Is it Fall already? How did that happen?

Happily for you, I’ve been jotting down my thoughts on books all summer long, even though you haven’t seen much of me. The following is an online journal of some of my summer reading. These books feature: a manatee, a ghost, a secret husband, a librarian, and a trip to Mars.

Pebble & Dove by Amy Jones

This was a highly anticipated book for me. I have loved Amy Jones’s two other books (here and here), and I was intrigued by the idea of a manatee as a character.

If Pebble is the manatee, then who is Dove? Dove is a 14-year-old girl who has just been expelled from school but has not told her mother yet. Before she gets the chance, her mother Lauren whisks her off to Florida where her grandmother left them a trailer in a trailer park upon her death. If it was not made clear to Lauren that Dove is no longer in school, it also wasn’t made clear to Dove that her grandmother has died. There have been secrets kept (and still new secrets kept) in this family of women, often kept for the good of others but usually having the opposite effect. In other words, their lives are a mess and somehow they have to find a way to work it out. Enter Pebble – provider of comfort and catalyst for bringing everyone together, even when they don’t want to be.

Character-driven, relationship-heavy, coming-of-age, and full of heart and passion like all of Amy’s books.

(Dove) She wants to do the right thing, but she’s not sure what that is anymore, and she has no one to tell her. And there’s a part of her that’s worried that this is how it’s going to be from now on–just her fumbling around, trying to figure shit out on her own and getting it wrong half the time. Is that what it’s like to be an adult? How can you even live like that?

(Lauren) It’s as if the line between giving her daughter too much and not enough independence keeps shifting, and she’s always on the wrong side of it.

(I have also recently read and written about Amy’s husband’s book The Marigold.)

Much Ado About Nada by Uzma Jalaluddin

This is a contemporary romance inspired by Jane Austen’s Persuasion. Of course, you don’t have to know anything about Persuasion or Jane Austen to enjoy this book.

Nada has avoided the annual Muslim conference in Toronto the past five years for a reason, but this year her friend has forced her to go – she wants Nada to meet her new fiance (and his brother Baz). Sure enough, almost as soon as they arrive, Nada and Baz come face-to-face. And they really don’t seem to like each other. As Nada goes through the motions of being at the conference, her present situation starts to alternate with flashbacks of other times Nada and Baz have met over the years until we finally get the whole story and come to understand what is going on between them.

Other interesting storylines are going on at the same time: Nada is almost 30 and still living at home with her brothers and parents; Nada’s entrepreneurial spirit was crushed when she was betrayed by someone she thought was a close friend; her oldest brother has been suffering with depression since his wife left him 6 years ago; and Nada’s younger brother–who suffers from ataxia–desperately wants his freedom. There is an underlying theme throughout the story about the continuing cycle of patriarchy.

The group rose to their feet. The women threw out the take-out containers, finished the last dregs of their tea, and corralled the strollers. The husbands remained oblivious, not even issuing a cursory offer to help… “Don’t blame their mothers… It goes deeper than that and you know it.”

And there is so much tea!

Rose Addams by Margie Taylor (NeWest Press)

Rose Addams is a charming story about a woman entering her sixties and the life changes that come with it. Her two children are grown, but worrying about them never ends. Her son Jason has a new partner that Rose isn’t sure she likes very much. Her daughter has just broken up with a man Rose thought was ‘The One’ and may possibly be dropping out of school at the tail end of her thesis program. And her husband Charles has retired unexpectedly without consulting her and has been acting a bit strangely ever since.

…she was beginning to think that when he walked away from the university he was doing more than just leaving the place where he’d worked for most of his life; he was walking away from who he was.

Now Ryan–a boy the family took in for a year many years ago–has shown up after all these years, and he is living in a tent. What is Ryan’s story and what should Rose do for him, if anything? What happened between Morgan and Ian? And, most importantly, what is going on with Charles?

People say that now, don’t they? They refer to any troubling event in your life as a journey. Well, it isn’t helpful and it takes all the joy out of the word.

Highly enjoyable!

The Librarianist by Patrick deWitt (House of Anansi)

This book is less wacky than French Exit, but still showcases deWitt’s absurd humour, which I love.

Bob Comet is a quiet bookish boy with few friends, and he grows up to be a quiet bookish man with few friends. But he seems content, until suddenly he’s not. The first time he shakes things up, he’s an 11-year-old boy who runs away from home. The reader doesn’t learn about this episode in his life until later in the book when Bob is remembering his trip to the Hotel Elba with two wacky women and their dogs. June and Ida adopt Bob for the days he’s away from home, a situation that suits him nicely.

The other thing that uproots his quiet, contented life is love. He meets Connie and Ethan as a young man working his first job at a library. He falls for both of them, which causes nothing but trouble. The reader can’t help but wonder if Bob would have been better off without ever having met them at all.

He had no friends, per se; his phone did not ring, and he had no family, and if there was a knock on the door it was a solicitor; but this absence didn’t bother him, and he felt no craving for company. Bob had long given up on the notion of knowing anyone, or of being known. He communicated with the world partly by walking through it, but mainly by reading about it.

Bob does make some new friends later in life, which is where we find him at the beginning of the book – as a 71-year-old man who decides to volunteer at a group home after delivering one of their own back to them after she’d gone missing.

The passage of time bends us, it folds us up, and eventually, it tucks us right into the ground.

Fans of deWitt may not find this his most accomplished offering, but will enjoy it all the same.

Girlfriend on Mars by Deborah Willis

Speaking of absurdity, Girlfriend on Mars reeks of it. Such fun!

Unbeknownst to her boyfriend of 14 years, Amber has applied to be on a reality TV show whose two winners will be the first to live on Mars. The catch? There is no coming home. Kevin is hurt beyond belief. What does it say about the way she feels about him if she would rather go to Mars than stay home with him? And to not even discuss it with him first!

