Little Green is such a beautiful, moving story. I immersed myself in it on a hot summer’s day, and absolutely felt for all of the characters. Cohen has written a story about a marriage undergoing tremendous strain, and then pushed to the breaking point when the unthinkable happens to the couple’s daughter, and I love how real, nuanced and complex the characters and their relationships are.

Elise Sorensen is a horseback rider who competes in dressage and aspires to be in the Olympics. Her husband Matt has curtailed his own professional ambitions to be the primary caregiver for their child Gracie, and as a result has not yet made partner at 50. The novel takes place at Lake Placid, where the couple needs to sell off Matt’s childhood home to pay for Gracie’s school and physiotherapy and for Elise’s career.

Cohen is incredible at the subtle tensions and complexities of real life. The very beginning of the novel demonstrates this: Elise is on her way home to see Gracie in her first play, but has to deplane because of an issue with her horse. In response, Matt drives Gracie to Lake Placid without waiting for Elise, and soon learns that his first girlfriend (as Elise sourly notes, literally the girl next door) is back in town as well. Each is a minor incident on its own — a missed school play, an early drive — but as we can probably relate to from our own lives, each is also infused with so much hidden meaning.

Within the first few chapters, we understand Elise’s guilt at how much time she spends away from her family, but also her unwavering determination to achieve her professional goals. We can feel Matt’s frustration at his wife’s absence, and underlying that, his resentment that because he’s always around, his presence doesn’t mean as much to their daughter. We can understand how he could have fallen in love with Elise for her drive, but now longs for a quieter life. Elise and Matt are real, and with each new layer of emotion and memory and hidden resentment Cohen adds on, their lives become ever more relatable.

There’s a great moment where Matt reflects that Elise is fine with him making major decisions while she’s away, but expects to take over when she comes home, as if Matt is a middle manager and Elise is the CEO swooping in with veto power. That moment is particularly strong because Elise seems to regard the decisions she makes as minor, and doesn’t quite realize how she’s affecting Matt. I especially love that while Matt and Elise certainly lack open communication, their relationship has also gotten to a point where you feel like simply talking things over is not going to help.

I love that Cohen flips the traditional gender dynamic, with the husband supporting the wife’s career — and that neither Matt nor Elise is bothered by this. I also love that their relationships with the family that raised them (Elise’s deceased mother and estranged father, and Matt’s deceased grandfather) have such a strong influence in the way they act, and that Elise and Matt don’t necessarily realize this until later in the book. I love how both of them have to confront uncomfortable truths about these family members, and how this impacts their approach to their marriage.

Little Green is such a nuanced story with compelling characters. I loved it a lot, and highly recommend it.

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I met Tish Cohen at a recent #HarperPresents Summer Reading event. Read my recap here.

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

“Ernest Hemingway changed my life,” Paula McLain said at a recent meet-and-greet at The Spoke Club in Toronto. McLain’s books are intrigued not just by Hemingway himself but rather by the women in his life, and in particular, bringing forth their stories from behind his rather large and imposing shadow. The Hemingway in McLain’s books is larger than life, strong and brilliant enough that we can understand how women could fall in love with him, yet soon revealing the hot temper and (for lack of a better word) self-centred asshole behaviour that makes them eventually leave him.

Love and Ruin is about Martha Gellhorn, a wartime correspondent and badass writer in her own right, who happens to be Hemingway’s third wife. McLain’s respect and admiration for Gellhorn shines through loud and clear in this novel. We see how pioneering a figure Gellhorn was, fighting her way up the ranks to be taken as seriously as her male counterparts. I particularly loved how she ended up being one of very few journalists — and the only woman — at D-Day because of a twist of poetic justice — Hemingway and other male journalists were stranded at a spot that had earlier seemed more promising for a scoop.

The novel focuses mostly on Gellhorn’s journalism career and tumultuous relationship with Hemingway, but it was Gellhorn the novelist whom I found especially compelling. I loved the section where Gellhorn and Hemingway lived together and were working on their respective novels, but while Hemingway’s novel flowed easily, Gellhorn found herself struggling to write hers. I loved how McLain portrayed Gellhorn’s fear that her own writing would get subsumed by the shadow of Hemingway’s success, and how while both of them are talented and have very strong personalities, it’s hard to be a good writer living with a great one. This isn’t a knock on Gellhorn’s talent, but rather an acknowledgement that the book Hemingway was working on turns out to be the pinnacle of his already illustrious career, and I related so hard to Gellhorn’s insecurity about her own work.

In the book, Gellhorn’s novels get criticised for the journalistic objectivity of her writing style, and ironically, it’s this same vocal restraint that kept me from being fully in love with Love and Ruin. To McLain’s credit, the narrative voice reminds me somewhat of Hemingway’s writing (I’ve never read Gellhorn’s work and so can’t compare), and her descriptions of the settings and the war feel true to life. It also slows the book down somewhat, and the book never quite swept me up emotionally. McLain also includes some sections in Hemingway’s voice, and they were okay, but for me, didn’t really add much to the novel.

