52 Tigers in Red Weather (RWYO), Liza Klaussmann
This is a great novel if you're into reading about dysfunctional people who apparently have the financial luxury to sit around and ruin their lives with their own neurosis/psychosis. (a Goodreads review)
I liked this. A family saga/whodunnit told over a series of summers, starting in 1945 just as the war is ending and stretching forwards into the late 60s (with a couple of flashes back to the war years). Cousins Nick and Helena share summers at the family property in Martha's Vineyard, initially as friends, later as something much more complicated.
Could have been cheesy but it's written with a level of restraint, unfolding the plot carefully over a series of accounts which return to the same key events from different character points of view, leaving the gaps in the plot open just long enough before filling them.
Jazz parties, boats, sultry nights, cold cocktails, beautiful dresses. Family secrets, unhappy marriages and ugly humanity: this book invites comparisons with many things from F Scott Fitzgerald to Mad Men by way of Revolutionary Road - it's not as good as any of those but I'd call it a better class of sun-lounger read.
usually luv bks about rich white people problems but this one can kick rocks. The writer tried to do way too much and it all ended up quite pointless and dumb (another Goodreads review, lol)
53 The Health and Wellness Lie, Nick Tiller
Long and detailed, sets out the many ways in which we are manipulated by companies and grifters into believing that certain products or practices are good for us, when at best the evidence is poor. Not sure why I found this a slog to read, as Tiller writes well - I think once you get the main message that most wellness content is BS, reading chapter after chapter of examples seems a bit superfluous. I also struggled with it on Kindle as there are a LOT of footnotes and it would have been much better to be able to flick back and forth to those while reading.
54 Yesteryear, Caro Claire Burke
Who was I? A flawless Christian woman. The manic pixie American dream girl of this nation's deepest, darkest fantasies.
Much read and reviewed here and elsewhere. I still can't work out if this is a clever book masquerading as a dumb one, or the opposite.
Most of you will know by now that this is the story of Natalie, a hugely successful "tradwife" influencer, who wakes one morning to find herself seemingly transported back to the 1850s. The story alternates between two strands: one telling how Natalie built her social media empire (and the choices she made to do so); the other showing her struggling to exist without modern luxuries as she tries to work out where on earth she is and what has happened. Time travel? a reality show prank?
Burke is someone with a large social media following herself, and had written and spoken a lot about the tradwife phenomenon before writing this book. The film rights were sold before the book was published and she talks int he afterword about "the privilege of workshopping it [the book] with some of the greatest living artists and thinkers in the world", name checking Anne Hathaway for her contributions (Hathway is set to both star and produce the forthcoming movie adaptation).
I started thinking that this was a clever skewering of some of the more problematic elements of the tradwife image (misogyny, social media, religion, racism, the falseness of it all, the rights of the family children not to be filmed) while not taking itself too seriously. It all seemed a little too "on the nose" but very readable if not particularly subtle.
Then you find out the big reveal and I hated it. At first. One of my least favourite fictional tropes (would actually have preferred "then i woke up and it was all a dream"). I was so frustrated - it seemed like such a cop out, and an offensive one at that.
However. After I finished reading, it stuck with me, and I thought a lot about that reveal, the ending, and the further questions that it opens up. Why is Natalie the way she is? Who are the villains of this piece and who are the victims? I like that Burke sets up these questions but doesn't answer them, instead leaving the whole picture murky and ambivalent.
Look forward to joining the masses around the world discussing this over a glass of wine with their book groups 😊