Tag Archives: Fiction

Review | Beautiful Day, Elin Hilderbrand

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4984cdf8952a88d0371a815d73eca7eeElin Hilderbrand’s Beautiful Day is a fun, soap opera-like beach read. Jenna Carmichael and Stuart Graham are getting married on a beautiful Nantucket beach… What could go wrong? For one thing, it turns out that the bride’s sister is bitter about marriage in general and about her role as the responsible mother figure. She also happens to be having a fling with a much older man. The groom’s parents have divorced over an affair, and subsequently remarried, and the woman who caused the divorce in the first place will be at the wedding with her son (the aforementioned cause of the divorce). Bridesmaids and groomsmen are in and out of each other’s beds, and soon various skeletons in various closets are brought to light. What can I say? Beautiful Day is a fun, absolutely fluffy, ride of a book. Take it with you to the beach and enjoy!

Even better, amidst the fluff and melodrama are some real tender moments. Central to the wedding is a notebook left behind by Jenna’s mother before she passed away. In it, Jenna’s mother writes down her hopes and dreams for her daughter’s wedding — a sweet way for her to be involved even though she is no longer physically around. I admit, my own mother has passed away, and the realization that she won’t be around to see it if I ever do get married is almost too painful for me to contemplate. My mom was a major romantic, much more so than I am, and to be honest, she’d probably have enjoyed the ceremony of my wedding much more than I would have. So Jenna’s mother not being around and instead leaving a notebook for Jenna to refer to did make me somewhat teary-eyed.

I can also see how the notebook, while a sweet gesture, puts far too much pressure on the family. As Jenna’s stepmother points out, Jenna has had hardly a say in her own wedding — everything had already been detailed by her mother. The notebook also, understandably, puts a strain on Jenna’s father’s current marriage — his previous wife is a much more dominant presence than even the bride herself.

There are also moments of sharp social insight. The Best Man’s boyfriend Jethro for example is hyper aware not just of being one of the only two openly gay men on that Nantucket beach, but also being the only black man at the wedding apart from a server and the bandleader. His tongue-in-cheek commentary is funny, and the way some other characters comment on his adding a welcome touch of “diversity” to the wedding is a hilarious bit of satire about the white bread nature of that predominantly upper class resort.

Beautiful Day is just a fun page-turner for the summer. Take it with you to the porch, or to the beach if you’re lucky, and lose yourself in the delightful soap opera of the Carmichael and Graham families.

Review | When We Were Good, Suzanne Sutherland

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17076485Remember being a teenager? Remember that all too dismissive word “angst” and the feeling that all these things you’re going through are much bigger and much more significant than adults give you credit for? Suzanne Sutherland’s debut YA novel When We Were Good plunges the reader right into that angst. I don’t know how I would have reacted to the book as a teenager, but as an adult, it did bring back memories of how it is to view the world as a teen. And in a literary landscape where teenage characters are either Joss Whedon sophisticated wits (think of John Green’s teens) or forced by dystopian societies to grow up too soon (Katniss Everdeen and her many succeeding iterations), there’s something refreshing about an author who decides to show teenage angst straight up. Protagonist Katherine Boatman is flawed, horribly confused, and desperate to “be good” without fully understanding what that means.

It takes a lot of skill to pull such a character off without letting her mess of emotions turn the story itself into an emotional mess, and unfortunately first time novelist Suzanne Sutherland hasn’t mastered it quite yet. There’s a lot going on in the novel, and a lot more that the author tries to do, and the result isn’t as tight as it could have been. That being said, Sutherland’s sense of characterization is strong — Katherine comes off troubled and sympathetic rather than melodramatic, and straight edge loud mouth Marie, who admittedly does get annoying at times, actually does sound real rather than a caricature.

This strength is sometimes overshadowed by an overabundance of detail and attempt at verisimilitude. In a scene for example where Katherine cries while grocery shopping, one can almost hear the creative writing professor advise to “show, not tell.” Yet after a couple pages of the physical symptoms leading up to the actual act of crying, I would have preferred the single line: The avocados reminded Katherine of her grandmother and made her cry.

