We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves

I often feel that the books I like the best are ones that I could never have expected.  They're not predictable, they're not typical of any particular genre.  They're just what I was in the mood to read at the moment I was reading, but I could never have said what I was in the mood for.

"We are All Completely Beside Ourselves" by Karen Joy Fowler is one of those novels. It's essentially the story of a family, and of the remarkably complicated and thoughtful narrator's attempts to understand how her unusual upbringing affected her. But this was no ordinary family, you learn along the way.  It's difficult to say more without spoiling the plot.  But I can say this:  Read it. It's amazing. Beautiful,  Thought-provoking.  Poignant.  Funny.

There's a reason this book has won all sorts of acclaim.  It's short-listed for the 2014 Man Booker Prize, it's won a 2014 Pen/Faulkner award, and it's one of the New York Times Book Review's 100 Notable Books of 2013.

I'm not kidding. Add this to your Must Read list.

One more thing:  I've read other books by Karen Joy Fowler, and I wasn't wowed by them. This one, however, I LOVED.

The Secret Place

I've read and loved everything by Tana French, so I moved quickly to get her newest novel, The Secret Place, when it came out.  And I wasn't disappointed.  This was another novel that I gave a "5" to on my 1-5 scale.

French's mysteries all involve a murder squad within the Dublin police force, but each features a different detective and each novel stands squarely alone.  French's stories unfold slowly.  There are no gimmicks -- just deep character development and careful plotting.  What I love about French's mysteries is how the place becomes almost an additional character in the story. The setting provides the tone and color for the whole novel in a way that I don't often see in books.

And that was true in The Secret Place, which takes place in a posh girls' boarding school.  There'd been a murder there a year ago, as yet unsolved.  But when the novel begins, one student approaches a detective she remembers because she finds an unsettling reference to the murder on the school's "secret place," a bulletin board where students are encouraged to post whatever anonymous bits they like.  As the detectives investigate how the note came to be there and what it might mean about the murder, they see more and more of the life at the school.  There's the sense of layers being pulled back and revealed as more secrets emerge and characters' relationships emerge.  

The novel actually takes place over the course of one rather long day.  The story was engrossing, and French's writing is skillful and evocative.  But what I especially loved is how the theme of belonging, of fitting in, of how much of yourself it is safe to reveal to the people around you, carries through.  It's explored as the dynamics between the school girls are examined, and it's something the detective himself struggles with as he works to sort out his own role among the detectives.  

This was a rich, deep reading experience. 

Wife 22

"Maybe it was those extra five pounds I’d gained. Maybe it was because I was about to turn the same age my mother was when I lost her. Maybe it was because after almost twenty years of marriage my husband and I seemed to be running out of things to say to each other.

But when the anonymous online study called “Marriage in the 21st Century” showed up in my inbox, I had no idea how profoundly it would change my life. It wasn’t long before I was assigned both a pseudonym (Wife 22) and a caseworker (Researcher 101).

And, just like that, I found myself answering questions."

   Wife 22 by Melanie Gideon was quite the thought-provoking novel for me.  I was reading it on what turned out to the last vacation my husband (from whom I am now separated) would take together.  But, rest assured, the novel isn't to blame for that.  But the story of a woman who is thinking about her marriage, and examining why she got married, how she and her husband got together, and where they'd come to years later, resonated strongly with me.  Told from the wife's perspective as she worked her way through the Marriage questionnaire, it was sweet and charming and poignant.  It gave me a lot to think about.  And I think anyone who is married, or who has ever been married, or who isn't but is fascinated by the complexities of marriage, would be intrigued and entertained by this novel.  Me, I loved it.   

ADDED AFTER POSTING:  I was thinking about this book and wondering whether my view of it was affected by the time in my life that I read it, so I just went back and read it again.  And I was quite happy to find that I liked it just as much the second time.  I'd forgotten a lot about this book: how chapters start with funny bits from the narrator's google searches; how the story is interspersed with Alice's answers to the questionnaire questions which reveal so much about her; how Alice's struggle to connect with her teenaged children feels so real; and most of all, how the biggest theme is how important it is in a marriage for each partner to truly see and hear the other.