Gina
If a book has won an award, Gina has probably read it. She loves classics, literary fiction, and contemporary fiction. To escape, she reads big fantasy novels and cookbooks. Gina recommends...
Martyr! by Each of the stories told are these raw human stories and all of them were so compelling and vividly painted that I was fully immersed. In general, this follows main character Cyrus who has struggled heavily with addiction and is now sober. Cyrus is a poet and has recently become interested in the idea of martyrs (people who give life meaning through death—dying to make things better). We hear from Cyrus in the modern day and then get POVs from Cyrus’s father, mother, and uncle in the past. There are some reveals towards the end that make it clear why the perspectives of Cyrus’s family are included but I did struggle with the constant shifting of perspectives. There are also some chapters that are Cyrus’s dreams. The prose is perfect—it’s beautiful (you can tell the author is a poet) but also not over done.
James by A retelling of Huck Finn from the perspective of the enslaved Jim, this is an adventure story at its core but also manages to be both moving and insightful. A good portion of the book is the same story, but made more fascinating by being from Jim’s (James's) perspective and there is a lot of new content as Everett accounts for what happened to Jim when Jim and Huck were separated. The ending does venture into some new plot and I couldn’t read fast enough because of the tension. Even if you know the story of Huck Finn well, this book still feels fresh and fast paced. Particularly interesting is the focus on language and dialect; Jim speaks in a dialect around white people but speaks in a very elevated intellectual way around non-whites.
The Rachel Incident by I read this book about a woman in 2010s Cork in only a few sittings. It sharply focuses on a few characters and the events unfold quickly, which makes it unputdownable. The book opens on Rachel, a college student working at a bookstore with her best friend James (who, at this point, is still pretending to be straight). Rachel has a crush on her English professor Frank and, in what starts as a joke, James and Rachel organize a launch party for his newest academic book in an attempt to get Frank to notice and start an affair with Rachel. What actually ends up happening is a bit of a surprise and Rachel and James are both drawn into a situation that changes their lives forever. It’s actually not as dramatic or intense as I am making it sound but rather very honest and real.
The Bee Sting by A very well-paced novel that gives the reader points of view from each member of the Barnes family as they lose both their fortune and social standing; we first hear from the children Cass and PJ as they deal with bullies and school issues and wonder about their parents. Things start to unravel fast. It was very satisfying to learn about the hidden family secrets when we got to mother Imelda and father Dickie's point of view and how things are not always as they appear. It felt very much like one of Jonathan Franzen's family focused novels, in a good way. The ending implications left me reeling.
The Vaster Wilds by I think this might be my favorite Lauren Groff novel yet: once again Groff uses an isolated female narrator but, unlike previous books, plot threads come full circle in the end, tying together. This is very much a survival story while also examining the wild American landscape. This follows a young servant girl who runs away from a colonial settlement to survive in the wild alone. We are with her as she builds fires and catches fish to warm and feed herself. She experiences some dangers and occasionally, while wracked with fever, thinks about her past as a servant who was forced by her mistress to come to America from England (which provides an interesting story to break up the survival narrative a bit). Like Groff's other works, it's not overly plot-heavy but very slow, repetitive, and character-focused.
Trust by I truly raced through this layered novel that is an homage to Edith Wharton. It has 4 parts/perspectives and each perspective pulls back more layers until the truth is revealed, similar to Rashomon or more recent books like Trust Exercise. The first part is a fictional novel about a wealthy couple Ben and Helen Rask. We get both of their childhood stories as they both grew up in solitude with intellectual gifts. We follow them through the stock market crash. I was so hooked by the characters and the well-paced plot. It's a juicy little fiction novel within a novel. The sections that follow provide viewpoints that attempt to illustrate the real-life people the book is based on with some surprising reveals throughout.
