Trudy J. Morgan-Cole's Blog, page 17

The Company of Heaven, by Catherine Fox

Longtime readers of this blog will know I am a huge fan of Catherine Fox’s Lindchester Chronicles, having discovered the first two books — Acts and Omissions and Unseen Things Above — back in 2015. The next two, Realms of Glory and Tales from Lindford, I read in serialized form on Fox’s blog, chronicling the turbulent events of 2016 and 2020 respectively. (The first two books were initially serialized in the same way, but were already out in book form before I discovered them). The blog format provided a fascinating way to anchor novels in a specific time so the reader saw the impact of real-world events like Brexit or the Covid-19 pandemic unfolding week-by-week or month-by-month in the lives of ordinary people.

The “ordinary people” at the centre of this book series are the clergy and people of an English cathedral town called Lindchester, and the nearby town of Lindford. The first three books centred mostly around the cathedral, and most of the characters were either clergy or otherwise directly connected with the cathedral; these latest two take us further out into the community. While there are still several clergy characters (old friends from the earlier books), there are lay people as well, along with a few agnostics and atheists who are, in this novel’s warm and inclusive gaze, still recipients of and channels for grace, even though they might not use the same language for that grace as the more religious characters do.

“Grace” is, I think, the overarching theme of this novel, and of the whole series. If you ask “what’s this book about?” … well, it’s about a lot of things. It’s about a community living through the difficult months of 2021-22, when Covid is supposed to be “over” but refuses to go away. It’s about two gay dads sharing a home with the mother of their new baby. It’s about a cranky, highly relatable middle-aged university prof confronting the secrets hidden in her family history. It’s about a divorced couple raising two teenage girls while slowly finding their way back to each other. It’s about a solitary man creating home and shelter for a young relative going through a difficult time. And those are just a handful of the many plotlines woven through the novel. Through it all, it’s about grace — the grace of God filtered through ordinary people muddling through, trying to help each other, sometimes screwing up, doing their best.

This book probably works as a stand-alone — most of the characters are ones we met in the earlier books, but there are some new ones, including the wonderful Ellis and Paver whose story threads the other plot lines together. We’re given enough background on the returning characters to make sense, so you could jump into this one without having read any of the previous books. However (and this is not to discourage you from picking up The Company of Heaven if you haven’t read the others!) I think there’s so much more richness here if you have read the series, and get to see how characters like Freddie, Jane, Martin, and others, have grown over the years as we’ve gotten to know them.

There’s much more I could say about this book; I feel like I’m only scratching the surface. If you click the links to the titles of the four earlier books above you can read my reviews of each of them, where I touch on many of the other things I love about this series, including my reflections on the Anglican in-jokes that fly right over my head because I’m not Anglican (that’s a plus, not a minus — I love a book that immerses me in a subculture even if I don’t catch every reference!). Because the publishers kindly sent me a free copy in return for an honest review and are including this post in the “blog tour” around the novel’s release, I’ll try to restrain my ramblings a little and just say: this is a wonderful book, the latest (hopefully not last?) in a wonderful series.

As well as the serialized form of initial publication and the Trollope-like cathedral setting, there’s another way in which these novels, so steeped in twenty-first century issues and concerns, call back to nineteenth-century English fiction. They have a very direct, self-aware narrative voice, a narrator who addresses the reader directly, who calls attention to the fact that the story is a construct and she is making choices — and in doing so, invites us to participate in that story.

All my jewels, precious jewels, my loved and my own, Fox’s author/narrator reflects. Sometimes I can’t believe I made these characters up. They all come out of my head, and now they live in yours, as if they’re real people, and we care about what happens to them.

How true! In September 2022, when Catherine Fox had finished posting the online chapters of this novel (the characters left, as it were, in suspended animation), I watched from Canada as our news endlessly covered the Queen’s death, and those strange and unforgettable images of the endless, hours-long queue for mourners to file past the coffin. I caught myself thinking, “Is anyone in Lindchester enough of a monarchist to come down to London and stand in this line-up? Would Freddie May join the queue and lead those around him in an impromptu sing-along? Would Leah’s parents let her go to London to hold up a protest sign? Is Jane shaking her head and rolling her eyes at the whole spectacle?”

As if they’re real people, indeed.

The Foghorn Echoes, by Danny Ramadan

I stumbled across this book more or less by accident, as someone was raving about it on Twitter. It’s not an easy read, but it’s a really good one. It begins in Syria, with two teenage boys, Hussam and Wassim. They are attracted to each other, but in the deeply homophobic environment they live in, one stolen kiss leads to tragic consequences.