Still, I love that this novel sheds light onto a historical figure who’s super kickass, but often overlooked in Hemingway’s wake. I’m also fascinated by Gellhorn’s story after she divorced Hemingway, which McLain talks about in the afterword. It’s high time we stop referring to Gellhorn as “one of Hemingway’s wives” and start referring to Hemingway as “one of Martha Gellhorn’s husbands.”

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

Oh. My. God. This book. I zipped through it in a day, fell completely in love with all the characters, and already I want to read it again and tell all my friends to read it to. (Read this book!)

Ayesha at Last is a modern-day retelling of Pride and Prejudice set in a Toronto Muslim community. I’ll be honest: I wanted to read this book because it seemed like a fun contemporary romance and I want to support diverse authors and diverse stories. But I’m a bit tapped out on Jane Austen retellings, and Pride and Prejudice in particular has been done to death.

But then I read this excerpt on the publisher’s Facebook page, and totally fell in love with the writing. I wanted to read more. I was intrigued by the fact that it was Khalid whose mother was trying to marry him off, and not Ayesha, and I laughed at the image of a travel mug falling off a car roof as Ayesha drives off.

Then I met the author and got a copy of the book at a Harper Presents event, and loved what the author said about the character of Khalid popping into her head and refusing to leave until his story is told. (It took 8 years!) Khalid is a romantic hero I don’t think I’ve ever read about before — he’s super conservative, dresses in a long white robe and skullcap and has a beard. Jalaluddin reimagines Darcy’s arrogance as super conservatism — the infamous moment where Darcy rejects Elizabeth Bennett is here reimagined as a super judgemental moment where Khalid dismisses Ayesha as not being a good Muslim because she happens to be in a bar and holding cigarettes. (Even though she’s drinking a virgin cocktail and the cigarettes aren’t hers.) And Elizabeth’s prejudice is here reimagined as Ayesha immediately deciding Khalid is a “fundy” with very rigid views on morality. (She later realizes she made some unfair assumptions partly based on his appearance.)

I loved the character of Khalid, and how his sometimes off-putting behaviour is contextualized by his really strict adherence to religious doctrine and more importantly, by his social awkwardness. I love that Jalaluddin avoids easy categorizations for her characters — Khalid happens to be a conservative Muslim, but there are many other Muslim characters, including Ayesha herself, who show varying degrees of adherence to religious practices. Even better, it’s Khalid’s inflexibility and snap judgements that are shown to be his faults, and not his conservatism per se. In fact, his faith and dedication to his community’s mosque are among the qualities that make Ayesha fall in love with him.

I also love the character of Ayesha, who is a substitute teacher by day and performance poet by night. At 27, she is considered a spinster for the rishta (arranged meetings between potential brides and grooms) market, and she’s okay with that, because she’s focused on her career. I related so much to her first day at work, and I absolutely love her family, with the Shakespeare-spouting grandfather, amateur detective grandmother and flighty cousin Hafsa, who wants to start an events company and is determined to have 100 rishtas before accepting a proposal.

I love the subplot about the mosque fundraiser that brings Khalid and Ayesha together, and the mistaken identity chaos that started out funny but turned out to be rather heartbreaking. I also really like the subplot around Khalid’s co-worker Amir, and how a man who seems like such a dudebro at first turns out to be dealing with much deeper issues. The moment when he opens up to Khalid was such an eye opener to me as well, and made me realize how much I wrongly assumed about him myself, based on his behaviour.

I especially love the subplot about Khalid’s workplace, where his racist boss plots to have him fired. I felt really bad for Khalid, and grateful for Amir’s support. But also I love the character of Clara, the recently-promoted HR Manager who also happens to be Ayesha’s best friend. She has to straddle the delicate line of protecting Khalid’s right to practice his religion while avoiding getting fired herself.

There are certainly familiar story beats from Pride and Prejudice throughout, but Ayesha at Last is such a great read mostly because of the elements that distinguish it from Austen’s original. I love the glimpse into the world of rishtas. I love the family dynamics amongst the characters, and the workplace dramas as Khalid deals with racism and Ayesha has to figure out what it is she really wants to do. Khalid and Ayesha have the cutest romantic chemistry, and I was cheering on their love story all the way.

This is such a fun, compelling book, and I highly recommend it for anyone who enjoys contemporary romance.

As a side note: any chance for a spin-off romance starring Clara? I think she can do much better than her boyfriend, and while I love the cute way her romance subplot wrapped up, it also felt rather abrupt. Basically: I just want more from Jalaluddin, and I’m already eager for a sequel.

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