Category Archives: literary fiction

I’ll Be Right Here, by Amy Bloom***

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I’ve been a reader of Amy Bloom’s novels for decades, and so when I see a new one is coming out, I leap, usually without even checking out the synopsis. Just the author’s name is enough to get me moving. This time was a little different. I began reading, but had trouble engaging, and my mind wandered. I decided to get the audio from the library, once the publication date had come and gone, and that was how I eventually finished it.

My thanks go to NetGalley and Random House for the invitation to read and review. This book is for sale now.

We start out in Europe during World War II. Gazala emigrates from Paris to New York, and becomes friends with a pair of sisters; later Samir, Gazala’s brother, joins her. Now here’s where it gets icky, (to use a highly literary term.) Gazala and Samir become a couple. They don’t tell people they meet that they are related, so they are accepted. Their friends also become involved in—to be charitable—unconventional relationships. In looking back at the synopsis, it’s all right there: “the lawlessness of love.” Hoo boy. It definitely is.

So, after forcing myself to finish listening to this thing, I nearly give it two stars, but the nugget that saves it for me is the concept that occurs when they are grieving a loved one, the notion of a “dead people’s party.” I love thinking about this! I have already started imagining my own such party, having lost too many people I cherished, when my sister dies. Her death is not altogether unexpected, as she was a great deal older than I am and has been in ill health for many years, but it still packs a punch. The thought of my sister’s dead people’s party—complete fantasy, as far as I am concerned, but who cares? Is what has helped me through a dark time.

So Bloom gets an extra star.

Nevertheless, I don’t recommend this thing unless the reader has carefully read the synopsis and is still interested. Yikes! I’ll probably read Bloom again, but this time I’ll be more careful before I commit.

Over Yonder, by Sean Dietrich*****

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Sean Dietrich has written another fine novel, Over Yonder, one full of quirky characters, weird yet oddly credible situations, and a whole lot of heart. My thanks go to NetGalley and Thomas Nelson Books for the review copy. This book is for sale now.

Dietrich has been writing for a long while, but this is just the third of his books that I’ve read. As I begin this one, I develop a niggling suspicion, wondering whether this author uses a formula. This would be a sad discovery, because till this point, I have greatly loved his work. And so the question I have to answer before I can do much else is whether that’s true, or whether he is writing unique stories using a signature style. Here is what I am seeing: each story focuses on a girl—teen or child—who’s down on her luck, possibly facing a crisis, with no adult that will help her or advocate for her; an older man dealing with misfortune of his own such as a fatal or serious illness, and who is otherwise isolated and in need of redemption; and a chance meeting of the two in a small town in the deep South.

I suppose, after reading this third one I am inclined—as you can see from my rating—to say this is a signature style rather than a formula. I hate to be played. If I felt this was a formula, I would feel annoyed and my review would not be generous, but that’s not what happens.

Caroline is 17 and pregnant. Her boyfriend, Tater Bunson, is at the wheel of his ’93 Honda.

“Caroline stared out the lace-like cracks of the passenger window’s single bullet hole at downtown Knoxville…her hair was the color of a carrot. She was ninety-four percent freckles. Her small, upturned nose, full cheeks, and cherub face brought to mind a character from the highly successful Cabbage Patch Kids product line…Tater spun the wheel right. The car made a sound not unlike a Folgers can of rocks falling down a public stairwell. The spiderweb crack on the passenger window came from a .22 caliber bullet that had passed through the glass during Tater’s last heated disagreement with his mom.”

Woody Barker used to be a priest. He has a houseboat and a bad heart, and not much else. He can qualify for a heart transplant, but only after he quits smoking, and it’s not going well. He’s lonely; he had hoped to pick up with his ex-wife once he got out of prison, but now that he’s out, he sees that she has a boyfriend, and it looks like he’s out of luck. Then an old girlfriend summons him to her deathbed. She wants him to meet his 17-year-old daughter. Who? What??

Dietrich’s wry humor and visceral figurative language are out in force here. Highly recommended to those that enjoy strong Southern fiction with deeply developed characters.

My Friends, by Fredrik Backman***-****

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“Being human is to grieve, constantly.”

Well now. Fredrik Backman’s many fans ought to brace themselves for his latest novel. The feel-good stories he’s written, and written brilliantly, in years gone by are nowhere in evidence here; those of us that look to this author to bolster our sense of optimism and to remember that human beings are innately good are not going to find it. This book is far darker than anything he’s written to date, and I have no idea what is behind this sorrow and misery sandwich, but I am sorry it’s come to this.