Similarly, many conversations between characters consist of information unnecessary to the plot, and awkward in a way that feels real, but adds nothing to character development. Again, there is the basic creative writing tenet to capture “real” conversation — to be fair, the dialogue does mimic conversations we hear on between teenagers on the bus. However, for conversations on a page, I would have preferred more polish.

Toronto is very much a character in this story. Katherine’s exploration of the indie music scene takes her around the city, and Sutherland takes the reader with her, naming real Toronto streets and landmarks. The Bloor Viaduct, in particular the “Luminous Veil” suicide barrier becomes a potent metaphor for Katherine’s grief. The author hammers home the point a bit too much for the image to keep its resonance, but again, one remembers the overpowering emotion of teenage life, and certainly my teenage self probably would have latched on to that symbol as much as Katherine did.

LGBTQ stories in YA are becoming more mainstream, though still fairly rare. Even rarer, at least from my own personal reading experience, is having a straight edge character — one who stays away from alcohol and drugs and genuinely believes that’s the cool way to live. (or as kids today are more likely to say: that’s the sick way to live) In Marie, Sutherland creates an unapologetically lesbian straight edge love interest. I wish Marie had been given more nuance, and that the development of her relationship with the (sexually confused for most of the novel) Katherine was less abrupt. Still, Sutherland does make a statement by glamourizing the straight edge lifestyle, and one that invites discussion.

When We Were Good is Sutherland’s first novel, and while this does show in her writing, the novel also touches on some really important issues. What does it mean to “be good”? How can a fifty dollar bill be enough to honour a beloved grandmother’s life? How can a teenage girl deal with so many things going on, without allowing herself to be pulled under? Sutherland’s novel explores the overwhelmingly emotional nature of the teen years, as well as its amazing potential to discover new interests and new ways of viewing the world.

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

Review | The Banks of Certain Rivers, Jon Harrison

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17665375High school teacher Neil Kazenzakis is having a rough time. His wife has been severely disabled in an accident, and now lies in a coma, his girlfriend Lauren is pushing him to commit, his son Christopher doesn’t know about Lauren yet, and to top it all off, he’s just been implicated in an act of violence against a student. There’s a mystery to be solved in Jon Harrison’s debut novel The Banks of Certain Rivers — who on earth would take the trouble to frame a teacher for assault? — but it’s above all a family drama, and a rather touching one.

Harrison does a good job pulling his readers in. The two major plot points — how can Neil tell Christopher about Lauren and how can Neil prove his innocence in the altercation — are compelling, and Harrison’s characters are so well-developed they feel real, and so we as readers feel invested in what happens to them. The novel deals a lot with grief as well, and in such a lovely, subtle way. I really liked Neil’s emails to his wife, as he tells her how his life is going, and the realization that these emails may never be read is heartbreaking.

There are a couple weaknesses with the novel. First, even though the wife’s accident was depicted in the first chapter, the story immediately picks up in the present day without explaining exactly what had happened to the wife. If not for the book blurb stating she was alive and “profoundly disabled,” I would have thought that she’d died. As it was, for the longest time, I thought she was in the bedroom the entire time, unable to leave because of a disability. As well, the resolution of the mystery regarding the video evidence of Neil’s assault on a student was far too abrupt. I wish Harrison had integrated it better into the story; as it was, the solution just seemed random, and while the characters explained why it made sense, it still seemed unrealistic to me. A solution placed for the sake of having one.

Finally, a certain theme central to the relationship between father and son, and a large part of the major rift later on in the book, may have been hinted at but never really explored. Neil’s grief at his wife’s accident was certainly covered, but the specifics of how he handled it were left vague, until a climactic moment later on. Given the enormity of this revelation, as well as its implications on other parts of the story, I wish Harrison had, again, integrated it better into the novel throughout.

That being said, The Banks of Certain Rivers is a strong novel, definitely worth more than the $2.99 Kindle price on Amazon.ca. I was drawn in to Neil’s story, and ended up reading it in a single afternoon. Harrison has a gift for making characters feel real, and as we get to know Neil, we can’t help feeling invested in his story.

UPDATED: The Banks of Certain Rivers has recently been picked up by another publisher, and is now available in paperback format. Click on the book cover below to see it on Amazon.

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I received a free copy of this book in exchange for an honest review.