March's Reads Mini-Review Roundup
Echo the Copycat by Joan Holub and Suzanne Williams
Calliope the Muse by Joan Holub and Suzanne Williams
These books are consistently good. I don't have much more to say about them than what I've already said. They're short enough to fit in quickly, but long enough to have substance. There's always a sweet element of humor and the characters are just straight up nice. These are feel-good books and I'm glad the new stories are still being published.
The House at Riverton by Kat MortonFirst, let me get this out of my system: FINALLY!!! Ahem, okay, so I've had Kate Morton's books on my shelves for, oh, over eight years and I've never read them. Why you might ask, when these books seem so right up my alley? Well, because they're long and I had this impression in my head that they would fall into that "rewarding in the end but a slog to get through" category. Where I got that idea I don't know, but firmly set in my mind it was and so I longingly and shamefully looked at their beautiful spines for years.
Until January 2019, when I picked up The House at Riverton and got about 50 pages in before putting it down again. It seemed nice enough, but it just hadn't grabbed me. I vowed to pick it up again...someday.
That someday came just over a full year later when in March 2020 after tentatively toe-dipping back into reading I somehow decided NOW was the time. And it was.
This may be a hefty book (almost 500 pages) and the chapters aren't super short, but I sped through it. I didn't really like any of the characters and the plot wasn't what I'd call fast, but this is the kind of book that has a deceptive slow burn where it feels like not a whole lot is happening but I feel utterly gripped anyway. Then in the final quarter all of the threads started coming together, building and building toward the absolutely face-smacking conclusion. And then that final piece of the puzzle...ah, what a punch in the gut. It's weird to say that a gut-punch is a good thing, but in this book it made me do the mental equivalent of sitting down suddenly in shock with my jaw dropped to the floor. I loved it!
I started reading this book years ago, picking away at it a little at a time. It's a short book with tiny chapters-- each only about a minute or so to read. Each chapter focuses on a different aspect of love and mindfulness and I read it slowly because I wanted to let each lesson sink in. Not every chapter was profound or mattered to me right now, but every few chapters were. Those were the chapters that made me pause, think, and sometimes change my approach. I love the simple, approachable way this book is written.
Sanctuary by Edith WhartonMy dabbling in Edith Wharton's short novels/novellas continued and for the next foray I chose Sanctuary. This one felt a lot shorter than Bunner Sisters with the characters reading more like sketches. The first half of the story follows Kate, a young woman soon to be married to a man who has recently come into a fortune. Shortly before their wedding, Kate discovers something about her husband that irrevocably changes their relationship. The situation unravels with Wharton presenting a thought-provoking moral dilemma that left me mulling over the possibilities and wondering "What would I do?" Had the story ended here, it would have been an interesting short story.
But, of course, it didn't end there. The choice Kate ultimately made (which I thought was absurd) guaranteed that Wharton had to write the second party of the story. This is that part that left me lukewarm. The bones of the story are good. The writing and characterization is strong in the way I've come to expect from Wharton. The dilemma mirroring the dilemma in the first half was interesting and kept up a "What will he do?" tension, thickened by what the reader, but not the character, knows happened in part I. A dozen conversations could be sparked by this story and I would happily chat for hours over the different angles of the story (nature versus nurture, morality, so on). While I appreciated the short length, it might have been nice to have the second part fleshed out a little more, and maybe even told from Dick's point of view.
And yet...I couldn't shake an icky feeling throughout the whole second half. Kate's relationship with her son felt...wrong. I can't say more without spoiling things, but it's this relationship that leaves me slightly unsettled with the story, even though I loved everything else.
Okay, almost everything else. Kate is so righteously annoying. But, I don't read Edith Wharton books for her lovable characters.