The story then jumps forward many years; both are young men now. Wassim in still in Syria in the midst of the civil war there. He has attempted to live the “normal” life his family expects, marrying and having a child, but that has fallen apart. Meanwhile, Hussam has left the country, first for a refugee camp in Turkey, then for Canada, where he has been sponsored by a well-off older Canadian man he met online.

It’s no happily-ever-after for either of them: Wassim ekes out a marginal existence, hiding in an abandoned house and talking to a ghost. Hussam seems to have it all –rich Canadian boyfriend, safety, acceptance in a world where it’s OK to be gay and there’s no war going on. But as we follow him through a dizzying series of unsatisfying hookups and self-destructive choices, and see him facing the casual everyday racism of his new Canadian home, we realize Hussam is no more free than Wassim is. Both are still tied to the past, to the ways in which they have hurt each other and been hurt by the world around them. Both characters’ slow and tentative journey towards healing — and the gentle kindness of those who reach out hands to help them along the way — make for a lyrical and beautiful story, even if some of what they go through along the way is difficult to read.

Senior Management: Parenting My Parents, by Martha Vowles

About a year and a half ago I attended an idyllic writing retreat at which New Brunswick author Martha Vowles was one of the other participants. Those of us who were published writers talked about her work, and I wanted to read Martha’s memoir immediately, not just because of the quality of her writing and the warmth and humour of her personality, but because the title is one of my favourite punnish titles ever. Martha’s book, like mine, is published by a small Atlantic Canadian press, so it took me a little while to get my hands on a copy, but I bought it on my latest trip to Nova Scotia and read it over the couple of days I was there, and thoroughly enjoyed it.

Senior Management lives up to the promise of its title. It’s a witty, sweet, salty, thoughtful and thought-provoking memoir about a period of several years in the author’s life when her father and stepmother gradually slipped into dementia and became both physically and mentally less able to care for themselves — while, at the same time, stubbornly insisting on maintaining their independence. On top of this, Martha lived in New Brunswick and her parents in rural Quebec, so she was managing all this remotely through frequent visits and enlisting the help of neighbours, relatives, and friends.

As people live longer (a good thing!) dealing with parents and other loved ones into their 80s and 90s with diminished capacity is something most of us will have to deal with while we struggle with our own challenges in midlife. I’ve been lucky so far (I wouldn’t exactly call my mom’s sudden death at 78 “lucky,” but I have always been grateful she did not have to endure a long and painful decline; my dad, who has just of his own volition moved out of his house into a very nice seniors’ apartment, is still relatively independent at 86). Even so, this book touched a lot of chords that resonated with me and will resonate even more with others who’ve had similar experiences. I highly recommend this book.

No Time Like the Future: An Optimist Considers Mortality, by Michael J. Fox

As a longtime Michael J. Fox fan and enjoyer of his two previous books, I naturally wanted to read — or in this case, listen to, in audiobook form read by the author — his latest book, in which Fox reflects on where is in his late 50s (he’s now almost 62, but the book was written a couple of years ago and published in the fall of 2020). The Parkinson’s Disease that he’s been living with for 30 years has continued to impact his ability to work as an actor, even as it’s led him into a new career as an activist raising awareness and money for Parkinson’s research. In recent years he’s also had to deal with spinal surgery for a benign tumour, as well as a series of falls and broken bones. All of these experiences, along with worsening speech difficulties and memory loss due to Parkinson’s, led to Fox fully retiring from acting in 2021.

The subtitle of this memoir is telling, because ever since he went public with his diagnosis three decades ago, Fox’s public persona has been all about optimism. Yes, his promising career was cut short and his life made far more difficult by a degenerative disease when he was still a very young man, but he’s made his brand all about positivity, gratitude for his wife and family, and the good he’s been able to do in the world as a high-profile person bringing attention to Parkinson’s Disease.

All those things are still there in No Time Like the Future, but so is a lot of raw and sometimes painful honesty about how difficult it’s been for him to navigate these past few years. There’s still a lot of gratitude and optimism, but it feels more hard-won, even though the author’s voice (both metaphorically, on the page, and literally in the audiobook) is still fairly light with plenty of humour.

