There Was No Tomorrows, We Packed Away Our Sorrows
Welllllll, let’s get to the business of me writing about the books I read all the way back in April, shall we? We went on our vacation to the Grand Canyon in April, so I only read three books that month.
1.) The first book I read in April was Wellness, by Nathan Hill. I loved The Nix, and so I was excited to check out his second novel. Plus, Hill went to the University of Iowa and worked as a journalist in Cedar Rapids. You all know how much I live an Iowa connection.
Anyway, Wellness is about a couple who meet in Chicago in 1993. This book takes place in 2014, and the couple have gotten married, had a kid, and are not in a good place in their relationship. They try different things to fix their issues, some of which include the husband signing up for “the system” that is supposed to be a full wellness program, the mom finding herself in a weird, fake christiany, Trumpy cult when she tries to mingle with the parents of her son’s classmates, and they even go to a swingers club to rejuvenate their marriage.
It is a 600 page book, and you know how hard that can be on my ADHD. There’s a whole long thing on algorithms and how the husband’s dad becomes a sad conspiracy theorist, that at first I thought might have been a little indulgent, but once that section was over, I realized it needed to be that long, so you could live that whole process along with the father and son. So, I forgave him for that. I thought the novel was funny and sad and well written and very interesting take on living in the 21st century and dealing with all the bizarre bullshit we find ourselves in.
2.) Elizabeth Strout’s Oh, William! is a book with a voice. You hear it from the first sentence in. It is the voice of Lucy Barton, but it’s decades after Strout’s, My Name is Lucy Barton. Lucy’s second husband has just died and her daughters are grown and not living at home anymore. Her first husband, William is having issues of his own, and he talks Lucy into taking a platonic trip with him. I don’t want to give away too much, but the reason they’re on the journey was an interesting premise.
During the trip, Lucy looks at her current relationship with William, and looks back at their issues when they were married. She also delves into her complicated feelings about her parents and her childhood. I do love strong voices in fiction, and Elizabeth Strout is a very strong writer. This is the third book in the Lucy Barton series, and I think they are all worth reading.
3.) I picked Hello Beautiful by Ann Napolitano because I knew we were going on vacation, and I thought it would be something a little lighter to read. It was billed as an homage to Little Women, which sounded like it might be fun. A lot of people raved about this book. I, however, was not one of those people. My ex-husband was an actor and he used to talk about one of his acting teachers at the conservatory he went to in LA. When they were rehearsing scenes, this guy would stop them and say, “I don’t believe it.” That’s how I felt about this book.
Again, I don’t want to give anything away, but there were several situations where I thought, “Would people really react that way, and for so long?” Also, the two older sisters kept being described as being so close that they spooned each other every night and slept in each other’s arms, even after the oldest sister was married. I certainly don’t claim to know much about functional families, but is that normal? It all seemed to veer dangerously close to a Flowers in the Attic situation. But you should definitely read this yourself, because a LOT of people loved this book, and you all know I’m not normal. There were things and parts of the book I liked, I just got so frustrated with some of the characters’ actions. Like, so many of them had to be so unyielding in order for the novel to work, and I Just couldn’t go there with them.
Soooo, April was full of books about trying to figure out their relationships. All the books made me think, and I liked that about them. Even if one of them made me think, “I don’t really like this book.”