lightreads: a partial image of a etymology tree for the Indo-European word 'leuk done in white neon on black'; in the lower left is (Default)
Flying Solo

4/5. Determinedly single woman comes back to her home town on the brink of turning forty to clear out her great aunt’s house. She runs into an old boyfriend and also a mystery involving a carved wooden duck and exactly what her “spinster” globetrotting great aunt was up to.

Ah, lovely. Lots of you are going to like this. It’s a big glug of cozy small New England town with a splash of mystery, a splish of mild revenge thriller, and a shake of romance. It’s about how hard you have to swim up current to choose, actively, to be single, but not alone. This book lives in that tension between intensely wanting your own space/solitude and also loving somebody very much. It also uncomfortably lives in that space where making an unconventional choice takes on a sort of political life beyond you, so that suddenly your choices all seem weighted and meaningful.

It's sweet and bantery and thoughtful, and there’s a lot of Linda Holmes in here. So if you like her, you will probably like this. Also, the heroine is fat and (mostly) unconcerned about it.
lightreads: a partial image of a etymology tree for the Indo-European word 'leuk done in white neon on black'; in the lower left is (Default)
Evvie Drake Starts Over

4/5. Former MLB pitcher temporarily rents a room from a recently-widowed (recently-liberated, really) woman in charming tiny town Maine.

Linda Holmes (NPR Linda Holmes) wrote a book, and it is exactly the book Linda Holmes would write: warm and sharp-eyed and kind and deeply satisfying. This is somewhere on the spectrum between contemporary fiction and romance, if you want to classify it (you can tell they're marketing on the fiction end since they slapped "a novel" on it). It meets in the middle in a story about getting up again when you've been knocked down really hard in the most unfair and inexplicable of ways, and doing the hard work of friendship, and mental illness, and baseball, and tiny town life, and all sorts of things. It has some first novel wobbles – the charmingness is a little bit manufactured, to start – but it gains confidence and poise until it made me genuinely sniffle in the end.

Content notes: Recollections of an abusive relationship.

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