The Abolitionist’s Daughter, by Diane C. McPhail

I picked up this book on a whim from the e-library because the premise sounded good: an American Civil War novel told from the perspective of Southern slaveowners with abolitionist sympathies. The book touches on the fact that while there were Southerners who supported abolition in principle, the economic and legal structures in place at the time made it difficult and sometimes actually illegal for them to simply free their slaves. A man like Judge Matthews, father of the novel’s protagonist Emily, might find himself trying to do what he thought best for the enslaved people on his plantation — such as educating them, and generally treating them almost like human beings — while still profiting from a system he was in theory opposed to.

This is an interesting moral dilemma, but it was barely hinted at and certainly not fully explored in the novel. Nor was the experience of being a Southerner opposed to the Southern cause while the country explodes into civil war on your doorstep – while most of the novel takes place during the war years, the war feels almost peripheral, certainly distant.

Instead, the focus is on the personal relationships of members of the Matthews and neighbouring Slate families. There’s nothing wrong with focusing on a small-scale, personal story against the backdrop of bigger event, though the aspects of the personal story that are influenced by those bigger events should feel natural and organic, and they don’t here — the enslaved women, Ginny, who Emily is close to, often feels like a stereotypical Wise Black Woman Dispensing Insight rather than a fully developed human being. This was, in fact, my main problem with the novel — none of the characters felt fully realized, or engaging. The things that happen in their personal lives are interesting (though not as interesting as the larger conflict that they’re basically ignoring for much of the novel) but I never felt interested in them; I simply didn’t connect with the characters enough to care what happened to them.

I’m not going to slam the book for the fact that I didn’t find the characters or their lives that interesting — this can often just be a mismatch between an author’s writing style and a particular reader’s tastes; someone else might find this novel completely engaging. Maybe it just wasn’t the right book at the right moment for me. I do think, though, that it’s valid to criticize a book for selling itself in such a way that the reader expects the perspective of Southern abolitionism and the experience of enslaved people to be centred, and then to find those important topics dealt with in such a perfunctory way, centring the white slaveowner experience and relegating the Black characters to tropes if not outright stereotypes.

David Copperfield, by Charles Dickens, and Demon Copperhead, by Barbara Kingsolver

As a fan of Barbara Kingsolver’s novels going back to The Poisonwood Bible, her new novel Demon Copperhead has been on my radar, and on my hold list at the library, ever since I heard about it. However, I had another little assignment to finish first: I wanted to read the book that inspired it: David Copperfield, by Charles Dickens.

I’ve struggled to enjoy Dickens over the years, though I have had some success with reading and liking A Tale of Two Cities and Oliver Twist. Bleak House and Great Expectations, which I read much earlier in life, did not work as well for me. I’ve always sort of intended to read David Copperfield, and this seemed like the perfect opportunity.

I think I must be growing into Dickens more as I get older, because I genuinely enjoyed David Copperfield. Yes, there was the requisite sentimentality and long passages of way too descriptive prose, but there’s also genuinely moving descriptions of poverty, especially childhood poverty, in Victorian England, and David (who Dickens considered his most autobiographical character, apparently; some aspects of his biography do echo the experiences of his author) is an engaging narrator I couldn’t help cheering for as he makes his arduous climb from rags to semi-riches. It has a huge cast of vividly sketched characters, and best of all, it’s genuinely funny — probably the funniest Dickens I’ve read, especially when David is besotted with his incredibly dumb girlfriend, Dora, and able to comment sardonically on the passions of his younger self.

The novel has its flaws too, the biggest probably being that the three young women — Dora, Emily, and Agnes — are largely stereotypes, each standing more for an idea or type of womanhood than a fully developed human being (a flaw not shared by the older women in the novel, Peggotty and especially Betsey Trotwood). And although the novel is sometimes described as a searing indictment of social ills in 19th century England, for my money there’s more serious critique of societal, structural causes of poverty in “A Christmas Carol” than in David Copperfield, where David’s misfortunes seem to be more the result of individual, personal cruelties, able to be overcome by individual grit, courage, and determination such as David manifests for most of the novel (when he’s not busy falling for Dora).

The same critique cannot be leveled at Demon Copperhead, Kingsolver’s reimagining of the novel set in Appalachia beginning in the late 1980s. This novel, too, is the story of a smart, determined boy born into poverty and hardship, orphaned young, subjected to the worst his society has to offer children. After David Copperfield’s mother dies, his cruel stepfather sends him to work in a factory. When Demon (birth name Damon, but the nickname sticks quickly) loses his equally hapless and unlucky young mother, he is ushered into the social services/foster care system; even this early in his story, Kingsolver is serving up a ringing indictment not just of abusive stepfathers (though yes, Demon has one of those too) but of a larger societal system that heaps far more abuse on children than an individual can ever do.

