What an incredible, beautiful, captivating book this is! It’s the kind of book that begs to be read slowly, to have its words savoured as we dip in and out of Cyril Avery’s life and allow ourselves to be lost in John Boyne’s Ireland. This is one of my favourite books this year, and I cannot recommend it enough. In fact, I recommend you save it for a lazy weekend or your next staycation. It took me over a week to finish this (at 600 pages, probably no surprise), but it was a struggle each and every time to put it aside for real life. Going to work, running an errand and even going to sleep all interrupted my experience of this book, and I often wished I had saved it for a time when I wouldn’t have to take a break from reading quite so often.

The Heart’s Invisible Furies is a Dickensian epic, a coming of age story set in 20th century Ireland. Boyne dips into Cyril Avery’s life in seven year intervals, from his birth after World War II, through the AIDS crisis of the 1980s, and all the way into the legalization of marriage equality in this century. We meet the people in and around Cyril’s life — his birth mother who was chased out of town by her parish priest for having a child out of wedlock; his adoptive mother, a novelist whose greatest tragedy was that people loved her work; his adoptive father, a wealthy man who skirted tax laws and always reminded Cyril that he was “not an Avery”; his best friend and first love Julian, a handsome and charismatic young man; and Bastiaan, the warm and loving doctor whom he takes as a partner.

Boyne’s writing is beautiful and wry; he inserts biting commentaries about the violence of homophobia and hypocrisy of religious fundamentalism with such finesse that the humour feels gentle even as the observations are sharp. There’s a gentleness to the story overall, a subtle distance that keeps the reading comfortable even as Boyne tackles deeply troubling subjects. Much of that is due to the seven-year format. Just as a situation becomes too intense — a character is murdered, another character dies, a horribly hurtful decision is made — the section fades to black, and we revisit Cyril’s life seven years later when presumably the characters have moved on somewhat. We see the aftermath and the scars without having to deal for too long with fresh wounds. This is not to say that the story is easy; the novel is Dickensian not just in scope but also in tragedy. At times, the coincidences and the ill luck strain the edges of credulity, yet the story is so captivating and the characters so real that we’re more than happy to suspend disbelief.

Perhaps the crux of the story can be found near the end:

Maybe there were no villains in my mother’s story at all. Just men and women, trying to do their best by each other. And failing. [p. 557]

Such is life, and such is this book. The Heart’s Invisible Furies is a life writ large, intimate in scope yet expansive in the world it channels. It’s a beautiful, heart-breaking, hopeful novel, and one I wholeheartedly recommend.

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

I absolutely loved this book. An ambitious young Congressional intern Aviva Grossman has an affair with her married boss. Like Monica Lewinsky, she is eventually found out and vilified by the public as the Congressman’s team rapidly launches into damage control PR. Aviva’s reputation suffers from the fallout, and she finds herself unable to land a job in either politics or communications. Fast forward a few years, and Aviva has reinvented herself as Jane Young, a wedding and events planner in small town Maine raising her daughter Ruby. This is where the novel begins.

Young Jane Young is told in multiple perspectives. I absolutely loved the first section, told by Aviva’s mom Rachel, who longs to reestablish a relationship with her estranged daughter. I thought her voice was the strongest of the sections, and while the other sections of the book eventually intersect and reconnect with Rachel, I still wish we had gotten a chance to revisit her story and her perspective later on. She had been a vocal opponent of Aviva’s relationship from the beginning, yet looking back, she realizes that her aggressive, overprotective response may not have been what Aviva needed. Her regret is palpable, as is her fierce love for her daughter, and for the longest time, I shared in her resentment for Aviva, at not listening to her mother and making such stupid decisions.

Jane’s section is next, and while the story itself — about a wedding she has to plan for a sweet and meek woman and an overbearing politician — is interesting, her voice didn’t grab me as immediately as Rachel’s did. There was also an annoying coyness at the beginning about Jane actually being Aviva, which I thought was unnecessary, given that this reveal is already made on the back cover and Goodreads summary. Still, this section sets the groundwork for what happens afterward, which is well worth the set up.