My thanks go to NetGalley and Atria Books for the review copy. This book is for sale now.

Our premise is that a homeless teen artist, grieving the death of her best friend, befriends an older, dying street artist who turns out to be someone famous and revered in the art world. The artist senses in her a kindred spirit, and so his last act is to have his friend and business agent sell everything that the artist owns in order to purchase back one of his most iconic paintings and give it to her after he dies, because “She’s one of us.”

Okay. It’s a stretch, but it’s fiction, and after all, Backman generally delivers, so I’ll suspend disbelief and roll with it.

Nearly the entire remainder of the book consists of the friend, whose name is Ted, spilling his and the artist’s past to the girl, whose name is Louisa. He’s traveling by train, and so he takes her with him. We hear all about their childhoods together, along with the two other friends that made up their tightly knit friend group. At one point she runs off, and at another, they lose the painting and the artist’s ashes, but these constitute minor breaks in the otherwise unending conversation, which is nearly a monologue.

It didn’t take me long to be heartily sorry I had ever taken the galley; I finally bonded with the narrative at about the 60% mark, and from that point until just past the 80% mark, I was reading because I wanted to know what would happen next, or be said next, rather than from a sense of duty. For most of the final 20%, I was watching the page numbers and wondering if this thing was going to end, ever.

It’s hard to rate a book like this, because so much of my disappointment stems from my earlier admiration of Backman’s works. If this was written by someone with whom I was unfamiliar, would I rate it a little higher? But then, if the author wasn’t known to me, I likely wouldn’t have picked it up in the first place. The stark shift in the author’s world view is shocking, and I am still not entirely over it. I can only recommend this book to you if you need a grief book, because anyone in need of a good ugly-cry will surely find it here.

The Fisherman’s Gift, by Julia R. Kelly*****

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“Why is it, she asks herself, that we only ever remember the things we did wrong?”

Julia R. Kelly’s novel The Fisherman’s Gift tells a luminous tale of long ago, and it is one of the year’s best. My thanks go to NetGalley and Simon and Schuster for the invitation to read and review. This book is for sale now.

Dorothy lives alone in Skerry, a tiny Scottish fishing village, in the year 1900. She is an outsider, having moved here to teach the children; she marries and has a child, but when the child is tragically drowned, her husband leaves her, and now her life is one of solitude and regret.  Then a little boy washes up, a shipwreck victim, and Joseph, a fisherman that shares a past with Dorothy, brings him to the village; it is Dorothy that takes care of him, and every day, he seems more like her own lost boy. She wonders from time to time whether God has sent him back to her.

This is a beautifully written novel, glorious not only for what is said, but for what isn’t. Kelly crafts every character in the story with nuance, and so there are no bad people, and also no perfect ones. The entire book is written in third person omniscient, so we get a peek into one character’s thoughts, and then another’s. Sometimes this can be frustrating, because I want to climb onto the page and explain to one of them or another that what they’re thinking is wrong, and can’t they see that they have misunderstood a person, or an event? But when I yearn to do this, it’s because I believe every single word about every single character.

It’s a bittersweet tale to be sure, but readers can rest assured that Kelly won’t burn everything to the ground.

To those that love historical fiction, and to those that enjoy a good love story, I highly recommend this sweet story.

Maggie, or a Man and a Woman Walk into a Bar, by Katie Yee****

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Author Katie Yee makes her novelistic debut with Maggie, or a Man and a Woman Walk into a Bar. A mother of two young children is blindsided when her husband reveals that he is having an affair with a woman named Maggie; almost simultaneously, she learns she has breast cancer, and so she decides to name her cancer Maggie, too. Now she and her soon-to-be-ex each have a Maggie.  This novel is a vivid, authentic, utterly believable narrative that hijacked my attention from the other books I was reading. My thanks go to NetGalley and Simon and Schuster for the review copy. This book will be available to the public on July 22, 2025.

“They talk about women’s intuition…I never suspected a thing.”

The way that she contends with the news is completely different from how I would respond, and yet I believe her entirely. There’s no drama, no crying; at least, not when anyone is there to see her. Instead, she eats a lot and tries to maintain some dignity for herself. The scales are so badly skewed against her; Sam comes from heart stopping wealth, the sort of family that has multiple houses peppered around the U.S., and a couple of favorite places they like to stay in Europe. Our protagonist, whose name I am fairly sure is never provided, hails from the hardscrabble working class. And in leaving, her husband tells her that she can have the house as well as a generous chunk of alimony. If it were me and I were inclined to be nasty about it, all that money might stop me dead in my tracks, since clearly, the guy could get away with giving her far less if she really wanted to push him. 

