Tin Man is, quite simply, a beautiful book. The story, about a friendship between two boys that blossomed into a form of unfulfilled love as they grew older, has a lovely, languid feel. It reminds me of Call Me By Your Name and other Merchant Ivory type films — where deep emotions are subtext barely glimpsed beneath a serene veneer.

Winman’s writing is quiet and deceptively restrained. There are moments throughout with the tone of a whisper and the emotional charge of a shout: Dora’s painting that kicks off the entire story, Ellis being forced to punch his father’s hands and join the car company, Michael dealing with his partner having AIDS, and so on.

I absolutely love the imagery of van Gogh’s sunflowers, and the copy that Dora won at an auction. In my absolute favourite passage, Ellis contemplates the contrast between the painting and its creator:

The original was painted by one of the loneliest men on earth. But painted in a frenzy of optimism and gratitude and hope. A celebration of the transcendent power of the color yellow. [p. 89]

The physical book as well is a thing of beauty, and a definite collector’s item. The sunflowers on the cover are streaked with goldleaf that makes the cover glimmer in the light. Strokes of gold literally gleam on the page, and create a feeling of transcendence.

The beginning (Dora’s painting) and the end (Michael’s section) were the strongest parts of the book for me. The middle confused me a bit, with the shifts in timelines and the fairly large cast of characters.

But overall, this is a beautiful, and beautifully written, book. It’s a great gift for a book lover, and a lovely story to lose yourself in on holiday.

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Thank you to Penguin Random House Canada for a copy of this book in exchange for an honest review.

When Noah Denning stands her up on prom night, Wendy Liu decides to transform herself from shy wallflower to total badass. She also decides to avoid Noah at all costs — not too difficult when he moved to New York to become a public prosecutor. But when Jane, Noah’s younger sister and Wendy’s best friend, gets married, Wendy has to deal with being around Noah again. Worse, even after seventeen years apart, even with her kickass career as a high-powered Toronto attorney and her determination to stay romantically unattached, Wendy realizes that her childhood crush never really went away, and that her feelings for Noah are stronger than ever.

There are so many things I love about this novel. First, I have a soft spot for any romance with an Asian heroine, and I have an even softer spot for short Asian heroines who don’t always wear towering heels. (At one point, Noah notes that their bodies don’t quite mesh perfectly by book and movie standards — rather than her chest meeting his chest, her chest met his sternum, which I found cute and relatable.)

I also love that both Noah and Wendy are super successful lawyers, and that a lot of their sexy banter comes from discussing court cases. There’s a great scene where someone asks Wendy how she can be a defence lawyer and sleep at night, and Noah jumps to her defence by pointing out how, as a prosecuting attorney, he’s grateful whenever a defence attorney reveals a crucial piece of evidence that proves the client’s innocence and prevents Noah from inadvertently sending an innocent person to jail. Along with their obvious physical attraction to each other, they also very clearly respect each other’s intelligence, and I love that about their story.

Finally, I love how their relationship makes them confront their own personal issues — Wendy’s fear of being left alone, and Noah’s inability to let go of his role of responsibility within his family. While the romance was nice, the parts that really made the book for me were Noah’s relationship with Jane and Wendy’s relationship with Jane, Gia and Elise. I love the scene where Wendy confesses her misgivings about Jane’s fiance Cameron, and her further confession that her feelings had little to do with Cameron himself and more to do with her own fears of how Cameron may take over her spot in Jane’s life. I also love the banter between Jane and Noah, and I especially love the emotional scene later on when she tells him something she’d never shared before about her own feelings over their father’s death, and Noah realizes he hadn’t been as responsive to his sister’s needs as he thought he’d been.