The bulk of the action in the novel takes place over the next two sections when Jane decides to run for mayor of her town and her daughter Ruby runs away from home to track down the man she believes is her father. Ruby’s precociousness and independence strain credulity, but I actually liked her character and especially her emails to her pen pal in Indonesia.

My main sympathy for these sections of the book lie mostly with Embeth, the congressman’s wife who is surviving cancer, supporting his reelection campaign, and surprised to learn that after all this time, she is still expected deal with a scandal she’d thought long buried in his past. I’m so glad we got a section from her perspective, and that we got to see her humanity, as people around her don’t often see past the cool facade. She definitely deserves much better than the Congressman and I hope her story after the events in this book leads her to some form of happily ever after.

I thought Zevin handled these sections well. Ruby’s running away is a melodramatic act, yet Zevin’s treatment of the story and the multiple perspectives keeps the characters grounded and their emotions real. I also like how each section keeps a tight focus on its own perspective, so that even when other characters re-enter the picture, we are privy only to what the narrator sees. For example, Rachel appears in Embeth’s section during the whole drama over Ruby’s running away, but we don’t really get a sense of how her presence at this time impacts her relationship with her daughter or granddaughter. While part of me wanted to know more, another part acknowledges that Embeth would likely not be involved at all in that, so her perspective has a different focus.

The final section takes us back in time and reliving Aviva’s affair through a Choose Your Own Adventure. Part of me thought this format was a bit cutesy, but I also like how it framed Aviva’s affair as a series of bad choices, and filtered through a more mature, knowing perspective that understood how alternative choices (e.g. leave the room instead of pulling the congressman in for a kiss) may have been better options.

Overall, I highly recommend Young Jane Young. Some sections are stronger than others and some plot threads are frustratingly left unresolved, but I liked seeing how a youthful mistake can lead to some long-lasting consequences for many people beyond just the individual. I also liked the realistic depiction of power dynamics (the Congressman is a dick for taking advantage of Aviva like that) and the unfairness of gender disparity (Aviva being labelled a slut and unable to escape this label). I remember growing up in the Clinton era. Then and now, I firmly sympathize with Hillary Clinton, who has faced the public fallout from the affair even longer than Bill has, which I think is ridiculously unfair. But looking back, I also realize now how unjustly I viewed Monica Lewinsky, and reading this book prompted me to think about what she must have gone through.

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

Twelve year old Daisy Tanenbaum is sent to live in Paris with her cool code breaker aunt, and gets embroiled in a spy caper involving the Queen’s Diamonds. Daisy in Exile is very much targeted to the middle-grade crowd, and includes an entertaining series of hijinks as Daisy and her Parisian friends — a cat burglar from the wrong side of the tracks named Sief and a beautiful, stylish teen named Nina — race around the city and through the sewers to escape Russian spies.

The first book in the series was written as a pitch for a Disney Channel show, and I can definitely imagine Daisy on the small screen. The danger is lighthearted, the adults are almost unbelievably naive, and the mystery of the secret code and the diamonds are almost secondary to the romp around Paris. It reminds me somewhat of the Mary Kate and Ashley books I read when I was younger, or the Lizzie McGuire movie, and will likely appeal to middle grade readers.

There are middle grade books that also appeal to adult readers, but this one didn’t quite make the cut for me. The story is fun and whimsical, the plot hits all the notes of teen action adventures, and it was a solid read overall, but it never quite hooked me. The writing is strong enough, but the plot twists felt predictable, and despite Daisy’s mad dash around and underneath Paris, it never quite felt urgent. Possibly, younger readers will enjoy it more. I do really like the Paris descriptions, and the beginning in particular really made me want to visit Paris.

One note of warning is that this book has much smaller font than what I would expect for a story for younger readers. I don’t need to read large print books, but I found it a physical strain at times to read this one, though I admit that may have to do with my expectations around fonts for this kind of story. If I were to try another Daisy Tanenbaum book, I may consider the ebook version instead.

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Thank you to the author for a copy of this book in exchange for an honest review.