So instead, she sets some hard new boundaries. She won’t tell Sam about the cancer, at least not yet. She doesn’t want the awkwardness, the one where she witnesses him struggling with what is the right thing to do, versus what he’d rather do. No, she decides, it’s not his business anymore. And then she names the cancer after his girlfriend.

Maybe she’s a little passive aggressive, but who can blame her? It’s all she has left.

This novel has some power behind it, and if this is Yee’s debut, I can hardly wait to see what she writes when she has more experience. I recommend this book to any woman that enjoys contemporary fiction, especially those that have been jilted, and to progressive-minded men as well.

Broken Country, by Clare Leslie Hall*****

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I am late to the party, but it would be a crime not to review Broken Country, the stirring love story by Clare Leslie Hall that can make even the hardest cynic weepy-eyed. My thanks go to NetGalley and Simon and Schuster for the review copy. This book is for sale now.

The story is set in a small village in Britain during the mid-1900s. The setting bounces back and forth between the present day and the past; it’s easy to keep track of, partly because the author takes care to delineate which chapter is which, and partly because there are few characters to keep track of. Our protagonist is Beth, and she and her husband, Frank, are farmers, have lived in the same community for their whole lives. A farm accident claimed the life of their only child, Bobby, a few years before, but they are both still fragile, ragged in their grief.

Then, oh my my, who comes back to town but Beth’s old flame, Gabriel, a man that came from money and went on to make a name for himself as a novelist. Gabriel has inherited the family house and land, and in the wake of his divorce, has brought his son Leo to live here. Here. Right next door to Beth and Frank.  And to complicate old feelings all the more, his son Leo is about the same age as Bobby was when he died.

Is it possible to be in love with two men at the same time? Beth would tell you that it is. Frank can see what is unfolding, and he tries to reason with Beth, but she assures him that everyone is grown up now, the past is the past, and there’s no reason that they and their new old neighbor cannot be friends.

Well.

I seldom reach for novels like this one, wary as I am of schmalz and schlock, but reader, I see none of either one in this story. The writing is disciplined and restrained, yet oh, so intimate. When a formula or trope comes into view, Hall goes the other way instead. And though I may have thought I knew where we would all end up, I was mistaken; the ending is beautifully planned and executed.

Because I had fallen a bit behind, I checked out the audio version from Seattle Bibliocommons; reader Hattie Morahan does a stellar job with the narration.

Highly recommended.

The Children of Eve, by John Connolly*****

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If Stephen King and James Lee Burke had a baby—an unnatural one, of course—it would probably look a lot like John Connolly. Connolly has a genius for creating tales that take place on Earth, and are in most regards realistic, while adding elements of the supernatural that go well beyond magical realism. There’s the mystery, and there’s the horror, and if we’re reading a Charlie Parker mystery, we cannot have one without the other, nor should we.

My tremendous thanks go to NetGalley and Atria Books for the review copy of The Children of Eve, the 22nd Charlie Parker mystery. This book is for sale now.

The story commences when Charlie is contracted to find and protect a man named Wyatt Riggins, who has disappeared. Riggins has thrown in his lot with some baddies, and may have bitten off more than he can chew. As Charlie—and we—pursue Riggins, we learn of some seriously nasty skullduggery that’s afoot involving international art thieves. Added to the mix are four missing children, believed to have been kidnapped. There’s not a single slow moment as Charlie tracks Riggins, and we see, through the third person omnipotent, the manner in which these thieves have fallen out, and the trail of bodies that are left in their wake. This is grisly business, and not for the squeamish, although I will say that some horror and hardcore detective novels do go places that I can’t, but Parker novels always manage to stay just inside my own boundaries.

Recurring characters Angel and Louis, perennial favorites, return briefly. At one point, Parker has been roughed up and is in the hospital. Angel and Louis have been listed as his next of kin, and they seem unlikely nurturers. While guarding Parker’s room, for instance, Louis amuses himself by making those that pass by him nervous. And when he is discharged on the condition that he not be alone for the next 24 hours, Angel and Louis make the doctor uneasy as well. She asks Parker whether he has “any other friends? Any at all?” I would have loved to see more of these two, but perhaps Connolly is keeping them in the shadows, lest they grow stale. That’s hard to imagine, but no other reason makes sense. I also enjoyed the brief glimpse of the Fulci Brothers, hired (but not brilliant) muscle men that resemble “bears in green leisure suits.”