It was a great idea to read the two books back to back. While I’m sure Demon Copperhead works fine as a stand-alone novel without knowing the source material, and people who read it after having read Dickens decades ago probably smile at the faint echoes of the Victorian novel, reading it right afterwards highlighted what a brilliant job Kingsolver did of taking the major plot arcs and characters of Dickens’ story and translating them into a modern American setting. In some cases she has improved on the original, particularly with the young woman: Dori, Emmy, and Angus/Agnes are significantly more well-rounded and interesting as people than their Dickensian originals. Some things are timeless: Mr. Micawber’s/Mr. McCobb’s frantic search for a money-making hustle and his wife’s desperate round of the pawn shops translate almost seamlessly from Victorian London to modern-day America.

Demon reaches his teens just as the opioid crisis reaches Appalachia, and it’s here that Kingsolver’s social critique is at its most scathing and pointed. I’ve read a few reader reviews saying that the characters and the situations in which they find themselves in Demon Copperhead are “too stereotypical,” but this is surely the point, much as it is in David Copperfield: these characters are types, little slices of life from a moment in history. Mr. Micawber is a great comic character, but also an indictment of the economic system that kept such a man from ever getting ahead in life. Demon’s Dori is a teenager caught in a cruel cycle of poverty and addiction; her story may be predictable (even if you haven’t read about what happened to David’s Dora), but it’s also what really happened to a lot of young people in that place and time.

I enjoyed both of these books tremendously, though Demon Copperhead was a much faster read: I loved the characters and the world in which I was immersed while reading both of them. Both writers are, to an extent, writing about a world they know: Kingsolver has spent much of her life in the region where Demon Copperhead is set, and of course Dickens was writing about a time and place that was very much his own. While David Copperfield is not fully autobiographical, many of Dicken’s early experiences, particularly that of being a child forced into factory work (though not for the same reasons) make their way into the novel. In reading David Copperfield, I feel relatively confident that the specific type of Victorian poverty David Copperfield experiences — that a boy growing up in a family with some pretensions to gentility who falls on hard times (even when David and his mother are apparently destitute, they have a servant, and while David loves Peggotty and her family dearly, it’s very that these working-class people are of a lower class than he is, and no matter how low he sinks he will not find himself doing the same kind of work they do), and his climb up from that poverty, is something Dickens got right because he knew it from experience.

While Barbara Kingsolver certainly has experience of living in Appalachia and knowing people like those she writes about, it is just as clear that she has not lived the kind of life that Demon and most of his family and friends have lived. Whether this makes Demon Copperhead less authentic than David Copperfield is not for me to say. Only someone who has lived a life similar to Demon’s could say whether Demon is believable or is, indeed, a bit of a stereotype. All I can say as an outside reader is that it feels authentic, and completely absorbing.

I highly recommend both these books, and if you can read them back to back over a period of a couple of weeks, that’s how I’d recommend doing it.

With My Little Eye, by Joshilyn Jackson

Let’s be clear about one thing: I will always, always read anything Joshilyn Jackson writes. I’m not even going to link to my reviews of her previous books, because I’ve read them all and been reviewing them since before I started this blog; and a JJ novel has been on my top ten list for the year six times. I’m a die-hard fan.

That being said, with her last three books she’s taken a direction away from the kind of thought-provoking, upmarket women’s fiction that categorized her first several novels, and definitely moved into “psychological thriller” territory. I’ll be the first to admit I don’t love thrillers as much, but because the characters have been created by Joshilyn Jackson, I’ll follow them anywhere, even into fairly obvious and stress-creating danger!

With My Little Eye is the story of Meribel Mills, an actress whose role in a sitcom 20 years ago gave her just enough fame to keep her steadily, though not glamourously, employed ever since in various supporting roles and one-off appearances (often as a murder victim) on crime procedurals. It’s also just enough fame to have earned her a very scary stalker, who’s gotten close enough to Meribel’s real life — and to her daughter — that she’s decided to leave LA and take a job back in her hometown of Atlanta.

But Atlanta is complicated. There’s Meribel’s ex-husband, who she left under not the best of circumstances. There’s a new neighbour who might be more than just a friend, but he’s got a complicated situation with his own ex. There’s the guy she left behind in LA who she still has feelings for her — and worst of all there’s the stalker, who seems to be following her.

