at Mr. Penumbra's 24 hour bookstore, working from 10pm until 6am.

The bookstore is odd, with tall shelves that can only be accessed by ladders.  There are only a handful of books in it that anyone has actually heard of, the bulk of the stock being obscure volumes that customers "check out" and return based on some archaic system only Mr. Penumbra understands. Without much else to occupy his mind or his time, Clay begins an analysis of the customer behavior, thinking he may uncover whatever the strange store is a front for.

What he discovers is far stranger, and when he brings his findings to his eccentric boss, things take a turn toward the bizarre.  Clay finds himself on his way to New York and the headquarters of an ancient institution where people engage in a centuries-old quest for immortality.

Mixing conspiracy theories, ancient texts, font analysis, big-tech, romance and more, this book was a total blast from start to finish.  The characters are unusual, yet for the most part, endearing and I found myself ripping through the book in a single afternoon, desperate to discover the secret to eternal life alongside the characters.

I won't reveal the ending or much else because it would ruin the joy of reading the book.  Just know that this is a fun romp with a lot f surprising twists and turns.

Definitely recommend.

But don't just listen to me.  Here's the blurb:

Global conspiracy, complex code-breaking, high-tech data visualization, young love, the secret to eternal life. Mostly in a hole-in-the-wall San Francisco bookstore.

Clay Jannon tells how serendipity, sheer curiosity, and the ability to climb a ladder like a monkey has sent him from Web Drone to night shift at Mr. Penumbra’s 24-Hour Bookstore. After just a few days on the job, Clay realizes just how curious this store is.

A few customers come in repeatedly without buying anything. Instead they “check out” obscure volumes from strange corners of the store. All runs according to some elaborate, long-standing arrangement with the gnomic Mr. Penumbra. The store must be a front for something larger, Clay concludes.

He embarks on a complex analysis of the customers’ behavior and ropes in friends to help. Once they bring their findings to Mr. Penumbra, it turns out the secrets extend far outside the walls of the bookstore. A quest to New York City dips in a world conspiracy for eternal life. The current of romance pulls Clay onward.