Perhaps the most disquieting aspect of this novel—scratch that, not “perhaps”—is the development of Connolly’s dead daughter, Jennifer, who has come to him periodically and watches over him. I won’t say anymore about that, but I finished this book 2 days ago, have been reading several other books, and yet I can’t get Jennifer out of my head. For those that love gritty detective novels, and for those that are drawn to things that go bump in the night, this book, and this series is strongly recommended.

The Family Recipe, by Carolyn Huynh*****

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“We all need to feel needed. Otherwise, what’s the point of living?”

Carolyn Huynh made her authorial debut in 2022 with The Fortunes of Jaded Women. It was one of my favorite novels not only of that year, but of all the thousand-plus galleys I have read since I began reviewing. She’s back again with The Family Recipe, and it’s every bit as good as the first. My thanks go to NetGalley and Atria Books for the invitation to read and review, but make no mistake: I would have hunted this thing down and bought it with my Social Security check if it came down to it. I wouldn’t have been sorry, either.

This book is available to the public now.

Once again, our protagonists are Vietnamese and Vietnamese-Americans, mostly women, and once again, they are siblings and other family members that must come together; it isn’t a voluntary reunion. And that’s where the similarities between the first book and this one end.

Duc Tran, the patriarch, has laid out the terms by which his children may inherit his fortune. Once upon a time, he was the Vietnamese sandwich king, and in order to become his heir, each of his four daughters must relocate to a city she doesn’t want to live in, and revive a down-at-the-heels restaurant in a now undesirable end of town. It’s a contest; that is, unless Duc’s one son, Jude, succeeds in getting married within the one year’s time limit of the contest. If he can do that, he wins. (His sisters aren’t worried; who would marry Jude?)

The story is told from several points of view; these include the siblings, their uncle—a shady lawyer, and Duc’s best friend; their mother, who abandoned them when they were small, when her mental health collapsed, and never went back; Duc’s second wife; and briefly, Duc himself, who mostly serves as a mysterious figure that doesn’t even return to the States to lay out his children’s requirements, sending their uncle as his proxy.  As the story unfolds, we learn more about each sibling, and about the traumas they have experienced, as well as their successes.

The thing that makes it work so well is Huynh’s unerring sense of timing. It’s a dramatic tale, but it’s shot full of humor, as we see at the outset, when we learn the sisters’ names. Their father was a huge fan of the Beatles, and so the girls are named Jane, Paulina, Georgia, and (wait for it…) Bingo!

There are plenty of twists and turns, and the dialogue crackles. The internal monologues are mesmerizing. This book would make a fantastic movie.

Since I was reading this galley digitally, I highlighted quotes that I thought I’d like to use in this review, but there are 28 of them. Obviously, I cannot share them all here, but let that inform you, if nothing else here has, how much I love this book.

Highly recommended to anyone that has a beating heart, at least a passing interest in Vietnamese-American culture and/or family stories, and can use a few good laughs.

The Road to Tender Hearts, by Annie Hartnett*****

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The Road to Tender Hearts is aptly named, possibly the most big-hearted novel of 2025. Author Annie Hartnett first came on my radar in 2022 when she published Unlikely Animals, which turned out to be one of my favorites that year. When I saw that she had a new one out, I tried to temper my expectations; not many authors can write more than one novel so hugely imaginative, genre defying, darkly funny, and yet heartwarming. And it’s true; not many can. As it happens, however, Hartnett can, and she has.

My thanks go to NetGalley and Random House Ballantine for the review copy; however, this is one of those rare instances where I would have paid full cover price if that was the only way for me to read it. It will be available to the public Tuesday, April 29, 2025.

Like Hartnett’s previous novel, The Road to Tender Hearts has quirky characters and at least one sentient animal with an internal monologue, but the structure of the plot is not as complex—a thing I am grateful for, near bedtime—and there are fewer characters and settings. Both are magical, and the distinctions show that Hartnett is not one to write the same book, more or less, over and over. She has more imagination than that; she may have more imagination than ten or twelve ordinary people.