The one snag for me is partly due to how strong these secondary relationships were in the story, and how I sometimes felt Wendy and Noah’s feelings for each other were getting in the way of these other relationships. A huge part of their romance is their intense rivalry — Wendy offers to pay for pre-wedding drinks and Noah insists on being the one to pay; Noah and Wendy fight over who gets to pay for Jane’s dress; Noah and Wendy make a bet about who throws the best bachelor/ette party. It was likely meant to be cute, but so many times, I wanted to tell both of them to grow up, stop bickering, and think about Jane for once. The bachelor/ette party weekend was particularly annoying, as they executed plans based on their rivalry more than based on what Jane and Cameron actually want. At one point, Noah’s jealousy over a stripper has him sabotaging Wendy’s plans in a horribly awkward way, and good on Jane for calling him out. Holiday does a great job of contextualizing their actions, so I understand why they acted the way they did, but it was still annoying.

Overall though, I did enjoy this story. Wendy and Noah have great chemistry, and I love how Holiday shows the progression of their feelings for each other — and their realization of these feelings. I also loved the scenes involving fake New York backdrops and Pez dispensers — gestures that were (to be honest) cheesy and over-the-top actually meant something to this couple. They contained inside jokes and childhood icons, and so scenes that could’ve just been silly and fun balls of cheese were actually full of heart, and showed why this couple was so perfectly right for each other. It’s a fun and fantastic story, and I loved it.

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Thank you to Forever Romance for an egalley of this book in exchange for an honest review.

Little Big Man is such a sweet book about family and all the messiness that happens in family relationships. Ten year old Zac has never met his father, who allegedly abandoned the family before he was born. When Zac’s mom accidentally admits that his dad was the only man she’s ever loved, Zac decides to track his dad down and bring him home before his eleventh birthday. The thing is, the reason his dad left in the first place is complicated, and Zac’s mom and grandparents all have to confront their culpability in what happened.

Zac isn’t the only hero in this novel. I love that the book also takes on the perspectives of Zac’s mother Juliet and Zac’s grandfather Mick, because they all put together the pieces of a very complex puzzle of what had happened over a decade ago. I love that Juliet is dealing with issues of her own, having raised Zac as a single parent and being afraid she’s not quite providing him what he needs. I also like that Mick is dealing with his own history of alcoholism and how that informed his determination to be a great grandfather to Zac.

Zac’s search for his dad is the main plot of this book, but more compelling to me was the subplot about his weight and his getting bullied at school. I found Juliet’s response — her guilt over her limitations as a parent and her defensiveness over Zac’s weight and her own — very relatable, and I love that she always puts his welfare above her own. For example, even though she doesn’t like exercising and she really doesn’t like talking about his father, she offers to go jogging with him and to tell him something new about his dad with each kilometre they run.

Even more importantly, I love that weight loss isn’t shown as the solution to Zac and Juliet’s problems. Zac does lose some weight, and Juliet survives the jogging just fine, but neither ends up actually thin, neither ends up actually obsessing over their weight, and their jogging ends up being more about Zac wanting to learn about his dad rather than about losing weight or becoming more physically fit. I also absolutely love the side character of Jason, who used to date Juliet until Juliet broke it off with him, but who continues to be friendly with Zac. Jason is a fitness trainer, and unlike the stereotypical gym dudebro, he genuinely thinks Juliet is beautiful just the way she is, and he seems very empathetic to Zac’s desire to find his father. I was full-on shipping him and Juliet to end up together, but I also appreciated their deep friendship, and how Jason was there for Juliet and Zac even without the possibility of romance.

I also love Zac’s friendship with Teagan, and how supportive they are of each other. I love how Teagan signs on for Zac’s quest to find his dad, no questions asked, even though she’s dealing with her own pain around not having a dad. And I love how well their personalities complement each other, such that each falls easily into an assigned role when they go out to investigate Zac’s dad’s whereabouts. They’re just fantastic as best friends, and their adventures add a fun caper-like feel to the heavier issues within the story.

Little Big Man is a beautiful and poignant story that goes much deeper than the initial quest that sets the events of the story off. I loved the characters, and I loved their stories.

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Thank you to Publishers Group Canada for a copy of this book in exchange for an honest review.