This Is How It Always Is by Laurie Frankel

November - This Is How It Always Is by Laurie Frankel

THIS IS HOW IT ALWAYS IS should be required reading for all humans. It tells a beautiful story and feels like a roadmap for dealing with life's tough issues. It shows us how to love and how to be human. And it is filled with hope.

There is so much anger, and the world feels so divided that hope seems hard to come by lately. So, I love that this book takes on gender identity, a subject that can be divisive in certain circles, and reminds us that we are all struggling with what it means to be our true selves. Laurie Frankel renews our spirit and our faith in humanity.

I fell in love with the whole family, Penn Adams, Rosie Walsh, and their five children. I wanted to be their neighbor. I wanted to be a part of their Dueling Dinners and send all our kids to next door to eat pizza while we prepared a more sophisticated menu for the adults and drank wine.

I want to be like Rosie. I want to parent with her fearlessness. Or at least as if I were fearless because, of course, there is fear because that is parenting. As she says, we make huge decisions on behalf of our children with limited information, and there is often no way to know if we are doing the right thing. We can forget that sometimes the easy life might not be the same as the best life.

Like a bonus track on an album, Frankel weaves in a fairytale with the adventures of Prince Grumwald and Princess Stephanie as a bedtime story, metaphor, and comic relief. So it's a book about family, parenting, love, worry, and acceptance, with some Buddhism and some fascinating fish facts.

Also, it contains this nugget of truth that I will take with me for the rest of my life and repeat at least one Tuesday per month. "It's not a book club if there isn't wine."

This book is funny and charming and delightful and deep. It's a parenting manual and a life-affirming escape. Read it.

The Midnight Library by Matt Haig

September - The Midnight Library by Matt Haig

The Midnight Library is a little like It's a Wonderful Life. Except instead of Jimmy Stewart jumping off a bridge, we have Nora Seed taking too many pills. And instead of seeing what life would be like if she had never been born, we see how Nora's life might have turned out if she had made some different choices. No angel working for his wings, instead a helpful librarian and the Midnight Library. Haig gives a nod to the movie in a reference to Pottersville in the novel.

Like It's a Wonderful Life, the story is cute and a little too neatly packaged, but it still manages to hold a few profound truths. First, it reminds us that there is no perfect life. Every choice we made led us to this spot from an infinite number of possibilities. Whether we consider our life to be sad or happy or good or bad, the truth is that it is all of the above.

With short sections rather than long chapters, the formatting works for my short attention span and contributes to making the book an easy read.

For all of Nora Seed's troubles, she has a huge skill set. She was a talented musician, a writer, a philosophy major, an excellent student, a chess player, interested in science, and an Olympic-level swimmer. So she's not your average underachiever. Her many, many aptitudes do allow for a wide range of options when imagining other lives. Her varied interests and knowledge across disciplines also enabled the author to dribble in references about multiverses, Hobbesian memory principle, Dunbar's number, Newton's third law of motion, the impacts of global warming, and other exciting theories and observations. A broadly gifted Nora makes a better story.

And Matt Haig's story us a multitude of wonderfully true, but maybe trite sounding truths and lessons.

"I think it is easy to imagine there are easier paths…but maybe there are not easy paths."

"You don't have to understand life. You just have to live it."

"…you can choose choices, but not outcomes. "

"…success is a delusion."

We waste too much energy with our regrets and might benefit from more self-acceptance.

Suicide as a plot device in a 1946 film may be more understandable than in a book released in 2020. I appreciate how Haig guides the reader toward those moments where the wonder and beauty of life are breathtaking, but I also worry that using a suicidal woman to get us there might be insensitive. Does the novel oversimplify and trivialize depression and mental health issues? We know now that having a better attitude and appreciating the little things are not available for someone with suicidal thoughts.

The Midnight Library is worth a read, though not without issues. But maybe it's worth reading precisely because it raises issues.

The Witch Elm

August - The Witch Elm by Tana French

I picked up The Witch Elm while browsing in my local book store. Sometimes I choose a book by scanning prize winners or best book lists or the hundreds of books recommended for me by an algorithm or a wily publisher. Sometimes a friend recommended it, or it's a book club read, and sometimes the book finds me.

The Witch Elm found me. I was scanning the shelves over at the Village Bookseller in Mt. Pleasant, picking up books, and reading the blurbs. I'd heard of The Witch Elm and Tana French. Nothing except that they rang a bell, meaning the names were vaguely familiar, but I had no actual knowledge of Tana French's writing or the plot of The Witch Elm. There was a lot that appealed to me. The book was a notable book of 2018. French was a "master of her craft." And the book is set in Ireland.

So I didn't look any further. (FYI, this book has nothing to do with witches.)

I loved this book, but part of me felt it should have come with a warning label. I'm a little squeamish. Maybe I should have paid more attention to the fact that one of the blurbs was from Stephen King. However, if it had a big warning label, then I might not have read it, and that would also have been a mistake.

My coping mechanism for getting through the book was to take breaks. I cover my eyes if there is a gory scene in a movie. I've walked out if it gets unbearable. Sometimes I come back. Sometimes I have my friends tell me how it ends. Reading The Witch Elm took me a few weeks, but I had to know how it ended, and I didn't want a summary. I wanted to know all the twists and turns.

But I needed breaks in reading The Witch Elm because Tana French is a vivid, talented, realistic writer. Early in the novel, Toby (our Main Character and narrator) is attacked in his home. The brutality described on the page not only painted a picture in my mind, it hurt. I found myself wincing, flinching, and recoiling. Toby was lucky to be alive, but he didn't come out of it unscathed. He's not the same physically or mentally.

It wasn't just the violence or just this scene that forced me to set the book down for a little while before I could continue. French writes suspense in a way that was almost equally challenging for me. She sets up situations that are so uncomfortable. Toby is clearly about to make a bad choice, and I can't bear it. It's excruciating to let it unfold. And waiting to find out just how badly the consequences will be is agonizing.

After all that, it is well worth the ride. The novel hands you are bizarre but realistic. Toby is charming and disturbing. She has you in her grip until the very end, where you struggle to see who was good? Who was bad?

The whole terrible fiasco was a combination of bad luck, bad decisions, and desperate choices. Maybe, we are all capable of terrible things. Maybe, it's just what Toby's cousin Susanna suggests. We are only as virtuous as our circumstances allow. Unless we are pushed, unless we are forced into a corner, we may never discover what darkness lies at our core.

The Witch Elm delivers a complex mystery that is satisfying in its myriad of details, but also because it raises questions about the nature of reality. Many mystery novels leave us wondering how well we can know someone we are close to, but French makes you wonder how well you might know yourself. How reliable is your memory? And how much do your memories contribute to who you are?

Pick up your copy and see what else Tana French has written at www.tanafrench.com.