Kevin and Amber are so stuck and comfortable in their relationship that this is not even a deal-breaker. Amber heads off to be on the show while Kevin watches from their couch at home and hopes she gets eliminated. In protest, he declares that he will not leave the apartment until Amber comes home.

So why would Amber want to go anywhere else, especially to a red, dead rock? I thought we had an understanding. We’re not married; we don’t have kids; we don’t have pets. But we have our plants and we have each other. And we’re committed to this kind of noncommitment: growing weed in our apartment, ordering pizza from the gluten-free place up the street, watching whole seasons of Arrested Development all at once. We sat on this couch and made a decision. We were, I believed, committed to going nowhere. Going nowhere together.

A favourite line: “Sometimes novels are too real, so thank god for reality television.”

Girlfriend on Mars has been longlisted for the 2023 Giller Prize Longlist.

Joe Howe’s Ghost by Bretton Loney

This is a good read for a Canadian history buff. Especially political history. Erin Curran is a newly elected Government MLA in Halifax, Nova Scotia. She is lucky enough to run into Joseph Howe’s ghost, where he is still roaming the hallways of Parliament House more than 150 years after his death. Erin is the only person he’s spoken to in all that time.

The book alternates between the stories Howe tells about political life in Nova Scotia in the mid-nineteenth century and Erin’s present-day experience as a female politician. As a woman, Erin is juggling her career with her home life with her husband and baby. As a politician, she’s not happy with the behind-the-scenes power plays or the still-existent gender gap.

If Nova Scotians only knew how much internal party politics influences external provincial politics and screws it up, they’d be shocked. And pretty pissed off, too.

I learned some new things about Nova Scotia politics, past and present, but I think I mainly learned about Joseph Howe and the role he played in Nova Scotia’s directory, as well as what NS was like when it was just getting off the ground. I was horrified by the voting process: “A freeholder had to make his way up to the hustings to announce his vote by forging a passageway through the heaving crowd. If the other side’s supporters were nearby, it was like running a gauntlet, with many a kick to the shins and elbow to the stomach or face on your way to exercise your democratic right. All sides hosted open hours during elections, which added to the mayhem, as one’s political supporters were plied with free drink, food, and tobacco to boost their courage before heading to the hustings.”

In addition to political history, conversations with Joe Howe’s ghost reveal his friendship with Thomas Haliburton, creator of the character Sam Slick, and his meeting with Charles Dickens.

Lump by Nathan Whitlock (Dundurn Press)

Lump is a good example of a book that can be funny and depressing at the same time, and I’m starting to feel like this is one of my things.

Cat’s life with two young kids is starting to feel like a grind. (“It is miraculous, the idea that she spent decades living only for herself. How had she not awoken each morning laughing out loud at how easy it all was?”) But if she thought that was bad… within just a few days she learns that her husband has been lying to her, she is pregnant again, and that the lump in her breast is the worst kind. Her attempt to get away from it all leads to even more mess – while her husband is trying to care for the kids by himself, Cat is staying with an eccentric yoga guru with a very old dog.

Donovan–Cat’s husband–is a piece of work. Spoiled rotten, entitled, and a total creep. Cat isn’t always likeable herself, but she sure deserves better than Donovan. One of the complaints I noticed on GR is that there aren’t any characters to like in this book. But I have no problem with that, as long as the characters interest me.

She could argue that she is merely conforming to the new pattern of dishonesty in their marriage. Isn’t the concealment of important information how things work now? Should Isabelle and Silas get in on this? Her son could hide cash in the mattress of his bed. Her daughter could start a relationship with a married women. All four of them could be at different corners of the house, holding lit cigarettes out windows so that the smoke won’t be detected.

A story of a life that looks great from the outside but is crumbling away on the inside. Tragic and darkly funny.

Somehow, they’d fallen into ancient, hated gender roles, as if they had gotten so far past them evolutionarily that they’d lost their instincts to avoid them.

We Happy Few by Aren A. Morris (Black Box Publishing House)

Last, but not at all least, a debut novel written by a Nova Scotian author, rounding off this group of books nicely with some historical romance.

I have to admit, We Happy Few had more romance (i.e. sex scenes) in it than I was expecting, but the scenes are well-done and support the themes of the book.

Polly works as a welder in the Halifax shipyards during WWII while the young men are away. She enjoys her work and doesn’t look forward to the day when the men come home and take their jobs back. She’s engaged to a nice man she’s not in love with, and lately has been questioning whether she even wants to have a husband and children.

Then she meets Seb, a sailor from Quebec, and they fall in love. Over the next couple of years, whenever Seb is in port, they continue to meet up, and every time he goes back out to sea, Polly wonders if she will ever see him again. The horrors of VE Day in Halifax arrive and Polly’s mother disappears in the chaos. Through the turmoil of VE Day, the search for her mother, and the messiness of her own personal life, Polly must decide what she wants: A life of independence and adventure, or one–with the irresistible Seb–as a wife and mother?

The city he had come to consider a home away from home was in ruins. Barrington was littered with smashed glass, storefronts to be sure, naked mannequins, empty store display cases and abandoned merchandise… all of which was presumably more than the thieves could carry. It reminded him of parts of London after a Blitz, except here there had been no enemy attack. Here were the results of a city unprepared for wartime growth, a city caught napping, while it quickly became one of the most crucial ports in North America as the Allies fought the Germans.

An interesting and enjoyable read, right to its eyebrow-raising ending.

Hooray, you’ve made it to the end! Is there anything here that tempts you? Any recommendations for me from your own summer reading?

I hope you all had a fabulous summer! 🙂