There’s a lot going on in this story, and I felt like it could have been a bit longer to fully develop all the plot lines, particularly the bit twist midway through that makes the reader realize we’re dealing not just with a single potential crime but possibly much more. I’d also love to have had an epilogue, or even a last chapter with a bit of space for denouement — once the crisis happens, everything unfolds so quickly and then wraps up so suddenly that I was left worrying about the characters I’d come to care for, particularly Meribel and her daughter Honor, who is such a great and lovable character I wanted to be sure she’d be OK! Jackson has always had the gift of making me care deeply about her characters, and while that kept me turning pages quickly throughout this novel, it also left me wanting a bit more at the end.

A Living Remedy, by Nicole Chung

Nicole Chung’s first memoir, All You Can Ever Know, was a lovely, poignant, moving exploration of Chung’s experience growing up as a transracial adoptee in a small US town where she knew no other Asian people and had no connection of the culture of her birth family. That book told the story of her eventual discovery of that birth family, while maintaining her close ties with her adoptive parents.

This book focuses mostly on Chung’s adoptive parents, although the birth sister with whom she has a close relationship as an adult does appear here too. The focus of this story is on grief: Chung lost both her adoptive parents within a relatively short period of time, and writing about their deaths gives her the opportunity to reflect not just on their lives and her relationship with both of them, but also the many other issues that impacted their deaths. Among these is the intersection between poverty and ill-health (especially in the US); lack of affordable health care was particularly a factor in Chung’s father’s untimely death. The Covid-19 pandemic also played a role in Chung’s losses; her mother had already received a diagnosis of terminal cancer and been sick for some time when the pandemic struck. After a family visit with her mother over Christmas 2019, Chung had planned to return alone in March to spend more time with her dying mother; when she postponed the trip for safety’s sake as the shutdowns began, she couldn’t have imagined that she would never be able to visit with her mother again.

One of the few truly useful things I learned in the process of getting a degree in counselling (which I’ve never actually used) is the concept of “complicated grief”; so many of our griefs are complicated, and Nicole Chung narrates this story not only with insight and sensitivity (and beautiful writing) but also with an awareness of how tangled, how complicated, her journey through her parents’ deaths has been. Most readers, especially those who have lost a parent, will find much to relate to here.

Finlay Donovan is Killing It, by Elle Cosimano

This is a somewhat light-hearted fantasy — at least, as light-hearted as a book about murder ever gets — playing around with the ever-popular premise that it would be easy to mistake a murder mystery writer for an actual murderer, given the grisly nature of their conversations and internet searches. Such is the fate of Finlay Donovan, a not-particularly-successful writer who is trying to keep her career afloat while dealing with two small children, her ex-husband and his new wife, and a chronic lack of funds. When a stranger in a cafe overheard Finlay’s conversation with her agent, she mistakes the hapless writer for a contract killer — and tries to hire Finlay to get rid of an unwanted husband.

Our hapless and overwhelmed heroine is, of course, not a professional hit person, and has no intention of killing anyone — even though she could really use the money. Things get more complicated when she meets her supposed target and discovers he is not only genuinely scumbag who deserves to die, but that he has ties to the Russian mob and a lot of people besides his wife want him dead. Finlay Donovan is no murderer — but she is in over her head, in a twisty series of events that’s more fun for the reader to untangle than it is for Finlay.

This is definitely one of those plots that could have been solved or avoided by “why didn’t you just tell the truth right at the beginning,” but as people don’t always do that in real life, and fiction would be much duller if they did, I was able to suspend that bit of disbelief and thoroughly enjoy the wild ride that Elle Cosimano takes us on in this novel.

Improbably Yours, by Kerry Anne King

Improbably Yours is a novel about a woman who approaches her 30th birthday on track to live the perfect life. Blythe is living with Alan, who appears to be the perfect boyfriend and is about to propose. She has a interview lined up for the perfect job. The only problem is: Blythe doesn’t want this life. And she doesn’t know what kind of life she does want, because she’s grown up doing what’s expected of her without ever following her own dreams.

The only person who might have encouraged her to follow those dreams was her grandmother Nomi, who died when Blythe was just a child. Now, a mysterious bequest from Nomi sends Blythe on a literal treasure hunt to a remote island that’s been turned into an improbable tourist destination. Here Blythe may find treasure … or romance … or maybe just herself.

It’s a great setup for a fun novel that never gets dark or heavy — it does get a little improbable at times, but that’s right there in the title! Kerry Anne King is an old, old writer-friend of mine (I mean we’ve known each other for many years, not that she’s very old) and her novels always offer a wonderful journey of adventure, not just in the world outside but in the hearts of her characters. I found this a very enjoyable read.