Our protagonist, to the extent we can identify just one, is PJ Halliday. PJ was living the good life, a happy family, steady work, and the esteem of his neighbors in Pondville, Massachusetts, but then his elder daughter, Kate, died when she was eighteen, and PJ, and his marriage, came apart. Since then, he’s been doing two things: drinking, and giving away chunks of his huge lottery prize to every sad sack and every player that comes with an outstretched palm. But all that is about to change.

The son of PJ’s late brother, from whom he was estranged, dies, along with his wife, leaving two elementary aged children without a home or family. It seems that PJ is the only relative these little tikes have. Luna and Ollie aren’t sure that PJ can be trusted, since their own parents and skeezy grandpa never could be, but he actually has some strong if rusty parenting skills, and he is determined to clean up his act for them. There’s just one other thing he needs to do: his old high school flame, Michelle Cobb, has recently become a widow. He never forgot her, and now he intends to drive to her retirement community, Tender Hearts, in Arizona and see if he can try again with her. Two little kids in the car? No problem. And now, add his (still living) daughter Sophie, who figures she’d better keep an eye on him and the tots, and Pancakes, the cat that has adopted him.

Pancakes has a unique talent: he can tell who is about to die, and he goes to them, so that oftentimes, their last breaths are taken as they stroke a purring kitty. And so, Pancakes goes on the trip too, but every now and then, he disappears and is found on the lap of some elderly individual in poor health. (Or, not elderly. Hey, Pancakes just knows.) It’s no coincidence that the story begins and ends with Pancakes.

PJ is not always the best decision maker, and there are several times when I wince at the choices he makes. Sometimes, someone else swoops in and fixes his blunders, and at other times, they’re left hanging in the wind, and we have to wait to see how they will affect the story’s outcome.

Every single aspect of this book is golden. The dialogue flows naturally, and the internal monologues, all told in the third person omniscient, are authentic and full of character. In short—and I rarely say this—there’s not one single thing about this glorious redemption tale that I would change.

Highly recommended to everyone that loves fiction, and that has a beating heart.

Book Review Hot Air, by Marcy Dermansky*****

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4.5 stars. An impulsive choice made at the last minute, and how often do those pan out? Literary fiction, 4 stars. 

Joannie is an author trying to live off the increasingly scant checks garnered by her first–and last–novel. She’s a single parent, and as she and the rest of the world come out of hiding following the pandemic, blinking like naked mole rats, she accepts a date, her first in seven years, from a man that lives around the corner. He has a child too! So it all starts out so innocently, so normally, and might have remained so, had the billionaires not crash landed their hot air balloon in Johnny’s pool that evening.

My thanks go to NetGalley and Knopf for the review copy. This book is for sale now.

I generally avoid novels that feature major characters that are wealthy, but this one had its platinum tongue in its diamond-encrusted cheek so plainly that I decided to take a chance. Here’s what I love the best about it: instead of opening with a humorous passage or two that turn out to be about the only funny material the book has to offer—the sort that makes me suspicious that the author only brought out their A game for the first three chapters, the part that the publisher would see—Hot Air begins with a clever moment or two, and then it ramps up until the climax, at which point I am helpless with laughter. The pair in the balloon—Jonathan and Julia—are the most solipsistic individuals I’ve seen in print in some time, but they want to believe in their own goodness, and the inner conflict, what there is of it, between trying to be at least sort of decent, yet being determined, in the end, to put their own wishes first, is deftly handled. Joannie, on the other hand, is from the real world, and she’s trying to find just a scintilla of personal happiness without screwing things up and making her little girl pay the price. We bounce between their points of view, including the home owner’s, of course, with occasional references made to Jonathan’s personal assistant, Vivian, a young Vietnamese woman tasked with cleaning up all of his messes. Here’s a sample from the very beginning, so I’m not spoiling anything:

“He took a photo of the hot air balloon at the bottom of the pool and sent it to Vivian in a text message. ‘Here’s a challenge for you,’ he wrote. She could take care of it. She was the one who had actually rented the balloon, after all, set up the lessons. It occurred to him that this was her fault. She should have told him it was a bad idea.”

We’re well into the second half of this novel when we hear Vivian’s point of view, and it is a miracle that I am able to avoid spraying my sandwich across the table, it’s so surprising and so funny!

At 208 pages, this little novel flies by, aided by the abundant, punchy dialogue. I haven’t had such a happy surprise in ages; now you can, too! Anyone might enjoy this story, but I especially recommend it to women. If you need some comic relief, get this book! You won’t be sorry.